Between Two Kingdoms

by Suleika Jaouad

  I contemplate pouring myself a glass and cooking a real dinner but I am too beat, and instead I scarf down a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and shimmy into my sleeping bag. Across the room is a sliding glass door that looks onto the darkening meadow. I watch as night knits over everything. My eyes adjust, and I see small details I hadn’t noticed before. The faint silhouette of trees swaying in the wind. The stars pricking the night sky one by one. I count them, attempting to hush my unquiet mind, but sleep eludes me. I can’t get comfortable on the mattress, which is hard and craggy as bedrock. As I toss and turn, longing for my own bed, I find myself questioning what I am doing here—or, for that matter, why I’m on the road at all. As the hours tick by, the darkness whispers all kinds of worries into my ears, conjuring the horrible things that could go wrong over these next months. A loud bang outside the cottage sends me lurching forward, my heart cantering wildly in my chest, only to discover that it’s just the screen door sprung loose in the wind. I lie back down, feeling pathetic—a grown-ass twenty-seven-year-old woman afraid of the dark.

  Oscar, meanwhile, has been fast asleep the whole time. He’s curled up on an overstuffed armchair, making a soft puff, puff, pffft sound as he dozes. I envy his unself-conscious state of being, the total trust with which he moves through the world, seemingly unaware that there’s danger and death in the pot. I whisper his name and am relieved when I hear him rouse and jump to the floor. He lopes across the room, his nails clipping against the cold brick, then nuzzles his nose against my hand. “Get on up,” I say, patting the cot. Oscar isn’t allowed to sleep in bed, and he gazes up at me, perplexed. I pat the bed again. He crouches low on his stumpy hindquarters and flings himself into the air, landing on the mattress with an inelegant thud. I work my fingers through the silky fur behind the ears, down the coarse crest of the neck and over to the pink mottled skin of his belly. He sighs with pleasure and nestles into my chest. I put my arm around him, and we’re buddies together in the dark of our makeshift camp. His warmth radiates through the thin cotton of my T-shirt. I close my eyes. When I open them next, a band of pale orange is rising over the meadow. Day 2 is here.

  * * *

  —

  At dawn, I leave a thank-you note, lock up, and tromp up the hill to the car, haggard and bleary-eyed. An hour and a half later, over two-lane country roads, I arrive at the first address on my list: an all-girls boarding school called Miss Porter’s. White clapboard Victorian dormitories jut up from manicured lawns, so pristine and proper that the setting looks as if it belongs in an Edith Wharton novel. Searching the sidewalk, my eyes anxiously skim past throngs of girls with heavy backpacks rushing to class, until they land on a vaguely familiar face.

  Seeing Ned in the flesh is jarring. I attempt to match the man before me with the photograph I received three years earlier of the bald cancer patient sitting shirtless on the edge of a hospital bed. Present-day Ned has a full head of thick, brown hair and he wears glasses, a blue collared shirt, and wrinkled slacks that give him the mature, bookish air of someone far older than his twenty-nine years. It’s hard for me to believe this person was ever sick. He crosses the street to greet me, and as he does, whatever closeness I felt to him quickly dissipates. I realize that, away from the intimate glow of our computer screens, we are just two strangers meeting on a sidewalk for the first time.

  Ned and I exchange an awkward hug. “I’m so excited to meet you!” he says with a bashful smile. “And my students are, too!” He teaches tenth-grade English here at Miss Porter’s, and when we were making the plans for my visit, he asked if I’d meet with his students and share a bit about my trip. “This way,” he says, then leads me across campus to a shingled schoolhouse, Oscar bouncing excitedly along.

  The dozen or so girls are seated in a semicircle around a wooden table in a small classroom. They look like thoroughbreds, athletic and lithe, with long, glossy ponytails and fleece jackets. I can feel the heat rising to my cheeks and my chest turning splotchy the way it does whenever the spotlight is on me. As I take in the room, I begin to think that there’s no audience more intimidating than an online pen pal and a group of teenage girls.

  “Good morning, ladies,” Ned calls out. “I’d like you to meet a very special guest.”

  “Hi—I’m Suleika Jaouad,” I say. “And this is my dog, Oscar.”

  At the sound of his name, Oscar squeaks with excitement and his woolly butt begins wap-wap-wapping against the floor. A chorus of oohs fills the room as the girls jump out of their seats to pet him, and I silently thank Oscar for breaking the ice. Once the excitement has abated and Ned has successfully ordered the girls back into their seats, the attention returns to me. I shift uneasily from one leg to the other as I tell them that I’m on a long road trip around the country—a hundred days to be exact. I just left home yesterday, and they’re my first stop.

  The classroom seems stuffy and confined, and I long to be outside in the fresh air of the courtyard. I swallow hard, feeling exposed, then continue on with the story of how I was diagnosed with leukemia right after college. “I’m now in remission,” I say. “I’m taking this time on the road to recover from what I’ve been through and to reflect on where I want to go next. During these months on the road, I’ll be visiting some of the people who wrote to me when I was sick. Your teacher is one of them.”

  Ned then tells the girls that he, too, had a similar experience in his early twenties, and after coming across my column, he’d felt compelled to write me a letter. “I remember being cooped up in a hospital room and feeling so isolated and frustrated by all the momentum I had lost,” Ned says, turning to me. “Believe it or not, I spent a lot of time fantasizing about getting out and embarking on an epic road trip of my own. But you’re actually doing it. And now you’re here. Kinda surreal.”

  The girls gawk at us. They appear stunned, but also softened. It’s as if Ned seems less teacher-y, more relatable all of a sudden—a young man not much older than they, who has a life outside of the classroom, who gets sick, who has his heart broken and walks the earth with secrets, just as they do.

  In the hour that follows, the girls raise their hands one after another and ask dozens of questions about my road trip and my writing. They nod brightly in encouragement as I speak, which helps settle my nerves. Then they begin to share their own stories. A day student whose parents are from Bangladesh talks about the difficulties of switching between cultures at home and in school. Another talks about how her father unexpectedly died and how much she misses him. A competitive athlete with honey-colored freckles later pulls me aside to talk about her own cancer diagnosis a year earlier. “Before, if you had asked me who I was, I would have identified as an athlete,” she says softly. “But now, I’m not so sure, because cancer does a weird thing to you. It takes who you are and what you think you know and throws that all in the trash.”

  When the bell rings, several linger to chat. “Take me with you,” one says. “I want to come, too!” says another. I feel profoundly grateful to Ned and his students. They’ve looked at me in my shy, shaky nervousness and listened as I confessed to my lack of clarity about what lies ahead. And yet, they seem to believe in what I’ve set out to do and to see in my road trip something exciting and worthwhile. I don’t share their confidence, but they’ve given me a much-needed boost. Their openness has shown me what can happen when we quit all the bullshit posturing and admit to uncertainty.

  After class, Ned and I drop Oscar off at his apartment and walk to the school’s cafeteria. We pass a wall of oil paintings, presumably former headmistresses, all austere white women who look as if they stepped straight off the Mayflower and into the portraits. The elite boarding schools of New England are governed by rules and traditions that someone like me, who attended public school my entire childhood, can’t quite grasp. Ned, on the other hand, was born into this kind of environment. As we eat, he tells me about how he was raised on the campus of the Mas
sachusetts boarding school where his parents taught—teaching is in his blood. His position at Miss Porter’s is his first job since dropping out of college to begin treatment. When I ask how it’s going, his face deflates. “It seems to be going okay,” he says. “The administrators are happy. But I worry I don’t measure up to the old Ned. And that makes me feel like a fraud.”

  “Is that the hope?” I ask. “To go back to being the old Ned?”

  “I mean, it would be ideal, but it’s just not realistic,” he says. He shakes his head.

  I open my mouth to speak, then close it. What can I possibly add? Ned has just summed up what’s taken me almost a year to untangle for myself. There is no restitution for people like us, no return to days when our bodies were unscathed, our innocence intact. Recovery isn’t a gentle self-care spree that restores you to a pre-illness state. Though the word may suggest otherwise, recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is being newly born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.

  After lunch, Ned takes me on a walk through residential streets with picket-fence yards, past cornfields, down to a nearby river. I’ve known him for only a couple of hours, but I find myself speaking more frankly with him than with anyone else in the last year. As we ramble, I tell him about all of it—Will, Melissa, Jon, and the depression that held me hostage. I even tell him about the smoking and my relapse fantasies. For so long, I’ve been bound by the omertà that seems to envelop survivorship, too ashamed to confide the truth in anyone. It is a relief to know not only that Ned will understand but also that he’s experienced many of these challenges himself.

  “So, I’ve been meaning to ask—what made you want to come visit me?” Ned says.

  “What you wrote to me about transitioning out of treatment—how hard it was going to be—I get it now,” I say. We walk silently for a bit and then I add: “I know you can’t go back to the person you were before cancer. But I was hoping that you’d found your way back to normality by now.”

  Ned’s pace slows as he listens. I mention Sontag’s kingdoms and ask what it’s been like for him to reenter the realm of the well. Ned cocks his head, appearing thrown. “I wish I could tell you I’ve climbed over that barbed wire and made it back,” he says. “But honestly I just don’t know if that’s possible.”

  His answer is dizzying, and as we continue on, I realize what I’m feeling is profound disappointment. The notion that reentry is an ongoing and difficult process is usually referenced in the context of veterans of war or the formerly incarcerated, not to survivors of illness. Over the last year, I’d imagined Ned settled back into the kingdom of the well, the worries in his letter long behind him, and that he’d now be in a position to guide me. But he, too, is still finding his way, still struggling to carry the collateral damage of illness, and suddenly I realize: We may always be.

  “Did you notice anything strange about the way I walk?” Ned asks, pointing out the slight limp in his step.

  His limp was the first thing I’d noticed when we started walking, but it doesn’t seem polite to say so, so I say nothing.

  Ned tells me that a side effect of his chemo regimen was that it eroded his joints, and he recently had both hips replaced. He suffers from neuropathy and chronic pain, which makes it difficult to run or to play sports. And like so many former patients, he lives with a constant hum of vigilance, ears pricked for bad news, eyes ever on alert for signs that disease has re-infiltrated the plot.

  I know all about this, I do the same. Before I left, I spoke with a doctor at Sloan Kettering who explained that I was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis I had always believed was reserved for people who had endured unspeakable, violent atrocities. Some traumas, I learned, refuse to remain in the past, wreaking havoc in the form of triggers and flashbacks, nightmares and fits of rage, until they’ve been processed and given their proper place. This helped me understand why the horror of my cancer did not end on my final day of treatment but surged in its aftermath: The haunting feeling that something terrible could happen again at any moment. The nightmares that tore me from sleep. The panic attacks that left me gulping for air on scraped knees. The resistance I felt to forging real intimacy. The private shame that I carried and the guilt that I bore at how all of this affected those around me. The nagging voice in my head that whispered: Don’t get too comfortable because one day I’m coming back.

  Recognition of my post-traumatic stress was a revelation, but so was the possibility of what psychologists describe as “post-traumatic growth.” My illness has humbled and humiliated and schooled me, offering knowledge that might otherwise have taken decades for my pre-diagnosis, self-absorbed twenty-two-year-old self to accrue. But that old Hemingway saw—“the world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places”—is only true if you live the possibilities of your newly acquired knowledge. Neither Ned nor I have quite figured out how to do this, but as we finish our walk and part ways for the afternoon, I feel comforted to know I’m not the only one.

  * * *

  —

  Later that evening, I slide behind the wheel, then pick Ned up for dinner. The car lurches down the highway, the sky turning a darker and darker shade of charcoal. I’ve never driven on a highway at night before and am reassured to have someone other than Oscar as a co-pilot. Ned directs me to the restaurant, giving driving advice as I change lanes. I’m feeling confident by the time we arrive, and I pull into a parking space, then hop out and start walking toward the restaurant. But Ned remains frozen by the curb. “I feel the need to point out that your car is parked diagonally across two spots,” he shouts after me. He’s trying hard not to laugh. “Since we’re in front of a liquor store, it might be prudent to repark it before someone calls the cops on what appears to be a very sloshed driver.”

  Once the car has been properly reparked, we head toward the neon red Seoul B.B.Q. & Sushi sign. As we wait for the waiter to bring our appetizers, Ned reaches into his backpack and pulls out a manila envelope. He slides it across the table. When I open it, I find a stack of poems, each one annotated in pencil. “One thing I’ve learned in the midst of all this,” he says, “is that I derive sustenance from poetry. I see my experience embedded in what I read and that becomes the language I use to capture it. I’ve compiled a few of my favorites. They might speak to where you’re at—where we’re both at right now.”

  Ned closes his eyes and begins to recite a few lines of a Stanley Kunitz poem called “The Layers.”

  I have walked through many lives,

  some of them my own,

  and I am not who I was,

  though some principle of being

  abides, from which I struggle

  not to stray.

  * * *

  —

  Like Ned, reading and writing have been central to me since childhood. After my diagnosis, putting pen to paper was what allowed me to hold on to a sense of self even as I deteriorated—even when I no longer recognized myself in the mirror. It gave me the illusion of control when I’d had to cede so much of it to caregivers. Trying to render the experience in words made me a better listener and observer of not only others, but also the subtle shifts in my own body. It taught me to speak up and advocate for myself. (My medical team joked that every time they made a mistake, I wrote it up in The New York Times.) Reporting on my experience granted me a way to transmute suffering into language. It also created a community—delivering me here to see Ned.

  I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that writing saved me. No matter what happened, I churned out words, even if they only amounted to a few sentences.

  Except this last year.

  After I return to my motel room, I keep thinking about the poem Ned recited—about the idea of a “principle of being” that threads through the
past, present, and future. When talking with Ned, I noticed how he kept subconsciously referring to himself as split into three selves: pre-diagnosis Ned, sick Ned, and recovering Ned. Whenever I talk about my life, I realize I do the same. Maybe the challenge is to locate a thread that strings these selves together. It strikes me as a challenge better worked out on paper.

  For the first time in months, I crack open my journal and start to write. I decide to do this daily, to follow the thread where it leads.

  * * *

  —

  Between Ned and the next person on my list lie seven hundred miles of highway. A more experienced driver, or someone with a deeper reservoir of energy to draw from, might be able to do it in a straight twelve-hour shot. It will take me nearly two weeks. On the morning of Day 3, I wake up in Farmington with a suspicious scratch in my throat. I’ve been looking forward to camping but I appear to be coming down with a cold, and forecasts warn of a storm.

  Ominous purple and black clouds bruise the sky as I pull into a campground in Middleborough, Massachusetts. Stepping out, I feel a drop of rain, then another. The prospect of sleeping with a dog in a tent in the rain when I’m already sick sounds miserable. At the campground office, I rent one of the cabins instead. They form a half circle in a wooded area, overshadowed by two dozen RVs parked in long rows across a field of yellowed grass. It’s hardly the wilderness experience I cooked up in my fantasies.

  I unpack my gear and sit at the picnic table outside. It is the first truly cold day of autumn and I’m dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt, a black puffy jacket, and a wool hat. Oscar is asleep on my lap, warming my thighs as I examine my map. I’m absorbed in charting the next week’s course northward when Oscar abruptly leaps down, growling and baring his teeth at a car that has just pulled up to the cabin next door. Two little dogs wearing matching pink bows jump out. Their owners follow, a young couple in their thirties, and soon make their way over to me.