The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic

by Nora Gallagher

  I knew from working as a prayer minister at Trinity that many people there had drowned. Prayer ministers work in teams of two. During communion, we stand at the back of the church near the baptismal font and wait. When a person approaches us, we stand with our arms around each other, enclosing a small, separate piece of air. (It was this circle—people holding each other up—that I remembered when people who had been sick themselves helped me out.)

  The man or woman would then let us know the truth about his or her life: the daughter starving herself; the lymphoma out of control; the husband who may have embezzled. The prayer ministers took turns praying out loud, which was always just about what came into our heads. I was almost always surprised at what came out of my mouth or the mouth of the person standing next to me, the words that seemed to come from the best place in us and also from another place, an otherness. The words were not sentimental or necessarily “religious”; they were words dug up on the spot, and they tended to have a fresh, original scent. Then one of us would take out a little sterling silver box containing oil on cotton and anoint the person’s forehead. After all that, the same person would march back to the pew.

  The trick to keeping a confidence is to keep it secret not only from others but from the self, so I would see the same people after we had prayed together and not quite remember what they had told me. I felt as if I had left their secrets either in the air back by the baptismal font or in the font itself, which seemed to be the best place for them. But several times, more often than not, when I saw one of them holding a mug of coffee or eating a homemade cookie at the coffee hour, we would exchange a look across the space and the people between us. In that look was an acknowledgment of the disaster that had happened to them.

  The irony was that in this place where you could cry in a pew or go to a prayer minister to pray, it was still hard to be actually sick, actually vulnerable. The very same woman who had told me of her lymphoma stood at the coffee hour trying to look upright and purposeful. The prayer ministers and the priests knew how many people were suffering; the rest of us did not.

  I was embarrassed to be sick; I felt I had failed in some fundamental way.

  On a Sunday in early January, after the news from Dr. Mesipam that I would not be traveling, I made my way back to a service on Sunday. I sat at the back of the church, in a pew that was in shadow, and leaned against the plastered stone wall. I stood up for the opening hymn. With one eye, I read the opening prayer along with everyone else. I sang a hymn. I listened to a decent sermon. Something wasn’t quite right. I felt a gap open up between me and the service, between my suffering body and the words I had repeated over and over for forty years. In The New York Times, Samuel Freedman wrote about a woman who had been raped and her first Sunday back in church. In the state she was in, the service did not console her. It had an “empty predictability.” That summed it up for me. I could not find a place in the service that gave me comfort or a place where I could expose my vulnerability.

  And when it was time to say the creed, I stood up with the crowd. When they said, “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” nothing came out of my mouth. They made their way through “Jesus his only Son,” “Born of the Virgin Mary,” “Ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of God.”

  I stood there mute, and when everyone else said, “Amen,” I sat down.

  The words were suddenly all wrong. It was not so much about concepts or theology. They were wrong for me. For where I was. I was so small. I was so scared. One might think a God that was Almighty would have been good news. But He was not. All these people—the Father, the Son, the Virgin—in that formal declaration were very far away, in another country. Not in my country. Not in Oz.

  It’s easy to imagine that I was angry at that Almighty God because He had let me fall sick, but at that moment, at least, that wasn’t what I felt. I felt … alone. I remembered all the people who had come to us prayer ministers and told stories of pain, anguish, and illness, and then stood upright in their pews, and at the coffee hour. How had we gotten to the place where the man who took the blind man by the hand was nowhere in sight?

  And the words almighty, holy, virgin, only weren’t any help at all. I had said them, with more and more reluctance over the years, but the scalding power of illness had swept away pretense.

  The word heretic came to my mind; a word based on the Greek for “choice.”

  I walked out the door into a cold January day and did not go back.

  I told no one. I had enough guilt left over from … where? The ether? That if I didn’t go to church on Sunday, it was my fault.

  The church secretary asked me a week or so later if I wanted my name on the weekly prayer list, and I said yes, please. I was grateful for the thought that someone might pray for me, whatever that meant to them, and grateful for the prayer shawl and for the people who, trained from years of church, had brought dinners to us. I was grateful for the building and for Mark and for the hundreds of people at Trinity and for the effort that the larger church had made at keeping alive deeper meanings. But it was not a place I could be.

  Years ago, on a Sunday morning, my friend Ann Jaqua picked me up for church. She came in while I downed the last cup of tea, and there was Vincent sitting at the dining room table reading The New York Times. He greeted her, offered her a seat. She declined and said, “I don’t know if I have wanted to have this picture in my mind of the alternative to going to church.”

  The Sunday after I didn’t say the creed, rather than take a shower and rush out the door for the ten o’clock service, I sat with Vincent and read the Times.

  He noticed, of course. Finally, on the third Sunday, he asked. I said I was taking a break.

  “It means so much to you,” my agnostic husband said with a worried frown.

  “I know,” I said. “I can’t explain it right now.”

  After a couple of Sundays—by this time the wild luxury of sitting around in my sweats reading the Style Section had started to get old—I realized that there was something that had been hidden under going to church. Something raw.

  In January in the rain, I ran in front of an SUV to try to save a dog.

  We had been walking with friends on the bluffs above the beach. They were driving up from L.A., on their way to the Bay Area. As we drove back to our house for dinner, in a two-car caravan, we saw a dog weaving between cars on the narrow road to the beach. We pulled over. We stopped. It was twilight. Our friend Patrick remembers thinking, “This is the kind of situation where people get hurt.”

  He and I got out of our respective cars. Just as I stood on the edge of the road, the dog, crouching on the other side, stood up. I screamed “No!” and ran toward him. I heard the screech of brakes. I saw the lights. “This close,” Vincent said later, holding his fingers an inch apart.

  I was so terrified of what I had done that I kept reliving it, then forcing it out of my mind.

  At that point I knew that the steroids had affected my brain.

  “My father became very chatty on steroids,” my friend Martha said. I was very chatty.

  I was in it. It had me.

  I could drive, after practicing in the neighborhood. I drove more slowly and did not take the right periphery for granted. A new Whole Foods Market opened near our house, and I drove over to check it out. I was soothed by the 1960s music, by the bins of food, by the cheeses laid out to taste under plastic domes. I held on to the cart as if it were a walker and wandered around. I took to shopping two or three times a week—pretending to shop, that is, just to feel soothed by the music and the cartons of food. The world goes forward, I wrote in my journal. I do not.

  One of my friends wrote to me that she and her husband were going to Italy. Another casually mentioned a week in New York. It didn’t even have to be Rome or New York. They spoke of going out to movies during the week, staying out late at restaurants, working on the weekends, doing a “bunch” of errands. They had so much energy. Their lives were so biz
zy. They had somewhere to get to. My friends could not have known it, but for me what they were doing was … out of reach … way over there.

  One day, as I was driving to Whole Foods for my biweekly vacation, I found my usual route blocked. Signs were up that the road would be closed intermittently for four months. A backhoe was positioned in the creek bed under the bridge I usually drove over. Later I walked to the park that the creek ran through and read the signs that said the creek restoration was now in full progress, as part of a larger project to help bring back steelhead trout to southern California. The backhoe was taking out the concrete that the Army Corps of Engineers had put in there in the 1940s to “prevent” floods. I had of course seen this creek many times in the twenty years we had lived near it. The concrete along its edges made it odd and unattractive. It always had bits of trash, plastic bags mainly, somewhere in its waters. It went dry in the summer, as do many of Southern California’s creeks, and then it was an alleyway in the city; people crossed it if they couldn’t figure out another way of getting from one side of the park to the other and dropped trash on the way. I didn’t have a whole lot of hope for this restoration, but I watched its progress. I waited.

  I had a new job, in addition to my half-time job at Patagonia and my half-time job as a writer—managing my care. I had four doctors in town: Dr. Mesipam, Dr. Burks, Dr. Lowe, and Dr. Wright. I had seen Dr. A the neuro-ophthalmologist. I now had to go back to Los Angeles to see Dr. Narsing Rao, a specialist in uveitis, one of three top specialists in the world, at the Doheny Eye Institute. Dr. Rao had seen me every few months for several years after the first episode of uveitis. Like many specialists, he was in his clinic only once a week. The rest of the time he traveled, gave lectures, attended worldwide conferences. He was bizzy.

  The receptionist told me that Dr. Rao had one morning appointment at ten o’clock on a Tuesday. Getting from Santa Barbara to downtown Los Angeles in a car during the week in the midmorning is impossible. I knew this. I weighed staying with a friend in Los Angeles the night before but was reluctant to leave my own bed. I weighed leaving at five a.m. and having breakfast somewhere nearby. I weighed simply sitting in traffic for four hours. I could leave at six. Then I remembered that my eyes would be dilated, and so I could not drive alone. Vincent had a day at work that he could not cancel. My friends had done so much; how could I ask them to sit in a doctor’s waiting room in Los Angeles?

  It was the beginning of not only managing my medical care (that is, balancing the doctors, reporting to each one what the other had said, keeping notes, and remembering to bring scans, lists of medications, blood tests to each visit) but also managing when the appointments would take place and how many there would be and how I would get to them. It’s what all patients of my category undertake.

  Then I realized there was a train to Los Angeles. In the West, unlike the East, we do not regard trains as actual transportation, because they aren’t scheduled to run when people want to travel and they are rarely on time. When I looked it up, however, I saw that the Surfliner left at six forty-five in the morning and got into L.A. two and a half hours later. I could take a cab from the station to the medical center. Later I would discover a free shuttle bus.

  That morning I rose at five, dressed, and had breakfast. Vincent took me to the station. He told me to sit on the right side so that I could see the ocean. About fifteen minutes later I got on the train.

  I watched the ocean waves that seemed to be right beneath the tracks, the beaches, the coves. Near Patagonia headquarters, I saw ducks floating on the Ventura River, where it meets the sea. I saw, inland, a brown rabbit sitting still in the sun. A black horse with its head in a feed bin that hung off a fence; a crow lifting off a pile of garbage underneath oak trees.

  Yellow rocks in Chatsworth Park and Stoney Point, where Vincent’s uncle had climbed as a boy to hawks’ nests and where I had climbed with the Honettes.

  To be where I am but to wait.

  A small ranch, with trucks, corrals, a circle for exercising horses, a soothing anachronism in the midst of the sprawl of the suburbs of Los Angeles.

  Mountains in the distance, the coast range.

  Three tunnels following one another. The total dark of a tunnel.

  The smell of a skunk

  Why is the information in the present needed? Where does it come from? Why did I think this?

  Faceless gray brick warehouses with circular fire escapes from the roof.

  Costco.

  A man running for his car.

  I want something to make me feel content (safe, unafraid) all the time, thus drugs. Thus what has come to mean religion.

  An electrical power plant with many tall power poles.

  Tumbleweeds.

  Metal low warehouses with lots of graffiti/tags.

  Tumbleweeds.

  Swimming pools in backyards, some oval, some kidney-shaped, the blue water inviting, alternating with horse corrals.

  Trains are the only way to see people’s backyards.

  A horse trail running along the railroad tracks on which I would see, on later train rides, a man who looked like a real cowboy.

  Planes at a large private airport.

  Dust.

  Locust trees with purple flowers.

  Three men wearing white chef’s hats coming out of a door.

  An ambulance in a car lot.

  Palms.

  A woman in a golf cart.

  A concrete water channel with algae at the bottom.

  Businesses of the same genre congregate.

  In Van Nuys, busted car country: used lots followed by smashed lots. A front end with the hood in the windshield.

  I wonder who managed to survive these wrecks.

  “We’ll see your sedan and raise you a Passat” on a billboard.

  A woman looks at herself in the train window as she gets off the train in Burbank.

  Self-storage.

  Another channel. Were these channels creeks or rivers?

  Stacks of shipping pallets.

  Right beside the tracks, a trailer with a neat awning, a picnic table, and cords of stacked firewood. A man standing beside the trailer cooking breakfast on a grill, as in Nicaragua, or Mexico.

  A burst of human life.

  The “Déjà Vu” bar advertises pole dancers.

  Broken school buses.

  A flock of pigeons rising.

  Palm trees in containers.

  A pile of paint cans.

  Rows of clothes on racks.

  The warehouses get spiffier as we near L.A.

  “Import” and “export.”

  A bakery.

  Trucks with tanks of oxygen.

  Janitorial supply.

  A wide green lawn that turns out to be a cemetery.

  Bob Hope Airport.

  A bald man in a red shirt, pacing.

  Fryes Electronics with its signature: a life-size flying saucer crashed into its sign.

  Garbage out on streets in a neighborhood.

  Rose bougainvillaea spreading over a wall.

  Two police cars in a wrecking yard. Which makes me smile, involuntarily: my old “pig” feelings from the sixties still there.

  Stacks of broken things in big plastic crates.

  Dump trucks (which I wrote as “dumb” trucks).

  “Central Casting.”

  “Gold’n West,” another strip club.

  The strippers: where do they come from?

  A tin shed.

  Trees, a relief to the eye.

  A brick warehouse.

  I wonder whether inside the many warehouses are sweatshops.

  More shipping pallets.

  What is shipped? Where?

  An American flag poking out of a small yard.

  Driving through New England after 9/11: bunting on the fire stations.

  A jasmine vine.

  Buckets.

  Razor wire. Always, razor wire.

  Two cypress trees.

  A blue tin
shed.

  A red tin shed

  A yellow tin shed.

  I can still see.

  Galilee Mission Center.

  Plumbing supply next to another strip club.

  A small billboard: “Share curiosity, read together.”

  An RV with a blue ocean painted on its side. I’d like to hop in.

  A field with crows.

  Fir trees along a fence.

  A turquoise wall.

  A little cottage, alone in the midst of the parking lots and warehouses.

  Does someone live there?

  Another unpaved lot with large palm trees, and tags.

  Vines covering an old awning factory, long gone.

  “People should respect each other” written on a sheet and hung off a roof.

  A mural of faces in glowing colors.

  An empty lot with tires.

  Plastic covers a mound of dirt.

  Then, suddenly, the part of the Los Angeles River that has been allowed to return to its wild state from a channel. Grass and cottonwoods along the sand and clay banks. It had surged recently, lots of debris on the shore. Rocks in the middle. Birds floating. A feeling, like the man cooking breakfast near his trailer, unorganized, free.

  Trees trees trees.

  Small yellow square things.

  Empty dirt lots—with pieces of paving.

  The train is slowing.

  A bamboo screen on the stairwell of neat subsidized housing apartments next to the tracks.

  Bottomless freight cars.

  “Low low prices.”

  Store-it-all.

  Worlds disappearing, worlds colliding.

  Union Station.

  It was much easier to stay in the present while sitting on a train. The train moves, the present changes.

  Each thing I had seen had information in it; each one either mirrored our troubled lives or was their antidote. And the attention I had paid to each of the things—a pole dancer lounge, a man who sold wood by the tracks—gave me what amounted to a particle of time. Those particles, rather than disappearing from me in inattention, now remained. I still see them.