It was hot here today in Southern California, being over 90 in some areas. It reminded me of what heat is like, given that we have had (for us) a relatively cool winter.

So I try to imagine what it is like in Calalini. I had always thought that the hottest places on earth were the Sahara, the Gobi Desert in China, Central Australia, and our very own Baker, California in the Mojave Desert. The hottest recorded temperature in the Mojave was 138 degrees. The other three locations have all recorded temperatures over 140 degrees, in the shade. At that temperature, your body is sweating so much that without drinking a liter of water every hour you will die within hours. Simply standing outside in that kind of heat will dehydrate you within minutes, raising your core body temperature, and leaving you at risk for heat-stroke (which is when your core body temperature rises above 102 degrees).

It turns out though that the Sarah, the Kimberly (in Australia), the Gobi, and the Mojave are not the hottest places on earth. There is a much hotter place, called Calalini.

You will have to forgive me if my spelling is incorrect. I have never been there.

Daytime temperatures in Calalini reach 160 degrees during the summer. At that temperature you would stroke out in minutes and you would lose water faster through sweat than you could possibly replace it, even if you drank water constantly. But that isn't even the worst of it. At at temperature, your skin would turn red with first degree burns and begin to contract and wilt. If you want to know what that would feel like, run your bath as hot as you can (the average faucet is legally restricted to not exceed 120 degrees-still hot enough to scald your skin) and jump in. You body would go into shock. Just put your hand under it and imagine living in that.

Calalini obviously is very hostile to humans. Yet, there is life there, although not life we would recognize. 400 the cat lives there. The Seven Rats (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) live there. 100 Degrees and 24 Hours, two young 8 year old girls, live there, apparently immune from the killer heat.

I doubt any of you have ever been there because those that go to Calalini don't come back. Not that any of us could go there even if we wanted to. You can't get there on a plane. You can't get there on a boat. You can't get there in a car.

If you have never heard of this hell on earth, you are lucky. I have been listening to stories of it for two years.

When I first heard of Calalini, I thought it was just a fantasy, something beyond the horizon of my life. Why would I have to worry about a child's fantasy?

Today, I worry. I worry because Calalini is invading. Yes, it has an army, an army of cats, rats, and little girls. And we cannot kill that army without killing innocents. We cannot win this war without destroying ourselves.

Calalini is coming for my daughter.

On the way to visit Jani today, I could feel it bubbling up when I got off the 405 and crossed Sunset to Church. It was an emotion that I have come to fear. It is an emotion that makes me right crazy Facebook posts telling God to go fuck himself. It is the emotion that makes me say things I would never normally say, like telling a full-time faculty member and the current acting director of composition at CSUN that I will be there forever... as a lecturer. This is not something full-time faculty really understand. They see what they do as a career, and with good reason, because to them it is. For full-time faculty, life is filled with scholarship, the New York Times (and time to read it), drafting articles for publication, etc. For me, teaching is not a career. I am no scholar. My "career" serves the same purpose as food does. It keeps me alive. It is not an end on itself, only a means to survival.

Most of the time, I maintain the front to my friends and colleagues that I am functioning and that I have the same hopes and dreams as the rest of them. I do not. I maintain this front not through any act of trickery or supreme suppression.

You see, I have a gift. When Jani is in crisis, my emotions shut down. Not completely, mind you, but they go dormant. Soldiers in combat experience the same thing. If you allow yourself to feel, you will fall apart. So I stop feeling. Automatically. Without effort. When Jani is psychotic I go into crisis mode, focusing only on the ground in front of me. I function automatically.

Crisis times have become the easy times for me, because I can function automatically, without function. In crisis, it becomes only about keeping my family alive: Jani, Susan, and Bodhi. If I get my family alive and physically intact to the end of the day, I have succeeded. That is all that matters.

But when the crises has passed, when the meds appear to be working and Jani is starting to stabilize, when she seems like a normal little girl, when there is no violence, that is when I start to feel that bubbling. The bubbling is a sense of doom that I suppress, the fear that would cripple me, fear that my daughter will not live to adulthood.

It comes only in the quiet moments and when I feel it coming, I want to leap out of my car and run screaming through traffic. I want to overturn desks at work and cry uncontrollably. I want to do all the things that Janni does when she is psychotic. I want to be psychotic. I want to let go and not have to worry any more.

That was how I felt as I drove into UCLA today. I could see myself walking into the LRC tomorrow morning at 10:30 and collapsing, screaming and blubbering. I was going to tell you all that I had had a great fall and that I needed you, my men and horses, to put me back to together.

But tonight I am calm. Tonight I am back in crisis mode.

When I reached the Unit, the first thing I saw was a nursing staff sitting at Jani's door. Instantly I knew that something had to be wrong. If a nurse is stationed outside a child's door, it means that child has what is called a "one to one." It means that the staff must maintain at least one set of eyes on the child at all times.

I had never seen this nurse before. She didn't have a UCLA ID. I was already compartmentalizing my thoughts, and one of those thoughts was that the staff was short handed and had brought in another nurse (a temp, if you will). The nurse told me in a West African accent that Jani was asleep but I could talk to the nurses. I moved past her into Jani's room and saw that indeed she was asleep. I tossed the Burger Kind mac'n cheese I had brought her on her desk and debated trying to wake her, but I decided since she was asleep this gave me time to check with the nurses.

I passed Miss Nigeria and went into the day room. Diane, one of the regular nurses who has worked with Jani since she came in three months ago, was sitting on the couch with the other three kids on the unit, all watching a movie. Diane turned to me and I swear her eyes were red. She looked she'd been crying. I tried to reason with myself that maybe it was just allergies.

Diane got up and moved away from the kids. It had been a very bad day. She told me what had happened, looking like she was about to cry. I think she was. I think, after three months of taking care of Jani, seeing her everyday, she has started to feel what we feel.

Jani had woken up at 4:30 this morning. One of the side effects of changing meds all the time is that it plays havoc with the sleep patterns. Jani knows that if she wakes up early she must stay in her room and watch tv or have quiet time until 8am on the weekends. She knows this. But this morning she would stay in her room. She hit the staff. She bit Diane. She had her first PRN (pro re nata-Latin for "as the situation demands or as needed) of Benadryl at six this morning. It knocked her out for a few hours but when she woke up, everything was a catastrophe. She screamed that she had missed breakfast (they had saved her tray). She screamed she had missed RT (recreational therapy-they waited for her). She could not control her emotions and could not calm down. At 10:30 they gave her another PRN. She fought the effects of this one, refusing to nap, lying on the floor in front of the swinging doors where she could be hit or stepped on. When she wouldn't move at staff order, she was movedinto her room, kicking and hitting and biting (I have done this many times). In "timeout" she had be watched to make sure she did not try to injure herself. She started biting down on the chair, biting the furniture, saying her teeth hurt, leaving blood stains.

Yesterday she was fine.

You see, there is no consistency. One day she will follow the rules and will be very cooperative. On that day, she wants to earn points to get stuffed animals from the point cabinet. Then the next day, she will break all the rules and suffer any punishment. She will say she doesn't care about points or rewards. Because in those moments, she doesn't. That is what schizophrenia and psychosis do. They make you do things you know are wrong but you can't stop. When children have a real behavioral problem there are two signs: 1) There is an external trigger for the behavior, like not getting what the child wants. 2) The bad behavior is consistent.

For Jani, there are no external triggers. Yes, stress can set her off, but stress just breaks the damn of psychosis. Still, it is her mind that places these restrictions on her, not the outside world. And for Jani there is no consistency. One day she will follow the rules, as happy as a clam. This is because she wants to be good. Then the psychosis, Calalini, comes for her.

I went back into Jani's room and tried to wake her up. I said "Hi, sweetie! Daddy's here" and gave her a kiss. Her eyes fluttered open and she sat up like someone had flipped a switch. She looked at me, eyes dull, mouth slack, and said...

"Who are you?"

For a second I thought I had misheard her. She was mumbling. Her mouth was dry and she had blood and hair encrusted across her lips. Her hair and clothes were a mess. This is another sign of psychosis, when she lets her personal hygiene go.

"Who am I?" I repeated, half expecting her to crack a sly smile to let me know she was joking.

But her face stayed slack.

"I'm your daddy," I told her, in an amazingly level voice.

"Oh," she said, then turned to look around the room. "Did you bring any food?"

I got up to retrieve her Burger King, fighting back terror. She hadn't recognized me. This was the first time. She looked like she was awake but still in a dream.

I gave her her food and she started to eat. As soon as she opened her mouth, I saw that her mouth was full of blood. Panic flashed for a minute and then crisis mode took over. I asked Miss Nigeria to open the bathroom (they look the bathroom to keep the kids from killing themselves in there) and called for the head nurse. Alfie and Diane came and told me about her chewing on the chairs, claiming her teeth hurt. They pointed out the blood stains on the chair Miss Nigeria had been sitting in. I told them to get her a Tylenol for her teeth and got the bathroom door unlocked. I wet a paper towel and wiped the dried blood and hair off Jani's face. Alfie came back with the Tylenol and put Jani's hair in a ponytail. She spilled water on herself. I waited, holding my breath, as she looked down at it. I wasn't sure if she would erupt screaming and try to tear her clothes off. But she let it go. She was too tired.

The TV was set to Animal Planet and was showing "Human Prey," a show about people who have survived wild animal attacks by sharks and lions (in this case sharks). Computer imaging showed what a Great White Shark does to a human body. Since Jani was barely registering my presence, I felt desperate and wanted to teach her, to try and engage her. I could feel her slipping away. I seized the sharks, explaining to her why large predators always violently shake their prey rather than trying to eat it alive. I explained that the shark was shaking the computer generated man because it wanted to break his spine, because living prey fights for its life, hitting, kicking, biting, and, in the case of humans with opposable thumbs, going for the eyes. This makes consuming living prey a bit dangerous. Better to kill it and be able to relax over the kill.

Jani suddenly tells me that it is now 200 degrees in Calalini. That was the last thing she said tonight. After she ate, she went to sleep. I stayed with her another hour or so, just holding her. I hope somewhere deep inside she felt it.

Susan had a great visit yesterday, except for one thing. Jani told her 400 the Cat was back. 400 is the worst of her delusions, a "command" delusion that tells her to hurt herself and others. Susan didn't think much of it at the time because Jani was calm yesterday.

But Jani was trying to warn us. Jani always knows when the denizens of Calalini are coming for her. She was trying to warn us that 400 was creeping around the edge of her consciousness and that when we saw her again, she might not be herself.

And she wasn't. 400 took her in the dark. She is 400's prey and now she is fighting for her life, trying to keep 400 from dragging her back to Calalini.

Calalini is getting hotter. That is also another warning. Two years ago, Jani kept asking me at what temperature things burn at: steel (1500 degrees), wood (500 degrees), paper (450 degrees), human flesh (250 but the water in our bodies will boil at 212 degrees). I didn't think anything of it at the time. It was just curiosity.

Do you know what happens to the human body at 200 degrees? At that temperature, our oceans would evaporate, along with every other body containing water, including our own. The human body is 95% water. At 200 degrees, our blood would literally be starting to boil. Within seconds, all the water in our bodies would vaporize, like the erupting bubbles in the bottom of a boiling pot of water.

I pray for a cold front in Calalini.