by Floyd Skloot
A month ago, my friend George Core, after learning of my symptoms, sent me an Irish walking stick he’d had in his home in Tennessee, a genuine shillelagh made of blackthorn and hazelwood. It arrived unexpectedly, just after lunch, packed in a long, thin box, and delivered to my door by Federal Express with a brief, warm note of support. My friend Hilda Raz encouraged me to go ahead and fly to Memphis for a long-planned visit with my daughter, saying that flying hadn’t worsened her own symptoms of vertigo, which I didn’t know she’d had. Within an hour of posting a note on Facebook about my condition, I received dozens of responses from people who’d either had the same thing or knew someone who did. I was buoyed by the sense that my situation, which had struck me as so bizarre and rare, turned out to be far more common than I supposed. I’d read the statistics, but until people in my life began to talk about their symptoms, I hadn’t internalized the knowledge that vertigo strikes so many. Friends advised me, reassured me on that bumpy road, and now it felt like they were here with me again. Maybe that’s why I felt so crammed in here.
Fever
Bublé’s voice again, and the first lyrics I can distinguish, after the plucked bass and cymbal taps, are never know how much I care. Thank you, Michael. “Fever” transports me back to adolescence, when Peggy Lee’s 1958 version of the song opened a whole new idea for me of what sex might be about. There was more than mechanics involved! And girls enjoyed it too! Then a couple years later, Elvis sang the song in a suave, knowing way that suggested it was possible—effective, even—to smolder quietly. This was a song to study, not just memorize.
But now it stops—just before we get to Romeo and Juliet, and the only occurrence of the word forsooth in popular music that I know of—and I’m being drawn out of the MRI. I hadn’t realized how warm I felt until leaving the machine’s confines for the cool air of the larger room. Molly, seeing gooseflesh, offers me a blanket.
As she begins preparing a vein in my arm for the contrast dye injection, I look away, toward the door beyond which Beverly waits. It refuses to hold steady, and I can feel myself being swept up in the kind of swooning spiral that’s become a frequent sensation over these months. I think of it as an inner cyclone, and wonder if that’s what L. Frank Baum had in mind when he began The Wizard of Oz with a cyclone that sweeps Dorothy out of the Kansas prairies and into a strange and alien land. Maybe Baum had vertigo. So what I need is a pair of Silver Shoes like Dorothy’s. Then all I have to do is put them on, knock their heels together three times, and command them to return me to the place of balance. What, I wonder as Molly squeezes my ankle again and sends me back into the tube, would be the right song for that journey?
At Last
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that Molly had this planned. As the final scan revs up like an outboard engine, the song that comes on is Etta James’s version of “At Last.” She’s one of those blues singers, and “At Last” is one of those complexly romantic songs that I don’t remember knowing about until I was in my forties, when I was ready for them.
Though I’m grateful that at last, my love has come along, and I know how fortunate I am, in this moment I take the song to suggest something else entirely. Not just that at last the MRI will be over. Not even that at last I may learn what’s causing my symptoms, and find effective treatment. I’m thinking that all the signs are aligned—like the MRI has aligned my hydrogen molecules, like the playlist is ending with a song called “At Last” that’s about bad fortune coming to an end—to reveal a hidden truth: I will get better. That’s the dream that I can call my own.
Now that this occurs to me, I see a trend starting a week ago. Things fell into place as they almost never do: I called my internist at just the right time for him to call the neurologist so the neurologist could see me for his last available appointment before his annual month-long vacation. Having heard the report from my internist and given me a quick exam, he set up this MRI, requested test results from the neurotologist, and would call me with results before leaving town. He even had the same name as my best friend from childhood in Brooklyn.
Easy, I tell myself as the MRI ends; maybe I’m reaching for meaning where there’s only coincidence. Side effect of having my brain zapped by magnets. But I get off the table feeling optimistic. Feeling good.
Over the Rainbow
The neurologist calls to say my MRI reveals no sign of stroke or tumor. Looks to him like there’s a slight area of contact between a blood vessel and nerves of the inner ear. Maybe that’s the cause. I’m in no danger—unless I fall, so I should be careful—and he’ll see me after he returns from vacation. He also says I should take a tiny dose, just a half milligram, of Valium twice a day to dampen the nerve responses. See you August 24.
Through July and early August, I take my Valium and notice no significant change in symptoms. At the grocery store, I bend to reach a roll of paper towels, stand, turn toward my cart, lose my balance, and fall sideways. The shillelagh clatters to the floor, the package of paper towels goes flying behind me, and I’m so humiliated I want to bawl. Beverly helps me up. At the gas station, I start getting out of the car to clean the windshield and something—maybe a change of light in the air as clouds pass, maybe an unevenness in the concrete—makes me swoon backward into the car again.
At about eight on the evening of August 12, Beverly and I are sitting on the couch in our living room. It’s been raining all day, unusual for Portland in the summer. I’m reading Willie Morris’s memoir of his friendship with James Jones when suddenly there’s a great burst of outward pressure inside my head. It plugs my ears and the world goes silent. I drop the book, open my mouth wide, put both hands to my ears. In two seconds, the pressure reverses, vanishes. My responses have caught Beverly’s attention.
“Did something happen?”
I explain and, delighted that I can talk, that I can move both arms, can shift position on the couch, add, “I don’t think it was a stroke.”
She looks at me for several seconds, then smiles. “Stand up. I wonder if your dizziness is gone.”
I do. It is. And the dreams that you dare to dream / Really do come true.
Twelve days later, the neurologist doesn’t notice that I’ve walked into his consulting room without a cane. He doesn’t notice that my shoulders and neck are no longer hunched down like someone afraid to move. When I tell him what happened, and that except for some residual light-headedness the symptoms haven’t returned, he nods, then shakes his head.
“I’d like to take credit for this,” he tells me, chuckling, “but I don’t think I can.” He’s quiet for a few moments, then says, with a tone of amazement in his voice, “Those test results, and my own exam, I have to say you were in measurably poor vestibular shape.” He’s quiet again, looking out the window. “Based on what you just told me, I have a theory about what caused your symptoms.”
For a moment, I’m actually not sure I want to hear this. Not that I believe in miracles there in the land of Oz where I’d dwelt for five months. But with all the diagnoses that turned out to be incorrect, and with all my ongoing admiration for the mysteries of neurological function, I’m not convinced I’ll believe him. Then where will I be?
No, I have to hear this. I put my notebook on the desk and take out my pen, and look at him.
“Intracranial hypertension. On a molecular level, viruses are much larger than normal spinal fluid. Given your history, I’d say it’s possible that an earlier virus reactivated, or you caught a new one, which caused a buildup of viral material in the spinal fluid, which plugged up the holes through which the fluid normally drains.” He looks and sounds like he’s testing the idea rather than confirming it. “Plugged drains led to a buildup of fluid and pressure, which caused the symptoms.” His gaze returned to me. “I actually thought about this possibility before, and wondered what would happen if I gave you a spinal tap. Probably would have released the pressure and you’d have been fine.”
“So it came unplugged on its own, twelve
days ago?”
“It’s a pretty elegant theory.” He smiled again. “Listen, if your symptoms ever return, we’ll do the tap right away and I bet it fixes you right up.”
The symptoms still haven’t returned. I look back to that rainy August night when the barometric pressure had changed so radically. I remember that earlier in the day I’d had another of the weekly acupuncture treatments I’d been taking for my dizziness. Weather? Needles? Spontaneous unplugging of viral material? They all sound both absurd and plausible—as did ear rocks and fluctuating fluids—as explanations for the distortion of my body’s fragile system of balance that came and went so suddenly. What I know is that one night, as suddenly as I arrived there, I returned from the land of Oz without even having to click the heels of my Silver Shoes.
11
* * *
ANNIVERSARY FEVER
Day by nomadic day
Our anniversaries go by,
Dates anchored in an inner sky,
To utmost ground, interior clay.
Douglas Dunn,
from “Anniversaries”
Today’s my father’s birthday. He’d be 102. In four years, he’ll have been dead as long as he was alive.
Today’s also ten days before the first anniversary of the day I woke up, got out of bed, went reeling against the wall, and fell on my face. The vertigo lasted 138 days. It may have been brought on by reactivation of a virus that had targeted my brain 21 years earlier.
I never have recovered what I lost in cognitive function 21 years ago. Particularly in the realms of abstract reasoning, capacity to structure thought or visual stimuli, reliable word-finding ability, concentration, and memory. Last week, I announced to Beverly that I’d numbed the television rather than muted it. I also told her that I would evaporate rather than delete a film we’d just watched on our DVR. Last night, by the time I reached pen and notepad, I could no longer remember the item I’d wanted to add to our shopping list. This morning, because of their abstract nature, I couldn’t even begin formulating answers to an interviewer’s string of questions: How have you thought about yourself in relation to writing? What are your thoughts about being an artist in 2010 in the United States, and how do you see the role of the artist? Common enough occasional glitches for most people, especially as they age, but for me they have been typical of how I’ve functioned across the last 21 years.
Today’s also eleven days before my maternal grandfather’s birthday. He’d be 124. He was 94 when he died on Leap Day, February 29, 1980. Since the anniversary of his death date only comes around every 4 years, I keep trying to figure out how to compute the year in which he’ll have been dead as long as he lived. Adding 94 years to his 1980 death would be 2074. But there’s only one February 29 per 4 years, so … Can’t do it. Too abstract, or too neuro-convoluted for me, for my damaged brain. Still, I try to work on puzzles like this, or like Sudoku, to stimulate my brain. Recent research has shown that our brains are more plastic than previously supposed, and that damaged brain cells can repair or regenerate themselves. So let’s see, if it takes 4 years to accumulate 1 year on my grandfather’s death-tally, and he died in 1980 at 94, would it take 376 years (4 x 94) for him to be dead for 94 years? So he’d be dead as long as he was alive in 2356? At which point I would be 409, or 221 years older than my grandfather.
While hoping to grow new brain cells, I also use, as a kind of mind-cane, various aids to compensate for and manage my cognitive losses. Scribblings on index cards, scraps of paper, and Post-it notes that I collect in multicolored folders to organize fragments of memory, thought, experience. Techniques of repetition and sensual association to help shift important memories from short-term to long-term storage: Her name is Susan, his name is Herman, so Her-man is her man. Rigorous control of distraction to enhance concentration: No background music when reading or writing, no views of trees or birds from my desk. Or an obsession with calendars and anniversaries to find and anchor myself in time, manage my broken sense of coherence, create a feeling of order. I know I go overboard with it, have a case of chronic anniversary fever. But for me, in a very urgent way, the philosophical idea that tormented T. S. Eliot in his poem “Burnt Norton” is a firm daily reality: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.” Time truly swirls through me. And memory, as Richard Lattimore described it in his poem “Anniversary,” is but the “shell of moon / on day-sky, two o’clock in lazy June.” I feel compelled—driven—to grab whatever I can, however faint, and hold it in mind.
When I can access a memory, revisit a person or experience, it’s a kind of anniversary. The echoing moment, past but present, alive. It’s the flip-side of what happens when an anniversary triggers the memory of a person or experience. The British poet Ted Hughes, recalling his mother’s death in “Anniversary,” writes that “Every May Thirteenth / I see her with her sister Miriam.” In that poem, the recollection is stimulated by Hughes quite purposefully: “I lift / The torn-off diary page where my brother jotted / ‘Ma died today,’” clearly an annual ritual. Douglas Dunn, mourning his late wife in “Anniversaries,” writes that “each routine anniversary / At night, and noon, and dawn, / Are times I meet you, when souls rinse / Together in their moist reunions.” He yearns for these meetings, and his anniversary fever goes beyond the typical she-was-born-on-this-date or she-died-on-that-date structure, extending to more routine matters at various moments throughout the day (she went to bed at 10:00, so I’ll keep going to bed at 10:00).
Before my neurologist figured out the cause of my sudden onset of vertigo 355 days ago, my internist casually mentioned that he sees a lot of vertigo cases in the spring. Something about changes in weather and barometric pressure, maybe. So in the back of my mind, though I know spring wasn’t the cause of my vertigo, I can’t help noting that the equinox will arrive three days from now. Or that it’s ten days before the first anniversary of Vertigo Day. All right, I know it’s ridiculous, given the subsequent facts, for me to associate the coming of spring with another threat to my sense of balance. In his poem “Anniversaries,” Thomas McGrath says, “anniversaries / Should have our praise, as trees / Salute the queenly coming of the Spring.” Yes, yes, I could praise the coming anniversary as a milestone passed since I no longer have vertigo (KNOCK ON WOOD). But I still keep worrying that the Queen of Spring might again issue her order: off with his head.
I don’t have many memories of my father because I didn’t spend much time with him. He died when I was fourteen. For the three years before that, he’d been hospitalized, recovering from the crushing injuries to both legs sustained in a car accident. Before that, he’d always worked six days a week in the poultry market he owned, leaving home each morning by 5:00 and returning each evening at 7:00. Basically, I saw him on Sundays and for two hours on weekdays, times when he was exhausted and eager for me to be in another room. As a result of barely knowing or remembering him, I believe that I’ve sought to hold onto him through diligent, conscious observance of anniversaries. They provide a formal context to think and recall him at least twice a year, on his birth and death dates. To keep him alive in my brain and mind, present in my life’s story, bringing back the time we rode a sled down a hill in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park or the Saturday morning I spent with him at his market or the Sunday ball game at Ebbets Field when I watched his gnarled hands fumble with a miniature bottle of scotch. The anniversaries spur me to take out the old photo album with its half-dozen assorted images of him, to celebrate a secret anniversary of the heart, as Henry Wadsworth Long-fellow says in his poem “Holidays”: “the holiest of all holidays are those / Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; / The secret anniversaries of the heart, / When the full river of feeling overflows.” They help me see him again, vivify him, though he has in truth all but vanished from me for good even as I draw closer to the place where he has gone.
I’m 62 years and 254 days old. In 351 days, I will have lived 10 years longer tha
n my father, who died at age 53 and 239 days. On the other hand, it will take me 11,988 days to live as long as my mother, who was 95 years and 197 days old when she died. I never thought I’d live longer than my father did. Now I find myself trying to believe I’ll catch my mother. This is a huge shift in perspective, from an anniversary-inspired vision of genetic doom to one of genetic blessing. Pessimism turning toward optimism as various anniversaries pass. Omens becoming milestones.
As I enter old age, I recognize that my anniversary fever induces a doubling of perspective. A delirium of timeposts, calendar mania. Not only am I driven to track anniversaries in compensation for earlier cognitive losses, and to use them as a springboard for all sorts of cockamamie computations, I’m now also doing what people my age naturally do: “It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence,” as T. S. Eliot says in “The Dry Salvages.” Looking back, noticing patterns, calculating, seeking a structure for both time and memory as time and memory run down, run out.
My brother, Philip, was buried the day I turned 50. He would have been 58 if he’d lived another 77 days. Late on the afternoon of my birthday, writing a note about the dates Philip had been born and died, I found myself remembering one of his great peeves: my bar mitzvah in 1960, celebrating the day I officially became a man according to religious law, had overshadowed his 21st birthday, celebrating the day he officially became a man according to secular law. Our parents, in consultation with the rabbi, had picked the date for my bar mitzvah, which was the day before Philip’s birthday. The lavish party, the gifts, the recognition—the whole emphasis was on me instead of him. Now, freshly 50, I sat in my living room just before bedtime, grieving and looking at old photographs. And found myself chuckling, knowing that if he could, Philip would wink and say I told you I’d get even.
