I spoke with my wife’s parents about her issues. My FIL didn’t know how to respond and sat there, drinking beer, staring off into space. But my MIL agreed, enthusiastically, with my assertion that we get my wife hospitalized, and even went as far as to tell me that my wife was “horrible” and a “terrible person.” I wasn’t sure if that translated into English how I interpreted it.
Later that day, we had an intervention, and told her we decided to commit her to a mental hospital where she could undergo treatment. Surprisingly, at the time, she didn’t put up a fight and agreed to go.
A few days later, we drove up there to have a look at the facility, my FIL, her and me. It was near Vienna, the hospital, and looked more like a ski resort than a hospital. The place was next to a sprawling, scenic freshwater lake that was
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent draped by a range of spectacular emerald green mountains, their serrated tips like the mouth of a playful animal.
As an American, it was unbelievable to me that this was wholly covered by national insurance. Wouldn’t cost us a dime…
We drove back to Graz, silently, listening to Bruce Springsteen, which my wife, FIL
and I all liked.
She’d agreed to be committed, check into that hospital, and was to leave in a couple days. I was to stay at the house, keep working online, at the plant nursery, and keep helping Gertrud’s dad.
However, that evening, as we, my wife and I, sat down to dinner, my wife had something of a psychotic break. She picked up a carving knife, came at me with it, yelling and cursing, saying how I wanted to “get rid of her.”
Being as frail and weak as she was, I was able to slap the knife out of her hands, easily. Part of me wanted to pummel her. Like, how could she do that? Attack me like this? After I’d stuck with her, despite all her problems and had orchestrated the intervention, the movement to have her treated… But I knew the truth. And I couldn’t be mad. I knew that it was her demons in control. That this wasn’t her anymore...
After I’d slapped her arm, the knife flew to the floor, and she collapsed, began bawling, weeping, saying how she wanted to die.
It was clear to me that she was on a path to destruction. Far worse than I imagined. She had a death wish.
I ran downstairs, got her parents, and we drove her back to the hospital, that night, and had her committed.
I’ll never forget the look on her face as we left the hospital, her crying in her mother’s arms, the look of pain, sadness. It hurt so bad, to walk away, to know there was nothing I could do for her. That image of her in anguish is forever burned into my psyche. It’s another image I wish I could delete like a computer file. But I can’t.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent 52
While in the hospital, she turned for the worse, was calling me daily, berating me for putting her there. Saying the worst possible things she could say. Hurtful, personal things. Things I never thought her capable of uttering. She blamed me for ruining her life. That everything was my fault.
In a way, seeing her disintegrate the way she did, it was similar to watching my father die. She’d become emaciated like him. She’d been overtaken by this terrible disease. And like him, she was in denial about it.
I’d done what I could to help her but was exasperated. I’d talked to her parents, neighbors, and a couple schoolmates of hers. All told me really awful things, stories of her temper, her lashing out at people, her conflicts. She’d driven away most everyone and didn’t have any friends. It turns out that was part of why she went to South Beach, to start anew.
It was like the person I’d met and fallen in love was dead. I blamed myself. I figured that we should have stayed in South Beach. Then none of this would have happened. I started blaming myself for Gertrud’s death too. Like I should have done more to help her, taken her away from this crazy village, and maybe she’d still be alive, have had my baby.
The nightmares were continuing too. Every night seeing death, tormented by my sleep, and every day felt like 100 years…
I was starting to think that not only was my wife not right for me, maybe Austria, too, wasn’t for me. At first the history had disturbed me, the nightmares, but it was becoming more about teleology, with all these crazy people and death. I came to believe in a negative mist, an energy, a form, a heart of darkness there.
Insane cases in the media came out too, like Josef Fritzl, the arrant psychopath, who’d kept his daughter as a captive sex slave for years, in a locked basement of their house, and had kids with her, the kids also forced to live as prisoners in the basement.
There were a couple other similar cases too of girls being kidnapped, forced to live as slaves, prisoners in some freak’s house.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent I was feeling like a prisoner too. This wasn’t the life I wanted. This wasn’t the person I wanted to marry. I missed America, too, my old friends there, the culture.
I’d reached a denouement.
I decided it was best to separate from my wife. Take a few months apart, let her have her treatment, hopefully get better. I needed a break. And I wanted to travel around Europe a little, see Rome, Scotland, and Paris, while I could. I was so close to so much.
And so I left. I left Austria. Left that crazy village, with all its memories. And my first night away from there, the nightmares stopped. Completely.
By myself, I did some backpacking, traveling around the continent and saw incredible, once in a lifetime sights. The Eiffel Tower, the Roman Coliseum, The Highlands of Scotland.
I visited England, saw my long-lost aunt, met extended family out there and had a blast. The English countryside being one of the most beautiful places I’d ever been. The rolling green hills’ beauty defying mere words to describe it.
I’d been looking at jobs in America and had found an opportunity in Sarasota, at a legitimate finance company, seeking loan officers, especially those with international experience, language skills, and although I spoke an accented, stilted, and grammatically poor German, I’d become quite fluently conversant, and had aced the phone interview, part of which was done in German.
Back to America I went. To start my new life. A life that was surprisingly boring.
Reverse culture shock hitting me like a sledgehammer, in ways I didn’t think possible. Everything seeming otiose.