Also: I knew I didn’t have it. What I learned from my eye tumor fake-out was not so much “live life to the fullest” as “don’t get your hopes up.” It was perversely ideal: A disease that would enable me to leave work early twice a week? A disease that would get me out of any social situation of my choosing? A disease that would keep me in sugar cookies from the doctor’s office for a year? A disease that I would never actually get as long as I kept up the cure? Another bumper sticker: “Too globin to be true.”
I went to get the results by myself but I knew them before I walked in the door. It was a familiar song: the second tests were in and wouldn’t you know it? I had been chewing spinach in my sleep. Just before I started to fast the night before the test, I had consumed a large spinach salad for dinner. Perhaps it’s recovered memory—my mind sitting me on the sofa and taking me through Polaroids of me washing the spinach, now chopping up the leaves, now with a fork headed in the direction of my face—aww, and look at you chewing in this one! You remember, don’t you? I now have a vivid recollection of said salad that had escaped me at the time of my original blood test. Not having hemochromatosis and therefore not being concerned about nonspecific stomach pain, I ate enough spinach to throw off the test.
“I can’t believe that’s possible,” I said to the hematologist.
“These things can be tricky.” He shrugged. “The human body is a funny thing.”
“Hysterical.”
I knew I had to make contact with concerned family members but treated myself to a long walk home and a few minutes alone in my apartment first. I lay on the middle of the floor with my knees up, looking at my ceiling. I was not subtly, not perversely, but openly disappointed. I had fallen in love with my flaws once they were easily contained. Every lie I had ever told, every disappointment I had wrought, every botched attempt at normalcy, every successful proof of my inadequacy—all looked practically charming when they shared a raison d’être. I wanted to hold them close but controlled like a balloon tied to my wrist with an IV for a string. If anything went wrong, all I had to do was tug at the string and bring my explanation down for others to see. This is who I am and this is why.
But now my problems had been set loose. They could be anywhere at anytime and I was just like everyone else I knew: almost positive that there was something profoundly and undiagnosably wrong with me. I sat up and leaned back on my hands. With my weight on one arm, I lifted the other to my face and wiggled my fingers. I saw nothing, just a hand. I was all grown up, too old to play sick, and robbed of my green ribbon. I looked at the phone. I had calls to make. Important calls to concerned family and friends that would put everything back the way it was, releasing me into the bloodstream of humanity where I would be accountable for my behavior and expected to overcome basic obstacles just like everyone else. I picked up the phone and ordered in sushi.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the many people who made this book what it is—some unwittingly and some on purpose. For the former, I know it’s not customary for thieves to leave thank-you notes but: Sorry I broke into your lives. I wouldn’t have done it if they weren’t so shiny.
For help of the intentional variety, I would like to thank Denise Shannon, whose guidance and sanity has been invaluable. Thank you also to everyone at Riverhead Books for your freakishly instant warmth and brilliance: Sean McDonald, Larissa Dooley, Geoff Kloske, Ben Gibson, Craig Burke and the publicity department. Actually, thank you to pretty much any book publicist ever: there is a streak of the saintly in all of you.
At Knopf, I would like to thank everyone for their generous support and friendship over the years, especially those at Vintage Books. Russell Perreault, Lisa Weinert, Jennifer Jackson and Marty Asher have been amazing colleagues and wonderful friends. A debt of gratitude is also owed to anyone who has ever edited me closer to funny, specifically Suzy Hansen and Ed Park who first said, “You should turn this into an essay,” followed by, “Let’s get some oatmeal.” Josh Kendall and Elizabeth Spiers were early readers and are two of the best people in New York—I am lucky to know them both.
Finally, thank you to the Crosleys. To my mother, who once peeled my eleven-year-old body from the pavement after a horrific bike accident; to my father, who ran no less than three stoplights on the way to the hospital; and to my sister who—as I lay bleeding on a gurney—announced that I had forgotten to put underwear on that morning: I love you more than words can say.
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