Feverland, page 11
Beyond the explicit physical manifestations of pain—the cuts and blood and bruises—the more complex elements of pain can be confounding. In many cases a pain’s source can’t be found.
When someone wants or needs pain it’s called psychogenic.
My self-hurt has always been delicate, veiled. An X-Acto knife sliced between the gums. Drumsticks banged against the knee. A rainbow of underarm bites. Vomiting in the shower. A black eye made midnight with my fist. And then the accepted, the “manly”: tattoos and hours in the gym and muscle-building, fat-burning diets. Partying, sleepless weeks, and mile after mile of running. Wounds and wounding Trojan-horsed into daily life through violence and sports.
Ascetics, mystics, and martyrs have self-applied pain for thousands of years through rites of passage: symbolic deaths, rebirth through self-flagellation, beds of nails, starvation, and weeks without sleep. Freudian psychoanalytical theory views “holy” masochism as the ego’s response to the guilt of the superego.
In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry argues that chronic pain destroys its victim’s ability to communicate, and, in the end, shatters their world, including the innermost self. In “Sacred Pain and the Phenomenal Self,” Ariel Glucklich, a theology professor at Georgetown, writes, “Pain, in short, unmakes their profane world and leads the mystics to self- and world-transcendence.”
IV
There’s been no medical cause for the numbness in my extremities and face, the twists and knots in my gut, the tremoring in my hands and eyelids, the weight loss, or the surprise bruising. I’m in and out of MRI tubes and X-ray machines. Needles collapse my veins. The muscles on my right side are weaker; they have a different tone. My right leg is jammed up in the hip socket because I always fall in that direction. I’m in and out of the hospital. Pill bottles, herbal treatments, vitamins, and tinctures forest the bathroom sink. I stretch, meditate.
I get two digital rectal exams, by two separate doctors, on the same beautiful California Tuesday. To see if I can feel “normally,” to see if my nerves and pain receptors are functioning properly, a neurologist has me undress and then uses a needle to scratch the flesh of my groin. He scrapes methodically, like he’s drawing Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, then looks up and asks what I feel.
That night, in the shower, I feel my thighs and groin, thickened with dashes and welts.
A week later the same neurologist attaches me to a computer. Working from foot to neck, he inserts an electrified needle into my nerves and shocks me. Three escalating pulses. The muscles between the needle and the electrode contract and the computer logs my body’s reaction.
Exhausted, I sit in my car for an hour afterward. The stereo murmurs as if I’m underground.
For months every part of me hurts. I take handfuls of pills. I lie down. All day I am a zombie, lurching around my home. My wife sleeps in our new bed. Every bone in me feels like it’s shattering when I lie on the mattress so I sleep on the floor, flat on the hard carpet or fitted into a homemade armature of cardboard.
V
People born with congenital analgesia do not feel pain. Often they bite chunks out of their tongues. They cut their fingertips off, pick up scalding pots with bare hands, and fall from jungle gyms, but don’t realize something’s wrong until someone points out the streaming blood, the furrows of blisters, the way a bone shard pierces forearm skin.
People with congenital analgesia sometimes develop Charcot joint from simple wear and tear. Normally pain prods one to protect a wounded area—by limping, for example—until it heals, but when pain isn’t felt, the injury is worsened, and the area, especially in the joints, is ground down. This place of erosion is the perfect breeding ground for bacteria, and it can lead to life-threatening infection.
Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) has been called the father of neurology. Freud and Alfred Binet studied under him in France. Charcot is credited with first identifying multiple sclerosis and Lou Gehrig’s disease (or ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), and with modifying James Parkinson’s findings and then granting a name to Parkinson’s disease. Charcot also studied hysteria, which he believed was a mental disorder with physical manifestations. He tried to expand scientific and medical knowledge by adding hypnotism, magnetism, and electricity to his therapeutic detective work.
Charcot’s work did not benefit me, however; I’m not lucky enough to have the terror of a nameable malady. They say it’s not multiple sclerosis, ALS, or early-onset Parkinson’s. My body is a backfiring car. Punch up the volume and it accelerates, in reverse. Turn on the dome light and the hood pops. For years pleasure came to me only in pain. I needed to hurt. A sweet caress was an aching jolt.
Now everything’s on fire—it throbs and I am blissed out. I’m numb and my cuticles bleed when I wash up and I feel good and weep when someone says they love me and sometimes my wife’s breath burns my cheek.
VI
So I make lists. On September 13, 1848, outside of Cavendish, Vermont, Phineas Gage and a group of rail workers were blasting rock, preparing a roadbed for a new train track. After a hole was drilled into the stone, Gage added gunpowder, a fuse, and sand, and then pounded all of it down with an iron rod. The rod was 1.25 inches in diameter. It was almost four feet long. When the powder exploded, the rod ripped through the side of his face, shattered his upper jaw, and passed behind his left eye before sprouting from and passing through the top of his head. Amazingly, Gage was speaking within minutes.
Frank Sinatra stars as Tony, a widower and wannabe playboy, in the 1959 Frank Capra film A Hole in the Head. Tony asks Mario, his wealthy brother, to finance his dream, a Disneyesque resort in Miami. Mario, sickened by Tony’s lifestyle, agrees under the condition that Tony either marry and settle down or give Mario custody of his son, Ally.
Hole-in-the-head disease starts as sores above the eyes. If the sores are allowed to grow, they’ll penetrate a tropical fish’s skull.
In the British girl group Sugababes’ music video for “Hole in the Head,” a man licks a guitar. He is a bandleader, singing and strutting, gyrating and headbanging. The Sugababes, half-clad, glammed-out women, dance in the crowd. They fawn over the all-male band and caress the bandleader’s bare chest. They trace fingertips through their cleavage and over their hips. By the song’s finish, however, the three women have pushed the bandleader to the floor. They kick and stomp, destroying his band’s equipment. Guitars are thrown. Mic stands topple.
A hole in the head. Versions and subversions of the cliché have been pervasive in music since the early twentieth century. Recently it’s been used by Sting, Cypress Hill, the Dixie Chicks, Box Elders, Nickelback, and Andrew Bird.
The first time I saw the movie trailer for the documentary A Hole in the Head, I thought it would be about memory loss. It begins with grainy footage of an African tribe dancing and singing exuberantly, long spears like flagpoles. The voice-over—“Dawn in the uplands . . . the land of mystery”—sounds straight out of a middle school classroom. But the next image stunned me. Tightly framed: four hands in a bloody mess, weaving in and out of red muck. A grinding sound, like a nail scraping concrete. The next shot makes everything clear; a skull is at the center of the slick flurry of fingers. The scalp has been peeled away. A metal tool digs at the human head. The voice-over recedes. The scene changes to a woman cutting her hair in front of a mirror. The trailer begins rapidly cutting between four people explaining trepanation and footage of a human head being drilled into. The woman reappears, this time wearing a hair cap, with a gap across her forehead. The four explanatory voices continue in voice-over while she arranges her coverings. The scene jumps. Now her entire head is bandaged and bloody. She swabs her face. The scene changes again. The final time she appears is the missing scene, between the second and third appearances. Her hair cap is pulled back. The background music, trippy classic rock, gets louder and louder. It’s rabbit hole music. A small power drill angles diagonally from her exposed forehead. It’s held in her hand. Blood rivers from the hole she’s drilling, down the bridge of her nose and into her mouth. She’s wearing aviator sunglasses.
VII
Outside, the smoky California air smells like a diesel engine. The hummingbird feeders are filled with red sugar water, but there are no birds. The rat that’s living in the aloe plant is gnawing on something in the shade. I’m not sure how many days now the world’s been burning.
All our elderly neighbors have their TVs on. One stops by with a bag of fruit from her backyard trees—pomegranates, grapefruit, oranges, and lemons. She tells me that the book her eighty-year-old husband’s been working on for decades, an academic tome on Lutheranism, has finally been accepted for publication. Teary eyed, she says she hopes it will be published before he dies. After she leaves, I halve a pomegranate, spoon out the magenta seeds, and eat sloppily. The TVs drone more endless news about the wildfires. Every five minutes the old guy who lives behind us shouts, “Awww fuck!” when the Dodgers game loses its signal and blips to static. Throttled by the wind, the sun-bleached prayer flags I purchased in Nepal tear loose from the porch columns. After scrambling over the fence, I chase them down the block. All afternoon I rehang them, listening to the neighbor cuss.
VIII
I bought the prayer flags outside Boudhanath Stupa, one of the holiest sites in Boudha, in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 2002. The building, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, used to be the focus of the neighborhood, but when I visited it was hidden by tall restaurants and thick clouds of exhaust. Beggars and the maimed moaned for coins, beating ramshackle drums. Trinket sellers and vendors—singing bowls, Vishnu, the North Face, the Nepalese flag—lined the narrow entrance to the temple.
But walking through the gate, I molted. Kathmandu’s cacophony peeled away. The primary pilgrimage site for Tantric Buddhists, Boudhanath serenely bustles with monks and nuns in maroon and orange robes, Sherpas, Tibetans. The mandala-style structure is a hundred feet tall. Prayer flags arrow down from the golden spire. The sky is a flock of shifting colors. Enormous painted eyes gaze out from the tower. The unblinking eyes of God. Blue and red and yellow and black. Each stair represents a step on the path toward enlightenment. Pilgrims circumambulate the tower, chanting and spinning the 108 copper prayer wheels embedded in the structure’s base. Everything goes clockwise. Everything has meaning. Juniper incense burns. The temple space is open to the sky, and unlike in the rest of Kathmandu, it is brilliant, blue.
The day after we visited, my girlfriend and I took a bus to the India-Nepal border. On a jungle walk we had to cross a river by walking over a fallen log. Our guide pointed out the alligators below us and smiled. I was the first to cross. Five steps out on the log, the world spun and blurred and I toppled. It had not even been a year and a half since my brain surgery. Two hands locked on my shoulders—and the Brit who was on the walk with us said, “Easy, mate, easy,” and helped lower me to the log. I was ashamed, and though I only heard him lighting his cigarette, I knew all of them were giggling behind me.
I returned to Boudhanath a few nights after we got back to Kathmandu, and thousands of worshipers, monks and tourists, were crowded around the stupa. Everyone lit butter candles. In the dark their faces glowed.
IX
In 2004 I start seeing things. Streaks and lightning, something whiplashing past the corner of my eye. Sitting on a Manhattan bench, I look above the taxis and see tiny orbs of light, like will-o’-the-wisps. I adjust the eye patch my neuro-ophthalmologist has me wearing. I blink and furiously rub my eyes. The ghostly lights have vanished when I look again. But within a few minutes new bulbous flashes appear, bobbing and jerking through the autumn air. My vision is failing, so my walk to the Hudson is slow. I step cautiously off each curb. Walkers stream briskly around me like I’m a boulder in a creek. They are a haze. With the eye patch, I have no depth perception but at least my double vision is gone. My eye trembles each time I set my foot down. Above the Hudson I see fireflies lighting up the gray day.
The next day I do not leave the apartment where I’m staying. I cry to my host, ask him why this life can’t be easier. I say it would be better if I cut out one of my eyes. He hugs me before leaving. Turning in the doorway, his face weighted by my sadness, he cracks a joke. Says it could be worse. Something about dog collars and Abu Ghraib.
In the middle of the night, I’d sent an e-mail to my doctors. I’d read it over and over before sending. I sounded crazy. Batshit crazy. “Vibrating rectangles of light.” “Bulbs swinging in the air.” By noon there are a number of responses in my in-box. I need to make an appointment. They tell me about Charles Bonnet syndrome. Occluding one eye with the patch has radically changed my vision, and it’s possible that I might be hallucinating in ways similar to those who have CBS. I Google and read, Google and read—hallucinations after car accidents, hallucinations caused by torture, hallucinations due to sensory deprivation.
A person who hallucinates may see the faces of loved ones or objects in swirling carpets or in shadows. The hallucinations may take the form of concrete objects, like iron skillets or coffee mugs or knives, or they might be abstract: spots of light, glittering spackle. CBS usually affects those with damaged eyes or optic pathways, or who have developed visual impairments through aging. Macular degeneration. Glaucoma. Methyl alcohol poisoning.
Charles Bonnet, a Genevan naturalist, studied tree lice and discovered that butterflies and caterpillars breathe through pores called called stigmata. Bonnet’s eyesight began failing, but he continued working, fascinated by plants’ abilities to choose and feel. He believed that man’s mind is fueled by pleasure or pain, and that happiness is the end of human existence. He first described CBS in 1769, when his grandfather, almost blind from cataracts, began seeing people, birds, horses, homes, tapestries, and floating patterns that weren’t actually there.
In “Sacred Pain and the Phenomenal Self,” Glucklich describes hallucinations that are similar in nature to CBS. He says that visual hallucinations are not caused by psychopathology or impaired thinking, but “result from the disruption of sensory input among patients suffering eye damage.” When the eyes stop working correctly, when they don’t see properly, the lack of external stimuli is overcome by hallucinations created and projected onto the seen world by the brain.
X
A week after my thirtieth birthday I get a colonoscopy. The last thing I remember is a nurse smiling as she flips down a clear welding visor. Afterward, deep in the drug fog, I lie in a hospital bed, drinking a juice box. The gastrointestinal specialist is beside me when I look up, pointing at pictures of slimy caves. Other than the hernia and ulcer and a few hemorrhoids, the doctor says that everything looks fine. I need to return in two weeks. A half hour later I sign a form and a nurse says I can change into my street clothes. At home I show Ariane, my wife, the images from the wormhole camera. The slick pink world of my insides.
XI
Ariane leaves me in a dream. I do not know why she goes, but the dream happens weekly. More of the narrative unfolds each time. I live in a mansion on an oak-topped hill. From the porch I can see a town with industrial smokestacks. Now and again I hear traffic, but there are no roads. There’s no driveway. I hear trains. Fields of sunflowers stretch down the hill. A yellow sea surrounds the mansion except for a small grove of apple trees in the back. Seven monkeys live with me. Time passes—I know this because my toenails grow long and my hands wrinkle. I can no longer wear socks. I go barefoot. The apple orchard begins to smell sour, like whiskey. At night apples smack to the ground mushily. Four of the monkeys have babies. I take two of the babies away in Adidas shoeboxes. I give them food and water, but raise them in separate locked ballrooms on the third floor. The other monkeys, the seven adults and two additional babies, live together in a jungle in the basement. The jungle used to be a gym. Vines on the basketball hoops. Cracked bowling alley. A canopy of trees making the ceiling impossible to see. The temperature regulated to keep my monkeys happy. A thin mist spraying from above. In a greenhouse I grow orchids under expensive-looking lamps. Once a day I wheelbarrow bananas and leafy greens to a gazebo and unload. Hidden in the trees, I watch the monkeys eat. Years pass. My toenails are so long now. The baby monkeys grow up. The elder monkeys are gray around the mouth. The baby monkeys I’d kept secluded upstairs get large, but they spend all their time staring at the veins in leaves.
One morning I walk into the greenhouse and all the orchids are withered. All day I walk up and down the lanes of the bowling alley. The next morning I shoot all the monkeys with tranquilizer darts. I fit them with shock collars. While they are knocked out, I fill the feeding area with bananas. In the ballrooms upstairs I build desks out of dried sunflower stalks and planks of wood. Lit candles and bananas are arranged on the desks. When the monkeys wake up, I watch them gaze at the flames. Again and again their sausage-like fingers reach into the fire. One afternoon I walk out of my hiding spot toward one of the monkeys, flicking a lighter. The monkey looks up, puzzled, as I touch the flame to its bearded face, but it doesn’t draw back. When I pull away the lighter, the monkey waves its hand over the flame. A week later the two monkeys in the ballrooms are lousy with weeping wounds, and I realize they’ve been biting themselves. I begin shocking the seven monkeys in the jungle. I push a button and they roar. I push it again and screams shake the trees. They tear at their necks. I walk toward them with my lighter and they sprint into the jungle. This goes on for dozens of weeks. My toenails snap off and bloody footprints begin layering the parquet lanes of the bowling alley. I no longer hide during feeding time. When I shock the monkeys, they lope hunchbacked out of the trees and look around, eyes glazed. Smoke from the collars rises above their heads like a foul halo. They saunter by me and sit at the gazebo. Lumpish hands curled in their groins, they wait.
