Between Two Kingdoms

by Suleika Jaouad

  From a distance of several continents, I am able to see my life with clearer eyes. For too long, I’ve been like a bee trapped inside a window, smashing my forehead against the glass with mounting desperation in a futile attempt to get out. These last two weeks have provided a temporary respite, but I worry that once I’m back home in New York, I’ll return to that sad, stuck state. I feel I have to do something drastic to ensure I won’t.

  On the long flight home, I daydream about embarking on a solo pilgrimage, though what form it might take, I don’t know. I want to be in motion—to figure out a way to unmoor myself, to thrust myself into the greater expanses of the world. Not because I have a particular hankering to explore, but precisely because I’ve grown afraid of the world and my ability to navigate it alone. I want to expect nothing. To ask for nothing. To depend on no one. To find out what lies on the other side of the in-between place. To start living again.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t yet have the vision, strength, or resources to cast off on an epic journey, so I begin my quest with a series of short, preliminary outings. A few weeks after I return home, I board a train to Vermont, where my family owns a little log cabin near the Green Mountains. I had always been too unwell to come here alone. Now, though, learning how to be on my own feels like a necessary first step to whatever is next. I need to trust that I can be independent. I need to become my own caregiver. It took me a while to say I was a cancer patient. Then, for a long time, I was only that. It’s time for me to figure out who I am now.

  Buried deep in the woods, the cabin has no cellphone reception, and the nearest town is a fifteen-mile trek down a desolate highway, past flaxen cornfields, dense stands of trees, and the occasional farm. With the exception of a neighbor, Jane, who is retired and lives with her husband a mile down the dirt road, I don’t know anyone. Since I still lack a driver’s license, Jane offers to pick me up from the train station. She takes me to the supermarket so I can load up on provisions and then drops me at the cabin, where I stay until I run out of food. “Honey, you sure you’ll be okay out here all by yourself?” she asks, concern splayed across her face. Other than Oscar, it’s just me, the deer that graze beneath the apple tree, and the sloping spines of the mountains in the distance.

  “I enjoy the solitude,” I reply, with an air of false confidence. The truth is, I’m terrified of what will happen when I’m alone with my thoughts.

  Jane drives away, and I unpack my things, then settle into an armchair near the stone fireplace and try to read. But I’m anxious and can’t seem to focus. The quiet and isolation have a magnifying effect, and I see more clearly than ever just how fearful and fragile I’ve become. Each hoot and howl echoing from the woods makes me jump, and I wake in the middle of the night to triple-check that the front door is locked or that there isn’t a serial killer lurking behind the woodpile on the porch. In my life B.C.—before cancer—I was obstinately independent and prided myself on my moxie, whether it was studying abroad in Egypt, reporting from the Gaza border, or hitchhiking across the Jordanian desert. My escapades often crossed over into recklessness. But living with a life-threatening illness for so long has changed my relationship to fear. It has trained me to be on high alert for the countless potential dangers lurking in my body and beyond.

  I am jittery and uncomfortable virtually every minute of this first trip to Vermont, but I force myself to live by a rule: I am not allowed to leave out of fear. In moments when all I want is to flee back to the city, I resolve to stay for an extra night, then two, then three. I decide to trust that what feels unknown and frightening will soon feel familiar and safe. I tell myself that, with enough time, I’ll grow tired of triple-checking the lock or losing sleep over imaginary predators. Maybe I will even start to make good on my lie to Jane—I might start to enjoy being alone. By the time I head back to the city on day four, I’m not quite there, but getting closer.

  Over the next couple of months, I return to Vermont as often as possible. With each trip I take to the cabin alone, I begin to feel a little more self-possessed, a little more brave, a little more curious about what lies outside the window. I walk longer and longer distances with Oscar, who sprints ahead, leading me down winding country roads, past ramshackle barns, bubbling streams, and riverbanks padded with emerald-colored moss. I learn to build a fire and venture deep into the woods to gather kindling. One day, a black bear lumbers onto the property and Oscar leaps up from the porch, roaring at it with the ferocity of a lion. The bear is so startled that it stumbles and trips, then breaks into a sprint and disappears behind the tree line. “The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence,” Annie Dillard once wrote. “We let our bodies go the way of our fears.”

  * * *

  —

  Entire days pass when I don’t see anyone. I call Jon from time to time, but he’s busy, back on tour. He also seems to understand—without me even explaining it—that I’m working through something big and daunting, and that what I need most is time alone. My solitude is interrupted only by sporadic visits from a young man named Brian who comes by to plow the long driveway and, as the weather gets warmer, to help out with the garden. One day, we get to chatting and when he finds out that I don’t know how to drive, he offers to teach me. In exchange for our lessons, I lend him a sympathetic ear, listening as he tells me about the difficulties of coming out in rural Vermont, and his various adventures on a gay networking app called GROWLr. We brainstorm ideas for his dating profile. “Cubbish, bearded, two hundred and thirty pounds, average looks. Big heart, hopeless romantic. Favorite flower: allium,” Brian says.

  I suggest: “Well-endowed Gemini.”

  He erupts with laughter. “Actually, I’m a Leo.”

  Brian is the closest thing I have to a friend around here, and I look forward to his company, if not the part where I actually have to get behind the wheel.

  Learning to drive was a momentous high school milestone for most of my friends, who, on the morning of their sixteenth birthdays, rushed to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get their permits. To them, and to most other American teenagers, driving was the ultimate coming-of-age ritual. It meant making out in the backseat late at night, giving your friends lifts to the mall, and tailgating at concerts. It meant independence. But to me, driving just sounded like a terrifying and overwhelming responsibility. A couple of disastrous trial runs in my parents’ minivan confirmed what I’d already suspected: It was best for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers everywhere if I didn’t learn at all. It was no coincidence that I’d chosen to go to college in a small town where a car wasn’t necessary and then, after graduation, to live in big cities where the go-to transportation was the subway.

  Being in Vermont without a driver’s license, however, is more than inconvenient. I dislike having to ask for rides, which only reminds me of my dependence. When I run out of milk for coffee, I want to be able to drive myself the twenty miles to the farmers market. It isn’t so much that I’ve stopped being afraid but that my fear is slowly being supplanted by a yearning for freedom.

  All summer, Brian gives me lessons, and I learn to navigate the back roads and practice parallel parking between pine trees. As I get more comfortable behind the wheel, a hazy idea begins to crystallize into a grand plan. My time in India has given me a glimpse into how travel can hurtle you out of old ways of being and create conditions for new ones to emerge. It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that I need to leave the familiar, but I don’t want to do it entirely alone—I want to seek out others who can offer perspective into my predicament, who can help guide my passage. By the time I finally pass my driver’s test, the next step is obvious: I am going to go on a road trip and visit those who sustained me when I was sick.

  * * *

  —

  It’s nearly midnight, the logs in the fireplace reduced to ash, but I rekindle the embers and make a pot of coffee.
Sitting on the cabin floor, I open a large hand-carved wooden box I bought many years ago from an antique store. In it are birthday cards from my grandmother, photographs, ticket stubs, and macabre medical mementos, like old hospital bracelets and my port. The box also contains hundreds of letters. There are beat-up envelopes sent from faraway lands, love notes etched onto bar napkins, thick stationery stock inscribed with invitations, and dozens of faded printouts of emails. Some of these dispatches were sent to me by people I know well, like Will’s father. He wrote me more than two hundred postcards—one every day of that first long summer after my diagnosis and one every day following my transplant until I was in the clear. But most of them were sent to me by people I’d never met.

  They say that in difficult times you find out who your friends are, but mostly I found out whom I wanted to befriend. Some people I thought I could count on disappeared, while others I barely knew did more than I ever expected. I was floored by the thoughtfulness of these strangers—readers of the column, anonymous commenters on the Internet, hospital waiting room acquaintances, and friends of friends I barely knew—who sent me care packages and humorous emails, confessional Facebook messages and long handwritten letters. They were more honest and vulnerable with me than a lot of the people I knew off-line. They shared their own stories about what it’s like to have life interrupted, whether by the rip cord of a diagnosis or some other kind of trauma or heartbreak. They taught me that, when life brings you to the floor, there is a choice: You can allow the worst thing that’s ever happened to you to hijack your remaining days, or you can claw your way back into motion.

  Since finishing treatment, I’d found myself gravitating toward the box. There was one letter in particular that I liked to read. It was a printout of an email from Ned, the twenty-five-year-old who wrote to me when I was living at the Hope Lodge in 2012 about the difficulty of transitioning back to “the real world.” The message angered me when I first received it; it arrived around the time I learned that I was going to have to resume chemo after my transplant. What could possibly be so hard about transitioning back to normality? I’d thought. All I want is normality. But once I’d emerged from the fog of treatment, I saw that Ned was right. As I attempted my own rocky passage, I turned to the letter repeatedly, finding comfort in his words. I knew very few people in real life who understood what it was like to be trapped between two worlds.

  There were many others who had written to me, and who could maybe offer insights into what it meant to live again in the aftermath of catastrophe. There was Howard, the retired art historian in Ohio, who’d spent most of his life struggling with a debilitating health condition and had built a vibrant life nonetheless. There was Bret, the young man whom I’d briefly met the first time I’d gone to chemo alone and who was now recuperating and attempting to restart his life back home in Chicago. There was Salsa, the ranch cook who’d offered to pile my supper plate high if I ever found myself in Montana. There was Katherine, the high school teacher in California who was attempting to continue on after her son’s suicide. And, of course, there was Lil’ GQ, the Texas death row inmate whose careful cursive—those looping p’s and q’s inked in blue on frayed notebook paper—remained tattooed on my memory: I know that our situations are different, but the threat of death lurks in both of our shadows.

  As I sift through the box’s contents, I make a list of two dozen people whose words and stories have kept knocking around my head. I draft letters to each of them. I explain that I’ll be embarking on a road trip and ask if they might be open to meeting. I’m not sure what to expect as I hit Send. In most cases, it’s been years since they initially reached out to me and I often wasn’t well enough to respond. I have no idea if they will remember me—or if they are still alive. But to my great excitement, within a few days, my in-box fills with a near-unanimous chorus of replies inviting me to visit.

  I buy a sheaf of road maps and spread them across the kitchen table. Tracing my finger along the curving purple lines of interstates, blue squiggles of rivers, and green swaths of national parks, my itinerary springs to life. The drive will sweep in a counterclockwise circle around the country, going from the Northeast to the Midwest, through the Rocky Mountain states, down the West Coast, and across the Southwest and South, then finally back up the East Coast. I’ll travel roughly fifteen thousand miles, drive through thirty-three states, and visit more than twenty people. Oscar and I will go to a boarding school in Connecticut, an artist’s loft in Detroit, a ranch in rural Montana, a fisherman’s cottage on the Oregon coast, a teacher’s bungalow in the Ojai Valley, and an infamous prison in Livingston, Texas. We will go where the letters take us and see what we find.

  * * *

  —

  Over the next couple of weeks, I return to New York to pack all of my belongings into boxes, put the boxes into storage, and sublet my apartment. I can’t afford to buy my own car but my friend Gideon generously offers the use of his old Subaru. Between the extra income from renting out my apartment and the four thousand dollars I’ve saved up, I should be able to make do. I plan to camp and crash on couches as often as possible, only staying in the occasional motel room. I scour Craigslist for secondhand camping gear and buy a portable propane gas stove, a subzero sleeping bag, a foam bedroll, and a tent. I pack all this, along with a crate of books, a sack of dog food, a first-aid kit, and a camera, into the back of the car. Before leaving, I go in for a last checkup with my oncologist.

  My trip will last one hundred days. It’s the maximum amount of time my medical team has agreed to until my next follow-up appointment, but I like to think of it as another Hundred-Day Project, a commitment to daily acts of newness intended to stretch the self. It will be my way of reclaiming a number that, during the countdown to Day 100 after a patient’s bone marrow transplant, represents a critical turning point in recovery. The difference, this time, is that the rite of passage is of my own making.

  27

  REENTRY

  IN THE MORNING mayhem of Midtown Manhattan, I finish loading my gear into the car and strap myself into the driver’s seat. Oscar sits in the back, emitting anxious, asthmatic pants, his little body trembling so much that I can hear his tags clinking. I try not to take his trepidation personally. Oscar doesn’t have a lot of experience in cars—though in fairness, neither do I. Signal, check mirror, watch for blind spots. I chant Brian’s instructions like a phone number I’m scared of forgetting.

  I twist the key in the ignition. As the engine hums to life and I pull out into traffic, I can hear the blood pounding behind my ears. Turning right onto Ninth Avenue, I pass an overflowing trash bin, abandoned bicycles chained to a lamppost, and a heavyset, wild-eyed man in tattered clothing who’s standing in the middle of the bike lane. He appears to be waving at me—a sight that strikes me as odd but unremarkable for New York City. As I cruise past, the man’s wave intensifies, his arms flapping frantically over his head. He seems to be trying to warn me of something. Before I can give any more thought as to what, car horns begin to scream. And then it hits me: The cars are honking at me. And they are driving straight toward me.

  It is minute five of my fifteen-thousand-mile road trip and I’m driving in the wrong direction on a one-way street. I crank the wheel left. I slam a foot onto the accelerator. In a sweeping U-turn, I swerve across the asphalt narrowly avoiding a head-on collision. As I pull over to the side of the road, adrenaline fizzes through my body. This road trip is a terrible idea, I think, watching the traffic fly past. I’m not ready. Too inexperienced. Too fragile to survive out here. The more responsible thing to do is to call the whole thing off. But even as I tell myself this, I know that I won’t—I can’t. To stay is to consign myself to refrains of brokenness forever. To leave is to create a new story of self. Really, it isn’t much of a choice.

  The detritus of my past litters the streets of Manhattan. It’s the city where I was born and the city where I nearly died. It’s where I
fell in love and where, over the last year, I fell apart. As the city recedes out of sight in the rearview mirror, I’m not sorry to see it go.

  My destination for the first night is only a hundred miles north, but I won’t reach it until dusk. I get turned around and end up on the Garden State Parkway, heading south instead. Still new to the concept of “blind spots,” I make several bad lane changes, resulting in more honking and at least one driver giving me an aggressive middle finger. Overwhelmed, I decide to continue south and stop in a small town on the Jersey Shore for an impromptu lunch date with a friend, then pull back onto the highway, this time headed north. I inch through Greater New York City in rush-hour traffic before gradually reaching the fertile green expanses of Connecticut. Driving is not a physical sport per se, but it feels that way. My wrists ache from gripping the wheel. The tendons in my neck throb. The task of sitting upright and focusing on the shifting variables of traffic requires a level of endurance my body still lacks, and it’s difficult for me to imagine how I’m possibly going to withstand another ninety-nine days of this.

  By the time I approach Litchfield, the last, tepid rays are filtering through the pine trees. I give my cheeks a succession of quick, light slaps to stay awake. When I arrive at the dilapidated farm where I’m staying, it’s almost dark. I park beneath an old willow and stagger out into the crisp autumn air, then fish a flashlight, sleeping bag, and dinner provisions from the trunk. I trudge down a footpath that leads to a row of tiny cottages overlooking a meadow. Inside, mine is bare and drafty, one all-purpose room furnished with mismatched armchairs, a cot covered in wool blankets, and a desk. The place belongs to a friend of a friend who is out of town and has offered to let me stay. On the desk, he’s left a bottle of wine and a note urging me to make myself at home.