The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  Her voice stopped me. She had called me “child,” as if I had suddenly lost many years and about thirty inches. I found the nearest men’s room, ducked into it, and retreated to a stall for several minutes where I sat down, put my head in my hands, and listened to a man’s piss gush into the urinal outside. My anger turned to despair behind that door. I felt broken. Even now, I can’t interpret with any accuracy the overwhelming sadness that flooded me. It was not the pain of compassion; it was shame and misery for myself, and a doomed sense of repetition brought on by the vengeful phrases that had propelled me, one foot after the other, toward the pediatric E.R.

  WHEN I SAT down beside Miranda, she barely moved, and when she told me the story of Eggy’s fall, she spoke to the floor. I gazed at her tense hands in her lap, with their long fingers and short nails. Lane had picked up his daughter after school and taken her to his apartment, as he did every other Friday. He was on the telephone talking to his dealer, while Eggy played with her string in the next room. Because of the excessive heat in the building, he had left his bedroom window open. While Lane talked, Eggy must have been tying things together. He heard her scream, ran into the other room, saw the open window, string knotted from bedpost to fire escape, and his daughter lying below. The drop from Lane’s first-floor apartment on Avenue A wasn’t far, but the child must have hit her head and lost consciousness immediately. Miranda lifted her chin and spoke to the wall. “He wasn’t paying attention,” she said. She paused. “How many times have I not paid attention.” Her voice sank at the end of the sentence. It was not a question.

  “Where is he now?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “He was here. I promised to call him. I don’t want to look at him right now. I know he didn’t mean to. I just, just can’t take him right now.” She squeezed her hands more tightly together. “Erik, I signed a paper saying they could put something into her skull. They wanted to know if she was allergic to iodine.”

  Everything was being done. That was the word. As I sat there in the waiting room beside Miranda, I found myself on the inert side of medicine, where neither heroism nor failure is possible, where time expands and ordinary numbers on a clock can’t register it. With every hour of coma the prognosis worsens. There are exceptions, even miracles, but they’re rare. And so we waited. The mostly blank walls, the stale odors, the unintelligible chatter, the sounds of beepers, the round face of the man with dreadlocks in the chair opposite me, and the queasy artificial light of the hospital had an almost hypnotic effect as we waited. For a while I stared at a torn, crumpled blue-and-yellow potato chip bag that lay beneath an empty chair, and then at the red cylinder of the fire extinguisher. The awful accumulation of meaningless sensory information became a leaden presence in my body that would have been boredom if it weren’t for my underlying hunger to know. Miranda’s parents and two of her sisters had arrived by the time the neurosurgeon, Dr. Harden, appeared, but he couldn’t tell us what would happen, only what had already happened. Eggy’s coma score was 10. Her pupils were normal. She had no broken bones, just a few bumps and bruises. She had been given Rocuronium, a paralytic drug, to keep her quiet, which had already worn off. A ventilator was helping her breathe. The CT scan had shown no contusions or hematomas, an enormous relief, but there was some edema, some swelling. Mild, he said. Still, he wasn’t sure what it meant. They wanted to err on the side of caution and keep checking, so they had inserted a catheter to measure her intracranial pressure, which at the moment was normal. He looked about my age and had the brisk, confident manner of an expert in his field. His tone was sympathetic, and yet I felt irritated by a bland quality in his eyes, which I later realized may have been simple exhaustion. Nevertheless, I knew the man saw what he was trained to see.

  When they let her go in to Eggy in the ICU, Miranda saw something else. She saw her six-year-old daughter lying at a thirty-degree angle on a gurney, with a partly shaved head, a red-brown mess of Betadine around the hole that had been drilled through her skull. She saw an array of nameless monitoring equipment, lines and tubes and machines attached to her child’s face, arms, chest, nose, and throat. She saw the scrapes on Eggy’s forehead and the bruise on her naked arm, and she saw that her daughter lay in a wounded sleep, from which some people never wake. When Miranda returned, she was walking very slowly, her lips pressed tightly together, and as she neared us, I saw her list suddenly to one side and reach out to the wall to regain her balance. I stood up, but her father rushed in front of me and helped her into a chair.

  Lane arrived a few minutes later. His face was red and swollen, and when his eyes met mine, I saw no flash of recognition. He walked straight past me and then kneeled in front of Miranda. She didn’t look down at him. He was whispering to her in a desperate voice, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” I turned my head away and found myself looking straight at Miranda’s father.

  Then I heard Miranda say in a commanding voice, “Get up and sit down.”

  When I looked back in their direction, I saw that Lane had obeyed and was sitting slumped over beside her, his head in his hands.

  And so we held vigil in an eerie space of the ongoing present, an interval drained of all significance, except that it was suspended between a child’s fall and some future moment when we would know.

  MIRANDA RETURNED TO Eggy in the ICU, and so she must have heard them say there was lightening, improvement, that Eglantine was coming out of it. Miranda was there when her daughter recognized her, and she was there when Dr. Harden announced his opinion that things looked good, very good, better than he had expected. I saw Jeffrey Lane weep with happiness when he received the news and Miranda’s parents embrace each other and then their daughters. I knew that it wasn’t over, that even if she recovered fully, Eggy would live with the story of the fall inside her. She would be changed by it.

  WHEN I LEFT the hospital, it was snowing—large wet flakes that would whiten the sidewalks and streets only briefly—but the snow was beautiful, and as I paused to watch it fall, illuminated by the building’s lights against the darkness of the evening, it struck me as a moment when the boundary between inside and outside loosens, and there is no loneliness because there is no one to be lonely. After the first major snowstorm, my father wrote, we were snowbound until spring. I remembered the great drift against our front door, the hoarfrost on the window with its complex patterns, my nose against the cold glass, and the vast white dunes formed by the blizzard overnight. Dunkel Road was invisible. The known world had disappeared. “When Lars died, it was snowing,” my mother said. “I watched it fall through the window. It fell straight down, and it fell steadily. A change, like a shadow, came over him; it seemed to crawl up his body and then it reached his neck and moved up to his chin, his nose, his cheeks, his forehead, over his head, and then I knew he had died.” The night Eglantine woke up, it was snowing. Ingeborg was so tiny, my grandfather said, they buried her in a cigar box. Somewhere on the twenty acres out there in the country, out home, the bones of a stillborn infant lie buried. My father digs the grave. An unborn child speaks from inside his mother on Cut Hill, and the English slaver falls to the ground dead. Uncle Richard is lying in a street in West Kingston. My great-uncle David hobbles down Washington Avenue in the snow with his stumps in his specially made shoes. He manages to get inside the lobby of the hotel and then he collapses. It was his heart, not the cold. King Edward and Mrs. Wallis Simpson. I see Dorothy expounding on the street, pontificating on the state of the world, the preposterous orator. Dear, old, sweaty Burton, memory man, rescuer of ladies in need, lady himself, mourning his mother, the one before the stroke, the woman of “yore.” My father is speaking at his eightieth birthday. He begins with the little ad in the paper: Lost Cat. Brown and white, thinning fur, torn left ear, blind in one eye, missing tail, limps on right front foreleg. Answers to the name of Lucky. I hear them laughing in the room. I see Laura laughing across the table and I feel her warm ass under my hands in bed. Miranda’s head is on my shoulder. I see h
er dreamed streets and her house with its disquieting rooms and curious furniture. I see a woman lying beneath a man struggle for an instant under his grip. I stand in front of her chest of drawers, and I want so much to look inside, to touch her things. A man slams his desk with a hatchet and finds manuscripts inside. Like the body of his father giving up secrets. I see my father’s orderly desk: paper clips, ammo, unknown keys. Sonia’s closet is messy now. She throws her clothes all over the room, and Arkadi pulls open the chest of drawers in the vast room and finds nothing but a voice. He gets on the train and sees a woman who looks like Lili but isn’t Lili, someone else who will capture his imagination, a creature of his invention. When was it, I think, just three days ago, Inga read the first letter aloud to me, her voice shaking. “Dear Lili,” Max wrote. “I write to you now in that other person, the one who has written all these years to live. He didn’t live to write. He wrote to live. There are days when there are no stories left in him, when he feels he can’t do it anymore. There are days when he feels dead. He can’t say this to anyone else. He says it to you because you have the armor he gave you, because you can’t see him, because you don’t know who he is. You don’t know he’s dying.” But Edie must have known that Max was chasing a figment, that he was writing to someone else, to a woman in a movie, a woman he would never find.

  Perhaps you loved Miranda because you knew you couldn’t find her, I said to myself, and that kept you from moving forward and left you shivering like Ms. L. on the steps outside a locked door. Deadlocked. People need to be seen. Mr. R. looks up and sees the rug on the wall in my office. Something has broken inside him. The Depression never seemed to end. I see my father walking across campus with his long strides, and he doesn’t recognize me. He passes his son, but he’s not looking for me at that moment. He’s too sad to see me, absorbed in old sorrows that return again and again. It’s something about Dad. Inga is talking about Max. We have different selves over the course of a life. My father is telling his story about the farm, his army days, his travels, and his work, about people he knew and loved, and about us, about my mother, Inga, and me. The speech seems to be over. My father pauses. His eyes are gleaming with humor. “And that’s why,” he says, “I answer to the name of Lucky.” It’s new, Sonia says about being in love. It’s new. The New World. A dugout on the prairie. The vanished. His vacant corpse had lost the man I knew. Joel will never know his father. Kyss Pappa. My young mother bends over the body of her father. The war is still going on. The wars are raging. Men and women are raging. My father sleeps in a hole on the beach as the rocket fire booms above him. Our brave young men and women in uniform fighting for freedom. A log house goes up in flames. A little girl is rescued from a burning house. We cleaned up them graves real nice, didn’t we? The towers are burning. Bad people burn up. No they don’t. My father cuts down trees. His fist slams into the low ceiling above his narrow bed. My grandfather cries out in his sleep and his small son shakes him awake. Lane saw it in me. He saw the violence, the violence my father wanted to walk off but couldn’t. The road isn’t long enough. A Japanese officer falls over in the long grass. Sarah jumps, falls. Eggy falls. Sonia watches from the window. People are jumping, falling. They’re on fire. The buildings fall. Wo ist mein Schade Star. The dead are speaking and Mr. T. is listening. We hear voices. I hear my father saying my mother’s name. He says Marit. He says it again. I see him as he leans over his coat in a narrow room in Oslo, methodically picking the pale fluff from the dark material. “If I could have one memory . . .” I stand and watch the snow, and it is all happening at once. It cannot last, I say, this feeling cannot last, but it doesn’t matter. It is here now. In the drawing the little girl has wings. The coma is lightening. My sister is lying in the grass. Kiss me, kiss me, so I can wake up. And then I see Ms. W. at the end of our last session. She is smiling at me, and she uses the word again: reincarnation. “Not after death, but here when we’re alive.” She puts out her hand and I take it. She says, “I will miss you.”

  “I will miss you, too.”

  Acknowledgments

  There are many people who in one way or another contributed to the writing of this book. David Hellerstein, Daria Colombo, and Ann Appelbaum gave me insight into the working lives of psychiatrists. Monica Carsky spoke to me about her experience as a psychotherapist. Rita Charon, head of the Narrative Medicine Department at Columbia Medical School, kindly allowed me to sit in on her class for medical students and then included me in the department’s lecture series. I want to thank Frank Huyler and Richard Siegel for their expertise in emergency medicine.

  Mark Solms introduced me to the world of neuropsychoanalysis, first through his books, and then in person. He invited me to the monthly neuroscience lectures at New York Psychoanalytic Institute and to the small discussion group that followed. I owe a debt to all the researchers, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts who came and went in that group, but I want to mention some of the regulars: Maggie Zellner, David Olds, Jaak Panksepp and, in memory, Mortimer Ostow. I thank David Pincus, also a member of the group, for his ongoing e-mail conversation with me about minds and brains.

  George Makari’s knowledge of philosophy and medical history, as well as his experience as a working psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, were invaluable to me.

  I want to thank Dawn Beverle, my supervisor at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, where I work as a volunteer teaching writing to the inpatients every week.

  I am grateful to all the people who came to my classes. Teaching that workshop has been a powerful experience for me, and without my students, I wouldn’t have felt nearly so close to the stories of people who are fighting the pain of mental illness.

  Jacquie Monda and Edna and George Thelwell deserve my gratitude for helping me find material on Jamaica, as well as sharing with me their own stories from that country.

  My greatest debt, however, is to my father, Lloyd Hustvedt, who died on February 2, 2004. Near the end of his life, I asked him if I could use portions of the memoir he had written for his family and friends in the novel I was then beginning to write. He gave me his permission. The passages in the book from Lars Davidsen’s memoir are taken directly from my father’s text with only a few editorial and name changes. In this sense, after his death, my father became my collaborator. The story of my great uncle David is also true, and the newspaper article about “Dave the Pencil Man” is quoted verbatim. Despite these direct borrowings, I have throughout the novel freely mingled imaginary stories with real ones.