We landed and collected our bags from the conveyor belt, and outside we were met with the chilled night air of Columbus. A Cadillac, white and sleek as the belly of a shark, pulled up even with us, and its trunk popped open. A wide man lumbered out of the car and greeted us. His hair was as white as his car, and he wore a golf shirt tucked into his khakis. His enormous gut was bisected at the bottom—he actually had a cleft gut.
He shook my dad’s hand and hugged my mom and called me Dave. We tossed our bags in his trunk, and Mom asked me if I was going to smoke in the car. I said yes, so I got the front seat. The man’s name was Bud, and he had lived on our block almost as long as we had. Bud was the top management guy at the local hospital, and he chain-smoked Marlboro Lights. We pulled out of the airport, nearly the only car there at that time of night, and we sped down the deserted highway connecting Columbus with Delaware, the small town I grew up in. Bud and I both cracked our windows and lit cigarettes. He glanced at me every once in a while but didn’t ask any questions beyond the status of our flights.
Dad conked out immediately, and Mom slid up between me and Bud, putting her elbows on the console as she talked a constant stream of plan-making to Bud. I was to visit the hospital and get a full checkup. Bud puffed away at his cigarette, laughably small in his enormous paw.
The streetlights pitched tents of orange glow up the length of I-71. The highway was a trembling marmalade wire stretched out through the undeveloped darkness of central Ohio. Bud and I smoked our way through it, his Marlboro Light cigarette butts the same white as his Cadillac, as his hair, as the edges of the ash we tapped into his overflowing ashtray. The cockpit of his luxury car glowed with lit-up information, the highway was lit up, and the spaces right in front of our faces were lit up intermittently, and we sucked that lit-upness into our lungs.
It took half an hour before we were deposited in front of our home. There was the off-ramp, the left turn, and the meandering stretch of blackness of State Route 36/37. I kept waiting for the moment where I’d recognize everything. Where the world would lock back into place and I’d become the person who belonged here. I waited for it like a dog waits for its walk. I wanted it to make sense. I wanted to feel the way I assumed everyone else felt: secure.
Bud stayed in the car while we unloaded our stuff and piled it onto the damp lawn. He powered down his window. I shook his paw, and he pulled me down close to him. He told me that I had no idea how much my dad loved me. Then he drove off.
Once inside, Mom asked if I would be okay by myself. I told her I was fine and asked her to show me how to turn on the TV. Dad punched the buttons and told me not to smoke in the house, and then they both went upstairs to bed.
I stood in the kitchen for a while. I was trying to assess if it was the kitchen from my hallucination, the one where all I had to do was go to the cupboard, pull down a pack of crackers, and say my trademarked slogan. The island in the center of the kitchen was there. But the kitchen was the wrong color, a burgundy rather than salmon. I opened up one of the cabinets and found bottles and bottles of liquor. I pulled one of the scotch bottles down and poured two fingers into a glass. Neat.
The house felt familiar, but I never experienced an avalanche of identity data. There was a dining room with wallpaper that had a fleur-de-lis pattern in red velvet. The extra-long living room where a previous owner had built an addition. My dad’s office, painted a terrifying shade of red. It felt like a sham, more like a parade float than a house.
In the halls there were pictures of me. The glass on all of them was cold. The house was littered with versions of me. A giant one hung in the stairway (next to giant ones of my sisters): me, late teens, in a studio, dressed in khakis, a blue dress shirt, and an eyesore of a tie. I was standing there with the cuffs of my pants tucked and rolled at the ankle, bare feet, sleeves rolled up to my forearm, and my mouth wide open in a scream. There were the Sears portraits of my family in front of backdrops of bookshelves, my bad teeth and bowl-cut towhead front and center. On my mom’s desk, right there next to her computer, there was a snapshot of me pretending to pee in a fountain and another one of me in a tight blouse and in a hoopskirt so tall, I must have been on stilts or on somebody’s shoulders.
These were the images of me my mom kept close at hand? I couldn’t tell who came out worse, me for having posed for the shots, or my mom for cherishing them. On her office wall was a blown-up photo in a heavy wooden frame: a very young, chubby-cheeked me in a white polyester suit sitting on a settee between my sisters, with a black-and-white dog stretched out on our laps. I didn’t know the dog’s name.
I could recognize these people in these photographs as me, but I felt a distance between us. They could all just as easily have been a chorus of doppelgangers. I felt myself slipping, worried that I’d never recover, that I’d be this wood-glue-filled piñata for the rest of my life. And then if I did recover, if I got everything back, who knew if it would happen again? How many times would I end up touring the exhibits of my curated self?
I sipped at my drink, which smelled like bandages, and turned on the TV. I sat on the couch and watched a documentary about an NBC weatherman’s gastric bypass surgery. I watched the entire absurd show and drank the terrible drink, forcing myself to believe it was all totally normal.
PART 3
He was many men and no man at all. He was a hysterical little bundle of possibilities that could never come true.
—Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm
I woke up on the couch with a dog’s nose in my face. She was large, and her tail was wagging so hard that her back legs frequently left the floor. Brown and black shaggy fur with a bear’s face and what looked like black eyeliner surrounding each dark brown eye. She was easily ninety pounds, but she hopped up on top of me on the couch with the ecstatic disregard of a puppy. My mom popped her head into the living room. She was flushed.
“I tried to stop her, but when we were coming up the driveway, it was like she knew you were here.” Mom petted the dog’s massive head and shook her by the skin under her neck. “Sally loves her daddy, there’s no doubt.”
All ninety pounds of her squirmed onto my lap and began licking at my neck and face. A dog that looked like a bear. She recognized me and wanted to be petted. Life could be simple. I had spent the night watching my brain, waiting for it to spit sparks and malfunction again.
The wiry mess of fur and drool in my lap superseded those anxieties. Pet the dog. For brief moments, Sally the dog had the ability to force perspective and to make those spiraling thoughts the vestigial remains of a biochemical hiccup. Pet the damn dog.
“Marlee said Sally made a lot of friends at the kennel.”
I pulled at her ears. “She’s a good dog.” I tried to remember adopting her, raising her, teaching her to poop outside and not to chew things, but the clearest images I got were like shadow puppets, shape and darkness, maybe a vet’s office near some train tracks. She was big and wriggly, and I traded on her ecstatic recognition of me and shoved my face deep into her fur. She smelled like a cinnamon stick left all day at the beach: salt, spice, and sand. She writhed as I held her tightly, fighting me off in order to lick my face.
Bud got us an emergency appointment at the hospital. My first day back in the States, and we spent it in a series of waiting rooms, flipping through magazines with pictures of beautiful people whose names I couldn’t place. At our first stop, we registered with the front desk. This first room had ceilings so high up that I got dizzy looking at them. A woman gave me a clipboard stacked with forms. Millions of little empty black lines. I puzzled over them and then pushed the stack of them into my mom’s lap and went outside for a cigarette. On my way out I noticed that there were birds careening about the vaulted ceiling, tiny darting things that had nested near a skylight.
It was cold outside. I had worn only a hooded sweatshirt, and the wind made lighting my cigarette nearly impossible. I crouched down near the building to create a wind block. I felt the brick
s humming, a deep vibration, against my shoulders. I sat down on a cold bench and tried to smoke as quickly as possible. The landscape was gray. A gray gas station, a gray strip mall with a gray Chinese fast food restaurant. The trees were gray, and the stoplight went from gray to gray to gray. The hospital was a shock of orange in the midst of this monochromatic batch of poor sketches. The wind blew hard and tried to shove the grayness into me. I relit my cigarette twice and tried not to think about the hospital vibrating behind me.
When I came back, there was a woman talking to my mom. The woman now had the clipboard, and as she talked to my mom she tapped a pen against her teeth. My mom stood up when she saw me, and I shook the woman’s hand. We left the giant room and meandered through halls, a white on stainless steel maze, following the woman through doors that swooshed back and forth after we’d gone through them and into an elevator that opened with different doors than we had entered through. I wanted to ask if my mom had seen the birds but kept quiet because I didn’t want to consider the implications if she hadn’t.
I sat in a chair with one armrest and took off my sweatshirt, and a different woman asked me to make a fist, and then she stuck a needle in me, and I saw my blood bubbling out into a little glass tube. The woman removed that tube and put another one on the needle. My blood was sluggish inside those things. It barely trembled as she affixed labels on the tubes. There were tiny little bubbles at the top of each one. I wanted to ask her if that was normal. Maybe the fact that my blood had bubbles was the reason I couldn’t remember high school.
After the blood was another length of twisting hallways to an X-ray, which involved a lead apron draped over my shoulders. They were seeing into my head. I wondered if they could see the birds flying around in there. Then there were more hallways, and I was injected with a contrast solution, and I emptied my pockets of anything metal. I was warned not to move before I was slid into an MRI tube. The machine was close to my nose, and it clanged and clanged as it turned me inside out. My body’s secrets graphed onto a readout, stapled to a folder with my name on it.
Back in my street clothes, I sat with my sweatshirt in my lap as the doctor went over the results. I was exhausted. The doctor said that the MRI and the X-rays had both come up clean. There were no spots, clots, or lesions on my brain. He told me that it’d take a day or so for the blood work, but that the results indicated that the catalyst for the incident was nothing organic in my body, but rather a result of the Lariam. He then said what everyone said after they mentioned that drug’s name: “The drug has a history of these kinds of side effects.” We’d have to wait for the blood test results to make sure.
I didn’t believe him. There was something definitely wrong. I wanted to tell him about the birds that I wasn’t sure really existed. I wanted to tell him I could feel the building singing, that the world was monochromatic. I wanted to tell him that I was the liquid center of the universe and liable to dissipate into nothingness. I wanted to tell him to check again.
My mom asked him some questions. He said I should take a different malarial prophylaxis if I decided to return to India. My mom said I was acting strange before I had left for India, like “angry strange.” The doctor nodded, but he didn’t write it down. “Angry strange” was news to me. The first I’d heard of it. She said that I’d gotten very angry in my dad’s office one night and had scared her. She pulled out a folder from her backpack. She had a whole spreadsheet typed out with every bit of information about the last couple of months. I found myself staring at the dates and numbers, and immediately looked away. She said that I’d arrived in India on September 22 and that I had complained of violent vomiting as of the twenty-fourth. I had written to her that the vomiting lasted about a week. Then she said that on October 12, I had walked into a Christian seminary in Hyderabad and told the priest that I had no idea who I was.
“This happened before?” I asked.
My mom told me that I’d gotten better after an hour, and then I’d called Veda, who came and picked me up.
“I remember being sick and this doctor coming to my apartment,” I said. The scene of it blossomed in my mind: The doctor wore a stained blue shirt and hadn’t shaved in a few days. He jabbed me in the upper arm with a syringe. “He gave me three injections, but he wouldn’t tell me what was in them.”
My mom told me that I’d been very nauseated and had been vomiting yellow stuff the night of the fourteenth. She said that Veda had told her that I’d been so delirious that when he came to visit I’d fallen out of bed and was sleeping on the floor.
The doctor said that all of this bolstered the theory that it was the Lariam. These events all seemed to be prodromal to the larger episode.
I had him define prodromal for me: ripples before the tsunami.
My mother’s spreadsheet was littered with prodromata, little events building to larger and larger events. How could I be expected to understand what had happened to me when they kept using words I didn’t know to describe it?
My mom explained the care I had gotten while I was in India. How I had started in one hospital and had been transferred to another. This was news to me. I thought I had been taken straight to the mental hospital.
“Which hospital did I punch the nurse in?” I asked, interrupting my mom’s narrative.
“You punched a nurse?”
Out of all the things I couldn’t remember, here was something no one else in the room had known. Mom and the doctor stared at me. Did it always feel like everyone was evaluating you? It was like their stares were another set of diagnostic machines. What were they seeing that I wasn’t?
“I’m pretty sure I did,” I said, trying to act casual. “Probably at the first hospital.”
Mom resumed her narrative.
After the whole day spent in the hospital while jet-lagged and on Ativan and Oleanz, I felt like I’d been subjected to a premortem taxidermy. I gathered up my sweatshirt, had the doctor sign a form from the State Department, shook his hand, and left.
It seems like I blinked my eyes and we were in Bud’s office. He was hunched behind his desk, and his office reeked of his chain-smoking. While he and Mom talked about the tests and the antimalarial drug, I lit up a cigarette and added to the full ashtray. Bud gave me a look like I was supposed to have asked permission.
Mom kept saying the drug’s name, Lariam, how it had a history of doing things like this. Then she told Bud how weird I was acting the week before I left for India, and how it all coincided with my first dose of the drug. She now told Bud the story of me sitting behind my dad’s desk, so furious about a missed fax that I threw a book across the room. She told Bud that she knew something had been wrong but hadn’t said anything.
Bud grimaced at me, and I felt like I was back at Mrs. Lee’s guesthouse, the kind of guy who terrorizes his mother, who breaks his mother’s heart. Just like a drug addict.
“What was the book?” I asked.
I sent out an e-mail to a list of friends and professors explaining what had happened. I told them that I was fine. I said that I had lost my memory and spent some time in a mental facility. I was fine now. I stressed that fact a few times. I had been lost but now was found. I was okay. I typed the sentence “I’m okay now” several times. I impressed on everyone that I was slowly recovering my memory and that I’d be back to normal very soon and that no one needed to worry. I needed everyone to know that I was fine. It was a funny story, really, when you thought about it, I wrote.
I was not okay, but it was easier to claim health than to explain why I felt like I was a step away from erasure at every moment or that I had begun to be suspicious of every mouthful of food. It was easier than admitting that I was suicidal.
I told them I was fine.
The next day the blood work came back. There was a high level of allergen-specific immunoglobulin E. The doctor said this was pretty good proof that what happened was the result of the Lariam. He told me to continue taking the drugs I was prescribed by Dr. Chandra in India sin
ce they were what he’d have prescribed me anyway. And that I’d need to find a replacement malaria prophylactic for when I returned to India.
“There were no other drugs in my system?” I asked.
He explained that they didn’t test for specific drugs so much as try to gauge what my body’s reaction had been, which to me was like guessing what the stolen painting looked like by studying the spot where it had been hanging on the wall.
“More than likely, it was the Lariam,” he said. “All we can do is make deductions at this point. If there is a relapse of the symptoms, we’ll make a different diagnosis.”
“It could happen again?” I asked.
“It’s not going to happen again. I’m pretty sure it was the Lariam.”
“You said that those other times—with the vomiting and not knowing who I was at the seminary—were all prodromal events, right? Stuff leading up to the bigger event?”
He agreed.
“How do we know that all of this isn’t prodromal to an even bigger event? How do we know I’m done?”
“We don’t,” he said.
Malaria is one of the oldest, deadliest diseases on the planet. Its effects can be seen in the genetic record as far back as five hundred thousand years ago. In the history of infectious diseases, most of them burst on the scene and aggressively kill but then settle down and become less deadly over time. Killing your host turns out not to be the most viable strategy for a pathogen. Scientists call this process “diminished virulence.”
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me Page 7
