Mom stays up late cramming information from her library books and articles. She reads paragraphs aloud, as if putting words in the air will pollinate Dad with a cure.
Like most Americans, she says, she has always known the basics about proper nutrition without bothering to follow them. But now, like the cop or soldier in the movies whose buddy is killed, she announces, “This time, it’s personal.” She memorizes the foods and supplements that provide B vitamins 1 (thiamine), 2 (riboflavin), 3 (niacin), 6 (pyridoxine), and 12 (cyanocobalamin), as well as folic acid, inositol, vitamins C and E; crucial minerals such as calcium, chromium, magnesium, selenium, iron, iodine, and zinc; and the amino acids gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), S-adenosyl L-methionine (SAMe), serotonin, melatonin, L-tryptophan, 5-hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP), DL-phenylalanine (DLPA), trimethylglycine (TMG), omega-3 fatty acids, and tyrosine.
These substances, Mom learns, improve brain function, restoring the moistness and flexibility of certain membranes and helping brain cells to manufacture the chemicals they need to keep the neurotransmitters signaling. But so many expert opinions, she tells us, are difficult to sort out. One book says that serotonin and melatonin are chemicals that the brain will produce after a body consumes the right combination of foods. In another book, melatonin and seratonin are capsules you can buy in the health food store. If both are true, where did the chemicals for the capsules come from? Mom shudders. Maybe she’s getting morbid because it’s so late (Dad is already in bed and listening to a talk show on the radio), but as I pass by her chair, she tells me her thoughts are taking a ghoulish turn. You hear about gravediggers and organ thieves. Is someone stealing brains and selling the chemicals from them?
The experts in Mom’s books agree that someone with Dad’s symptoms should avoid coffee and cola, alcohol, sugar, and dairy products. But a major source of two crucial substances, calcium (helps to maintain a healthy central nervous system) and tyrosine (stimulates the brain’s production of norepinephrine), is cheese. Mom wonders aloud if she should give him cheese or not. Should she look for a special, nondairy cheese? Kosher cheese? And where would she find extract of Griffonia simplicifolia, an African plant (and source of 5-hydroxytryptophan)?
And, Mom wants to know, what about Evgenia Sutter’s habit of saying “widely celebrated in Europe,” “available inexpensively in Europe,” and “exhaustively tested throughout Europe”? Have these chemicals been tested in America? Are they known by the same names here? Do they maybe have a “street name”?
Mom tells me she fell asleep earlier this evening and had a nightmare that she was arrested for trying to procure Griffonia simplicifolia in a back alley. She describes the dream: A bus ride back to New York, the city she thought she had left for good. Returning just once more, for Dad’s sake. Walking late at night from playground to decrepit coffee shop to back alley. Looking over her shoulder whenever she hears a sound. She can’t find the right address, the city makes no sense. The layout of the city resembles Granada, Spain. Has New York really changed so much since she left? When she finds the place where the deal will go down, it’s an alley behind a deserted high-rise. A gaunt, shivering figure approaches and asks for the password.
“Ignorance.”
“No.”
“Impotence.”
“No.”
“Hegemony?”
“No.”
“Fluoridization?”
“Okay.”
“How much?” she asks.
“Two thousand,” he says. “Cash.” Mom has only twelve dollars. In the dream, she forgets that she can go to an ATM. She finds a knife in her pocket, Grandpa Eddie’s old fishing knife. The knife flashes under the streetlight, and a siren begins to wail.
Hours later Mom’s reading lamp is still on.
“Mom, go to bed. It’s the middle of the night. You’re asleep again.”
“I never meant to cause any harm,” she says out loud.
“It all seemed so simple,” she says.
“Mom, you need to stop reading.”
I shake her awake. The tip of her index finger is white where she has used it as a bookmark.