by Andrew Potok
The last words I heard as I tried to shake the images from my mind were: “Without the Black Death, no Renaissance. . . .” I woke Charlotte in the next room and talked the images away.
Traffic roared by on Haverstock Hill, just outside my window. Scholars, I supposed, were already in their seats at the British Museum, artists were putting gesso on their canvases, writers were tearing sheet after sheet of manuscript from their hot typewriters.
As for me, I was undergoing a strange metamorphosis, an awakening, the first systemic reaction to a week of daily poison. I pictured the bee venom exorcising evil spirits and that internal filth accumulated from forty-three years of life. I imagined it working its way through brain disorders, incipient tumors, prostate problems, receding gums. It would, according to Helga, cause the emission of bile and pus, the eruption of boils, the exhalation of vile odors.
Two days after my bee illness, I was back at Helga’s, sitting in the usual patients’ chair. Her armchair was surrounded by piles of paper, some tall, substantial stacks of newspapers, some scattered mounds of letters. Helga stood framed in the doorway looking to me like a small spruce tree, her head covered with a wispy triangle of gray or yellow hair, her short, dumpy body becoming broader as it approached the floor. She stretched to step over the stacked papers and sank into her usual place.
“Have you ever seen so many letters, Mr. What-do-you-call-it?” Some days she didn’t even attempt my name. It was strange to be bound in the intimacy of our daily transactions, knowing that usually she couldn’t remember my name. The absence of any name maintained a barrier, perhaps consciously constructed by her. “I tell you they are writing me from everywhere. Can you imagine, I have a letter asking for cheap accommodations. What do these idiots think? That Helga Barnes is a hotel service?” She looked for that letter, found it, and tore it into shreds, spreading the bits of paper over the whole mess. She got up, and with her large buttocks pointing skyward, she riffled through more papers. “I want to read you a special one this morning,” she said. “How can I do everything all alone? Where is that stupid letter?” By now half the floor was blanketed with scraps.
I simply sat in the middle of the room. She suddenly kicked a pile furiously, scattering it like a flock of pigeons. Her face reddened. She peered for a moment and spotted it.
“Aha,” she said triumphantly, waving an envelope, “here it is. Listen, angel, listen to this.”
She sat down again and began reading a long, articulate letter from an Englishman describing his and his daughter’s retinitis pigmentosa. He was desperate. Helga Barnes was his last hope. “I would rather die,” Helga read, “than accept blindness. I refuse to believe that nothing can be done.”
Helga beamed. “That’s what I like to hear. This blighter has spunk! Of course he won’t accept blindness. All you people who simply take up your white sticks and act as if it were perfectly normal make me sick! You are being taken for fools. You have to fight!” she shouted. “I have the bloody cure, but do they bloody tell you about it? No, they don’t tell you about it. They laugh at me. It’s in their bloody interest to laugh at me. That way you’ll keep going back to them, begging them, ‘Please try your new drug, try it on me, darling doctor,’ ” she whined. “They charge you twenty-five quid for an injection of distilled water. Don’t think they don’t! I’ve seen it happen.”
She took a long breath and took up the letter again. Within it she found an enclosure, a letter written by an eye specialist at Moorfields.
“So this is a note from the famous Mr. Bach from renowned Moorfields Eye Hospital, is it?” she jeered. “They think they know everything, the rotters. Let’s see what Mr. Bach has to say.” And she read the letter, a prognosis and some genetics of RP. She read slowly, concentrating like a child, sounding out passages to herself first, her lips moving silently, then aloud to me. She plowed on bravely, then stopped in mid-sentence, encountering the words autosomal recessive . Her lips moved furiously, her forehead wrinkled with the effort, and finally she attacked it head on and garbled it completely. I felt badly for her.
As Mr. Bach’s RP narrative continued, she began to mutter “rubbish” under her breath.
“Rubbish!” she screamed, finally in a total rage. “Carriers, carriers”—she pounded her fists rhythmically— “bloody carriers! I can cure them too.” Nothing could stop her. She looked at me, and her trembling body quieted. “Bring your son,” she commanded. “He’s supposed to be a bloody carrier. I’ll cure him of carrying, that’s what I’ll do!”
I sat nodding, resisting my impulse to run. She then told me the story of an old patient who had called her late one evening, during a raging blizzard. The woman was frightened by boils that had begun appearing on her legs.
“Yes, yes,” Helga had assured her, “all of that filth the doctors fed you is coming up on your legs. Don’t worry. The bees are doing their job.” The woman called again, with new boils elsewhere, and the third time Helga wakened the chauffeur to brave the storm in her Daimler.
“Those boils were enormous,” Helga told me, “absolutely gigantic, and they began to pop. Some of them broke off from the old girl’s body and floated up to the ceiling where they splattered the room with a vile liquid.”
Helga had gotten up to act out the scene. “Splat! Splat! And down came torrents of putrid filth.”
She ran around the room dodging the bursting bubbles. She was laughing so hard now that she was hardly able to continue, but still she danced, turning and jumping. Her face was artless and naïve. She flailed her arms, crawled through lines of enemy fire, swam sidestroke in the river of boils.
She wiped her steamy spectacles. I sat in the middle, amused and terrified, like watching the furious manic performance of a sick child. Finally she sat down, out of breath.
“So, that is what happens to drugs. If you are lucky, they pop out on the body, but sometimes they are so strong that bees cannot budge them. Never,” she warned, “never let them give you anything after I am through with you.” She began to relax. “What a night it was!” She let out a final cackle. “Let me tell you, I have never had one like it.”
Added to the known levels of my healer’s madness, added to her rage and megalomania, was this banal looniness, this good old-fashioned craziness. This dimension frightened me more than anything I had encountered in her yet.
At long last, she seemed to recognize me as a patient awaiting treatment. “Well, now,” she said, “are we seeing any brighter today?”
“No, not yet. . . .”
“Are we seeing any cheerier then?”
“What do you mean by ‘cheerier,’ Mrs. Barnes?” I asked.
“Cheerier, cheerier,” she repeated. “If you are seeing better, it is cheerier, is it not?”
She fetched her ophthalmoscope and sat down next to me.
The ophthalmoscope is an ingenious instrument improvised by Hermann von Helmholtz, one of the most brilliant scientists of the nineteenth century, to demonstrate to his students, for the first time ever, the live human retina. Until then, looking into the eye was like looking through a keyhole into a dark room. Helmholtz’s solution lay in finding a way, using angled mirrors, to project a beam of light directly along the path of vision. The ophthalmoscope allows one to see the pink of the illuminated retina instead of the black of the interior space of the eye.
As Helga held the instrument between us, my face on one side, hers on the other, she chirped with delight: “It is absolutely marvelous! The pigment is dehydrating faster than even I suspected!” She had forgotten to turn on the light of her ophthalmoscope.
Her fingers on the instrument’s handle made it sound brittle and chintzy, like a toy made in Taiwan. It could as easily have been a plastic eggbeater or a cheap rotary drill.
“Ach, it is fantastic!” Helga said. I suddenly remembered myself at age fifteen in a New York whorehouse, trying to produce, while the lady under me, who could have been dozing, exhorted mechanically: “Yeah, baby, that’s the wa
y to do it.”
“Mrs. Barnes,” I said, “the ophthalmoscope isn’t on.”
She took it away from our faces and examined it. She said that she liked to turn it on in stages. “I had it on very low,” she said, flicking it on. “That’s the way I like to do it. And let me tell you, I see a tremendous improvement. The film is evaporating in the center of the right eye and on the edge of the left.”
She seemed oblivious to the immensity of her blunder. I couldn’t believe her nonchalance. I pictured her after my departure, hitting her head against the wall, crying: “What have I done? I must be getting senile. I have never messed up like that before.”
“If the pigment is thinning,” I said, “why isn’t my vision better?”
“Because, you silly sod, even though I can see the improvement in your eyes, you can’t possibly notice it yet. It takes time for the eyes to start working again. As that fungus disappears, the inside of your eyes steam up, and for a while your vision will get cloudy. Then the mist will evaporate. . . .”
On another day, I might have dismissed her archaic allusions as charming, even poetic, like the early Greeks who believed that the eyeball emitted rays of vision that illuminated objects in the viewer’s path. I might have thought it irrelevant, for I was sure that she had no biochemical knowledge of the visual system. But on the day of the unlit ophthalmoscope, I found her behavior and language unbearable.
“I thought the dead cells under the pigment couldn’t be regenerated,” I said angrily. “And what’s dehydrating? What’s evaporating?”
“Absolute rubbish,” she said. “They are very much alive, and the bees give them the push they need.”
She put her ophthalmoscope away. “Ah, angel, the eyes are cantankerous. They rebel against treatment. But they can’t fight it forever.”
She stung me with twelve bees, the most to date, and apologized for keeping me so long. On the bus back to East Croydon, where Charlotte waited in a coffee shop, tears streamed down my face.
“She says she can see my eyes getting better,” I said, not looking at Charlotte. She touched my arm, seeing there was something wrong. I hailed the waitress.
“Charlotte,” I said, “she didn’t turn the light on in her ophthalmoscope.”
I looked at the shadows in the coffee shop, the morning regulars. “My eyes don’t feel better.”
We drank our coffee in silence. I knew we had an audience, and I obliged those dark unseen faces. “Why should I give a shit,” I yelled, slamming my fist on the table, “if a goddamn beekeeper understands the fucking ophthalmoscope?” The place was silent. “Or the visual system?”
“Andy, let’s get out of here,” Charlotte said.
“It’s all right,” I answered. “These people don’t mind. We’re providing the morning’s entertainment. . . .”
“That’s not what I mean,” Charlotte said. “Let’s not come back to that awful woman.”
“But I can’t leave yet,” I heard myself explaining. “There’s Dirkson and the others.”
“But how can you stay?”
“What’s the difference if she’s . . .”
“She’s a phony, that’s what she is,” Charlotte said. “She’s going to pull you apart.”
“I can take it,” I said.
“I’m not so sure. Look at you now. And besides, people die from bee stings. . . .”
“Not Helga’s bees,” I heard myself defend her once again. “Look, she screwed up. She probably wanted to tell me I was improving to get things moving. You know, suggestion, conditioning. . . .”
“Did you tell her you saw the unlit ophthalmoscope?”
“Sure. I told her right away.”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised then,” Charlotte said, “if she gets rid of you. You’re like a witness to a crime.”
“You’re being melodramatic,” I said, but I thought she might be right.
As long as healing instruments or healing systems exist— whether helpful or imperfect or destructive—they are used. Depending on a patient’s luck and intelligence of choice, the user is more or less skillful, more or less honest, and the technology more or less benign.
When I was a child and I wheezed or coughed and couldn’t be sent off immediately to the country, I would lie in my blue bedroom (painted blue to match the color of my eyes) awaiting the “cupping” doctor. Soon enough, I would hear him clanking down sedate Moniuszki Street, his black bag bulging with little glass jars. He entered my room cheerily, rubbed his hands together to warm them, and placed his jars on a small table brought in for the purpose. He attached them to my back by creating a vacuum inside them with a match and they would hang there sucking gently, pleasantly. After a while, he pulled them off, each one tugging the skin, then popping with a loud smack. Their purpose was to clear my lungs, and, eventually and invariably, because of them or in spite of them, my lungs did clear. After the doctor left, I would sneak out of bed to look at my back in the mirror, gorgeously ringed with purple circles. I loved the cups.
Helga was closer to a more contemporary medicine. Her assaults were different only in method of application, not in kind, from establishment medicine. Both were traumatic and invasive, both constituted a war on disease in which the patient, caught in the middle, was the victim. Both, I thought, were equally inspired by ambition. I felt certain that, in spite of her antiestablishment rhetoric, had Helga been given the chance to make Grand Rounds in some fancy hospital, followed by grateful, fawning apprentices, she would have joined any orthodoxy, and her special brand of arrogance would not even have been noticed as peculiar.
A team of doctors and technicians at New York Hospital surrounded me many years ago, clawing at me, jerking and twisting my head into position to take fundus photographs, color pictures of the back of the eyes, shot through wide-open pupils, illuminated by terrible, blinding lights. The end result is primarily useful for recordkeeping, facts to be entered into their permanent collections of discolored retinas, pale with sickly yellow or blackened with debris or bursting with exotic crimson hemorrhages. The gains to patients from this procedure are doubtful; the debits are pain, stress, and, for many hours afterward, a temporary blindness, the kind produced by staring at the sun. No one seems to know for sure if the damage is permanent, but many believe one of the more promising hypotheses in the field of blindness prevention is that strong light irreparably damages the retina.
About the same time, I became a guinea pig, a statistic, in the development of human electroretinography, which measures retinal electricity triggered by light stimulation. A specific wave pattern was established as a normal response, while malfunction of the photoreceptor cells produced anomalies in the picture. Disturbances in this cell layer manifested themselves as changes in the peaks and valleys of an electroretinogram. Off-register waves, lowered apexes, or unmeasurable responses, seen as flat lines, were each interpreted as symptoms of some retinal abnormality. Flat ERGs, however, don’t necessarily signify blindness, as a flat electrocardiogram signifies a silent heart and death. This technology became the most advanced method of diagnosing people with retinal problems, and though it was useful for a single diagnosis, the manufacture of the equipment assured its overuse. It, too, depends on high-level illumination, and once ERG machines find their way into every ophthalmologist’s examining room, already frazzled retinas will be further battered by blinding lights.
When electroretinography was still in a crude stage of development, a wild and temperamental Yugoslav named Mikhailovich was its wizard-in-chief in the New York area. Terrified patients, whose teary, dilated eyes were held open for hours at a time with hard glass contact lenses and wired to electrodes, stared painfully at flickering lights of various wavelengths. We were immobilized and helpless, with little reassurance from Mikhailovich, who grunted angrily as he ran back and forth in his cluttered torture chamber, yelling at assistants, pulling plugs and soldering loose connections. Our comfort and peace of mind were about as important to him as
an experimental rat’s. The agony lasted long beyond a patient’s departure from this weird laboratory. My eyes were so abused by light that for days I could hardly see through the pulsating black retinal afterimages.
Something usually went wrong with Mikhailovich’s equipment, so that the procedure had to be repeated several times. The only reward for putting up with the pain of the ERG and Mikhailovich’s unpleasantness was his beautiful Swedish assistant, who knew her way through the maze of wires covering me like seaweed. As she helped Mikhailovich at a workbench, I watched her every movement. Having just handed Mikhailovich a pair of pliers or the end of a wire, she would turn to me and smile. I would blow her a kiss. Hands on her hips, emphasizing her voluptuous body, she would delicately blow one back. As Mikhailovich thrashed around a box of electronic widgets at the other end of the lab, he would tell Ingrid to make sure I was properly connected.
“I will check,” she’d say, bending over me and brushing my cheeks with her breasts.
As I lay there, intricately wired and plugged into every outlet in the room, Ingrid parted the color-keyed tangles of copper spread over my face and chest to allow our hands some freedom of movement. We were hidden from Mikhailovich by a black booth into which I would soon be wheeled, and while we heard his mumbling over some immobile meter, Ingrid’s mouth descended on mine while my hand ran up her long velvet thigh. We stole delicious moments in this madhouse, and on ERG days, we would meet in the late afternoons for a quick drink, and unable to bear it any longer, we would rush to her apartment to finish in leisure what we had begun with the excitement of children behind half-closed doors in the laboratory.
I found it hard to believe that these quick, erotic moments didn’t affect my ERG. Mikhailovich must have suspected something, I thought, seeing our flushed faces or Ingrid’s rumpled lab coat or the bulge in my pants. But he never said anything about it. Instead, he got his revenge by keeping me overtime in the black booth, flickering red, blue, and white lights at various intensities and frequencies into my eyes, making them flow with a constant stream of tears. I also suspected the results he sent to my ophthalmologist, always flat, were not mine but those of a completely blind man.
