Revertigo

by Floyd Skloot

  Holidays and days of special cultural significance seem to be when many significant events occur in my family life. My brother was born on September 11. He died on the Fourth of July. My father was born on Saint Patrick’s Day, had his car accident on Columbus Day, and died on Veterans Day. The day of the viral attack on my brain was December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, the Day of Infamy. Good things can happen for me on holidays too: 18 years ago, Beverly and I first became lovers on Memorial Day. Some dates possess a peculiar familial synchronicity: my grandfather and my daughter were born on the same September date, 92 years apart; my great-grandfather arrived in his new home, America, on the same July date that Beverly and I moved into our new home here in Portland 106 years later; our May wedding date coincides with the 28th anniversary of my maternal grandmother’s death. In a near-superfecta of temporal harmony, my wife and her mother, and my mother and her mother, were all born within eight days of one another.

  In poetic tradition, love and anniversaries of love’s touchstones have long possessed the power to stop time’s erosion. Celebrating their first year together in “The Anniversary,” John Donne assured his beloved that though “all kings, and all their favorites” and even “the sun itself ” might be “elder by a year,” and though “all other things to their destruction draw,” nevertheless “only our love hath no decay.” Love like theirs exists outside of time (“This, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday”), forever young. Nearly 400 years later, Donald Justice makes the same point in “On an Anniversary,” telling his wife that “thirty years and more go by / In the blinking of an eye, / And you are still the same.” They have, in essence, tamed time: “Time joins us as a friend, / And the evening has no end.” Of course neither Donne nor Justice believed this. They were operating within a romantic convention, one that may seem quaint in our current culture of irony and skepticism. But in September 2007, I found a blank journal I’d bought and never used. Its flyleaf was coffee stained, and between its first two pages, like a bookmark, was the receipt. It told me the name of the store on Fourth and Taylor in Portland, the Memorial Day purchase date from 15 years before, and the time: 3:07 p.m. So I knew the exact place and moment when I realized I was in love with Beverly. Because the journal, I remembered, was going to be the first one I’d ever kept, a record of dates and times and daily thoughts, a new approach where I would record regularly what was happening between us. But then I got back to my apartment that afternoon, set the journal aside while I prepared dinner for Beverly—who arrived after her day’s work—and never did start journaling. The book, when I look at it now, seems to freeze the story of love at an instant full of hope and expectation, still asserting that anything can happen, that time stands still when lovers commit to each other. It’s possible to see that the book, still all about hope and expectation, at once new and old, says something essential about the two of us together across all these years.

  Each month after we first got together, I bought Beverly a small gift to commemorate the date. Earrings, a bracelet, a necklace. The game of Go, which we said we wanted to learn but never did. Over the course of 11 months, the process acquired its own momentum. I was in a serious flare-up of anniversary fever. Then, shortly before our one-year-of-being-together anniversary, Beverly and I married. She took over the management of our financial affairs, and, quite sensibly, suggested that the monthly gifts stop, since we now had another date to celebrate.

  In his poem “Anniversaries,” the British poet Douglas Dunn says “the calendar / Recurs to tell us who we are, / Or were.” I’ve come to see that the marking of anniversaries has become vital to my sense of self. It connects me to a past that became fundamentally elusive when brain damage corrupted memory’s function, and it affords me a feeling of stillness, even calm, amid the racing of events through time. It helps me to find order in a world that can be snarled and chaotic for anyone, not just for the brain damaged, or to find harmony in the jangle and dissonance of experience.

  It’s now two days after the first anniversary of Vertigo Day. I didn’t have a sudden relapse. But I almost did. Two days ago Beverly and I were in an office located on the 27th floor of a new building on Portland’s riverfront. As we approached its wall of windows, I swooned. My stomach and thighs felt like they did when I was a kid on a Coney Island Cyclone ride, weightless, plunging in freefall. I was dizzy in the same swirlingly helpless way that I’d been dizzy for 138 days last year. I didn’t quite fall. Instead, I turned away and left the office. The elevator ride down turned my stomach again. For two hours I couldn’t make the lightheadedness and queasiness stop. It was as if I’d unconsciously dared fate—how could I have done this on the anniversary!—and fate had responded with a cynical giggle.

  Since I first read it 43 years ago, I’ve been haunted by W. S. Merwin’s poem “For the Anniversary of My Death.” Can anyone read it and not be? My memory is so poor that I can’t recite any of my own poems by heart, but I can recite the first three lines of Merwin’s: “Every year without knowing it I have passed the day / When the last fires will wave to me / And the silence will set out.” I figure that this idea is the germ causing my anniversary fever. Track patterns all I want, read in them omens or milestones, distract myself from time’s passage by focusing on the ways in which things keep coming back, I can’t avoid the unknown anniversary that bookends my July birthday. The date when “I will no longer / Find myself in life” and my survivors will begin marking it.

  Today is 136 days before the first anniversary of Vertigo Vanishing Day. It’s one day less than 200 days before my mother’s 100th birthday. It’s 310 days before the first anniversary of the day my daughter’s first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was published. “Though time turns,” Thomas McGrath says in “Anniversaries,” “history moves / As if to prove our loves, / Having no pattern but the one we give.”

  Part Four

  * * *

  CARTWHEELS ON THE MOON

  12

  * * *

  ELLIPTICAL JOURNEY

  When Beverly woke up I was standing a few feet from the end of our bed, naked, immobile, no longer shambling toward the bathroom. All my weight was on my right leg. My left hand probed my left hip.

  “What’re you doing?” she asked.

  “Trying to figure out if I’m really awake.”

  I heard sheets rustle behind me, then the clack of eyeglasses snatched from the bedside table. “Is something wrong?”

  “I think my hip just broke into a hundred pieces.”

  She got out of bed. This is something I always love to watch her do, but I couldn’t turn around to see her. Couldn’t put weight on my left hip, couldn’t pivot or let the joint rotate in its socket. I doubted I’d ever move again. Which was ridiculous, and why I’d been considering my familiar it’s-only-a-dream explanation.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I got out of bed, took a couple of steps, and my hip exploded.” I didn’t think I’d done anything out of the ordinary. There’d been no warning something was about to go wrong, and the intense pain seemed worse for its suddenness. So at sixty-four, despite never having had a hip problem, despite lacking a diagnosis or even a hint of an explanation, my mind went right for the only obvious conclusion: I need hip replacement. Today. “I think this is a bad sign.”

  “Can you sit down?”

  “I don’t see how.” With her help, I hopped backward on my right leg and sat on the bed’s edge, but that hurt almost as much as walking had. None of this made sense. It was like there was a gap between then and now into which all the important information had fallen.

  Beverly sat next to me. We looked at each other, not saying what we were both thinking: We’re scheduled to leave for Spain in eight days. No way …

  Throughout our first winter living downtown, Beverly and I had gone to the gym every other day. This was something new for us. We’d spent thirteen years living in the middle of twenty hilly acres of woods, our home a small isolated cedar yurt sh
e’d built an hour southwest of Portland. For our daily walks we’d follow deer trails in a broad loop across the landscape, often accompanied by our three aged cats. Even in foul weather, sheltered by Douglas fir and the great limbs of old oak or wild cherry, we could be outside most days for a half hour of exercise, sometimes hacking overgrowth, sometimes wading through the risen creek.

  I’d found the challenge of walking the woods to be more powerful than the hard five-mile runs I used to take daily in the years before getting sick in 1988. It took years of repetition before I could avoid getting lost if I could no longer see the house. But I loved these walks. They helped me regain some strength and balance. They helped me gain confidence that I could get around in the world, that I could find my way when things around (and within) me were confusing, fragmented, obscure. Walking like this wasn’t just about exercise or regaining a modicum of fitness. It was about claiming my place again, too.

  Now that we were in the heart of the city, living by the river, our daily exercise involved walking or riding bikes on the flat pathways along the water. All summer and fall, we’d kept company with osprey, herons, cormorants, ducks, gulls. We watched the swollen river recede from where it had overrun the bank and dwindle through the summer heat. Then cottonwood and ash on Ross Island, just across the river, lost their leaves and revealed a lagoon we’d been unable to see before. On one bike ride, a sassy Canada goose, turning quickly and hissing as I approached, made me skid and crash near the boat ramp at Willamette Park. But our ability to exercise was weather dependent. As winter neared, and we found ourselves exposed to the Northwest’s heavy wind and rain, we realized the time had come to exercise indoors.

  There was also a motive beyond maintaining fitness. We were planning a two-week trip in late spring that would involve some modest walking through the streets of Madrid, the hills of Andalucía, and—most ambitious—the steep elliptical core of Cuenca, built into the gorges above the Huécar and Júcar Rivers. So we wanted to prepare ourselves.

  Oregon Health and Science University’s Center for Health and Healing, just two blocks away from our new home, had a gym swarming with state-of-the-art fitness machines, free weights, cable equipment, mats, Pilates reformers, exercise balls. There were nooks and separate rooms for classes or consultations, blazing lights, mirrors everywhere. The place overlooked a shipbuilding yard, welders in their helmets at work amid a shower of sparks, giant blue cranes moving along their rails. There was so much going on, inside and out, that I found it hard to focus on what we were being told as we were led through the space. But we joined up, planning to work out there at our usual mellow pace while building up endurance and strength for Spain, and squeezing in river walks whenever the weather allowed.

  Membership came with access to a personal trainer for two free sessions. Aaron’s demeanor was gentle, his voice soft, everything about him suggesting that the gym was not going to be about intense, crazy muscle-building. He showed us how to use the equipment and helped us design moderate weight-lifting programs. Nothing here should be too hard for us. It was a gym, yes, but it was a health facility too, part of a medical institution. And, after all, I was nearing sixty-five, and had been disabled for more than a third of those years.

  “Take it easy,” he said, smiling, imagining—I suppose—that I would take heed.

  Membership also came with a free T-shirt that said Start where you are. It was clear right away that I had no idea what this meant.

  The old man rose and sank as though floating on air before the wall of windows.

  He was well into his eighties, at least twenty years my senior, and worked the elliptical machine in slow motion, head cocked, towel draped around his neck, bald head lacquered with sweat. Earbud cords snaked from a pack at his waist. A single trek-pole lay on the floor beside his machine, within easy reach.

  He’d been there when I arrived. I got on the machine next to him and snuck a look at its LCD display screen. His pace hovered around two miles per hour, then slowed and the machine thought the old man had quit so it flashed a message: PAUSE. EXIT WORKOUT? He carried on, bringing his workout session back online, and I began my own.

  Until we enrolled at the gym, I’d never used an elliptical machine. But I’d heard all about its benefits, especially when compared with treadmills or road running. As the website Livestrong.com notes, the elliptical’s primary advantage “is the reduction in stress on your hips, back and knees because your feet move with the machine and you don’t have the pounding that comes with regular running.” Used properly, it’s designed to be a low-impact workout, equal parts cross-country skiing, stair climbing, treadmill running, and—with its modified cycling motion—stationary biking.

  The elliptical machine is named for the motion of its pedals, the oval or closed-curve shape known in geometry as an ellipse. At the same time, you grip handrails that move back and forth as your legs pass through their elliptical rotation, so you look a little like you’re smooth-dancing on a staircase or skating on foam. Theoretically, it’s a versatile machine that exercises numerous muscle groups at once and provides strong cardiovascular work. Safe, easy on the joints, the skeleton. Just a few obvious precautions to note, such as to avoid standing on the balls of your feet or holding the handrails too hard or leaning forward or twisting your body as you stride. And as with any repetitive-motion activity, practice moderation because the most common elliptical machine injuries are due to overuse.

  I hadn’t been sure I could handle the machine’s up-and-down-plus-back-and-forth motion without risking vertigo. I still couldn’t handle heights or the multidirectional motion of a craft on water. But as long as I looked straight ahead and kept my eyes focused on an object, I could manage to maintain balance and avoid nausea.

  Crazy as it sounds, working out near the old man kindled my competitive fire. But then, working out near anyone of any age, including Beverly as she used the treadmill, kindled my competitive fire. Equipment! Clocks and timers and stats! The machine’s screen allowed me to view my exercise session as timed laps around a quarter-mile track, and I was riveted to the image as it traced my progress. Telling myself I wasn’t concerned with anything but my own health, I couldn’t stop glancing over to see how other exercisers were doing. What if my machine thought I’d quit my workout? If I was the only one in the gym, I’d have to outpace my last workout. By a lot. Despite the fact that I hadn’t done anything more strenuous than those twenty-minute walks or half-hour bike rides with Beverly in the last two decades, once inside a gym, I couldn’t help myself.

  Any physician (as mine did), any trainer (as mine did), any sensible person (as Beverly did), even my T-shirt would warn me to take it easy. But despite recognizing that it would be bad for me, that I couldn’t tolerate aerobic exercise in the aftermath of my illness, I couldn’t listen to them. I knew better, after having been a serious long-distance runner in my thirties and forties, but the lure of working out was too powerful.

  So I pushed myself during workouts on the elliptical, making sure my pace far exceeded the old man’s. Sometimes, as I gripped the handrails and churned the pedals hard enough to feel myself struggling for balance, the idea would surface that this was absurd. No one else in the gym seemed to be nearing orbital velocity.

  .… No way we’re not going to Spain. Right? I mean, absolutely no way this trip gets canceled. We—and by We I mean Beverly—had worked so hard to plan and prepare for it. She’d taught herself Spanish, working for four months at her computer with a program called Fluenz. She’d figured out the impenetrable rules governing international cell phone and computer usage so that the telecommunications racket wouldn’t bankrupt us as we used the web or kept in touch with people; as a backup, she’d learned how to use the experimental browser deep within Amazon’s Kindle reader that allows for free Wi-Fi and 3G access to the Internet. She’d arranged accommodations that would cater to our gluten-free diet and satisfy our desire to spend time in small, out-of-the-way places, using her nascent Spanish�
�and sometimes Google Translate—to converse by phone or by e-mail with staff at Madrid hotels or in the mountains of Las Alpujarras. She’d booked flights; rented a car; set up the satellite navigation device; bought tickets so we could get into the Alhambra on the date and at the time that best suited us; ordered vests that had enough pockets and hidden compartments to safely carry whatever we might need, including—according to a dream I had—both of our wheeled suitcases. This was a trip for which endless contingencies had been considered and planned. And those plans had grown so complicated and mutually interconnected that the very idea of replicating this trip at some later date was mind-blowing. We will not cancel.

  Therefore if I needed hip replacement surgery, I’d need the kind that let me recover full mobility and strength in about one week, including the ability to walk every day on hilly terrain. Meanwhile, Beverly relocated my old hazelwood cane so I could finally get to the bathroom.

  When I spoke to my doctor a few minutes later, he wasn’t optimistic. He told me there were several things that could cause the sort of sudden, immobilizing pain I’d described, and most of them weren’t—as he put it—things I wanted to have. He sent me to the emergency room, calling ahead to be sure his friend the orthopedic surgeon would be aware of the case. And yes, he’d tell him that we needed to be on the fast track because of the trip to Spain, though I shouldn’t get my hopes up.