KATHERINE GUTTMAN

I've been clenching my teeth an awful lot lately. It's the Zoloft. Lying on Brent's green couch, I can slowly wiggle one of my front lower teeth. I make my way to the shower, horrified by this loose tooth. I spent two years with braces, four years with a retainer. Should I have worn the retainer longer? In the shower, I discover a back molar insanely loose. Oh this is horrible! Is it another wisdom tooth? But I had them all out. I manage to pop the loose tooth up and can run my tongue along its jagged edge, can slip my tongue into the hollow bottom of the tooth. It's still in my mouth by a thread of something--skin? Clark enters the bathroom, slides the shower doors open with a bang, looks me up and down and says "My god, all the hair on your body is golden!" I'd respond, but I'm too busy worrying my tooth looser and looser. He reaches into my mouth and yanks the tooth out, slams the doors shut, and leaves me in disbelief.

I call my mom. It is raining and not yet cold enough for December.

"Mom, I'm using my normal long distance."
"What?"
"Well, you told me to use that 10-10-220 thing the other day, and I just used my normal long distance."
"What 10-10-220 thing?"
"You know, like the commercials with Tony Danza. The long distance plan?"
"Oh that. I never told you to use that. What are you talking about?"

I am stunned. It's as if the line between reality and my dreams is becoming too blurry for me to recognize. This is not a normal side effect, as far as I know. I had them all, in almost the exact order the doctor read them to me: dry mouth, fatigue, upset stomach, increased anxiety, sleeplessness, headaches, and nausea. Nowhere is it listed, as I recheck the Zoloft booklet: dreams that will seem like reality and become false memories in your brain; which only becomes apparent after you attempt to solidify them with people firmly based in reality. I stare woefully at my prescription bottle of pills and wait for the walls to start melting. Hallucinogen or anti-depressant? I'm beginning to wonder.

My father is bleeding from the head. His salt and pepper hair is matted with blood and he's got a wild disassociated look about his gaunt face. I'm petrified. Part of the airport is still on fire and my legs hurt from the crash. I can't understand what's going on and I can't hear too well. My father is on his cell phone, hiding from the security officers, police, and media. Buck Henry, sporting a University of Florida ball cap and tweed coat listens to my father on an earpiece as he strides confidently through the airport. Reba McIntyre, head also bleeding, though not horribly, examines my father's wounds behind a large white column. She can practically peel his scalp back. I am horrified and feel sick, but my father puts his cell phone down and pushes Reba away impatiently. He seems to be okay--until the gigantic killer poodle smashes through the ceiling and everything goes black.

I am chopping my 50-milligram pills into 25-milligram pills, as suggested by my psychiatrist. I am halfway through my 17-part "to do" list, and I'm a little jittery from the four cups of tea I had today. This is in direct violation of doctor's orders. I am not allowed caffeine beyond a cup of tea and no alcohol beyond a glass of wine a night. I know too well the consequences. Too much alcohol will render me useless and sick the day after, then it will be as though I had never been on an antidepressant and I'll be unable to get out of bed, just like my life before these beautiful blue pills. Too much caffeine makes me manic. I twitch, am unable to keep my eyes, much less my mind, focused on one thing for longer than a minute, and I scare the people I am close to. I light a cigarette in defiance. If they insist on taking away my alcohol and caffeine, I'll take nicotine. Oddly enough, the cigarettes calm my hands and make the pill breaking a little easier. I try to recall if the woman I babysit for actually called me with instructions to show up at 5 p.m., or if that was another too-real dream. Once I finish number eight on the list, I call her. She tells me to show up at 9 p.m. I worry that the fabric of my sanity is unraveling a little more, but get bored with that thought and proceed to item number ten on my list: Clean the apartment. It takes me roughly 45 minutes. This is a record. The last time I remember moving this fast and efficiently is junior year of college, when I popped ephedrine to keep me moving with three hours of sleep a night. Remembering what a terribly productive year that was, I quit worrying, until my anxiety attack that occurs at 3:30 a.m. and lasts approximately seven minutes, which is when I will vow to only drink one cup of caffeinated tea a day.

I am in my apartment after being away on vacation. But my apartment is suspiciously similar to a dorm. I try to listen to an answering machine and talk to my friend Liz who is also back from vacation. We have each taken a long bus ride. I am suddenly overcome by a fear of cockroaches and pull my bed back to reveal piles of dust, tsetse flies and miniscule salamanders. I decide not to deal with this until my brother arrives and look for my CDs, which are in shoeboxes all over the slanted room. It is sunny, and I would like to pull the blinds up to let the light in, but know that not only would this be detrimental, but also dangerous.

Oh, I've always had weird and vivid dreams. I used to entertain my friends in junior high with my late-night escapades, filled with Lou Diamond Phillips, kids we knew in school, and some unexplainable situations. Just two years ago I would have nightmares that would induce screams and heart palpitations. These dreams that I have now--mid-Zoloft--are vivid, puzzling, lucid, consistent, and extremely disturbing. But when I wake in the mornings, I have no immediate memory of them, my sheets are unmoved, and upon remembering I am neither disturbed nor surprised. I tell them to my friends, psychiatrist, and therapist just as I would tell amusing anecdotes about my family at Christmas dinner.

My doctors seem unconcerned by these dreams. I try to write them all down, but they are so involved and obscure and embedded in the recesses of my brain that sometimes I wander about the East Village with a vacant stare and no regard for traffic lights. Will Zoloft cause me to lose not just my debilitating depression, but my libido and my sense of reality and narrative as well? Which is the most valuable to me?

I am riding a bike that is much too small for me. My knees keep hitting the handlebars and the potholes on the highway are making it increasingly difficult to keep up with my companions. One of the kids in the bike race gets smooshed flat and I am horrified not only by his Pixar cartoonishness, but by his long, skinny arm laying further up the road. I keep riding, peddling with my heels to keep my knees away from the red rubber handle bars, and slowly make my way up the expressway on-ramp towards a wooden house, where I am involved in an investigation of jurors, one of which is Ilan Kempler, who I played clarinet with in junior high.