Revertigo

by Floyd Skloot

  But I’m all about high hopes, especially in inverse proportion to their probability. In 1988 and 1989, the early days of my illness when I was bedbound and unable to read or write or maintain balance, I never doubted I would find a way back. Not fully back, I understood that, but back to some level of meaningful function. As Viktor E. Frankl said in The Doctor and the Soul, “Man must cultivate the flexibility to swing over to another value-group if that group and that alone offers the possibility of actualizing values. Life requires of man spiritual elasticity, so that he may temper his efforts to the chances that are offered.” Neurological damage had thrown me out of the value-group where I’d wanted to be—I could no longer think or remember or move as I had, could no longer succeed in the ways that I valued—so I had to find another value-group, one based on a realistic understanding of my capacities. From where I was then, it was a triumph just to write a coherent sentence, just to remember the name of a person I’d met or my new phone number when Beverly and I got together, just to walk—with my cane—up to the mailbox and back. The worse things are for me, the more optimistic I become. It’s when things are going well that I worry most.

  So as we approached Good Samaritan Hospital on the morning of May 17, I was feeling certain we’d be arriving in Madrid on the morning of May 26 as planned. I left the emergency room five hours later with aluminum crutches, a prescription for Percocet, and a recommendation to see the orthopedic surgeon the next day. Beverly made the appointment by cell phone, as we left the hospital. I’d had a shot of the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug Toradol, which slightly mellowed the pain. I’d also had X-rays and a CT scan, and the attending physician thought there might be evidence of a fracture in the hip along with something he called calcific tendinopathy. He couldn’t make a definitive diagnosis, but the surgeon would have the results by the time of my appointment the next afternoon.

  “Beverly!” A woman screamed my wife’s name and semaphored from across the waiting room. She rushed over to us. “It’s me,” she said, grabbing Beverly’s hands, “remember?”

  Clearly not. Smiling, reflecting back this woman’s delight, Beverly tried to place the face and voice, and in that space when past and present poised before us, time seemed to stop. I knew what it felt like to be there, unable to recall, to make experience cohere. Memory may be the ultimate elliptical narrative, compressed, tersely expressed, built around great gaps in the flow of time and information. With so much missing, it’s essentially ambiguous, packed with symbols, suggestive, open to interpretation, pruned of the superfluous even when some of what we recall seems trivial. And it’s fluid, varying and evolving through the years. Yet we long for certainty, clarity—in our memories, of course, but in most of our immediate experience as well. We want coherence in the moment. I have to know what’s wrong with my hip. I need a story that links what I’ve done in the past with what has brought me to a halt now. But even in medical science, in the diagnosis and treatment of injury, ambiguities dominate. I’m not as tolerant of this as I’d like to be, or as I’ve imagined myself after all these years of daily experience with cognitive fragmentation.

  The woman, who managed the surgeon’s office, turned out to be one of Beverly’s long-lost best friends from high school. When she said her name, I could see time begin its usual flow again for Beverly. It was clear that her friend had sharp recall of events that Beverly had forgotten until hearing about them now, and there was a kind of relief in the way the story expanded. The Baskin-Robbins Store Escapade! The Clandestine Drives Out to the Airport.

  She escorted us to an exam room and said she’d be surprised if I still needed the crutches when the appointment was over. Before I could figure out what that might imply, a physician’s assistant arrived, burly, full of energy, clearly no stranger to gyms and workouts. He heard my story, read my paperwork, looked at the radiologist’s report, poked around my hip. Nah, no fracture, no tendinopathy. I had trochanteric bursitis, a repetitive stress injury to the point of the hip almost certainly brought about by overuse, repetitive motion, and aging, and distinguished by just this sort of sharp, intense, localized pain. The small, jellyish sac that’s supposed to cushion a joint’s bones from the soft overlying tissue had become inflamed. Surgery wasn’t necessary.

  “I’ll shoot you,” he said, and left the room.

  He returned with a kit that scared the bejeezus out of me, a long and thick-needled syringe filled with corticosteroids and analgesics that required ample time and internal maneuvering to empty into my hip. I heard Beverly’s indrawn breath as the procedure began. And, though limping and glad I’d taken a Percocet a couple hours before the appointment, I did walk out of the office without relying on my crutches.

  The hiccups began late the next morning and lasted ten hours. I’d sip a cup of water, they’d stop, I’d relax a few minutes, and they’d resume. I couldn’t figure out what was causing them, and kept recalling the terrifying 1958 news story, when I was eleven, about Pope Pius XII dying of hiccups. Of course, his lasted off and on for five years, but still …

  Beverly was the one who thought of the possible connection between my hiccups and the corticosteroid shot. Then she checked the Internet, where it was confirmed by articles in such journals as Anesthesia & Analgesia or Neuroendocrinology Letters, which states that “hiccups occurring secondary to high doses of corticosteroids are a well-recognized problem.” I was fortunate to have only ten hours’ worth since, according to several online discussion groups, they often last for days.

  My hot flashes began the morning after the hiccups. Over the course of about an hour, my face and neck and chest flushed scarlet, crimson, carmine. I couldn’t cool down, couldn’t stop sweating. I sat on the couch fanning myself with a rolled-up sports section from the Oregonian and sighing as I flickered reds like a neon sign. Beverly tried very hard not to gloat. Now you know what I went through. Back on the Internet, she found confirmation of the hot flash/steroids connection. OMG! someone had written in a discussion thread. Both of my hands and halfway up my forearms are blushed!

  But the hip pain was almost entirely gone in a couple of days, fading steadily after that except when I slept on it too long or, especially, if I put too much stress on it. But I would never do something like that.

  Beverly and I resumed walking outdoors as the May weather softened, testing the hip, trying to build up my confidence for the last few days before our trip would begin. The only lingering issue was a deadened feeling deep in the joint, a sense of disconnection, as though my hip were not quite mine, or not quite participating in our activities.

  As Beverly and I packed, I wondered about bringing along my cane. Just in case. I didn’t need anything extra to carry, that’s for sure, but I was worried about what would happen if the pain returned, if something caused the bursa to re-inflame. And having a cane did make it possible to board flights early and therefore secure the overhead storage space. No, I was okay, I was going to be okay. Cane-less.

  And I was okay until Cuenca, seven days into our travels. Looking back through my journal, I’m astounded to see how much we walked. On the evening of our arrival, awake for nearly twenty-four hours and searching for one of the many tapas bars that allegedly served gluten-free items, we wandered from our hotel in central Madrid to the Plaza del Sol, crammed with political demonstrators, and back, a two-hour concrete ramble. In Andalucía we walked whitewashed villages and hill towns in the foothills of La Subbética, walked the dog named Ruby who lived at the olive farm where we were staying, walked through the entire religious heart of Córdoba from the Great Mosque to the fourteenth-century synagogue in the old Jewish quarter, and walked the grounds of the Alhambra and the steep hill down through the maze of the ancient Albayzín in Granada. Only eight days earlier it was impossible to imagine that I could’ve walked this much, even on flat terrain at a moderate pace and with frequent coffee breaks. Yet my journal makes no mention of hip pain until Cuenca.

  Cuenca looked like what it was: an ellipti
cally shaped, hilltop fortress town constructed by eighth-century Moors on a ridge above two river gorges. Its Casas Colgadas, or hanging houses, are built into the sheer rock wall and have perched over the Huécar gorge for six hundred years. The entire Old Town was up there on the hill, and nearly devoid of level walking surfaces, a labyrinth of twisting and crisscrossing lanes and worn staircases. New Town, built well after Cuenca’s need to serve as a fortress, was located down by the river, nearly a hundred fifty feet below.

  Beverly and I stayed in the Parador, a converted convent located across the gorge and connected to Cuenca’s upper reaches by the narrow, low-railed St. Paul Bridge. One look unfortunately brought to my mind the Peruvian span that broke and “precipitated five travelers into the gulf below” in Thornton Wilder’s tragic 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

  After we checked in, Beverly sat in our room’s window seat overlooking the bridge and hanging houses, plotting out our walk. First, we’d cross the bridge, thereby allowing me a definitive triumph over vertigo, then explore Old Town. Next morning, we’d walk downhill from the Parador and cross the river at ground level to explore New Town, then wind our way up to the abstract art and contemporary art museums of Old Town that had been closed the night before, and cross the bridge at day’s end.

  The bridge crossing went well. I walked about four steps behind Beverly and never stopped looking at her lovely butt, even when she paused to take a photo of the hanging houses in the dusky light. By the time we reached the far side, I was giddy with the success of my crossing. But the relentless hill walking began to wear me down, and I needed to take half a Percocet before I felt comfortable enough to sleep. Which should have been adequate warning that I was in the same sort of overuse zone that I’d frequented when churning away in the gym.

  I finally made the connection the next day, while sitting on the plaza outside Los Arcos, the same Basque restaurant where we’d eaten the night before. We’d done our walk, descending one hundred fifty feet and working our way back up, and my hip felt both dead and tortured at once. Still under the illusion that I had things under control, I’d asked the waiter at Los Arcos to bring me “un copa cappuccino” instead of “un tazo cappuccino” and therefore was sipping a wine glass–sized espresso drink. In the ninety-degree heat, sore and abashed, I thought about the week ahead, including six days walking around Madrid with my daughter and her boyfriend, and realized I’d come full circle, or rather full ellipsis. It was me and the old man, again, only now I recognized that I was the old man too. I’d been working out with the wrong goals in mind—I shouldn’t have been trying to beat him, I should have been trying to emulate him. Work each day at the proper capacity so I could keep going, continually monitoring and adjusting my goals, staying strong enough and balanced enough to keep on getting stronger and more balanced.

  I smiled at Beverly, and we got up to pay for my vat of cappuccino, half-empty on the table. We went back to the Parador, crossing the bridge side by side and hand in hand, for a long afternoon nap. Not even the caffeine in my system could keep me awake.

  The old man is floating in front of the windows again. It’s almost a month since I last saw him, and as I approach the array of machines I find myself stopping to watch him. He looks calm, his expression only a few degrees shy of a smile, and he seems to be looking at the hull of a barge taking shape in the shipyard across the way.

  I’m not going to get back on an elliptical machine. This hadn’t really become clear to me until just this moment. I know that my hip injury wasn’t so much about the machine as about my behavior on it. But still, that flattened circle gait, that elliptical rotation, is a strange motion, at least for me. Why tempt fate? The hip feels okay.

  Beverly gets on a treadmill and turns back to look at me before starting her workout. She raises her eyebrows and moves her hand in a small arc, inviting me onto the treadmill machine next to her. When I begin my routine, I force myself not to look at her display screen. Or at the old man afloat three machines to the right.

  13

  * * *

  TO LAND’S END AND BACK

  A 1,512-Mile Drive

  Around Southern England

  The British exaggerate when they call this a road. It’s at best a roadlet, a paved path. Something roadish. Across a fold of the map, and in my dreams for the next month, it has a four-digit, B-road number too blurred to decipher. Call it B-XXX.

  I see B-XXX bend west two hundred yards ahead. There are no road signs and I can’t detect the change sooner because high hedgerows and overhanging trees obscure my view, further narrowing the absurdly tight space, creating shadowy blocks, distorting perspective. Then a burly black van bursts through the curve and speeds straight at us.

  My instinct is to jerk the wheel left. But I know—have been repeating to myself like a mantra, even before Beverly started saying it—that there’s a stone wall to the left, completely camouflaged within foliage. We’re as far over there as we can dare to go, but still seem to take up more than half the road. There’s no center stripe. It’s like hurtling along a bobsled run and meeting sudden oncoming traffic. I tap the brake, not wanting to risk a swerve, and hold the wheel hard as our car shudders in the van’s passing. My side-view mirror is blasted flat against the door. I don’t know how we survive.

  “Did you see how close that was?” I ask Beverly.

  “I just shut my eyes.”

  We’re silent for a moment. She checks the map and makes an adjustment to our GPS device, which responds by announcing that it’s recalculating. Which is what Beverly and I are doing too, recalculating the dimensions of our latest hair’s-breadth escape on British roads. This one isn’t quite as horrifying as when I ran over some sort of mound cloaked at a road’s edge and almost flipped the car while eluding a caravan near Land’s End, or when the left-front tire smashed across a hidden boulder in a remote corner of western Cornwall. But with its nightmarishly darkened, pinched setting and video-game intensity, and with its apparent normalness as a British driving experience—its modest ordinariness—the encounter on B-XXX is emblematic.

  We’d come to Great Britain for two weeks of scenic touring. Just the south and southwest of the island this time, seeing landscape and gardens and stone circles, paying homage at a few literary sites. We’d take walks in the Cotswolds and on Bodmin Moor, along Carmarthen Bay, in Dorset and Cornwall, where we’d also have a picnic at Land’s End. There was so much we wanted to see. Beverly had lived in Great Britain for four years in the early 1980s, and I had been there in 1969, when I was twenty-two. We loved the Great Britain we remembered, loved the art and literature, the land, the history, and wanted to see it together. But we didn’t want to overschedule our vacation or put ourselves in a time bind. So Beverly sacrificed visits to the grounds of Blenheim Palace, landscaped by Capability Brown, and to the gardens of Barnsley House or the Rollright stones from the Bronze Age, and I chose Thomas Hardy and Dylan Thomas over T. S. Eliot or the Dymock poets, and skipped a stop at the Hay-on-Wye bookstores. Eliot, whose Four Quartets I loved, was particularly hard for me to skip. I’d started researching where the sites that had inspired individual Quartets were located, saw that Burnt Norton and East Coker were not too far from where we planned to be, and stopped before checking out Little Gidding, telling myself that we’d be back in England again, and I could catch up with Eliot then. What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility.

  I’d anticipated that there might be some narrow roads here and there, and had noted Paul Theroux’s comment, in The Kingdom by the Sea, that “driving on English roads was no fun.” But the B-roads, farm roads, byways, and single-tracks were proving to be far more perilous than I’d imagined. So were a lot of the so-called A-roads. Maybe we needed to rethink our strategy for seeing what we wanted to see while not dying.

  When the next oncoming vehicle appears on a long B-XXX straightaway, I have just enough time to stop and back up toward a slight wrinkle in the shoulder I’d n
oticed moments earlier. Even tucked into it, I’m not sure the accelerating blood-red Saab will make it past us.

  Within two hours of renting a car, I realized that the true challenge wouldn’t be what I’d expected: driving on the wrong side of the road, with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car and the stick shift on the wrong side of the steering wheel. Those wonderlandy, mirror-world British elements required concentration and practice, and never did become second nature, yet were manageable right away. But the roads! So many brought to mind the ancient foot or cart paths they may once have been. Think of the occasional country lane in the United States where only one car at a time can cross a narrow old bridge; then think of that road stretching for dozens of twisty miles with two-way traffic and a speed limit of sixty miles an hour; then imagine it so overgrown that everything beyond and within it was hidden, or like a tight tunnel open (sometimes) to a bit of sky. Then picture it littered and bordered with potholes and obstacles that slashed tires, walloped rims, jolted chassis.

  And it wasn’t just a matter of the back roads. In towns, already-narrow streets were further crimped by cars or vans or delivery vehicles parked half-on and half-off sidewalks. Some streets dead-ended without warning or room to turn around. There were high curbs ideally designed to hammer tires, and, when traffic could pass in only one direction at a time, a system of unspecified protocols ensuring that you could proceed only when oncoming vehicles were likely to force you curbside.

  Road signs presented vast amounts of irrelevant or ambiguous information, as though Monty Python had been in charge of their design. The Bureau of Silly Signs. Newspapers routinely featured stories about driver confusion: Crossroads where dozens of signs clustered just a few hundred feet from the turn, a cascade of information about speed limits, nearby attractions, distances, cautions, permanent and temporary prohibitions, instructions. According to the Daily Mail, “At one junction near Oldham, motorists are told not to turn left, not to turn right, to give way and to keep to the 40mph speed limit—all at the same time.” Some signs contained a red circle with a line through a prohibited activity while others, also prohibitive, contained a red circle without a line. Arrows indicating that a road turns left might appear where the road turns right. A sign known affectionately as “the Evel Knievel Sign” seemed to show a motorbike vaulting over an automobile. While meant to indicate that no motor vehicles are allowed on the road, it could as easily be construed to mean that motorbikes have the right-of-way or that motorbike stunts are forbidden. A recent survey of 524 drivers showed that none could understand all twelve signs they were shown, and only one-fourth managed to identify half of them. I thought we might be safer just to ignore signs altogether, but on a road in Dorset, we passed several signs that said SUDDEN GUNFIRE.