Once a week, in an attempt to break the monotony, Hugh and I would grab our jumbo golf umbrellas and slog down the road to the pub, where we’d catch up on the local news. One of our few neighbors who had not yet flown to Spain had her house broken into while she was upstairs asleep. The thief stole her purse and, after discovering that her car keys were in it, took her Audi as well. In response, the local police suggested that, as a precautionary measure, we all start sleeping with our keys.
Had they responded this way in France or America, it wouldn’t have surprised me, but wasn’t everyone in England supposed to be a detective? Wasn’t every crime, no matter how complex, solved in a timely fashion by either a professional or a hobbyist? That’s the impression you get from British books and TV shows. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hetty Wainthropp, Inspector George Gently: they come from every class and corner of the country. There’s even Edith Pargeter’s Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who solved crimes in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. No surveillance cameras, no fingerprints, not even a telephone, and still he cracked every case that came his way. But now, almost nine hundred years later, the solution is to sleep with our keys? “How’s that for progress?” I said to Hugh as we waded home. “I mean, why not just tell us to sleep in our cars?”
In mid-October I was scheduled to fly to the U.S., and then on to thirty cities as part of a lecture tour. Canceling it was out of the question, so in early September I called the Home Office and demanded that they send my passport back. This meant canceling my application and losing the five hundred dollars that accompanied it, but what choice did I have? The person I spoke to on the phone explained that the return process could take up to twenty working days. She also said that if I left for the States, there was no guarantee the British government would let me back into the U.K.
I hung up thinking there were worse things than being deported from England. What’s with a country that takes six months to replace a sticker in somebody’s passport, this when it’s all right there on the computer? Then I thought of other things I don’t like about the place: the littering, the public drunkenness, the way they say “Jan” instead of January. There are problems everywhere, of course. It’s just that without my passport I can’t adequately appreciate them.
A few days into my tour of the U.S., someone on Oahu came upon a computer bag with a checkbook and a passport in it. He or she then took them to the nearest post office, along with a note reading, “Aloha. These were found abandoned. Very important documents. I hope they can find their way back to the owner.” There was no name at the bottom, just the word “Thanks.”
The postal supervisor used my checkbook to track down my banker, and three days later I had my old passport back. After opening it up and kissing my Indefinite Leave to Remain sticker, I called the Hawaiian postal supervisor, who told me that my things had been found in the vicinity of the house I’d rented, not far from the area I’d scoured with Gretchen. That was all he could tell me. Neither the passport nor the checkbook smelled of mildew, so maybe they were only recently tossed out. By whom? I no longer care. Instead of thinking about my burglar, I’m turning my imagination toward the unidentified person who so thoughtfully ended my nightmare with the British Home Office. I think of good instead of evil. I believe in luck again. It would have been nice to get my computer back, but I can live with its loss. My only regret is that my case was so anticlimactic. What began as a mystery ended as an even bigger one. Who are you, Good Samaritan? I wonder. What are you doing right this minute? Donating bone marrow? Reading to the blind? Teaching crippled children to dance?
On returning to England in early December, I handed two passports to my Heathrow border agent. He looked at the old one containing my Indefinite Leave sticker, and then at the new one, which he stamped and handed back. He may have said, “Welcome home,” or it might have been simply “Next.” In the way of people who have better things on their minds, I didn’t quite bother to listen.
The Happy Place
It was late September, and Hugh and I were in Amsterdam. We’d been invited out for dinner, so at five o’clock we left our hotel and took an alarming one-hundred-twenty-dollar cab ride to the home of our hostess, a children’s book author who lived beside a canal in the middle of nowhere. By the time we arrived, it was dark. Someone opened the door to greet us, and it took me a moment to realize it was Francine. Obscuring her face were two clear plastic bags filled with water. Both were suspended by strings, just sort of sagging there, like testicles. I, of course, asked about them, and she said they were for keeping the flies away. “I don’t know what it is, but they see or sense these sandwich bags and immediately head off in another direction. Isn’t that right, Pauline?” Francine said to her girlfriend. “Not one fly all summer, and usually the house is full of them.”
I planned to think about the plastic bags of water for the remainder of the evening, but other stuff kept getting in the way—Francine’s house, for one, which was really more of a compound: the Francine Institute, with a big modern space for writing, and a separate alcove for the dozens of books she’s authored, and all the products these books have generated, the dolls and posters and calendars.
Dinner was taken in the backyard beside the canal. It was a clear night, cold enough to see our breath, and a fire was burning. Joining us were Pauline, Francine’s ex-husband, and one of their sons, a twenty-year-old named Dan. Like his mother, he was blond, with the sort of looks we all might have were we allowed to construct ourselves from a kit: perfectly spaced blue eyes, perfect cheekbones, a perfect mouthful of big white teeth. On top of that he was really kind and interesting. After dinner we moved our chairs into a circle around the fire pit and were served apple cake. Hugh asked a question about the economy, and Dan explained that the Netherlands has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe. “As long as you get a master’s degree you’re pretty much guaranteed a job.” He himself was in his second year of college, majoring in saving the Earth. “That’s not the actual name of the program, but it’s pretty much what it amounts to,” he told us.
I asked what sort of things he was learning, and he brought up a biology class he’d sat through earlier that week. “We were talking about aging and how the average life expectancy keeps creeping upward. It used to be that people died in their midthirties, but now look at us! And it’s all changing so quickly.” Dan said that the first person who’ll reach the age of two hundred has already been born. “It’s anyone’s guess who it is, but he or she is definitely here.”
It could have been the authority in his voice, or maybe the firelight reflected in his eyes, but for whatever reason, this sounded to me like a prophecy. I swallowed the last of my cake and leaned forward to ask a question. “At the age of a hundred sixty, will this person be like, ‘You know what? I’m starting to feel a little tired,’ or will he be curled into a ball, puddled in drool and Botox?”
“We don’t know,” Dan said.
I stared into the flames and got a sickening feeling that the person we were talking about would turn out to be my father. And that I would be the one left to care for him. Think of the plastic bags of water hanging in the doorway, I told myself, but try as I might, I couldn’t get it out of my mind, not then, shivering beside the dark canal, and not later, on our way back to Amsterdam. The taxi meter clicked ever upward, and I saw the figures as ages rather than sums, thinking, Sixty-six, that’s like being in your twenties. Sixty-seven, that’s still nothing. When I’m sixty-seven my father will be a mere one hundred years old.
That would leave him a whole other century to call at odd hours and ask if I’d gotten a colonoscopy. This is a campaign he started in 1978, the first time he had one. “It was horrible,” he reported. “The doctor made me take my pants off and strapped me into a kind of bottomless chair—tethered me like a hostage. Then he tipped it forward and stuck, no kidding, a three-foot metal rod up my ass! Can you imagine? There I was, begging for mercy. Turned practically upside down, sweat dripping o
ff my nose, I mean to tell you it was just god-awful, like torture. The single worst experience of my entire life.” Then, in the same breath, he added, “I think you should get one.”
“But I’m only twenty-two years old!”
“It’s never too early,” he told me. “Go on. I’ll pay for it myself.”
I said to my sister Lisa, “It’s like he thinks I’ll enjoy it.”
I’d heard the procedure was easier now than it was in the late ’70s. Rather than being strapped into a chair, you lie on your side, doped to the gills, while a slender tentacle no thicker than packing twine meanders the empty corridors of your colon. “It couldn’t be simpler,” a doctor promised me. “We knock you out, and you wake up remembering nothing.”
“Nothing about you doing God knows what inside my asshole?” I said. “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound very reassuring to me.”
“You’re a ticking time bomb,” my father said. “Mark my words, you wait much longer and you’re going to regret it.”
When I hit fifty he doubled his efforts. He doubled them again the following year, and then it was basically all he ever talked about. I had oral surgery in the summer of 2010 and had just returned from the periodontist, my mouth still numb and leaking blood onto my chin, when the phone rang. “Seeing as that’s done, I want you to get a colonoscopy,” my father said.
I took him with me to a college in New York where I was to give the commencement address, and just before I went onstage he tapped me on the shoulder. “I want you to think about getting a colonoscopy.”
He worked it into every conversation we had. The one after I returned from Amsterdam, for instance, when I called to ask what he wanted for Christmas. “I want for you to get a goddamn colonoscopy.”
“You want your gift to be someone sticking a foreign object up my ass?”
“You’re damn right I do.” He continued to hammer at it until, exhausted, I told him I couldn’t talk anymore. We hung up, and two minutes later he called again.
“Or an iPhone.”
When I think of it, he’s actually not a bad candidate for two hundred. Here he is, eighty-nine years old, and he’s never once spent a night in the hospital. Four times a week he attends a spinning class at the Y, this in addition to a great deal of walking and dragging things around. His memory is excellent. He does all his own shopping and cooking and has never once called any of us by the wrong name. The secret, he tells me, is to eat seven gin-soaked raisins a day.
“Blond or dark?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Could I possibly cut out the gin part? Marinate them in, I don’t know, coffee or something.”
“Do you want to live or don’t you?” he asked.
When I told my father about Dan’s prophecy, he said, “Aw, baloney. A twenty-year-old kid in Holland, what does he know?”
“He learned it in school.”
“No, he didn’t,” my father said. “The guy was just pulling your leg.” He had a similar opinion of the plastic bags hanging in Francine’s doorway. “It’s just a load of BS.”
“As opposed to seven gin-soaked raisins keeping you alive until you’re eighty-nine?”
“Hey,” he said, “those raisins work!”
If not them, something was doing the trick. He harassed me with the energy of a man half his age until finally, six months after our trip to Amsterdam, I cracked. I was in the United States at the time, in the midst of a thirty-day, thirty-city tour. Once it was over, I planned on visiting my family, and, figuring I’d just be sitting around anyway, I called a North Carolina endoscopy center and made an appointment. The place I chose was not in Raleigh—my father would have insisted on watching—but in Winston-Salem, where Lisa lives.
Booking the procedure two weeks in advance left me plenty of time to collect stories, both good and bad. The part maligned by just about everyone was the preparation. In order for your colon to be properly studied, it has to be empty. To achieve this, you are prescribed a horrific combination of laxatives and stool softeners that essentially chains you to the toilet for a period of twelve to eighteen hours. Some of the people I spoke with had remained conscious during their colonoscopies and had even joined their doctors in watching the footage live on the monitor. These tended to be the same types who did their own taxes and read Consumer Reports before buying a dehumidifier or toaster oven. They were, in effect, the types I am not.
As long as somebody knocked me out, I felt that I’d be okay. Then I met a woman who took my fragile peace of mind and shattered it. “The camera up the bottom part was not so bad,” she reported. “I was out cold while all that happened, but then I was wheeled into what was called ‘the farting room’ and told I couldn’t leave until I had passed enough gas to satisfy them.”
“No!” I said.
“They inflate your colon with air, and you absolutely have to get it out before going home,” she told me. “I had a nurse literally pressing on my stomach like she was kneading dough.”
“And you had to do that…in front of people?”
She closed her eyes and nodded.
“I can’t,” I told her.
“But you’ll have to!”
“No, seriously. I can’t.”
“I didn’t have a farting room,” Lisa said when I repeated the woman’s story. “At least it wasn’t written on the door. And you might think it’s crazy, but I loved my colonoscopy.” Without my sister’s enthusiasm I might have canceled my appointment. As it was, she could not have been more helpful or encouraging. The day before my procedure, she gave me my laxatives and poured my first glass of Gatorade mixed with stool softener. I drank the required thirty-two ounces, I suffered the effects, and the next morning I forced down another bottle. I’d thought that going without solid food for a total of twenty-four hours would leave me peckish and cranky, but I felt no hungrier than usual when, at the appointed time, we headed to the endoscopy center.
At the front desk I checked in and was told that for the rest of the day I would not be able to write checks or make any legal decisions. “Is that okay?” asked the receptionist. She was cheerful and sweet-smelling, and as I picked up her pen to sign my release forms, I noticed the paw prints tattooed on her chest. It looked like she’d been stepped on, or perhaps hugged, by a bobcat with muddy feet.
“Those are darling,” Lisa said, and the woman, whose name was Vette, thanked her. Behind us in the waiting room were a half dozen people. All were a good deal older than me, and most were watching television. It wasn’t tuned to the news but rather to a loop of brief medical infomercials. “Could you be suffering from an overactive bladder?” the narrator of one of them wondered. Next we were asked to consider irritable bowel syndrome.
“Oh no,” Lisa whispered, wincing at the TV. I thought I’d get to sit with her for a while, and maybe learn something new about incontinence, but moments after signing my last form I was led into the back of the building and into the room where my procedure would take place. In its center was a tall hospital bed, and running along one wall was a high shelf loaded with supplies. There might have been a dozen things on it, but what caught my eyes and precluded them from advancing was the K-Y Jelly, which was stored in a tub the size of a bongo drum.
“Would you like me to outline what will be happening to you?” a technician named Dawn asked.
I told her I’d rather not know the details, and she left me alone to undress and step into a backless gown. When that was done, she arranged me upon the tall bed and introduced me to the anesthesiologist, who held an oxygen tube in her hand and asked if I was allergic to latex.
I answered no, wondering, Am I? She affixed the tube to my nose and was just inserting an IV into my arm when the gastroenterologist came in. Without quite noticing it, I seem to have reached an age when my doctors are younger than I am. This fellow looked to be in his late thirties. “Holmes” was how he introduced himself—just his last name, with no title. We shook, and a moment later the anes
thesiologist connected a syringe full of cream-colored liquid to my IV.
“Now I’m going to ask you to go to your happy place,” she said. The back of my gown fell open, and I felt the cool air on my exposed rear end.
“My what?”
“Your happy place,” she repeated. “It’s different for each person. The man I anesthetized before you, for instance, went to the Augusta golf course, and when he woke up he was winning the Masters.”
At first I thought my happy place would be a stage. I was walking from the wings to the podium, excited, like always, by all the attention I would soon be getting, when I changed my mind and revisited the house I grew up in. It was any night in the early 1970s and my sisters and I were sitting around the dining room table, trying to make our mother laugh. I could just see her, head cocked to one side, lighting a cigarette off a candle, when I jumped to a cottage my family rented one summer on the coast of North Carolina, and then to a September afternoon in Normandy. The anesthesiologist emptied her syringe into my IV, and just as I said, “No, wait, I haven’t decided yet,” or just as I thought I said it, I slipped away into a velvety nothingness.
When I awoke some time later, I was in a different location. Curtains surrounded me on four sides, and through a part in one of them I could see a woman folding papers and putting them into envelopes. I asked her, dreamily, if we had met, and when she told me that we had not, I gave her a little finger wave, the type a leprechaun might offer a pixie who was floating by on a maple leaf. “Well, hi there,” I whispered.
Never had I experienced such an all-encompassing sense of well-being. Everything was soft-edged and lovely. Everyone was magnificent. Perhaps if I still drank and took drugs I might not have felt the effects so strongly, but except for some Dilaudid I’d been given for a kidney stone back in 2009, I had been cruelly sober for thirteen years.
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