My ambulance smells like Play Dough, ralph and Scotch tape: a peculiarly nostalgic combination, unpleasant nonetheless. I can't hear very much but the siren, medical personnel speaking forcefully and clearly into raspy mikes around me, the sound of vehicle burning rubber. Ringing in my ears obscures most everything else, like it does in crowds. This is highly unpleasant. This is an experience that has been wholly unpleasant. My gurney is jouncing unpleasantly; I can hear its metal springs squeak.

"My gurney is jouncing unpleasantly."

Perhaps I spoke too quietly.

Defillibrators marked in red, made of mod nineties taupe plastic and clear tubes, decorate the walls of my ambulance's interior. The light and ventilation are pretty poor, and the smell is that which can be expected of a space through which many bloody, urinating, defecating, perspiring and/or drooling bodies are passed in rapid succession. I know I'm perspiring, but can't vouch one way or the other for the rest of those categories.

The driver discusses something with someone in a dry, impassive baritone. It's settled that we're nearing the hospital, I gather the gist is. I have a bad feeling that they're laughing. The ambulance rolls, then swerves to a dizzying stop. My head tips back and I see a gloved palm descend toward my face, lifting me.

In fact, as soon as they open the doors, cold white light flows in and I flow out. I float up and fly out, through a cold, stark breeze. Everything revolves under me in miniscule: I see the tiny pencil-chaff medics pushing my beetle gurney down on the blankness of the icy concrete, into a dollhouse hospital. Sodium distaste permeates my gullet as I watch myself go between the dark glass double doors, have a respirator pressed to my pink "O" mouth. There are scales on my face and wet fish squirming behind my eyebrows and throat; and I'm in a school of kindergarten salmon, swimming up the ramps and elevators until my teeth beach, grinding on petrified sand, and I'm lying quietly in a hospital bed, looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling.

I can't remember what I did.

 
When I was small I liked television. I didn't get to watch it much, because my mother wouldn't turn it on often (until the Beneraxil audition, anyways), because she had me in training to become a good kid. But we had an amicable faded-color set, just seventeen amazing Technicolor inches, on which she'd watch her soaps and news, and I'd watch commercials.

I loved commercials. I kept track of them, knew all of them, could tell one from another at a glance. Sometimes I recognized the actors and actresses from previous ads; I started making career records for these people, which I kept filed in the foldout part underneath my bed.

My all-time favorite ad, I'd have to say, was the one where the beautiful blonde in the bar is struggling with an arm-and-claw machine full of all the same fuzzy pink bear, and we see her last quarter and expression of determination, and she makes the arm shoot out and the hand shoot down decisively, and out of the jumbled bodies rises a single can of Kalop's Beer... and at the sight, so perfectly phallic/coprophiliac, the blonde jolts her hand involuntarily on the joystick and the can plummets back out of sight. As the necessary alcohol disclaimers rolled and my mother snorted with distaste, we'd see her from an angle with a better view of her boobs, their large tan tops scalloped with the curled ends of her photogenic hair, with her long tiny arms hitting the glass vainly.

A very close runner-up to that one was my own. The one I was in. I scarcely remember acting in it, I have a very poor recall of my childhood, all I remember is sitting in deeply uncomfortable clothes, looking into a darkness with the silhouette of a director in it behind the scalding lights. I think I was speaking untaped about my desire for more water. But I remember the actual ad's content, as seen on television, by everybody, very frequently - I remember that perfectly.

First there's Everyman. "Everyman" was his name in the script. Everyman was a heavy white gentleman in undressy but unmistakably middle-class clothes: "office-forgettable." Basically a typical guy, stand-in for the viewer, et cetera. But Everyman was obviously having Problems, you could tell. The overediting departments had brushed in shadows, gray bags under eyes, and his hunched posture over the marble kitchen counter that served as the set expressed almost as much as the deep troubledness displayed on his face. Shot of that. A firm male voiceover (not dissimilar in tone to the voice of the ambulance driver, or, for that matter, Tevy's voice) narrates Everyman's pressured exhalation: "Is it really just trouble at work, Tim," it says sympathetically, "or could it be ... Clinical Depression?"

As soon as we've heard that, a warm ray of sunshine appears behind Everyman. He turns, the shot widens and I'm in on camera, grinning, my hair golden (was I blonde? it's gone back to mousy brown since, anyways) and my radiance all over his gloomy self. "Papa, this is from Mama," I say with the pure cheer of a seven-year-old American Heartland female, taking my pudgy hands out from behind my back and coyly depositing a canister in Everyman's lap. Then I run off. I'm replaced by a woman of pale red hair and physical splendor, Everyman's wife, who takes my sunlight and fills the screen with it. She takes Everyman's hands, smiling, and whispers, "I filled the prescription for you, Tim ... the family wants the real you back."

(I've since learned, in Ad Studies II in my sophomore and final year of Harvard, that the phrase "the real you" was used in over 22,000 advertisements 1950-2010, according to a worldwide study conducted by the Genert Foundation. Seventy-six percent of those ads were for pharmaceutical drugs.)

Everyman flips the canister over, and we see over his shoulder that it bears the distinctive legend/logo BENERAXIL - Get the real you back! The golden sheen peaks, and in a flash we're transported to the scenically cushy lawn behind Everyman's house, where the narrator spouts all the side effects and Everyman grills, smiling, with his wife, smiling, wrapped around his back, in slo-mo, connoting utmost contentedness. The camera grazes me, too, making helical arms-out airplane circles around the grill with a beatific expression on my face.

The closing shot is of me hoisted in the actress's arms, grinning and saying to the camera, "Beneraxil gave me Daddy back! Ask your doctor about Beneraxil today!" as my fake mommy lifts me in the air. Her smile's teeth are white as a hole in the screen.

 
It's my real mommy who's visiting me right now, though. Funny.

It must be late. The ceiling is darker. Somewhere in whatever ward this is, a door is flapping open and banging shut. My mother's breathing has always sounded labored, as if it's a great task for her lungs to lift her heavy chest, for her diaphragm to push out her big belly. There's a quiet rustling as she turns a page in whatever magazine. If it's a magazine from the nineties, she'll be rifling through it for the print version of my ad. She collects all the copies she happens across in a big binder, or at least before I dropped out I know she did.

I think back to the ambulance ride. Well, shit, okay. I hurt myself somehow. Just don't know how. That's not the most alarming possible situation to be in. I'm in the hospital. The hospital is to make you better.

I bet it was the smoking. You're not supposed to do that when you're a kid.

Can't seem to talk right now.

Or sit up. When I strain upwards, oil-spill rainbows appear in my eyes. The feeling in my ribcage, I think, is more befitting of massive trauma temporarily medicated than emphysema, although my life has up to this point granted me previous acquaintance with neither, making an uninformed self-diagnosis difficult. Not to mention meaningless.

My mother turns a page again. Her loud breathing does not slow or quicken. There's a patter of professional leather-soled feet on the tile outside my door, but it goes away.

I won't be surprised if it turns out I've swallowed the sleeping pills.

The sleeping pills were Tevyn's, and he left them when he left me, in my medicine cabinet. They're prescription and everything. He used to take them right after dinner when he didn't want to talk to me. Obscure brand name, big white-lidded canister, list of active ingredients slapped on the back, ask physician for full list of ingredients, ask physician before ingesting. I didn't notice he'd left it there until two weeks after he took the rest of his shit. I ran out of toothpaste one morning, opened the cabinet, and found its shelves crammed with Tevyn's razors with Tevyn's gristle stuck in their blades, Tevyn's empty bottle of acne cleanser, Tevy's acetaminophen, Tevyn's B-12 and laxettes, Tevyn's sleeping pills.

I threw away everything but the pills, I think, because they looked prescription and there must be a law about throwing out other people's meds.

I visualize myself pouring out sleeping pills, little squirming capsules of preservative and dose, into my other palm. Do you swallow them all at once or one by one? I'd gag on a lot of them. Probably you'd swallow them in multiple gulps of three or four. Mice, raisins, ants, headless white things gleaming in a swarm and headed down my watering esophagus, to open up like missiles when they meet my digestive juices and leave shrapnel of chemical lacing my bloodstream 'til God knows when.

But it's irrational to fixate on that. I think I'd remember having my stomach pumped, assuming that's what they do. (The phrase "pumping my stomach" just sounds that memorable.) Plus there are lots of other things I could have done. Just in my apartment. I have a pretty new Cutco knife set, sharp blades, razors to shave my legs smooth. I have electric sockets. There must be an obvious way to do yourself grievous harm with an electric socket that I can't think of right now. I have a fire escape, although I'm probably too scared to shit of heights to jump. I can't move. I can't talk. I'm in the hospital. What does my hair look like?

 
Professional shoes on linoleum again. My ears prick up.

My mother puts down her magazine. "Doctor [unintelligible]," she greets the shoes, in the slightly hoarse voice of quiet rage I used to overhear her address my dad with, evenings he'd come home and I'd broken into the coin jar or dropped out of Harvard and gone into my room to sulk. But politely.

"Ms. Pean?" A lady doctor's voice, clear and soft as a bell. I wanted to be a doctor when I was a little girl, before Beneraxil ads. "Let's step outside."

My mother dutifully follows. I strain to hear, find I can incline myself upwards a small amount now. Improvement. Behind shatterproof glass crisscrossed with those black wires, I can see them confer. The lady doctor is tall and blonde and wears a lab coat, just like in the movies. My mother is short and pear-dumpy and soft. Their voices are hushed. Lady doctor has a clipboard, shows Mom something.

I let myself fall back with a whump, test my voice.

I can speak! Hoarsely, but I can. "...he-l-lo. Hello." It solidifies. I cough.

Immediately, they stop talking outside. Without a word, the soft squeaking of my mother's plastic moccasin soles re-enter the room. The lady doctor follows, clacking. In a moment my mother's beady blue eyes are peering directly into mine. I wish she wouldn't. She's a mushroom, I think for no reason. She's a big gray moon, her saggy soggy round cheeks the cratered surface.

"Jewel?" Her pet name for me.

I choke again, something in my throat, no problem. "Hi, Mom."

She vanishes, tilting back on her heels, sighs.

"She left her boyfriend a few months ago," she explains to lady doctor. "They were perfect together. I don't..." She sighs again, this time the hard sigh of disappointment in her Jewel. "I don't know why any of this is happening to her. She was such a good student. Now she's totally ... Oh, you know. She used to be serious."

"I'm serious," I choke out indignantly.

The doctor writes down something on her clipboard.

Now I'm pissed. Mom needs to shut up. She hasn't even talked to me in months and she's got my doctor writing stuff about Tevyn, who has absolutely nothing to do with anything, and I still don't even know what's going on. A door is flapping open and banging shut in its frame. Tendrils of mussed hair graze my eyes. I must look like living shit. I'm mad. I need to know what happened to get me into this place. As long as I find that out--

"What did I do?" I croak. My voice is an anticlimax, small and froglike and baby-weak.

The lady doctor leans forward. "I didn't catch that," she says softly.

"What did I do to myself?" Voicecrack. I might be crying right now. "You know--sleeping pills, tall building, what? What did I do?"

There's a silence in which the white light now on my ceiling can be observed to change by 2.5 degrees.

"That's what you think happened?" My mother is seething. She hikes back over to the chairs and snatches up her magazine so hard it almost sounds like a slap. "That's what you thought? You don't even know? You think you're a - a -"

"Mrs. Pean!" The lady doctor backpedals towards the door after her, uselessly.

"A suicide!" She nearly squeals. Now her voice is echoing in the hall outside, angry as ever: "No daughter of mine--" The doctor is trying to talk to her about something. Her moccasins hiss and squeak until they disappear. A door is flapping open and banging shut, flapping open and banging shut. My gut hurts. This is an experience that has been wholly unpleasant.

 
My ceiling is half dark and half light. The half in light is smooth as an eggshell, the plastic surface of a pill, the gleaming glass surface of an old seventeen-inch TV turned off in my parents' home. The dark half is a halo of gray, smeared on by the big pudgy hand of an all-American seven-year-old female. The day is always changing, in degrees.