Lying

by Lauren Slater

“Mom!” I yelled.

  Then she answered. Her voice clacked out of her throat like a prerecorded message. “Calm down,” she said.

  “Where are we going?” I said. “This isn’t the way home.”

  “I am running an errand,” she said.

  I rolled down my window and air, clean and fresh, rushed in, filled my mouth like sweet lake water when you dive down. Through the dense night, I saw we had entered a new kind of neighborhood, a place where the houses were sprawling and pillared, where blue pools lapped and the lawns were wide.

  My mother pulled over and turned off the car. “Wait here,” she said. Ahead of us stood a massive home.

  “What errand are you running?” I said.

  “My editor, Suki Israel,” she said. “I just need to drop off some work. I’ll be right back.”

  And then she wafted up the white brick walk, a door mysteriously opened, she sucked into the dazzle of light. And then gone.

  I waited.

  At first only five minutes passed, then what seemed like ten, and then I lost track of time. It was April, and the night grew chilly, and frost fell on the windshield. I wanted to cry.

  I waited some more. The car engine, still hot, ticked, and stopped. I thought it was possible my mother wasn’t coming back. I stepped out of the car, then, and heard a stillness that was not of this world. It was the stillness of a stage set, of a madman’s sleeping mind. I crept toward a window.

  What I saw inside there I will not forget. Huge aquariums were built into every wall, jellyfish like lamps in the green water, octopi bobbing, my mother nowhere around. It was beautiful in a frightening way. I saw, then, how essentially ahuman the world was, a place where the real turned to waves, and washed away.

  I went back to the car. What felt like a long time later she emerged, smoothing her skirt, her hair slightly mussed—or did I just imagine that?—smiling now as she stepped down the path, and when I said, “It’s been hours, Mom,” she said, “It’s been minutes, Lauren,” and I got so confused—water, vapor, twisted time—that right then I felt a craving in me, a craving for something safe and solid and absolutely absolute.

  • • •

  That was the night I started to steal. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I really started to steal a few days after that, or a few weeks before. Maybe it’s just certain narrative demands, a need for neatness compelling me to say that was the night or and this led surely to this, my life a long link of daisies, a bolt of cloth unbroken, I wish it were.

  So, that night. If not that night, I assure you it was around then.

  I stepped onto our lawn. Around me, I could see the more modest homes of our neighborhood, and they comforted me in their familiar size and shape. Across the street from us, the Slotnicks grew cherry tomatoes in the summer, and Mrs. Slotnick always brought me some, vitamin C, she said, being the cure for every disease.

  Now, I walked toward the Slotnicks’ house. I remembered how, years ago, when I was ten, I had rung people’s bells and waited in the bushes, loving it when, for just one moment, a door opened toward me, a place of possible comfort.

  I thought I would do that again, ring a buzzer and hide, nothing more. But, instead, when I got to the Slotnicks’ front door, I turned the handle and slipped in.

  Houses hold us, and all that is dear in our worlds. I slipped in, and felt the walls curve to cup me, and smelled roasted chicken and other just general living odors, sweat and steel wool pads leaving swaths of blue soap that are beautiful. A home has many purposes, but it should primarily be a place where you can cry and run a good fever.

  And as I stood there, hunched in the Slotnicks’ front hall, I had a sense of immense peace, and then longing. This is how it started. I looked around me. I heard someone moving in the next room. I didn’t want to be caught. On the hall table was a hat. There was an umbrella with a few broken ribs and on the wall, surrounded by other photos, a picture in a plain wood frame, an old-fashioned photograph of a lady in a garden, her hands heaped with greens. “My Aunt Henrietta,” Mrs. Slotnick had once told me.

  I looked at Aunt Henrietta, happy in her garden, her whole body sepia-soft, and I thought how good it would be to have her. So I took her. It wasn’t a big deal, it was just one picture, and a little one at that, so I took her. I slipped her in my pocket, and before I left the house I saw the small space I had made on the Slotnicks’ wall, a gap in the middle of human history where Henrietta used to be, and for a minute I felt full, the emptiness now outside of me.

  • • •

  Things become addictions for no good reason except that you started them. If that night I had gone to my parents’ liquor cabinet and poured myself a shot of Scotch, then it probably would have been Scotch that sang to me forever after.

  However, it wasn’t Scotch. I became addicted to tchotchkes, anything solid and small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, people’s personal possessions with their personal smells still on them. What I liked even more was the thievery itself, the rush and spice of it, how for one moment I could step into a place so steeped in adrenaline the world was real and rimmed with red. I didn’t know then that the word epilepsy comes from the Greek word epilepsia, which means “to take, to seize.” My body had become epileptic years ago, but when I turned thirteen, so did my soul.

  What I stole: a small tin filled with pennies from the Shocketts’ house; an egg timer, also from the Shocketts’ house; a mug with Bugs Bunny on it; an anchor-shaped paperweight. I never once stole from a store. (All right, once.) I stole from the houses in the neighborhood where I lived, edging my way in, the carpets sucking up the sound of my footsteps, the family, unsuspecting, eating meat loaf in the kitchen. I stashed all my goods in the toolshed out back, the one my father never used (“He can’t even figure out how to hold a hammer,” my mother would sometimes say, scornfully). The toolshed was itself like a little house, brown flower boxes beneath its windows. It was a world, and as it filled with my goods, it became my world. Sometimes I would go out there at night, just as the springtime sun was setting with a soft hiss, and the light was full of richness. The blue mug glowed; the tins quietly twinkled. I felt a satisfaction come over me then, and I would sit on the buckled brown floor of the shed, and hug my knees, and watch.

  • • •

  I got my period. This was a disappointment. In school we had a book on teenage emotions, in which there was a whole chapter devoted to the emotions around getting your period. The book said you would feel full of things, water and grief and little sparkles of joy.

  When my period came, you could barely even tell. I had imagined blood spooling generously from inside. Instead, there was just a brownish little flow, like rusty trickles from an old tap. I kept waiting for an emotion or two, but all I could feel was worried that I didn’t have an emotion, or two.

  What happened was this. Soon after menstruation, the seizures worsened, which is sometimes the case with females, hormones egging on the brain, estrogen tweaking the system. My nipples pegged out and my seizures came fast now, came furious, one a day no, two a day no, three, four, five a day, each one with a full-blown aura. I want to talk about the auras. I lost my social life, I lost my body, I lost my mother, I lost this, I lost that, everyone could see me but me when I went down, and so I don’t want to talk about the seizures. I want to talk about the auras, which many epileptics have and agree are truly special states. My auras. They were with me almost constantly after my period, states of light and sizzle, states of joy and trees, states of dread laced through with terrific sweet smells, the tongue so very alive.

  Seizures are not just spasms. That’s called a grand mal, or tonoclonic, and it was my most common type, but I had other types too. Some seizures are very subtle, just a twitch of the eye, and others are funny, a person, maybe, repeating a phrase over and over, or walking backward for no good reason. In school I started to say, “Wait. Wait just a minute!” I didn’t always fall on the floor. Once, so they tell me, I got up in the middle of math class and t
ried to climb out the window. I don’t remember that. I just remember smelling orange marmalade.

  This I do remember. Since the epilepsy had begun three years ago, functioning was always difficult, but now it was almost impossible. I just gave up. People, always wary of me, now made wide, careful arcs around me in the hall, and once, in the lunchroom, when I asked Amy Goldblatt for a sip of her Coke, she paused and then said, “Oh, sure, have the whole can,” and I knew it was because she didn’t want to put her mouth where mine had been. I didn’t go to Sarah Kushner’s parties, and I didn’t dance with boys, and I knew not even the cancer story would change these facts.

  I saw that success, if I were to have it, would be not outside, but within, my sickness. Sometimes I went down for hours, and when I woke up a whole day had passed, me dreaming through time on the spikes and jags of seizures. If it happened in school, I might wake up in the sickroom, a place, like the toolshed, that I came to crave. There was a nurse named Nell Fiore with baby-doll blue eyes. “Fiore,” she would say, “pronounced like fjord,” a word I knew, and I pictured it, a place of clean green water, the air delicious.

  “You’ve had a bad one,” Nell might say. “Shall we send you home?”

  “No.”

  I lay on the narrow metal cot. She put her hands on my forehead, and if I’d bitten my mouth she cleaned it with something that fizzed and tasted of lime. Sometimes I watched TV in the school’s sickroom, a movie, I remember, about World War II, and it all seemed oddly beautiful, bombs drifting down through the evening air like sinister silver angels, the perpetual fall of German snow. There was a world out there, but I didn’t have to be part of it, and slowly I saw the privilege of this. It must have been in the sickroom where illness became not a thing I had but a thing through which I could escape. It was a secret door in the back of a Victorian closet, and when I went through it I entered something soundless and secluded, a place of pure float. Through the thin walls I might hear the other world, the difficult world where maybe women were cold, where there was chalk trotting across a blackboard, Latin verbs declined down to their raw nubs, the titter of growing girls; I was free from that. I was safe. I saw hot-air balloons and lovely ladies fed me salted limes, and in this place, my place, I stayed small forever.

  • • •

  His name was Dr. Neu, pronounced like oy, and he looked like a Yiddisher too, a little frumpy and old-fashioned, with thick eyebrows and a curly beard. As soon as I saw him I wanted to touch his beard, because it was curly, but also because it was red, like a living fox, tipped here and there with white.

  He was my new doctor at Beth Israel, my brilliant neurologist who had published many articles, one of which I will include later in this book. Everyone, epileptic or not, should read the work of Dr. Neu, because he understands the philosophy of neurology, how the cellular phenomenon called consciousness is so much more than a blip of energy; it’s a blue light, a flame we can feel but cannot find; it’s mystery and love.

  I loved Dr. Neu, almost right away. I went to see him because my case got so severe, and also because I wasn’t a child anymore. So I said good-bye to my pediatrician, Dr. Patterson, and hello to Dr. Neu. I went up to the sixth floor at Beth Israel and waited in his waiting room. He called me in and looked me over. He said, “So, I hear you are quite a case,” and then he smiled.

  I smiled back. “I suppose I am,” I said, trying to sound weary and elegant.

  “Sit,” he said, patting the table.

  I considered hopping up on the table, but that seemed very unladylike. I smoothed my skirt. I was afraid if I jumped up, he might see my underwear. I smoothed my skirt again and then he said, “Oh, may I offer you some assistance?” and he brought over a stool, and he held my hand as I stepped up on it, like I was a queen coming into a carriage.

  “Thank you so much,” I said. The sound of my voice, even though it was not my own, pleased me. It was crisp and a bit British. Dr. Neu smiled.

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  • • •

  Like I said, he was not a normal neurologist. He was a brilliant man, and brilliance is never normal. His office was all stainless steel, white drapery, the sheen of surgical tools. In one corner he had a plaster human head with removable parts. I held in my hands the thalamus, the cerebellum, the substantia nigra. “Intelligence,” Dr. Neu said, “is not the sum of its parts. It’s even more.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, but it moved me. I could almost cry listening to him. What did I need with anyone else? I had him, and Nell Fiore, the sickroom and my sickness, and as time went by it all started to seem like enough.

  Dr. Neu, of course, had a different agenda. His mission was to cure me, and in order to do that he needed to find out where in my brain the seizures started. He called my parents and me in for a conference. “We need to know where,” he said. “And in order to find the locale, we will do some exploratory surgery.”

  “Why do you need to know where?” my mother said. “Does where matter? It’s not a question of where,” she said. “It’s a question of is. We know the epilepsy is. You don’t have to cut open her head to prove that.”

  “At this point,” said Dr. Neu, “I am not talking about cutting open her whole head. Only a small piece. It’s a harmless procedure.”

  “Will she have a visible scar?” my mother asked.

  “Beneath the hairline,” Dr. Neu said, and that disappointed me a little. Of course I wanted something shiny and pink and tremendously obvious, like a love tattoo.

  He did the exploratory surgery on a Wednesday. He recommended that I rest for the few days before, so I got to miss school on Monday and Tuesday, great. I lay in my shade-darkened room, my mother running errands, my father at work, the house so quiet I could hear the ticking of branches, the gurgle of the fridge. I sat in front of the mirror and combed my hair. I had never noticed before what beautiful hair I had. It was a chestnut brown; it bounced and glistened. It was the precise color of my eyes, I matched.

  • • •

  And then Wednesday. I was dressed in a white johnny, with blue scrub slippers over my bare feet. The OR was frosty, the steel table cool beneath my body. Dr. Neu and two other doctors came in. Dr. Neu said, “It’s such a simple procedure, Lauren. We’re not even going to put you to sleep. We’re just going to give you some Novocain in your scalp, so it won’t hurt when we cut.”

  I was not afraid. They had described to me how the doctors would make a small slit in my scalp, and then touch the surface of my brain with an electrical stimulator. It would not hurt; it would not take long, but I might feel a few funny things every once in a while.

  “Okay,” Dr. Neu said, standing above me. I felt him sawing at my skull, Jesus, and then the suck of something lifted, like the lid from an airtight cookie jar. “We’re close now. Soon you might feel something funny.”

  He had the electrical stimulator in his hand. I saw it. It looked like this:

  And then I held my breath. I felt myself go very still, the fear. Now, now I was afraid. They had promised me it would not hurt; they had told me the brain, which is the seat of all feeling, has no nerves in it. How could that be? The brain seemed to me to be as tender as the tongue, each bump a bud with which to taste the world. I heard a small zap. “Okay,” Dr. Neu said. And all my fear went away. I saw yellow, puffs and puffs of it, a yellow so pure, so true, it seemed extracted from the center of the sun.

  “I see colors,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Neu. “That’s because we’re stimulating your visual cortex.”

  I watched the yellow. After a while it moved into my mouth, and I tasted lemons and soil. I smacked my tongue. “Are you having taste sensations?” Dr. Neu asked.

  “Yes,” I said. The word yes had a taste too; it was like speaking through a strawberry sucker.

  “Pleasurable tastes, I hope,” Dr. Neu said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And now?” he said.

  “Voices,” I said. “I hear voi
ces. I hear a woman calling me,” and she was calling me, this woman, standing by a brick house in a long forgotten place. “Lauren, Lauren, Lauren,” and when I turned I saw her with her hands cupped round her cry and all the grass was moving.

  “And now?” Dr. Neu said. I had caught on to what he was doing. He was moving the probe from place to place on my bare brain, and each time he moved it, a new color, a new taste, probing all the pieces of me back so fast it was salmon swimming upstream, a surge beneath glassy water, and then there was that woman again—who was she?—walking down a flagstone path, and it filled me with a feeling like I wanted to cry; I did cry. “She’s crying,” I heard someone say, and I heard Dr. Neu say, “If only Freud could witness this, the material id.” And that was when it happened. The material id, he said, and right after that a pure sensation went through me, a sensation that flickered up and down the length of my spine like a spark travels the tail of dynamite, getting closer, getting closer, it was good, it was touch, it was true: “You’re tickling my back,” I said to Dr. Neu, and even when he said, “No, I’m not, I’m in the somatosensory cortex,” I didn’t believe him. I believed he was touching me, and that he might learn to love me after a while.

  • • •

  He was not touching me, he never was, but that was the year when what was and what could be—the real and the reflected, the true and the false—got all mixed up and merged together. I believed he was touching me; keep this in mind as events unfold. I believed he was. I had four more electrical probes after that one, and each time I would stay over in the hospital while my head healed up. Sometimes, also, I would stay over in the hospital for CAT scans, for angiograms, for extended encephalograms. I loved the beds that rose up and dipped down. I loved ordering my food from a menu and getting my meals in little packets, a present, each part. I loved socializing with the nurses, who liked me and played Parcheesi with me as late as 10:00 P.M. I was practically popular on the ward. In addition, the sheets were softer than at home, and people touched you kindly, and low lights burned all through the night.