Despite having airplane seats that turned into beds, sleep eluded me on the overnight trip from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. I’m worried about this lack of sleep. Will it make me manic? For people like me, with bipolar disorder, traveling can lead to mania, and the only antidote is sleep. To sleep, I need medication. I don’t have any. I stopped taking it a few months ago because it made me gain weight.
I’ve been here a couple of hours and should be napping when I hear a knock on my door and open it. “Be ready in 20. We are hitting a pub.” My travel companion glances into the room. “What are all these papers?” I shrug and say I’ll be ready. I put on tight jeans and a black sweater. In the mirror I look and feel amazing. I am gorgeous. Am I really gorgeous? Or am I manic and overly confident?
The next day, Lorenzo, my middle-school colleague who put the trip together, his mother, his sister and I make the most of London. We ride in a red double-decker bus, take pictures in a red phone booth and watch the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.
At night, I start off trying to sleep but cannot. Instead I work. The piles of paper seem to multiply. On the second day, riding the London Underground, I hear Lorenzo speak to his mother in Italian. I think: Why are they speaking Italian? Is something wrong? Is this a code?
I know that being severely manic can cause the brain to spin webs of conspiracies and make connections that aren’t really there. But I no longer ask myself if I am or am not manic. His mom must be an illegal immigrant. We’re going to have to smuggle her back into the U.S. I am terrified.
I am certain that his mom is not a citizen and that the British police are onto us. At the Sea Life London Aquarium, Lorenzo is studying a map. I walk over, but I cannot make sense of it. The neon-colored routes are shifting and merging into one another. I say, “How are you supposed to figure out where to go with the lines moving all over the place?”
Lorenzo turns his head and cocks it. “Nothing is moving on this map. Danielle, are you all right?” Suddenly I have a realization. Lorenzo is pretending the map isn’t moving. He is trying to tell me that his mom isn’t a citizen, and he is trying to figure out a way to sneak her out of this place so she doesn’t get picked up by Interpol. I resolve to be quiet and follow him, his sister and mom out.
On the plane ride home, I believe we are the biggest story in, if not America, the world. All the passengers on the plane are reporters, writing up the story of how we’re smuggling Lorenzo’s mother into the United States.
Lorenzo pleads for me to sleep. I lean my head on the small, cool window pane and try to sleep, but the second I close my eyes I hear the click-clacking of the reporters’ computers. They are all writing about me and Lorenzo’s family. When I open my eyes and crane my neck to catch them in action, the sound stops. They are cagey and slick, these reporters.
Back home in New York, despite zero immigration issues, my paranoia persists. In his car, Lorenzo asks if I took any drugs. “Be quiet,” I say, since the radio must be bugged. I hear a helicopter and am convinced that Lorenzo’s green VW is being broadcast on every TV station, just like O.J. Simpson with his white Ford Bronco. I picture reporters relaying the story of how two middle-school teachers smuggled an illegal immigrant from Italy, via England, into the United States.
Lorenzo pulls into the parking lot of a hospital and tells me to wait in the car. I am so scared of being caught on camera I curl…
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