Feverland, page 12
XII
The Emergency Care doctor rests a stethoscope against my abdomen, my back, my spine. Deep breaths, she says. I haven’t shit in a long time, four days, a week—I don’t know. I’m so full. I’m brimming. She scribbles on a prescription pad, and tells Ariane to rush me to the emergency room.
Head wounds, chest pains, an old lady moaning about how she wants to die: the waiting room is purgatorial. After checking in, I leave my wife in the waiting room and stand outside. It hurts to sit. It hurts to move. After two hours I join Ariane, who’s called her doctor father to ask his opinion. She smiles, comforts me, but the fear in her eyes is obvious.
A gaggle of teenagers stand in the doorway, peering around the waiting room. Two sit, and two others step up to the receptionist. One of the boys asks her, too loudly, if they have to give their names to be seen. Is there another way to get help for their friend? Shaking her head grimly, the receptionist says no. The boys back away from the desk as if she’s flashed a pistol. Their fucked-up friend is sitting across from us. He’s pale and skittery. They gather him up like a sodden duvet cover and leave. The old woman moans, asking her husband why it’s taking so long. She can’t wait any more, she wails. The husband tries to hush her. A man in a halo brace offers her a Vicodin. The husband gets a glass of water. He tips it into her mouth, and gently cradles her head while she swallows it down.
Dozens of people get called back. Paramedics roll people in on stretchers and wheelchairs. We wait. Next to us the elderly couple discusses whether it might be quicker to go home and call an ambulance. The woman says they don’t have the money. The waiting room clears and night falls and then the waiting room fills again. I’ve been forgotten.
A woman in a wheelchair is pushed to a stop beside me. Her face is blue white, like a whale’s belly. Her throat sounds as if it’s filled with Jell-O. While she struggles to breathe, bright veins work up her chest, circling her neck like vines of licorice. As I stand, she turns the color of fresh snow. Her head slumps. People point and shout and a pair of nurses rush her into the ER.
It’s almost one in the morning when I get called back. We’ve been here for almost seven hours. It takes another hour to see the ER doctor, and while Ariane watches, I receive a rectal exam. They take X-rays of my abdomen. When the doctor returns, she says that no physical obstructions appeared on the images, but my intestinal muscles have stopped working. I’m packed with shit. She tells me that people who’ve had surgery like mine sometimes lose digestive tract functioning, that I should supplement my diet with pills and vitamins. I tell her that I do. She hands me a list of tests for my doctor to perform. “Now we will fix you,” she says. “We are going to get an enema.” She says it as if we’ll all be doing this together. Me, the doctor, the nurse, Ariane looking on from her chair.
The doctor is a Sarah Palin look-alike. She has me roll onto my side and open the back of the hospital gown. Ariane sits directly in front of me. The ER is lit green and outside my bay is a hive of commotion. I groan, try to laugh as the doctor nestles a bag of fluids onto a hooked pole. She pries her fingers inside me and snugs something hard into place, like she’s just connected a hose to a spigot. I stare at the wall above my wife’s head. The doctor says, “Here we go,” and suddenly the fluids are cascading through me, swelling me like a manatee.
XIII
Like the windblown smoke from the wildfires, what I put inside me comes and goes—there are old drugs and new meds, doses change, I forget to or intentionally stop taking them. Blue-green algae, Vicodin, Neurontin, hydrocodone, calamine lotion, codeine, Amitiza, calcium, Lyrica, baclofen, flaxseed oil, Valtrex, Ambien, Flexeril, shark cartilage, Robitussin, Lunesta, clonazepam, chamomile, Ultram, Zantac, Vivarin, Xanax, Adderall, Tylenol with Codeine No. 4, Senokot, Ritalin, Carmex, Wellbutrin, saw palmetto, THC, Cymbalta, Mylanta, omeprazole, Soma, passionflower, Halcion, Celexa, Dexedrine, tea tree oil, vitamins A and B complex and C and D and E, Motrin, Cipro, garlic, Colace, magnesium, grape seed, iron, Saint-John’s-wort, Claritin, licorice root, corticosteroids, green tea, Tylenol PM, prednisone, ginger, B-12 injections, Advair, willow bark, inhaled albuterol, fish oil, diazepam, ginkgo biloba, finasteride, Diflucan, belladonna, milk of magnesia, cranberry, ephedrine, a “magic mouthwash” of steroids and lidocaine and antihistamines, Keep Alert, Darvocet, lysine, oxycodone, beta-blockers, bilberry leaf, MiraLAX, chewable caffeine, Dulcolax, cocaine, witch hazel, naproxen, goldenseal, amoxicillin, yohimbe bark, Klonopin, lemon balm, amitriptyline, ma huang, Imodium, LSD, antihistamines, evening primrose, magnesium citrate.
One doctor gives me steroids. Another wants to insert a baclofen pump into my abdomen, which I can press when the pain gets too bad, madly pumping my belly like I did my Reeboks in eighth grade. She gives me a DVD that explains the benefits of the medical equipment and details the surgical procedure. All the actors in the DVD, the “patients,” are at least twice my age. Older than my dead grandparents. They look sick. On the cover of the DVD an elderly, overweight woman strolls happily beside a perfectly manufactured creek. I stop taking the medicine, and decline the surgical pump. I prominently display the DVD case on my coffee table, however. I tell Ariane that it’s funny; the woman’s overzealous smile is ironic. But really I like to see it there because it pisses me off, and that hot fury feels good.
I am what I am. Man is what man eats.
What I receive and consume, even what I see, becomes my blood. The blood is my anger and love and bewilderment. As I walk through my neighborhood before sunup, morning birds beginning to squall, all of what I’ve taken in, all of what’s happened, all of what I’ll never know, feels engraved into my flesh. Words, whole stories, are carved onto me like hearts on a birch’s white bark. Pictographs chipped into stones. My litanies rise from every outward inch of my body. An ever-growing illuminated manuscript. I am turning and turning, a prayer wheel embedded in the breathing air.
XIV
The International Trepanation Advocacy Group—ITAG—says trepanation “favorably alters movement of blood through the brain and improves brain functions which are more important than ever before in history to adapt to an ever more rapidly changing world.” Its website documents the transition from ITAG’s first incarnation, an anthropological and medical database about trepanation, to what grew from it, the trepanning of fifteen volunteers by a medical professional between 2000 and 2004. No conclusions could be drawn from these cases. But the website states that in 2005 “an internationally known and widely published professor of cerebral circulation took up the investigation of trepanation and its effects on cerebral circulation for ITAG.” ITAG looked at a small number of minor brain surgeries where the skull was left open for some months before being closed. After monitoring the brain’s blood flow before, during, and after the procedures, ITAG reports that the blood flow in these patients’ skulls reached youthful levels while open, and returned to preoperative levels when closed. The website claims that these studies are the impetus for eight medical and scientific papers that are being written and will be published.
Near the bottom of the page, there is a link where people who would like to become volunteers can send in their names. I fill out the form, press Submit.
XV
Under the smoke-thickened clouds, I lie in the backyard grass. The Dodgers game is back on the radio. Every few minutes the crack of a baseball bat flutters through the trees. Despite the clouds, the California sun is so strong my face is burning. Frank Sinatra records start playing next door. Teenage girls shriek and begin dancing in the cul-de-sac. Magic Mountain, Malibu, the Corral Fire. The air vibrates around me—the ways we drill and dance and sing. Ash somersaults on the hot breeze. The rumble of fire trucks. Helicopters. Sirens. All of it seems perfect. Oranges to be picked, the aloe plant about to bloom.
WAY UP HIGH WAY DOWN LOW
I
God’s entrails, I think, half-awake, staring out the airplane porthole. The hallucinatory sky is golden orange, rippling with clouds, snakes trying to swallow identical snakes. The airplane shifts and dips. I am looking almost straight down. I lean from my seat into the aisle, toward the window, where morning light blossoms inside a bed of clouds. They are God’s guts aglow. I am still asleep, maybe, fever-dreaming. Guts, guts, guts. My watch is gone; probably someone in the Bangkok airport is wearing it. Having stayed up all night for my early-morning connection, I am wired and exhausted, trying to ride out my paranoia, a folded-paper boat flaming and spinning through gutter water. I’ve chewed my fingernails bloody. I am sick, too. I’ve been shitting at least once an hour since my first flight. Two days ago? Three? Kathmandu, Bangkok, Narita, and now we are on our way to Minneapolis. Home. Who knows how long it’s been? I am raw and fetid. A silent stranger was sitting beside me when I fell asleep, but now the scabbed seat is empty. An old man dozes in the aisle seat across from me. The darkened cabin is hushed—everyone I see asleep—but the silence is hollowing. It feels like I am the only person on this plane, in the world, breathing raggedly, alive. For a few seconds I forget about the earthquake that bounced the cups across the table right before I left for the Kathmandu airport. The clouds fall away as the plane rights itself. The light of the sunrise swings through the cabin, kaleidoscopic, and beside me, suddenly, the sleeping man’s arm, resting across his gut, is unshadowed. He’s drooling. A heart-shaped gob of spit dangles from his chin. His hand is writhing slowly. Where his thumb should be, a nub dips and rears and shines.
II
Sometimes, lost in thought, I wander my home, picking up mugs or books. I stare at them as if I’ve never seen them before. I turn them in my hand and gape as I chew my thumbnails. My wife says that I spit the slivers out wherever I might be standing in our house: living room, kitchen, bedroom. “Like some little prince, you walk around, patooo patooo”—her lips pop the air—“not worried in the least about who will have to pick them up. Damn!” I try to laugh with her when she tells this story.
III
Apes, especially chimpanzees, have been subjects in experiments for decades. For scientists they are human substitutes: physiologically similar, but different enough that we can justify using them. Utilitarian and effective, but disposable—like paper plates.
But the posttraumatic stress these chimps suffer resembles that of people, at least as described by the American Psychiatric Association. In labs, apes are treated like murderers: violently controlled, deprived of their senses in isolation, maimed purposefully, wounded by side effects, knocked out by darts and stun guns. Recent studies report that these treatments can compromise “scientific inference,” and question the legitimacy of experiments that use apes as test subjects. Many have concluded that the results are invalidated by the apes’ trauma and stress.
IV
“To suffer is to find oneself mired in oneself. Pain then is the inner experience of one’s own being as a weight, an affliction. . . . What wounds may be the instrument, but what pains is the sensuous element. In pain what oppresses is the light, the heat, the din, the density, the depth as such. In pain the sensuous is an oppression before it is a sense impression, impression of a sense.”—Alphonso Lingis, Phenomenological Explanations
V
Many people say spitting is: Disgusting. Gross. Crude. Repulsive. Dirty. A disgust response makes a person want to turn away; it saves you from the inedible, the worse than rotten. “We don’t do that,” my wife tells our son when she catches him hawking up phlegm outside. “It’s bad manners.” If this happens, I firm up my face with seriousness and nod—dutifully reinforcing her words—but find myself looking at a spot directly over his head. Growing up, I spit constantly: into the air as I pedaled my bike, all over baseball and football fields, while mowing dirtpatched lawns, out the rolled-down windows of Pontiacs.
Spitting can be seen an aggressive act. The lizard brain needs to protect and help itself, to disguise uncomfortable emotions, to get a reaction. The boy hard-swallows a handful of worms. A girl throws a used tampon on your car’s windshield. A guy asks the sky if it wants some and then whips his T-shirt off. Today I catch myself before spitting about half the time, and stop. The rest of the time I go ahead with it, then feel guilty, even if no one’s watching. Each night, as soon as I step onto my porch, I clear my throat like I am about to give a commencement address, and then I spit into the bushes. Thousands of wads of chewed gum are buried in their shadows. Sometimes I see ribbons of saliva, tiny spit bulbs, gleaming like diamonds in the darkness.
VI
I have always believed the worst was about to happen. More than that, even—I’ve felt disaster, like smoldering embers, always with me, always inside me, always waiting to burst into flame. One of my earliest memories is of peering at my mother from the doorway of my bedroom. It was hours past my bedtime. She didn’t know I was watching her. I was so worried that she would leave or die that each night I cried. Now I have a four-year-old son of my own. Often I find myself suddenly wide awake far past midnight. After tiptoeing into his bedroom, I press my face closer and closer to his, until his warm breath paints a mask over me.
VII
In the years after my brain surgery, I have a recurring dream in which I am a monkey. My head has been shaved, and I’m strapped to a metal massage chair, facing downward. A silver tray sits in front of my face. The restraints are so tight there is no possibility of movement. From above me there is the buzz of saws. And then I can feel my skull open, splitting with a crack like it’s made of balsa wood, followed by a painless prodding, like the push and pull of a dentist working at a Novocained tooth. Sometimes a piece of me—a chunk of gristle, a worm of tissue—is laid atop the tray and comes to life, crawling off the metal edge and falling silently to the antiseptic floor. Always, before the dream goes black, I feel blood rushing down my back like a cape and trickling over my forehead, pooling in my eyes.
VIII
But deep within, I think that a part of me loves this, the fact that disaster is always with me. That my bones are somehow lined with cravings for doom, sharp-edged dread, self-immolation, and violence. They bubble up jubilant and unseat me from the world in the precise seconds that most demand I be present, that I pay attention.
I am twenty-eight: sleet glazing a midnight two-lane highway, my car buffeted by passing semis. Its wipers are embedded in the frosted windshield. I push the pedal to the floor instead of turning on the hazard lights and pulling over. I pass each truck I see. I flick my headlights on, off. I am eight: hundreds of feet in the air, high above Red Wing. I lean so far over the edge of the cliff that I wobble and my stomach churns. I am every age I have ever been: This motherfucker, I say, I’m going to punch him in the face. I am twenty-one: heading into the brain surgery that will save my life. The chrome gurney arms are ice cold. The nurse who pushes me into surgery asks the same questions I’ve already been asked over and over again. I lie to her, say I’ve never done that, nope, that’s never happened, because I want to make the surgery fail, because I want to die. I am thirty: heading east on an overnight train, staying up all night to talk to a neo-Nazi drug dealer. I am thirty-four: asking myself how fast this hinged knife will flick open. It’s the sharpest knife I’ve ever held. As I slice a cucumber into thin pale-green moons, the blade passes through the two hand towels beneath and cuts a surgical line in the Formica.
IX
Excessive nail biting is called onychophagia. Almost half of all teenagers do it. Many adults stop before their thirtieth birthdays, but some studies have reported that about 20 percent continue. More boys do it than girls. Stress, anxiety, boredom. Before your lie detector test, before your date’s knuckles rap the door, with nine hours to kill before your flight departs. As a child you might have watched your mother gnaw at the edges of her fingers. Everyone has their technique: I start at the side of the thumb, then, delicately gripping the barely severed thumbnail between my teeth, slowly pull away, shearing the rest of it off. I suck it into my mouth, spit the perfect sickle into my palm, pop it back into my mouth. Then, I guess, wherever I am, I spit it out.
Freud argued that parental conflict (weaning a child from breastfeeding) can cause one of two oral fixations: aggressive or receptive. The receptive person loves to feast and reduces tension orally, by biting nails, eating, or drinking. They are sensitive and passive and needy. The aggressive personality is volatile. They speak over everyone at the dinner table. They will call you a worthless piece of shit, an ass clown, scream, You motherfucker! in your face. Today fingernail biting is categorized as a body-focused repetitive disorder. Chewing the inside of your cheek. Picking scabs. Pulling out hair. Prodding pimples and blemishes until the skin pocks and scars. Today everyone is anxious and overmedicated, and we know Freud was a coke fiend.
X
If spit is disgusting, it is also magical. In folktales from around the world, an object that is spit upon—or even the spit itself—will speak. Spit on that doorknob and it says howdy. Spit on the floor and it tells you where you must go. If you don’t spit when you see a white horse it’s bad luck. It was once believed that a person experiencing a seizure was being visited by something superhuman, and therefore their froth and spittle contained essences of that visitation. Holy men pass their baraka, their blessing, through their saliva. During initiation into most dervish orders, a sheikh would spit on your hands and forehead, and into your mouth. Good faith can be shown by spitting on a person’s hand. A priest spits on the foreheads of the kneeling couple he is marrying, and on a newborn’s head to bless it. The spit of the gods can purify. Power is imbued in the divining stick of a Zulu holy man when he spits on it. Spit on as much straw as you can find, then place it around your home to protect it from robbers. In certain South American tribes, sacred herbs are hung in the doorframes of newborns’ rooms; each visitor must chew some and spit at the child. All over the world, stones are stacked into monuments—beside trails or roads, in forest clearings, at the tops of hills—that show the way for any wandering spirits. Each time a rock is added to the armature, you must spit on it.
