Look Alive Out There

by Sloane Crosley

  In the end, I made my decision the way I make all decisions I’ve brutalized with analysis—by giving up and awaiting logistical intervention. On the second night of the shiva, a friend requested that we move our drinks date to a dinner date, thus giving me a clear window of time to brush my hair and walk upstairs.

  When I opened the door, I was so distracted by the fact that Marilyn’s apartment could eat my apartment for breakfast, I nearly forgot why I had come. I made my way down a long hallway, through the mourners eating pastrami, and found a woman directly related to Marilyn.

  “Was it sudden?” I asked after introducing myself.

  “Oh no,” said the woman. “It was pneumonia. It had been going on for months.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I just can’t believe it.”

  Had I not seen her, just last week, lecturing a new tenant about cigarette butts?

  “Aren’t you sweet to come?” the woman said, grabbing my arm and insisting I squeeze in on the sofa. “But he lived a long life.”

  “Who he?”

  “Our father.”

  “Who art in heaven?”

  “My father.”

  “Marilyn’s husband?”

  The woman cocked her head and blinked at me. Now the whole family was listening.

  “I’m Marilyn,” she said, putting her hand to her chest. “My father died. We’re sitting shiva for him.”

  Lenore. Lenore is the name of the feisty lady who helped me with the dryer. Ageism is a horrible thing that can appear in many guises. But unlike the more sinister sister isms, one of the symptoms is not thinking that all old people look alike. And yet, here we were.

  This is the danger of deciding, too late, to be a good neighbor, to care because you think you should. Extricating myself from the situation required a social deftness that I did not possess. I stayed for eleven minutes. As I left, Marilyn offered me food, which I was too embarrassed to accept. I had dinner plans and also a hunch that she thought I had secretly come for the food. We chatted about the building and the upcoming election and she couldn’t have been nicer, suggesting that maybe we were meant to be friends as well as neighbors.

  “Well, I’ll never forget your name,” I said, apologizing again, hugging her and slinking back down the stairs.

  At the mailboxes the next afternoon, I ran into Lenore. Because I was checking my mail in the middle of the day. Because I have become one of them. But I still have my boundaries. So when Lenore exclaimed, “Look at all this junk mail, it’s enough to kill me!” I only nodded. I did not tell her that I thought it had, in fact, killed her. When it comes to death, it’s better to live and let live.

  Cinema of the Confined

  The bed is spinning in circles and I can’t make it stop. I wake in the middle of the night to this sensation. It’s as if a basketball-playing giant has broken into my room, balanced the mattress on his fingertip and started pushing for his own depraved amusement. Petrified, I sit up straight as they do in horror films and gasp. The movement crests and fades, but it lasts long enough for me to pinpoint the direction in which I am whirling (clockwise). I try convincing myself there is nothing wrong with me. Earlier that evening, I had been speaking to students at Trinity College. Perhaps I can blame the disorientation on sleeping in a New England guesthouse. This is not my doily-covered bed. Those are not my porcelain bird figurines. But when I lie back down, the spinning begins again. There’s no denying it: This is full-tilt vertigo.

  When you have vertigo—or, more accurately, are subject to its whims—there is no protracted period of time during which you confuse it for something else, like being drunk or getting up too quickly. Not to withhold empathy from those who make a habit of lying down and getting back up again, but if you think you might have experienced vertigo, you likely have not. Unlike your garden-variety dizziness, vertigo is debilitating and surprising. Your brain processes it the same way it might process, say, being punched awake. It had also happened to me before (the vertigo, not the punching). The first time was after a breakup, during which it became the physical manifestation of a life spinning out of control—alas, there is no known cure for symbolism—and the second was while hiking along a ravine in Big Sur, California. I realize that sounds like something I made up, like having a heart attack in the card aisle of a pharmacy on Valentine’s Day. But you know what else sounds made up? Vertigo.

  Before I dabbled in it myself, I didn’t think it was a medical condition any more than I thought the willies were a medical condition. My sole association was the Hitchcock film. If you’ve seen Vertigo, you’ll know this is a movie that not only has little to do with the condition, but stretches the limits of believability in general: A stunning twenty-five-year-old woman throws herself at an unemployed fifty-year-old man and San Francisco is entirely devoid of traffic. These are but two of the many reasons they don’t show Vertigo in medical school. The trailer for the film, on the other hand, rings as true as tinnitus. A prop dictionary is flipped open and the camera zooms in on the entry for vertigo: “A state in which all things seem to be engulfed in a whirlpool of terror.”

  *

  On the train back to New York, I watched telephone wires bob and smokestacks billow as I focused on Long Island Sound. Once my body discovers it can do something—get a weird rash, have a sinus infection, eat an entire block of cheese in one sitting—it’s liable to do that thing again. What I did not want was to become dizzy on a fast-moving object. I imagined it would be like when a moving subway car passes your still one and you experience the somewhat embarrassing sensation of momentum. Are we mov—? Oh. Never mind.

  As soon as I got home, I made an appointment with an ear, nose, and throat doctor whose last name is Goldfinger. I had seen Dr. Goldfinger in the past and knew him to be one of those rare doctors who maintained a balance1 between treating you like a person and treating you like The New England Journal of Medicine. I also knew him to have a humongous painting of a Rorschach test in his waiting room. Please allow me to correct the image in your mind: The words RORSCHACH TEST are spelled out in giant letters.

  Because it had been many years since my last visit, I was given a clipboard with a frosting-thick pile of forms to fill out. Bending my head invited the spins, so I slouched in my chair until my chin was parallel with my knees and leaned the clipboard against them. A woman seated across from me glared in my direction, but an old man in a tweed cap had a smile for me. Boy, had he been there before! I knew I should have been grateful for this twinkle of commiseration, for this moment of kindness passed from one generation to the next. But I don’t want to be part of any club that can’t remember its own handshake.

  I clicked a cheap pink pen meant to resemble an esophagus and began filling in the blanks, of which there were many. Doctor’s office forms are a poor example of what we, as a society, are capable of. For starters, why are they on paper? Even the most avowed Luddite will concede that information like “Sulfur makes my throat close up” should not be subject to a mortal medium like handwriting. Also, why do they need your social security number fifty times? Are these forms being scattered to the four corners of the earth? Is one getting buried in a time capsule? Can I see the capsule? And “Who should we contact in case of emergency?” Well. I’m already at a doctor’s office.

  *

  Dr. Goldfinger hadn’t aged a day in the decade since last I’d seen him. This was not necessarily a good thing. True, he didn’t look a day over forty-eight, but he had also never looked a day under forty-eight. I’d seen photos. Either way, I was relieved to be in his presence. I knew he could help me because last time, he’d performed the Epley, a maneuver familiar to all vertigo sufferers. The Epley is often misspelled as “Epily,” the first half of the Latin word epilepsia. It should go without saying that vertigo is to epilepsy as the willies are to vertigo. But our brains are catastrophists, even when it comes to spelling.

  The Epley is the only known way to alleviate BPPV (benign paroxysmal posit
ional vertigo). Before the “benign” part erodes your sympathy, I might remind you that, technically, losing a pinkie is benign. The Epley was invented in 1980, a detail I find dubious in the same way I find the fresh ink in the Mormon Bible dubious. What did dizzy people do before 1980? Flounder around until they slammed into a flagpole? Also, maneuvers don’t feel very medical. For all its complexity, the human body is a finite terrain. There are only so many things one can do with one’s arms, for example. So if you’ve practiced yoga with any regularity, you have inadvertently Epleyed yourself.

  What happens is this: You sit up straight and turn your head toward whichever ear is causing you trouble. A doctor then knocks you backward in the chair until you’re horizontal. If you have vertigo, you will experience the sensation of someone putting your brain in a washing machine and drying it out on a record player. Once this happens, the doctor turns your head in the opposite direction. Done quickly, this is called murder. Done slowly, it’s called medicine. It’s meant to dislodge sodium crystals from where they have mischievously migrated—to your semicircular ear canals—and back to the inner ear, where they belong. Yes, crystals. In our ears. I know. We are all unicorns.

  The only catch is that you then have to face perfectly forward for the next twenty-four hours to allow the crystals to settle back into place. You’d think these instructions would be easier to follow in New York City, as most of us are not circling parking garages or merging onto highways. Alas, taking the subway is pretty much out of the question. As is descending steps, jaywalking, ducking, or reacting to noise. Oh, and drop something on the floor? That’s where that lives now. But twenty-four hours is a small price to pay for something that works.

  Except that this time, it didn’t.

  After sleeping as instructed (“like a mummy”: Dr. Goldfinger crossed his hands over his chest to be sure I got the picture), I woke up full of hope. I wanted to start the process of being thankful for my health so that I could go back to taking it for granted like a normal person. When we’re sick or in pain, even if it’s just a case of “something in the eye,” we swear up and down that we will be grateful for every moment from this day forward when there is not something in our eye. I don’t know with whom we’re bargaining or with what lousy chips. But I could worry about that once the ceiling stopped melting into the walls.

  Alas, the dizziness had not only worsened, it had mutated. Up until now, the vertigo attacks—or “spells,” as I liked to call them when I wanted to make them adorable and Victorian—had been peppered with hours of normalcy during which I could work or pick up socks. Those hours were gone now. I tried to stand but fell backward. My vision blurred. It was like riding the teacups at Disney World, if Disney World was built on a fault line that shifted every fifteen minutes. I watched myself go through this with as much of a sense of curiosity as fear. The moment something goes wrong with you that has not gone wrong before, it seems at once tragic and temporary. Imagine if you had made it this far without getting a common cold and then you got one. You’d probably think you were dying. This is because the frightened brain becomes a binary place: It’s “probably nothing” or you’ve contracted an incurable flesh-eating disease. That’s it. Those are your options.

  *

  Writing about illness is a form of travel writing. The writer’s mind stands at attention, even when her body cannot, because she has entered a new environment—in one case voluntarily, in the other not. Everything feels as if it’s of note. As it is in travel writing, the difficulty is not in taking a small incident and expounding upon it but in whittling a new world down to a manageable size. Every article on kite surfing in Tahiti has a larger narrative behind it of flight delays, food poisoning, and fraught texts with an ex. The big difference between travel writing and medical writing is that those extra details do not lend themselves to repurposing. Not at a party, talking to your friend who’s “super into weird medical shit,” not with your mom, who’s preprogrammed to care, not even with someone who turns out to have the same problem but would rather stick porcupine quills up her nail beds before revisiting it.

  If you’re the kind of person who gets off on daring people to be offended by a play-by-play of your mole removal, well, at least you’re not boring people. But being sick for an extended period of time isn’t about disgust—it’s about tedium, which is like toxic mold to entertainment. And yet here is where the truth of the infirm lives, in those in-between spaces of bed/transit/medicine, medicine/transit/bed. Here is a parallel universe of hold music and water glasses and make-a-fist montages. Come one, come all! Behold screenshots of my call logs to the insurance company!

  “This is what I’m dealing with,” I typed, anger-forwarding the pictures to friends.

  “That sucks!” they wrote back, because it did suck.

  What else was there to say? It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that they’re not there. What’s alluring about travel writing becomes repellent in medical writing. No one is asking to be “made jealous” by photos of your stitches. No one hears a rumor you’ve gone to Duane Reade and says, “Bring me back something.” In response, those of us living on the wrong side of the hospital curtain pick over our own misery for trinkets that might amuse a healthy person. It’s a form of digestion but it’s also a form of regurgitation.

  Here is my own best example of this: A while ago, my father was diagnosed with one of those ambitious cancers that demands a bone marrow transplant and quarantine. His doctors took away all his white blood cells and pumped him full of chemicals. (The trick with cancer is that you have to play dead in order to keep it from actually killing you.) He’s in remission now, but this was the largest-scale medical disaster ever to hit our family. It was all we thought about for a year. Yet this is the only story I tell from that time: I was sitting with my father during one of his chemotherapy sessions, reading a trashy magazine as he was fiddling with his iPad, when a volunteer opened the door. She was holding a fistful of wildflowers, which I was pretty sure were contraband in a cancer ward.

  “Good morning!” she said, in a high-pitched voice. “Would you like a flower?”

  I looked at my father. Should I call security on this squeaky toy in a skirt? He thanked her, gestured around the room, and explained that he didn’t have anywhere to put a flower. So she skipped off down the hallway. He returned to his e-mail, I to my magazine.

  Then, without taking his eyes off the screen, he said:

  “Wow, nothing says ‘You’re dying’ like ‘Here, have this fucking daisy.’”

  *

  Around and around and around I went. Dr. Goldfinger advised me to give it some time before coming back to his office. This was fine by me. My body was like a dreidel bomb that could go off any minute. Plus, his office is located on the Upper East Side, which is just a hive of doctors’ offices. Cab rides to the Upper East Side should really count toward one’s health insurance deductible. Alas, I moved too slowly and for no perceptible reason to take the subway. There wasn’t much to be done besides wait it out. Vertigo is neither rare nor fatal. Something like 30 percent of Americans experience it. It can be a symptom of stress or teeth clenching. People on sedatives report waking up with it. Surfers get it if they fall on a wave at the wrong angle. Some women get it with their periods. Because periods are refugee camps for all nondescript maladies.

  But then another week passed. And another. And another. Then four.

  Plans fell like bowling pins until I stopped lining them up. I turned to the holistic, experimenting with breathing and oils. There’s a Buddhist meditation in which the objective is to imagine the world on the head of a pin—but each time I tried, the world wound up on the tip of a conductor’s baton. For the friends and loved ones who called or texted, I apologized for being MIA. But I was neither missing nor in action. Just in. Some came over, carrying soup—a well-meaning gesture that reminded me of how ill-suited I was to my condition. My age bracket is trained to equate illness with the flu. People asked what more t
hey could do and were disappointed when the answer was “Please mail these letters.” Soup is the gesture of a hero. Letters are the errand of an intern. And for those who happened not to get in touch? I began to hold little grudges. At least now we knew who my real friends were, didn’t we?

  This is what comes of too much intimacy with one’s ceiling.

  Of all the indignities, showering was the worst. I was too young, with too many of my original teeth, to die a shower death. Other deaths, okay. Exploding manhole covers are ageless. But falling in the shower? Why don’t I just charge up a mobility scooter and mow myself over with it now? But hygiene won out over dread. I got undressed, leaned on the tile with both hands, and let the water spill down the back of my neck.

  Because I have seen too many movies during which people cry in the shower, I cried in the shower. Was this my life now? Would I only ever be able to walk two blocks and read half a magazine article? Pinning down the words was like removing shards of eggshell from a freshly cracked egg—possible but annoying. But mostly I cried because I was primed for hysteria. Unable to sleep without being spun awake, I had been indulging in the cinema of the confined. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Murder in the First, Awakenings, The Sea Inside, Room, and that most sacred of the claustrophobia canon, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. I was a meticulous curator: trapped, bedridden, or abducted only. Stranded could suck it. Stranded was always temporary. Go crack open a fresh coconut and cry to NASA, you big babies.

  I watched these movies because they presented a unifying tone, a myopic view of life in which there was no reality beyond their characters’ predicaments. With most movies, be they grim dramas or romantic comedies, there is an invisible door to a different version of the world and the unspoken idea that everyone on-screen could just walk through it. Even when we are not explicitly told so, we know the characters in the dramas have seen the comedies and vice versa. The people in Mystic River have definitely seen How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. They just have other things on their minds right now.