I'm Theo Ruckert: fifty, a painter, living in the back of my studio in an old box factory by the Newtown Creek. I was told I have manic depression in 1981; they call it bipolar disorder now. I've been on lithium since July 1997, the second time around. I teach a night painting class in Manhattan, I paint apartments when I have to, and I paint pictures because I have to. This is where I write down the weather inside.

If you have this thing, or somebody you love does: I'm a painter, not a doctor. Take what's useful here and leave the rest. And tell your doctor before you tell me.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1999
Four o'clock light

From about the middle of September the light over the creek changes. All summer it comes down white and flat, like somebody switched on a fluorescent tube over Queens. Then the sun slides south and lower, and in the afternoons it comes in sideways, gold, and moves across the oil tanks and the brick and the water like a warm hand across a tablecloth. It lasts about forty minutes. I've painted it every afternoon for four days: small boards, one a day, fast, but not that kind of fast.

Ben and Laurel came by yesterday. Laurel is starting to show, just a little, and she stood in front of the new boards and said, "These are happy." I said, "They're just light." She said, "That's what I said."

Ilse called Friday to tell me the comet is going on the invitation card for the November show. I thought I'd mind. I find I don't, much. It's a good painting. I painted it. Both of those are true, and it's also true that the man who painted it spent sixteen days without his shoelaces afterward, and I'm tired of making those facts fight each other.

Tonight while I was cleaning brushes the light went off the tanks all at once, like somebody closing a drawer. Some nights I miss the man who would have stayed up and painted the dark till morning. I'm not sure he'd miss me.

Tuesday, class. Wednesday, blood. Tonight, water. Goodnight, all.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1999

First day of fall.

It lifts like a tide going out, not like fog burning off. You never see it go. You just look down one day and notice you're standing on wet sand.

For me it was the fire hydrant on the corner. Somebody painted it silver years ago, and the silver's worn through to red on top where the kids sit on it. Tuesday on the way to the subway I stopped and looked at that red coming through the silver for a full minute, like a fool, with people walking around me. That's how I knew.

Class Tuesday was a real class. I did the gray squares. This term the "oh!" came from a big man in a Yankees cap.

Saw Dr. L. this afternoon. He said, "Better?" I said, "Better." He said, "Good," and we spent the rest of the hour on the Mets, which is how I know he believes me.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1999
The week

I kept the promise. I'll write about the week now, while it's still close enough to see, because some of you have this too, and I'd have given a lot for somebody to describe it to me in 1981.

Monday I didn't get dressed. It wasn't a decision. The socks were on the chair, and choosing a pair was a problem with too many parts. I lay on the bed and watched the light cross the ceiling from the window to the door. It took all day and I watched the whole trip.

Tuesday I taught the first class of the fall term from the bottom of a well. Sixteen new students. I did my introduction, the one I've done three times now, and I heard myself doing it from far away, like a radio in another apartment. Hector, who signed up again, looked at me for a long time at the break, and then went and got me a coffee from the machine in the hall and set it down and didn't say one word.

Wednesday I called Dr. L. That phone call weighed about four hundred pounds. He saw me Thursday. My level had come back a little low, 0.6, after a summer of sweating and drinking water like a camel, so we're raising the dose a little. We talked about the other medicines for the down side, and how for people like me they have to be handled carefully, because they can tip you up the other way. We decided to wait and see him again this week. At the door he wrote his home number on the back of a card and gave it to me. In two years he has never done that.

Here's the thing I want to say out loud about depression: it lies about time. It tells you it has always been like this and always will be. Every single time, I believe it. Every single time, it's been wrong. That isn't hope exactly. It's just the record.

Ben came Friday with soup from the Polish place and washed every dish in my sink and didn't make me talk, which was exactly right.

I'm safe. I want to say that plainly, because some of you will worry. It's lifting. I can tell because I just noticed that the soup was good.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1999

Something's off. Slept eleven hours and woke up tired. The coffee tastes like the cup. The new boards look like somebody else painted them, somebody competent I'm not interested in.

I know this weather. I'm writing it down so it's written down.

Fall term starts Tuesday. If it's still like this on Wednesday, I call Dr. L. I'm promising here, in public, so I can't weasel out of it.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1999 — Labor Day

Lenore called Saturday and asked if I'd have lunch, just the two of us, which we haven't done since about the first Reagan administration. We met at a coffee shop on upper Broadway, a block from the building where we lived when Ben was born. The building's still there.

We talked about the baby for half an hour, the way you'd warm your hands at a stove. Then she put her fork down and said she wanted to tell me something she should have said in 1986. "I didn't leave because you were sick," she said. "I left because I was tired. And I was ashamed of being tired."

I said, "I'd have left me too."

She said, "You did. A few times. You always came back."

I didn't have anything to say to that, because it's true. The up years are a kind of leaving. You're in the room, and you're gone.

We split the check the way divorced people do, down to the tip, and then she left an extra dollar the way married people do. Howard picked her up out front in the car. He waved at me. I waved back. Everybody in this story is a better person than I deserve.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 31, 1999

Ben and Laurel came for supper and brought a cake from the bakery on the corner, and I said, "What's the occasion?" and Laurel put the box on the table and said, "March."

I'm going to be a grandfather. Fifty-one by then. I've been practicing the word in the bathroom mirror. It sounds like somebody else's word, somebody with a cardigan and a Buick.

Later, doing the dishes while Laurel had her feet up on my terrible couch, Ben asked me, very carefully, not looking at me, whether it runs in families. The thing. I told him the truth: it can. Nobody can promise him anything either way. And that's the best reason I know to talk about it out loud, at the table, in front of the kid, instead of in the hallway with the door shut, the way my father's family did about my uncle.

He dried the same plate for a long time. Then he said, "Okay. The table."

SUNDAY, AUGUST 22, 1999

Ilse called Thursday. She's putting together a group show for November, five painters, and she wants three of mine: two of the 1997 canvases, the comet and the East River, and, after I asked, which cost me something, Creek, June.

She wanted four of the old ones. I said two old and one new, or none. I don't know where that came from. She laughed and said I drove a hard bargain for a man who hasn't shown in eleven years, and then she said yes.

So here's the knot I've been picking at all week. The work that will get the most attention of anything I've ever made is the work I made while I was losing my mind. I knew it. I said so on this page in 1997, sitting on a bucket. Now somebody with a gallery has said it too, and there's going to be a price list.

I keep telling myself it's the same hands. The man who painted the comet and the man who painted the creek are the same man. One of them was sleeping. That's the only difference I'm sure of.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 1999
The visit

She came yesterday at eleven. Ilse Harkavy is maybe sixty-five, small, silver hair cut like a helmet, reading glasses on a chain, and she said almost nothing for forty minutes. I'd swept, for the first time since roughly the Carter administration, and hung six of the new ones on the long wall with Creek, June in the middle. She looked at each one a long time. At the creek she stood so close her nose nearly touched it and said, "Hm," which I've decided was good.

Then she pointed her glasses at the stack of big canvases leaning face to the wall. "And those?"

I turned them around one at a time. It took twenty minutes; they're heavy and I'm fifty. She sat down on my paint bucket, my bucket, and didn't say anything at all.

Finally she said, "Who painted these?" I said, "I did. Spring of '97. I was very sick." I don't know why I put it that way. I've never said it to anybody in the business.

She didn't flinch, and she didn't do the sorry face. She said, "I see," and asked the dimensions of the comet painting and whether it was on linen or cotton, and wrote it down in a little notebook. Then she looked back and forth between the comet and the creek for a long time, like somebody watching tennis.

"I'll call you," she said at the door. Everybody says that. I think she means it.

Afterward Arturo came down and we sat on the roof with two cans of seltzer, and I told him about the bucket. He said, "Theo. She sat down. They never sit down."

THURSDAY, JULY 29, 1999 — 2 a.m.

It's still eighty-something in here. I'm writing this down because it's true, and because the deal on this page is that I tell the truth.

Ten days of heat. The tremor is worse in the heat, or I'm worse at ignoring it. I'm thirsty the way a field is thirsty. I've been painting small and slow for two years, and a woman with a gallery is coming in two weeks, and tonight I turned the comet painting around and looked at it and thought: that's who she's going to want. Not the man with the water jug. Him.

And I thought: it takes a few weeks to come up. I know the timing like a bus schedule. I could stop now, coast up through August, and have her walk in with the engine running. Paint five big ones in two weeks. Then go back on after. A controlled burn.

I got as far as the bathroom, with the bottle open, to pour it out. I stood there a long time.

Then I did the other arithmetic. Sixteen days on the psych floor without a belt. Ben in the doorway with his fever voice, after he'd called his mother from a pay phone. Nine thousand dollars, paid back one month at a time until this April. A controlled burn. There's no such thing. Ask anybody who's lived next door to one.

I took them, with a full glass of water, standing at the sink. I'd like to say it felt like a vow. It felt like paying a parking ticket.

This isn't a victory. It's a Thursday. I'll call Dr. L. in the morning and tell him about the bathroom, because the rule is you tell him about the bathroom. Now I'm going to bed.

SUNDAY, JULY 18, 1999

All weekend the radio has been the search for John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane off Martha's Vineyard. I was fourteen when they buried his father and he saluted. Every painter in America could draw that little boy from memory.

Good class Thursday. I set up a copper pot and one brown egg on a white cloth and made them paint the egg for three hours, the whole class. At ten o'clock Hector put down his brush and said, "Theo, I have painted this egg. The egg is finished." I told him the egg is never finished. The lawyer from the spring came back for the summer, and his egg still looks like a legal brief, but a looser brief than in February. Progress.

TUESDAY, JULY 6, 1999

Ninety-five degrees in the studio at noon. The paint won't set up right and neither will I.

Summer session starts tonight. Same room, same radiators, which at least aren't on. Hector's back; he says his wife wants him out of the house on Tuesdays and Thursdays and he'd rather paint than bowl.

And a phone call yesterday, on the holiday, from a woman named Ilse Harkavy, who has a gallery on West 22nd Street. Arturo borrowed Creek, June for his Fourth of July party on Saturday, because, he said, his apartment needed one thing in it that wasn't a sculpture of a foot. She was at the party. She asked who painted the creek. She'd like to see the studio in August, when she's back from somewhere with a lake.

I said, "Sure," like a man who gets these calls. Then I hung up and sat down on the floor.

Heat note, for the lithium people who write me: Dr. L. reminds me every summer. You sweat, you lose water and salt, and the level can climb. Drink. Eat regular meals. Don't reach for the ibuprofen without asking. I have a jug of water on every flat surface in this studio, including the toilet tank.