The Answer to the Riddle Is Me

by David Stuart MacLean

  I erased it and wrote that of course I remembered talking with her at the wedding and thanked her for her concern. It was wild there for a while, I typed, but I was fine now. Perfectly fine.

  I sent it off, got my cigarettes and a scotch, and sat outside in the cold, watching the stars, begging them not to move.

  A week after I’d come back to the States, ten days from my release from Woodlands, I slid into a padded chair across from a local therapist. It was the day before Halloween, and his office felt like a paneled womb. The man across from me had a beard and a clipboard and a sweater. I handed him the form the State Department had faxed me. Dad had given up the fax machine in his office after I left for India, claiming that he was printing out more junk mail than anything else, so all of our faxes came and went through the grocery store across the street from my parents’ house. All of the documents of the current and future prospects of my sanity were slid across a counter covered in merchandise branded with my high school’s mascot and faxed from a machine wedged between the cigarettes and lottery tickets. The therapist I was seeing was a friend of a friend of my mom’s. He’d come recommended. He came out from behind his desk, shook my hand, and sat in the other padded wingback chair.

  Before we began, he said, “I am going to say three things to you: White horse. Purple rose. Blue fountain.”

  For the next forty-five minutes, I told him my story. He was the first person with whom I shared the uncut version. Within five minutes he nudged a box of Kleenex toward me. I told him about the train station and about being a drug addict and not knowing who my girlfriend was and how everything felt queer and distant and lonely and infused with failure, because part of me still believed if I’d answered God/Jim Henson’s question correctly in my hallucination, I wouldn’t be stuck in this stupid world.

  Forty minutes later, when I had a fistful of damp shredded tissue in my hands and my legs pulled up onto the chair with me, as I sobbed and told him how I felt scooped out like a jack-o’-lantern, he interrupted and asked me to repeat the three things he had said at the beginning of the session.

  I said, “White horse, purple rose, blue fountain.”

  He checked a box on the form and scribbled his signature on it. He handed it to me and said that there was nothing wrong with my memory and that I’d be fine to return to India.

  Anne left a message for me with my parents and then sent me an e-mail to make sure I had gotten the message and to call her immediately. I wrote her that I wasn’t very good at the phone right now, and my sleep schedule was way off, and that we could do what we needed to do on e-mail, right? I ended the e-mail by telling her how much I loved her. These words felt required. I also needed her. She was a key to this other life of mine.

  This was at four a.m. Wide awake, I alternated time on the computer with time sitting in the backyard, where I drank scotch and smoked while Sally sniffed the frost-brittle grass. I also exchanged e-mails with Geeta. I had a picture of her on my laptop from the Fulbright orientation. She was gorgeous, Indian American, another woman who didn’t have an ounce of the Midwest in her. From our previous e-mails I had deduced that I’d been meaning to visit her in Goa. These plans might have been the reason I ended up at the train station on October 17. I’m not sure what I had meant to do with her in Goa, but from looking at the pictures of Geeta and from the flirty tone of our e-mails, it was pretty clear I had never told her about Anne.

  There were still many hours of my life that were completely wiped from my record. My friends and family could help fill in only so much. Those hours from four p.m. on the sixteenth till I woke up in the train station were a mystery. Nobody I knew had witnessed them. Why had I left my apartment? Where the hell had I slept? What was it about Geeta that had drawn me to the train station and not anywhere else in Hyderabad?

  Geeta wrote, making sure I knew that the invitation was still open whenever I needed it. That I should take all the time recovering that I needed, but she really missed me, as well. She kept saying that she was so sorry for what had happened to me and that she’d gone crazy with worry. Then she’d tell me about her bikini and how she needed me to be her “white husband” in order for her to wear it at the beach. I e-mailed back that I’d be happy to be her white husband, and if it would make her more comfortable, I’d wear a bikini as well. Our e-mails ended with x’s and o’s, which I fretted over till dawn, not knowing if either of us meant them in earnest.

  I took Sally outside so I could smoke and drink while she sniffed and peed. I’d just made promises of a sort to two different women, one who was attached to the old me and the other whom this new me was attracted to. It would be best to be honest, but I had no idea what the truth was other than the fact that I could walk by both of these women in the grocery store and not have a clue who they were.

  Another response from my mass e-mail, this one from Lizzy, a fellow Fulbrighter, began with the line “I’m going to be very genuine and act on the assumption that you are not making this up” and ended with the line “Good luck to you. And if you’re making this up, you are a big jerk.”

  I could only have known this woman for a maximum of two months, yet she knew that I was capable of creating fabrications and passing them off as truth.

  I asked my dad about these e-mails—the one from my professor and now this one from a woman I had just met. Why were people reluctant to believe me?

  He told me a story about when I let the front yard’s grass grow really long, played hooky from high school, and then mowed circles in it. I called the local paper and claimed that aliens had come in the middle of the night and made them. I begged them to send a photographer over right away.

  Then he told me a story about how I had written a review in my college’s newspaper of a new album by this band from Ohio. The only thing was that the band never existed. The college activities director wrote to the fake address I had supplied at the bottom of the article to inquire about booking the band for the school’s spring festival. The address was a friend’s, and I had kept up a correspondence with the activities director for months, apologizing for delays, asking if the demo I had sent had gotten through, cursing the mail system when she wrote back to say she had received nothing.

  “You do have a history of this kind of thing,” my dad said.

  “I’m not doing it now, am I?” I asked. “This really happened, right?”

  With the Oleanz done, I tapered myself off the Ativan, keeping a couple in reserve. My mom had pulled out every single photo album that she had, and in the afternoons, while my parents were at work, I’d pore over them. There were almost no pictures that didn’t have me mugging for the camera: bugging my eyes out, twisting my lips; I was predictably off-kilter in nearly every picture.

  My memory was coming back, but at a glacial pace. I’d remember parts of my experience at tiny little Warren Wilson College, but not all of it, which drove me frantic. I’d remember a walk I’d take every morning from the cafeteria to the organic garden where I worked, but I couldn’t remember what I did there. I’d remember that month I had a mania for ice cream cakes that Dairy Queen sold two for one on Tuesdays, and how I’d have to cut the cakes into thirds and stack them so that they’d fit in the dorm fridge, but I couldn’t remember who I ate them with.

  My years living in Chapel Hill were hazier. During these years, I was bumming around, working a dozen different low-paying jobs, guiding outdoor trips in western North Carolina during the fall and spring. I had a red Honda motorcycle. I had a belief that when people’s memories were working properly, they remembered everything. And these shards of memory I felt were evidence of how damaged I was, instead of realizing that that’s the way most everyone remembers.

  I could remember Ariel a little better. I remembered that we lived together for a time, but not at the end of our relationship, which was “pretty dramatic” according to what Jon and Mel had said.

  I found a book that Ariel had made for me. It had a copper cover with SO FAR stamped on it. In
side were collages of pictures, diary entries, drawings, and ticket stubs. On the second to last page was a list surrounded by pictures of the two of us. The list was titled “Clearly . . .” and took up the whole page:

  Shower curtain hugs, tagged pumpkin seeds, banana pudding skin, white heat dancing, best western inn, NYC rooftop glimpses, campers quarters, pushed together beds, lost keys, tekken, air hockey, banana protein shake car spills, the big sleep, big man singing on the metro while we doze, rose garden what are we doing conv., dirty pullout couch, late night bed talks, walking into a bare room w/ Joni Mitchell playing looking down at a beautiful boy, cheesy yes, a sweet call from mountain man boyfriend at chip’s party, jon’s b-day party, all around stimulating interaction, yes, I’d like to think.

  It was code, some sort of relationship code, embedded throughout with intimate detail but impenetrable to me. It was a fossil, and I stared at it, trying to imagine what it looked like when it was alive and roaming the earth. Hallucinating in the asylum, I thrashed against the straps, trying to figure out the quatrain that Jim Henson asked for. I had gotten half of it—“If you can’t understand that the world was made by Jim Henson in a studio in Burbank, then fuck masala dosa . . .”—but the other half had eluded me, so I never got to pass into the next level of experience.

  This list in front of me was another opportunity for fresh failure. Why couldn’t my brain work? Why was everything a jumble inside me? I was slowly getting memories back, but I had no idea what they meant. They were just scraps of evidence with no sense of the criminal they pertained to, or the crime.

  I devised a system. I’d study a picture, catalog who I was with, where it was taken, and what I was wearing, and then I’d imagine a scene where all this had taken place. I’d imagine the jokes that were told; I’d imagine the moments of fond exchange; I’d imagine the slight enmities that were running below the surface. I’d filter it all through the character of me that I’d inferred from reading my e-mails. A goofy, self-deprecating loudmouth who preferred to say outlandish things rather than attempt real conversation, but who, in rare moments, could provide intimate and earnest observations about another person’s well-being. I dubbed this voice onto the action captured in the photographs.

  Using this system, I placed myself at my sister Betsy’s wedding the previous August. I was dressed in a kilt and emptying garbage cans into a Dumpster. I placed myself in a parking lot in Asheville, wrestling with Ariel on the asphalt. I had located a stack of photographs in a box that I’d put in my parents’ attic, more recent photographs, and through them I placed myself in the house I had been renting in New Mexico, playing darts in the living room with Anne.

  Anne. It seemed I was fond of her, but distant. In the photographs, you could sense the distance. The way I always appeared to be pulling away from her, looking somewhere else. She had a tangle of brown curls that fell to her shoulders. Her eyes were wide set, and her nose was cute and a little upturned. There were pictures of us at a wedding. She in a purple sheath dress and a straw bucket hat, I in the suit that had been hanging in my closet in the flat in India. She stared straight at the camera and smiled, her arm stretched out and resting on my shoulders. I was talking to someone off camera. I didn’t like that when I looked at the picture I immediately thought about how much more attractive Geeta was.

  It seemed like I was always pulling away from women who liked me. Even at that moment, I was doing it. Anne was coming to see me, the only one of all my friends to do so, and all I could do was write to another woman. I wanted to not be the guy in the pictures. I wanted to be happy with someone who wanted to make me happy. I made a vow to stop writing Geeta. I was going to love Anne.

  The pictures weren’t always helpful. The ones from college were odd. I was in green-feathered pants and a sleeveless sailor blouse with two baby-doll heads taped over my chest. There was a series of black-and-white art shots of me wrapped in a satin blanket standing by a lake; the other shots revealed that underneath the blanket I was wearing tights and an aluminum-foil codpiece. I asked my dad about these pictures. He wondered if there were any of me in pink saran wrap.

  “It was your Halloween costume one year,” he said.

  “What else was I wearing?”

  “Just the saran wrap.” He sighed and said, “You’ve always been unique.”

  My brother-in-law’s parents worked at the National Institutes of Health. When I turned up in India with no memory, they did a literature review of Lariam, whose generic name is mefloquine. As I recovered in Ohio, my inbox filled up with the studies they forwarded me. I didn’t read any of them. I didn’t want to know the possible scope of my condition. To read them would have been to know, and to know would make me acknowledge that I was still a mess and not making the best choices for myself recovery-wise. Even a glance at the studies about the neurotoxicity of Lariam revealed that alcohol was the worst thing (other than more Lariam) I could have been putting into my body. And I wasn’t about to stop drinking.

  Malaria evolves quickly, sliding past our miracle cures in a generation or two. During the Vietnam War, when there were outbreaks of chloroquine-resistant malaria among the US troops, the military scientists at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) set about testing 250,000 new compounds to fight against malaria. The WRAIR is named after Walter Reed, the military scientist who demonstrated that mosquitoes were the vector for transmitting yellow fever. His work was used to control mosquitoes in Panama, allowing the construction of the Panama Canal. In their quest to test their hypothesis that mosquitoes transmitted yellow fever, Walter Reed’s colleagues, Dr. Jesse Lazear and Dr. James Carroll, infected themselves with the disease and charted their symptoms. The vector was proved, but at a cost. Lazear succumbed to the disease on September 25, 1900.

  In 1971, the WRAIR found that compound number 142,490 (which had been first synthesized in 1969) was able to prevent the malarial parasite from developing in the lab, but they didn’t know exactly how it worked. The understanding of why and how a drug works isn’t necessary for its commercial availability. If it works, it gets a price tag.

  Conceived initially as a treatment for people already infected with malaria, the drug was tested on inmates at the Joliet Correctional Center in Illinois. Of course, these prisoners first needed to be inoculated with malaria to see if the drug would work. After this testing showed the efficacy of the drug as a cure for malaria, it was then developed in conjunction with Hoffmann–La Roche, a Swiss pharmaceutical company. This was the first time a public-private venture was undertaken in regard to the development of a drug.

  The drug began to be marketed and used as a prophylaxis against malaria, something a patient could take to prevent infection, but never received the randomized double-blind study normally required of a drug for FDA approval. When the drug became available in 1989, Lariam was widely adopted by Peace Corps volunteers in malarial regions. An observational study was set up to record the PCV’s experience with the drug. These volunteers adjusted their doses as they saw fit. Some experienced troubling side effects, like insomnia and incredibly vivid dreams, and stopped taking the drug entirely. This information about these varied doses didn’t flow upward to those doing the observational study. The Peace Corps volunteers had received the drugs; the study assumed that the drugs were taken as directed. They were not.

  The volunteers were prescribed 250 milligrams every two weeks. When some still came down with malaria (most likely those who had altered their doses or had ceased taking the drug), the recommended dosage was bumped up to 250 milligrams every week.

  It’s important to note here that Lariam seemed to fit the bill as a “miracle drug.” It was effective and convenient. It only needed to be taken once a week. It seemed like it was the perfect thing with which to combat malaria. And it was, if you ignored all the reports of extreme reactions to the drug people were having. These reactions were easily dismissed as the reactions people have when they travel to stressful places.

  In 2001,
a randomized double-blind study was finally conducted on Lariam by a group of scientists based in the Netherlands. Sixty-seven percent of people who took Lariam experienced one or more adverse effects, and six percent had reactions so severe they required medical attention.

  And even that study doesn’t get to the bottom of how bad Lariam can be.

  It hadn’t taken as much effort as I thought it should have to convince my parents that I was okay to drive to the airport. They’d drawn a map and told me I should allow about an hour for the drive. The steering wheel felt enormous, and I questioned their decision the entire way there.

  Inside the terminal, a crush of people. Some sort of tournament was going on in Columbus, and the airport was filled with lanky, muscular young men and women traveling in groups, each defined by the colors of his or her warm-ups. They all looked slightly sick in the airport’s fluorescent light. They were on the outer edges of puberty and had grown-up muscular bodies stretched tight within teenagers’ skins, as though their bodies were elaborate machines they wound up in and hadn’t gotten the hang of yet. They bustled with an energy that disturbed me. If they channeled it all at once, they could tear the place apart and no one could do anything about it. I was Red Riding Hood in a forest of wolves.

  I was never going to find Anne in this mob. In this age of cell phones, we forget how we used to pick people up at the airport. It was always a small miracle when a pickup happened. I made my way down to the baggage claim and found more troops of warm-up-wearing giants. Men and women carrying clipboards shouted things at their groups. The normal travelers were dumpy squat things in comparison, wrapped in blacks and grays and browns, wedging themselves between the groups to haul their black, gray, and brown luggage off the conveyor belts. Having resigned myself to finding the intercom person, I bumped into a woman who was bent over, adjusting the straps on her backpack. In the middle of my apology, she stood up and hugged me. Then she kissed me in the midst of all of those strangers.