The Fatigue Artist

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  After a while I find a rack of books and pamphlets against a back wall. Aha, not a strange land. Let’s pretend it’s a musty library. Most of the pages are given over to recipes—ingenious ways of disguising tofu. But here’s one book, Take Your Health in Your Hands, that’s recipe-free and moreover includes a chapter on Creative Visualizing. Well, fine. That sounds like something I can do. The gist of it is that you can conquer or at least weaken whatever plagues you, from the common cold to AIDS or cancer, by envisioning your body’s good warrior cells destroying the bad invading cells in a pitched battle, using little swords or little bombs or machine guns or whatever toy implements strike your fancy. What a curious leap. We’ve been instructed about the dangers of seeing illness as metaphor, and now here’s cure as metaphor, too.

  I skim the examples of efficacious visions, bits of a microcosmic Iliad, and the writing isn’t half bad, either. I wouldn’t go so far as to buy the book, especially as it’s the sort of thing that drives my work out of the marketplace, but I read enough to get the idea.

  Outside, the sun is aglow in a radiant sky, the streets crowded with people in scant, brightly colored clothing. Plenty of Saturday afternoon traffic, and a red light catches me in Broadway’s center mall between northbound and south. What a falling-off. I can’t easily defy the flashing Don’t Walk sign and dash across in front of oncoming cars. These are honorable skills in the quintessential New York game of driver versus pedestrian, and losing them is ignominious, like losing teeth or hair or potency. Waiting for the light to change, like a tourist!

  On my left, three homeless people sit on a bench, perhaps feeling as sick as I do. One man wears heavy winter clothes and drinks coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Another is curled up, shirtless and barefoot. A woman sits apart, gripping a shopping cart that holds a bulging plastic bag. There’s some room on the bench. No, not yet. Give it a few months.

  Suddenly we’re all jolted as a glossy black convertible thunders down Broadway, crammed with teenage suburban jocks slumming in the city, the radio blasting voices and drums from hell. The buildings on either side tremble at the sound, the shop signs sway, glimmering in the sun, the asphalt of the street quivers and the traffic light swings on its cable. Louder, I can’t hear it, I’m always tempted to shout. But we don’t. We don’t know what they might be carrying in the car or what they might be on.

  I don’t shout. Only silently, from the battlefield under my skin, I shout, Die. I hope you die. It echoes through the channels and caverns of my body. Just for the hell of it I wish all the other drivers dead, too, for the crime of moving blithely along in fine health while I wait for the light to change. Die, so I can cross the street. It’s so energizing that I wish it on everyone in sight, from the beggars at the newsstand to the young mothers pushing strollers and licking frozen yogurts. Why don’t you all just die and get out of my way.

  I’m a little horrified, not so much at the vengeful wishes but at how easily they come, how I take them in stride. All at once I stiffen, recalling the strange case of Dr. B.

  I met Dr. B. shortly after Ev was killed. My sore throat had passed, thanks to Dr. A.’s antibiotics, but it left a tightness, as if something were stuck, something I couldn’t swallow or bring back up either. Ev’s old doctor sent me to Dr. B., who he said was a South American photographer-doctor, to get pictures of my esophagus in action. Wearing a powder-blue paper robe, I shivered for so long in a curtained cubicle that I thought I’d been forgotten. At last an acolyte led me into the presence of a tall, elegant man who looked so much like Vargas Llosa, the renowned Peruvian novelist, that for a moment I thought Vargas Llosa, who after all had recently had an abortive career in politics, might now be trying medicine as a sideline; we might even discuss his novels. He shook my hand and in his suave accent said, “I am going to mix you a little cocktail. It looks like a strawberry malted.”

  The cocktail was made of barium, and the idea was that as I ingested it, sip by sip, he would take pictures of its swift and slippery progress down my esophagus.

  “Now take a sip. Now hold it in your mouth. Now—swallow! Swallow, swallow, swallow!” he commanded again and again.

  I did my best to obey as Dr. B., behind cumbersome machinery, snapped away.

  “You’re not swallowing right,” he snapped. “You have to try harder!” He was undergoing a transformation: his charm was evaporating and he was definitely not Vargas Llosa. He was rather like those chameleon continental types in movies—Charles Boyer comes to mind—who can turn menacing in the space of a breath. “Swallow exactly when I tell you, not before and not after. Now! Sip, hold it in your mouth—swallow! Bigger sip. Big sip and . . . swallow! Swallow!”

  Dirk Bogarde, the fashion photographer in Darling, also snapped pictures of captive Julie Christie at an alarming rate: Now smile, pout, toss your head, good girl, smile! Quick, quick, more, more! And Julie Christie tosses her wonderful hair, pouts, narrows her eyes; everything she possesses, all her blood secrets, come rushing to her face like a blush, making her lips swell, darken, and tremble; her eyes glint; the lush sleek hair sings arias.

  I, however, was not a professional.

  “Swallow, and .. . swallow! You’re not cooperating! If you don’t cooperate you’ll have to drink more,” he threatened.

  “I’m doing my best. Tell me how you want it done and I’ll try to do it.” I imagined neophyte prostitutes saying those words to far-out customers.

  “Yes, well, all right, never mind. You can get dressed now.”

  On the bus ride home I wished something bad would happen to Dr. B. I didn’t specify, just something that would cause him discomfort and mortification.

  A week later a secretary called to say I would have to take the test over because the pictures hadn’t come out right.

  “Aha, how do you do?” Dr. B. shook my hand, all charm again. “So you enjoyed our little cocktail party so much that you decided to come again?”

  “Look, there’s something I must say before we begin. Last week you made a big fuss about the way I swallowed. Now, I don’t know if that’s why the pictures didn’t come out or if there was some other problem. But as you must know, swallowing is partly a reflexive act which I can’t totally control. The way I swallow is the way I swallow and I don’t wish to be scolded for it. Maybe the problem that brought me here in the first place is the reason I don’t swallow to your satisfaction. Have you thought of that?”

  Had such speech ever been spoken in a doctor’s office? How proud I felt, like young Stephen Dedalus complaining to Father Dolan of being wrongfully paddled when his glasses were broken, except I was even braver—I confronted the perpetrator himself. On the other hand, Stephen Dedalus was seven at the time and I was almost thirty-nine.

  After my speech, Dr. B. managed to behave like a man of science, despite his frustrations about my swallowing or his equipment or anything else in his life. I left feeling satisfied with us both: let’s hear it for civilized behavior, ententes cordiales, rah, rah. I took back my malevolent wish.

  What the pictures showed, Ev’s old doctor informed me a week later, was ambiguous: a minor problem or more likely a mechanical glitch in the camera. He seemed to be hinting that I let the matter drop, although he couldn’t say so openly in case I later died of cancer of the esophagus and in the process took it into my head to sue him.

  “The doctor seemed to be having trouble,” I said. “He kept complaining about the way I swallowed. It became quite an ordeal, as a matter of fact.”

  “He died. Dr. B. just died of a cerebral hemorrhage.”

  I gasped. “Oh, my. I’m sorry. I’m really shocked.” And he was so good-looking, too.

  “Yes, it was very sudden.”

  That was excessive, I whispered to the powers that be. Much more than I intended. At least I had not destroyed a famous novelist.

  “What’s that?” said Ev’s old doctor.

  Had I spoken aloud? “Nothing, nothing. That’s too bad.”

  I didn’t in
vestigate further. The tightness in my throat was easing, in any case. Perhaps it had come from shouting or smoking or weeping; any number of common daily activities might have caused it.

  So I wonder, do malevolent thoughts have power, riding the vibrations of the universe? The Tai Chi teacher calls it the great symphony, of which we hear only snatches of melody, those melodies we ourselves summon, like vibrations drawing like: anger drawing anger, love drawing love. There might be something to it. E chi lo sa? as Q. would say. Even my mother, surely no Eastern mystic, warned me against bad thoughts and bad words. Not nice. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. If you can’t think something nice, don’t think. . . .

  AT THE ELEVATOR DOOR, clutching my paper bag of bee pollen and vitamins, I almost collide with my downstairs neighbor, Helene, and her shopping cart, which she takes out daily, like a pet. Helene is a retired schoolteacher. Many of the locals have passed through her exacting classroom.

  “You’re looking rather peaked,” she declares. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t really know. I’m awfully tired. I’m having some blood tests next week, to find out. My stepdaughter thinks I might have one of those chronic fatigue viruses.”

  “Are you sure you’re not just depressed? All those newfangled illnesses, they sound like depression to me. What we used to call down in the dumps.”

  “Well, you’re looking just fine, Helene.” I’ll let her live, simply press the button to slide the door closed, erasing her robust presence.

  I stumble into the empty apartment. Ev? Ah, yes. My keys miss the table where I toss them and jangle to the floor. I open windows, look through the unpromising mail. If I’d kept the answering machine on, there might have been a friendly, chiding message from Tim: what a good time he was having at the shore, I should have come.

  Behind the screen at the French door are clumps that might be leaves or shadows. No movement. Gradually I make out a shape that is not leaves or shadows, a trembling, rounded shape with tiny bristling hairs catching the light. He’s curled up for an afternoon nap. A wave of weakness hits, making me sway. I don’t tap on the glass—too harsh for a sleeper—only give a low hiss against the screen. Nothing.

  The squirrel is clearly sick, too sick to respond promptly as squirrels do. What’s more, he’ll die here, he has chosen this place to die, and tomorrow or the next day I’ll find his body festering in the heat, perhaps with flies or bees hovering round, and I’ll have to raise the screen and lift out the body, wearing rubber gloves, of course, since squirrels are reputed to carry disease, even rabies, then place it in a paper bag—I know the procedure well, from the rat—and take it down to the garbage cans in the basement. The bag will smell, maybe like damp rotting leaves, maybe flat and stubborn like a decaying mouse under the floorboards, or worse. And suppose on the way down to the basement I get stuck in the elevator, for this happens from time to time and normally doesn’t frighten me, someone always hurries to the rescue, but to be stuck holding a dead squirrel in a paper bag with the stench filling the cubicle, to be trapped with the smell of death. . . .

  Stop, calm down, be sensible. The dying squirrel is just a coincidence. Unless it’s one of those angels or good witches who turn up in fairy tales in hideous disguise, testing the heroine’s character: does she offer hospitality or turn the wretch away?

  I sink back in the easy chair, facing the river. Now is as good a time as any to test Creative Visualizing. I’ll picture my innards as a battleground, the organs as the killing fields. A very intimate landscape, with strategic valleys and waterways.

  Recalling the instructions in the book, I conjure up the bad cells racing rampant down my bloodstream. Malevolent and alien, they’ll be blue, since few things in nature are blue except for bluebells and blueberries and, of course, the sky. (Though the blue of the sky, scientists say, is not true blue but a result of the refraction of light, as well as of our own desires: I’azur was the dream of the French Symbolist poets, who deepened the blue of the sky by sheer longing.)

  The bad blue cells come into focus, resembling speckled M&rM’s. The good cells, hot on their trail, are flat red disks with squat pointy spears around the circumference, like gears. I imagine regiments of good red cells—my heart pumping them out as efficiently as a draft board—flowing down the channels of my blood, protectively colored, hunting out the enemy. As the reds roll along, up-ended, their spears pierce the blues, which shrivel into empty crumpled skins like the skins of rotted grapes, to be washed away with other waste.

  This seems a harmless little fantasy, yet my heart’s pounding at the very notion of such mayhem under the skin. I’m used to the subtle contest of push hands in Tai Chi. I don’t like being a battleground. I let the vision go, and it’s abruptly replaced by a vision much closer to home, another battle against an intruder.

  I had set a new kind of mousetrap, a flat, white plastic rectangle about three by four inches, coated with a honey-colored, gummy paste. The plan was that the mouse who invaded our kitchen at night would stumble onto the rectangle and stick. Like most weapons of destruction, the trap was a metaphor, maybe from some inventive mind who couldn’t find work at the Pentagon: victim stuck in place, straining to tear free. (Mouse foot in aspic—could be some chic new delicacy from a bistro on the cutting edge.) I assumed the misstep would occur at night and hadn’t thought any further, for instance, what to do with the rectangle holding the stuck mouse. I was a wife, then, with a wifely outlook: Ev would take care of it. And to be frank, I was terrified of the mouse, or not so much of the mouse itself as of its sudden darting appearances, its scuttling shadow. I might not have minded had I been warned in advance, or had it moved more slowly. All the more peculiar that I wasn’t terrified by the rat scuttling across the window ledge as I spoke to Q. on the phone years earlier.

  Jilly was in for the weekend. We sat in the dining room lingering over coffee while she told me the plot of a crime movie in scrupulous detail; she could act out the dialogue so well that I didn’t need to see the movies themselves. Ev was out. Ev was out much of the time. Even when he was in, it felt like he was out.

  “So then she puts this personal ad in the paper. That’s to make you think the killer was after women who put these ads in, but that’s not it, because he’s really—”

  Yelps came from the kitchen. We dashed in.

  The mouse was stuck on the rectangle, beside the garbage can. Admirably, if unwillingly, rooted. In its vain struggle to get unstuck, legs straining and torso wriggling, it gave the illusion of forward movement, like those vaudeville dancers in top hat, tails and cane who affect a strutting motion but stay in place. I, too, felt glued to the spot.

  “Kill it,” said Jilly. “Put it out of its misery.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Knock it out.”

  I hastily grabbed a broom from the closet, though there was no need for haste; the mouse wasn’t going anywhere. It kept squirming and yelping as I flailed again and again.

  “Forget it, I can’t do this,” I cried. “I’m a pacifist.”

  “Since when?”

  “I never told you before. I wasn’t sure. Now I know.”

  “Never mind that bull. Just kill it. You can’t leave it there squirming.”

  I closed my eyes and battered blindly until the yelps stopped. Opening my eyes to slits, I swept the trap into a paper bag and stuffed it in the garbage, then leaned against the counter and took a few deep breaths. Jilly watched. Adolescents love to watch.

  “It’s easy to stand there looking contemptuous. Why didn’t you do it, since you’re so cool about it?”

  “It’s not my mouse,” she said coolly. “It’s not even my house.” And she sauntered off toward the guest room.

  She was right, I wasn’t really a pacifist. It wasn’t the brutal killing I abhorred, only its proximity. (Maybe I should use a stun gun on my bad blue cells, then administer a lethal injection that would work while I slept.)


  When Ev came home I said, “It’s funny, I didn’t mind poisoning them, remember, a few years ago? I left the stuff out and in the morning it was gone and that was that. I guess they crawled back into their holes to die. I never thought about it. But battering it to death was vile.”

  “There’s no difference whatsoever,” he said with the same coolness as Jilly. “It only feels different because everyone here is so sheltered. You’ve never seen killing except on a screen. We used to bomb whole villages at once, but when the Vietcong sneaked up in the dark and slit a few throats we called them barbarians. If you’re going to kill someone or something—and I personally don’t care what you do with the mice—you should at least do it in such a way that you know what you’re doing. That it’s for real.”

  “Well, aren’t you the pompous one. How convenient that you were out at the time so you could keep your integrity.”

  “I had to go up to the Bronx to see someone.”

  Then the phone rang, and it was over. His words shook me up because that war was one of the things he wouldn’t talk about. At our first dinner he’d mentioned being there, as if it were a secret to get rid of fast, and then never again except once, early on in bed, when I teasingly demanded an account of every year in his adult life, where he had been and with whom. It was a terse account. Mid-’sixties, Vietnam. He was drafted right out of college—drawing a low number—then wounded after two months and sent home to a desk. He never spoke of it and never wrote of it. He wrote about the other wars of the last twenty years, but never the one he was in. One of his silences.

  A few days after the mouse incident, Ev was dead. Trying to run but caught in place by a bullet. Certain visions require no effort and no instructions from a manual. Such as slamming the cab door despite the sign on the window, Please Do Not Slam the Door, barreling through the revolving door where I almost tripped a Korean woman carrying a baby, homing in on the path as if I were led through the hospital maze by an invisible Virgil, forcing my way through the swinging doors of the Emergency Room—not there, no longer an emergency—past flustered nurses and two old men in wheelchairs and a bearded security guard—door after door like Chinese boxes, to the final revelation—until too late, too late, the ripped body, the gaping throat, not meant for the next of kin. The blue shirt I had chosen, stained purplish-black. “That shirt looks like it’s seen better days,” I’d said, wifelike, just a couple of hours earlier. “Why don’t you wear another?” “I’m only going up to the Bronx to see my drug dealers.” “Still. Drug dealers dress pretty well, don’t they? You should fit in.” He was in a good mood. He peeled off the old shirt. “Okay. Which do you suggest?” “This one.” I picked out a blue one I’d given him.