When I first moved to the city, what struck me most were all the sounds that sounded like explosions. Fireworks, mostly. Backfiring cars. Alarms, of course, and sirens. I remember the tiles in the tunnel strobing white in the red brake lights as my bus came in. A small room, not much to unpack. By then I could set up anywhere and make it look like home. A poster from a French film, a certain blanket. And then just a whole life spread out in front of me.
Oh, there was a year between leaving home and leaving town. I am tempted to leave it out. My mother divorced me, legally. I could write my own sick notes for high school and went only four days a week and finished early on the honor roll. But something began to go wrong inside of me. My eyes, for example. Everything seemed blurry. Along the edges, at least, as though painted in a flat plane, without depth or perspective. The roads shifted as I drove, the curb a shock as a front tire bumped up onto it. I lived here and there. Once in a cluster of low-end town houses out past the highway, with hollow walls and hollow punched-in doors, and carpet in the hall that smelled like urine and mold. There was just one set of keys, and I didn’t have it, so I followed other tenants through the main door and picked the second door’s lock with my driver’s license and slept on the floor.
The doctor’s daughter was an infant when I left, and just a little after, in the deep midwinter, our mother had gone on a bender, and the baby wandered out onto the porch in nothing but a diaper. The police were called. She was blue and still when they found her, but alive, with all her toes and fingers miraculously intact. I went to see her a little after, and she screamed and screamed when she saw me, a stranger, and ran into the kitchen and hid behind the stove. That sister, the last one, is a teenager now. She just went on her first date. We talked and talked, she said. I told him everything, she said. I wanted to know what her everything was. She said she told him she had tried to kill herself when she was an infant. And she laughed as she told me this, in her voice a kind of pride. We are responsible, at least, for the stories we tell ourselves.
I have learned some skills in medical school that you might not expect. One is I am newly good at making phone calls. I used to sweat and shake before I could even order takeout. Now I can call any kind of place and demand information or well-timed appointments. And although I never knew the answers to the questions attendings loved to ask—the famous pimping that, true enough, can burn your sense of self-worth down to nothing—I was largely considered useful for my skill at finding things: old films, outside records, pillows, or lost false teeth.
Another skill is this: I am brave enough to ask people anything I want to know. So toward the end, on the phone, I asked my mother some questions. I asked how she had gotten through her life and what she made of it now. Through what? was how she answered. I asked about that night, the slaughterhouse man, the rocks. She said: I don’t think about that kind of thing too much at all. And when I do, it’s all just fractured. An image, a glimpse. She said she didn’t need to play it on repeat. So it’s my fault, in a way, for the way I see things, turn them over, bleed them for all they are worth.
When I finally left home, when I got to the city, there was something I needed that didn’t exist. A paper, in print, that explained all the noises from the night before, and the smoke in a subway station, and the strange delays, and why a manhole cover happened to explode. Because something turns rotten when we stop having any answers. We forget to wonder when we forget to ask.
I never had money and always had cigarettes. At the stand on the corner, I could trade them for fruit. My face, I guess, had yet to lose that Midwestern openness. So people talked to me a lot, and I let them. The city is full of sad stories spoken like arguments, performed for cash. Or that’s a crass way to say it. But I would meet the same man over and over, a man who said he was looking for a Western Union, that just down the block were his wife and kids and car, and could I help him out with a couple of bucks? I wanted him to stop. Because what was the money for, drugs? It wouldn’t have bothered me at all. Not that I could pay him. But I wanted him to go ahead and tell me who he was.
I had a boyfriend then, a rich kid, a music student, and all this talking drove him up a wall. It’s true it made it hard for me to get places, so I was late, always, and parted with any money I ever had. A woman in her fifties kept me in the park for hours, saying her partner had broken her jaw, had forced her to use methamphetamines. This was me just last year, she said. The picture she held up was beautiful and of her, I really do think, but peeling at the corners and with the soft sepia glow of a photo from the seventies. How can you take it? this boyfriend asked. So much lying. I had missed a date at the symphony. He needed me to know that she had done this to herself.
He was the one with the dead father, not Esteban. He watched the lights on the wall as the ambulance drove off with the body cold inside it.
The words in neurology all begin with a-, from the Greek that means without. Aphasia, without speech; amnesia, without memory; agnosia, without knowledge; abulia, without will. Every loss with its corresponding spot in the brain. Now they can see all this anatomy with functional imaging, but historically they learned it from patients with structural damage: tumors, strokes, penetrating head wounds.
One man with a massive glioblastoma had anosognosia—he couldn’t understand that he was sick. The doctors wanted to know how to treat him, when to back off, how he wanted his last days to go. But when they tried to ask, he just laughed and laughed. I’m not dying, he kept telling them, any more than you are.
There are, too, people who fake their illnesses or purposely make themselves ill. If this is done to avoid, for example, paying a debt or going to prison, it is called malingering. If it is done for attention or to feel safe or be loved, it is called something else. This difference, in the literature, is called primary versus secondary gain. The former connotes manipulation, the latter mental illness. The difference between the two, from a legal perspective, like all intentions or objects of consciousness, is arbitrarily definitive.
That music student—he dropped out and we lost touch until a few years later when he briefly dated one of my classmates. She told me that on their first date, after more than a few drinks, he came on to her so forcefully that she felt she’d been assaulted. I wondered at first if this could be a misinterpretation and then wondered what it meant to wonder that. The worst part was, even after it happened, she still wanted him to like her. She wanted me to tell her how I had done it, how I had won his awful heart.
Around then, the end of college, I started to wonder if maybe light was God. Not as a joke, not really. We had just covered Einstein’s special relativity. As you move closer and closer to light speed, you stretch out in length, and time slows down around you. And then, as close as you get, you can never really get there, because at that speed you explode, become energy, not yourself, not even matter anymore. Not anything. I brought this alt theology to office hours, but the physics professor was not impressed. None of this, he said, is a metaphor. I didn’t tell him that lights had started to flicker whenever I walked under them. The low fluorescents in the corridors at school would flash and buzz above me in the empty halls.