Everyone whom Mae and I met loved her and got tears in their eyes when they said so.
* * *
Historically speaking, settlers’ reasons for uprooting typically established the hierarchy wherever they resettled. Puritans relocated for religious reasons, so the devout became leaders. Forty-niners rushed in search of gold, and those who struck it gained status.
But people came to Snowflake to nurture disease, so here, illness acted like a social currency. Being “normies”—a mostly derogative term meaning that chemical fragrances and electricity didn’t (yet) cause us debilitating pain—not only dropped Mae and me into a category of people who had historically hurt, abandoned, and misdiagnosed everyone we were about to meet; it also ranked us as lepers.
Luckily, I was about to become very sick.
On day two, I woke with a crick in my neck, a headache, a creeping sense of self-hatred, and Mae’s hair in my mouth.
“Did you sleep?” she said.
I hadn’t made any noise or moved beyond opening my eyes, but apparently we were at the point where we could sense each other’s biorhythms.
“Yeah, did you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. The coils shrieked as she got off the cot. “I need to find coffee. I feel crazy.”
“We can’t tap out,” I called after her. “I watch a lot of those reality television shows where people are, like, dropped naked and stuff on islands and told to survive, and I always tell myself I would never tap out on the first day.”
I heard Susie’s and Deb’s voices in the other room and threw an elbow over my eyes, willing myself to cheer up. Despite my pep talk, I felt very close to tapping out. The headache I’d woken up with had snowballed into nausea. I was starting to feel the familiar, flu-like symptoms that for me pave the way for emotional darkness.
I had begged to write about Snowflake because I identified with the idea of sick people retreating to the middle of nowhere to find peace. Almost two years earlier, I’d suffered a mental breakdown and retreated to a psychiatric hospital for two weeks. Medication and therapy had brought me back to reality. But I felt I recognized the urge to leave everything behind.
In the almost two years since my collapse, sticking to the to-do list they gave us at the psychiatric hospital (sleep; eat; take medication) had, at the very least, made me feel in control.
Now, each item had been compromised thanks to our sleeping arrangements, the unsatisfying house staple (cabbage), and my personal desire to, at some point, become pregnant with a baby that did not resemble an octopus.
“I’m starting to think now might not have been the best time to start tapering off psychotropic drugs,” I said to Mae, who barely heard me.
“There’s a situation,” she replied.
In the kitchen, Susie and Deb revealed that trust issues had developed between us. The night before, Mae and I decided to charge her camera battery, and apparently it had kept Susie awake.
“But we could hear her snoring,” I said.
“You hurt her,” Deb said.
They wanted to know how they could be sure that we weren’t just another pair of journalists here to play games—to test their disease with shenanigans and make fun of them.
Deb said we couldn’t fool her.
As proof, she relayed a story about how, once, when her daughter was “ten or twelve,” they’d gone together to the grocery store.
“I lost track of her and her friend,” Deb said, smirking proudly, “and then I found them, and I could smell it. They claimed, ‘No, no, no,’ but I knew they’d gone and done perfume samples. So we’re in the car, and they’re giggling to themselves, and I told them to get out.”
That was the end of the story.
“Did you make them get out of the car?” I said.
“Well, yeah,” she said, looking confused. “We were only about three miles from home.” She told me she turned the car around “eventually.” But I couldn’t help seeing it from the daughter’s point of view: a friend had come over, and they’d been left on the highway.
I worried we were about to get kicked out, too.
I followed Deb’s gaze to the window. Outside, Susie’s dog had his nose in the nest of baby rabbits. His neck muscles jerked as he swallowed one whole.
“Nature is just awful,” Deb said.
She and I went outside to pick up some of the blind, still-squirming litter with shovels. I thought we should smash their heads with the shovels and put them out of their misery, but Deb said we should return them to the nest, in case the mother returned and could save some of them. I watched as she put the living and dead back into the hole and covered it with a piece of metal, leaving a pocket for the mom to burrow through if she returned. Somehow I knew she wouldn’t.
When we went back inside, the emotional meeting was called back into order. But I was distracted by the sight of Susie’s dog reapproaching the nest. He started digging.
Deb said, in order to trust us going forward, we had to promise we weren’t going to write anything but a positive piece that would clearly inform readers of the clinical validity of environmental illness.
“We can’t promise that,” Mae said.
A general silence fell over the aluminum foil room. Deb, who had been pretty emotionless up until then, looked like she might cry. Our chance at writing a story seemed to be disintegrating. So I cleared my throat and prepared to overshare in order to hopefully defuse things.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” I said.
* * *
I told Susie and Deb that I knew how it felt, at least a little bit, “to be sick and have nobody believe you.” I explained how, four or five years earlier, my hair had started falling out, and I had had this awful burning sensation on the back of my scalp that was so intense I used a bag of ice as a pillow, and I had felt nauseated all the time, and tired, and cried a lot.
They softened. When I got to the part about how every other doctor I saw that year said I was fine, physically speaking, and had referred me to a psychiatrist, they scoffed knowingly and protectively. They asked what my environment had been like; I thought they meant emotionally, so I told them how I moved to New York for this guy, and we signed a lease together, broke up after one month—then I lost my job and had no savings—la-la-la.
Susie cut me short: “No, your physical environment.”
I remembered, with a lurch, that our apartment had been downwind from a dry cleaner’s. I used to go stand next to its vents because the detergent smelled great compared to the chicken slaughter plant down the street.
Susie and Deb looked like they wanted to high-five. To them, my proximity to harsh chemicals proved that my depression had been a symptom of environmental illness.
“They use all sorts of chemical agents to clean slaughterhouses,” Deb said excitedly. “When you left, did the symptoms go away?”
“No, but they started to, a little, when this doctor friend of mine said to try eliminating gluten.”
“The gluten, that’s what happened with me!” Susie said. “That’s one of the things I found I was sensitive to. It’s commoner than people think.”
“For me, personally, it was a placebo,” I said carefully, clocking their disappointed looks. They cringed even more when I used the word “psychosomatic.”
“The gluten-free thing helped for a long time, especially with the problem I’d had shitting my pants—I think just controlling my environment probably helped. But the scalp burning didn’t go away until a dermatologist prescribed me antidepressants.”
“That’s not me saying the symptoms weren’t real,” I continued—and in my nervousness that I’d once again offended them, I then farted so shrilly that Mae laughed in shock.
Susie just shrugged and Deb remained completely impassive, as if maybe she hadn’t heard, which was not possible. Chemicals bothered them, but bodily functions were fine.
Given the progress made by discussing my medical history, I publicized my current headache. Susie s
crambled to get me Tylenol (apparently over-the-counter pain relief wasn’t toxic), and Deb graciously explained that this was yet another sign my body was dumping toxins from the regular world. My illness had immediately elevated my status in the household. “Here you go,” Deb said, handing me a mug. Susie tapped two pills into my palm.
After almost twenty-four hours of being told I stank and generally being treated like a contagious freak, I was so grateful for these ministrations that I went to hug them. Susie acquiesced, but Deb said I was still too fragrant for us to embrace.
“But I changed my mind,” she said to Mae. “I’ll let you film me, if you want.”
* * *
Susie and Deb, like most of their neighbors, received disability checks. But welfare had not made them complacent. It wasn’t easy to apply for disability when you suffered from an illness that most refused to recognize. And even if you did receive some aid, the checks could stop at any moment. All it took was one Arizona bureaucrat looking at your file and deciding that your sickness was made up. Or “psychosomatic.”
Over and over again, residents emphasized to me that they wanted to work, they missed working—they had no identity now, they said, no sense of self-worth. Many, like Deb, were former chemical engineers. They were smart, easily bored, and embarrassed by what they worried some might misconstrue as laziness or mooching. I believed them when they said they wanted jobs. I also believed that they were far too sick to work. Many spent entire days in bed, eyes clenched against the blinding pain caused by their illness.
“People here suicide themselves,” Susie said, as we trudged around the desert, collecting stones for her collection. She estimated that it happened around twice a year, which, given the shifting population of forty or so people, I pointed out, was an epidemic. Our boots crunched on petrified rabbit shit, twisted sticks, and rocks that were sometimes fossils—only Susie had said we couldn’t call them fossils, because many of the people here were Christian and didn’t believe in evolution. Sound carried so well that the hummingbirds overhead sounded like helicopters. Susie told us about a friend with environmental illness who had killed himself a few months prior.
“He wasn’t depressed or anything; he just couldn’t take it anymore, so he starved himself,” she said. “We bury our own dead.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
Many of the people we met had finally found doctors who believed them. In the regular world, after enduring years of humiliating checkups and stints in the emergency room, they had relegated the medical profession to enemy status. Now, they spoke adoringly of their physicians, most of whom practiced integrative health—a blend of Western science, holistic healing, and one-on-one therapy.
As long as I framed environmental illness as a physical phenomenon, Snowflakers were happy, even eager, to communicate. But they got angry if I broached their illness, even obliquely, as a psychological phenomenon. They had spent years feeling sick and battling skeptics.
Later, breathing through another stomachache, I scanned my notes, rereading scrawled concerns based on various conversations about the potential that everyone we met had some form of extreme PTSD, either from being sick, witnessing a nationwide health crisis, or—as had cropped up in one or two of the conversations—from being sexually assaulted. I worried that if Mae and I represented this environmentally ill community in any fashion that wasn’t simply a public service announcement about the validity of environmental illness, they might suicide themselves. I wasn’t convinced that our chemical odors would kill Snowflake’s residents. But our narrative about them might.
“Do you think it’s real?” Mae asked. “The allergies? The pain?”
I nodded.
I showed her how, if you covered up the “environ” in “environmental illness,” it spelled what I had.
* * *
At first, when I asked Susie whether she took any medications for her environmental illness, she cackled like a little girl and said, “None of your business!”
“I do, though,” she continued after a pause. “For seizures.”
Certain psychiatric drugs double as anti-seizure medications, so I rattled off a few familiar brand names. Susie nodded at one I took. I wondered if we had the same thing, whatever it was.
Later that day, my stomach cramps intensified. I wasn’t supposed to get my period for two more weeks, so I hadn’t brought tampons. Soon I was forced to make an uncomfortable announcement.
“Susie,” I said, “I menstruated in your pants.”
To my surprise, she was totally unfazed. Using her power outlets might have angered Susie, but when it came to the body’s natural processes, she was patient and kind. “Take as many as you want,” she said, unloading an armful of clean underwear into my lap. “Layer up! I wish we had something else for you.”
Mae, anticipating a night of sharing a bed with me, quietly asked how heavy my flow was.
“Do you want a sock?” Deb asked, and reassured me endlessly that, yes, it was fine to use one of her socks as a maxi pad. She told me the only thing to worry about was that it was dark outside, and animals might smell my blood.
* * *
On our last morning in town, Deb intercepted me in the driveway to explain how fragile I was. She had been thinking about my symptoms—the headache, my history of so-called depression, and my menstrual cycle, which started two weeks early on our second day there.
“My therapist says it’s just stress,” I said.
I told her I thought we recognized something in each other, but chose to call it different things.
She shook her head. “You have environmental illness, I can sense it.”
In a quiet, tentative voice, she explained to me that there was, in fact, an objective, scientific way to test me for environmental illness; she could do it right then and there. The procedure would be relatively painless, but I couldn’t mention the specifics in my piece.
“I feel like this will sound more ominous than it is if I leave out the details,” I said as we went through with the procedure.
“People will think we’re crazy,” she said.
“I am crazy,” I said.
“No,” she said.
After we finished, I lingered in the doorway while Deb searched the dark house for her glasses. I was no longer permitted indoors because I had changed back into my own clothes, and the scents emanating from my regular-world apparel had already caused Deb’s ears to swell, making it hard for her to hear. It was time to go, but Deb said the apparatus she used to diagnose environmental illness wasn’t working, so she would have to be in touch. I wrote down my phone number.
“Can I give you a hug good-bye?” I said.
“Not in those clothes,” she said.
As Susie ferried us back into society, beef cattle glared at us from the ditches, and calves stumbled in the road. Susie told us she didn’t see any overlap between mental and environmental illness. Certain substances were physically poisonous, and that was the end of it.
“If someone is reckless or careless about exposures that will cause issues for you, that is, to some measure, assaultive,” Susie said.
“‘Assault,’ that’s a strong word,” Mae said.
“Yep,” Susie said. “That’s why I say it.” She added, “You can be beat chemically, just like you can be beat with a fist.”
“Susie, have you ever gotten beat with a fist?” I asked.
She turned to smile at me. “That’s part of being female,” she said. “But if someone has cancer, you don’t say it’s because they got hit as a kid.”
* * *
At the airport gate, I remembered the emergency Valium in my bag, and all of my stress went away. But it wore off on the flight, and by the time I got home, I felt the sadness in my blood. I almost hoped Deb’s test would work—that she would find something scientific to substantiate how shitty I sometimes felt.
A few days later, when they called me, Deb and Susie put me on speakerphone, because holding the receive
r to their heads triggered neurological problems. Once again, they wanted me to tell them exactly what I would write about them. They worried I might make fun of them. I told them that wasn’t my intention, but that I tended to tell the truth, at which point Deb told me that my test results had shown her that I was sick.
“But I can help you.”
“We can help you shave off a couple years of fruitless effort,” Susie added.
“What’s wrong with me?” I said.
Deb promised she would tell me, eventually. But only after she read this piece.
“Isn’t that, like, blackmail?” I said.
Susie and Deb started to laugh, softly and shrewdly.
I’m still waiting for my results.
First I Got Pregnant.
Then I Decided to
Kill the Mountain Lion.
In 2012, a mountain lion fled his home in the Santa Monica Mountains and journeyed twenty miles to Mount Hollywood. He slunk across freeways, bounding between trucks and across parking lots and through residents’ front yards, all the way to the hills surrounding the iconic Hollywood sign, where he hid himself, right there among the public hiking trails.
During the day, he slept, occasionally snapping awake at the chatter of hikers. Below him stretched downtown Los Angeles, the Pacific Ocean, car exhaust billowing over crowded highways. After dusk, when the park closed and the spotlights at Paramount Studios danced across the polluted sky, he emerged from his nest to hunt, craving deer but settling for rats, which nested in the garbage cans near the public toilets.
Scientists suspected that the mountain lion had fled from the coast because things were getting crazy there. Resources were dwindling. One UCLA reporter wrote of “rivalry, slaughter, and incest.” The Santa Monica Mountains were played out. Griffith Park, although comparatively tiny, seemed to suit him better. He spent his new life in solitude. A ghost cat.
Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker Page 10
