The Fatigue Artist

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “Really?”

  “Yes. So I would guess you have to push yourself to do everything. I’ll work on that, this time. Since the virus is consuming your energy, I’ll have to take energy wherever I can find it and get it moving. But basically you have a strong constitution.”

  “I do?”

  “Oh, yes. You’ll be fine, but it might take some time. We have to get rid of the toxins first. That means you could have some uncomfortable symptoms, but once those pass you’ll feel better. Let me see your tongue. Yes, that’s what I thought.”

  She tips a small brown bottle over her palm and a lush forest odor rises into the room. She massages the oil into my stomach and my legs. Her touch is warm. Then she presses her hands down hard all along my legs. “Turn over.” She presses again. Laying on of hands. She’s transmitting something through the hands; I only hope it’s something good. When I turn on my back again, my body feels different, as if it’s drawn something alien and interesting from the hands. She opens a package of long thin needles tipped with red plastic.

  “Oh, needles,” I say.

  “Yes. You did realize that’s part of the treatment, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I just came because the teacher told me to. At this point I’d do almost anything.”

  “It won’t hurt, I promise.”

  “Do you sterilize the needles or what?”

  “I use fresh needles for every patient.” She holds up a miniature red plastic garbage can with a flip top, a cute gadget smaller than a beer can. “See, the old ones go in here. As you’ll see, I open a new package each time.”

  I peer into the little can. Dozens of discarded needles. She must use hundreds, maybe thousands, each week. Someone is making a fortune on them. “What about these uncomfortable symptoms? I have enough uncomfortable symptoms as it is.”

  “Well, I can’t always tell what they’re going to be. That depends on your body. But sometimes after the treatment you might get a headache or a skin rash or a stomach ache. Or maybe muscle aches, a cold, fever, menstrual cramps.”

  “Great. You mean you can give me all that?”

  She laughs. “That’s not my aim. But as I’m moving out the toxins, they have to find a path to leave by, and there are only the obvious ways. Everything in the body moves in certain directions—from the organs to the skin, from the center to the extremities, from up to down. The particular path they take is your body’s choice. Afterward, as I said, you’ll feel better than before.”

  “I feel like a sewage disposal plant, with all those toxins.”

  “Don’t take it personally. It’s the body’s natural process—taking things in from outside, using them, and producing toxins to be released. Okay, I’m going to insert the needles now. Breathe in.”

  They don’t hurt. The thickness of a hair, she says. I crane my neck to study the landscape of my body, in bra and pants, punctured here and there by the long, red-tipped stalks. I look like an exotic planet growing hair-thin vegetation.

  “They go in triangular patterns.” As she inserts several more and twirls them a bit, she points out the triangles they form. So she’s just another kind of performance artist after all, and I’m a canvas for her abstract art, an integral part of the project, like Grace’s dentist.

  “You see,” she says, “how the ones on your stomach aren’t standing upright but kind of leaning? That’s because of the low chi there. As the treatments continue, you’ll begin to see them stand up straighter.”

  “That’s something to look forward to.”

  She returns an ironic flash of her blue eyes, then reaches over to a little witch’s chest and brings forth an object resembling an extremely long cigar. She lights one end with a cigarette lighter and instantly the air fills with the sweet marijuana odor.

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to smoke that!”

  “It’s not pot. It’s moxa, a Chinese herb. Everyone thinks it’s pot, the first time. Mothers in China still use this when their kids have colds or coughs. It’s very healing. You hold it above certain parts of the body and the fumes penetrate.” She holds the moxa over my stomach, which grows quite warm as I inhale happily.

  “It smells good. It’s a long time since I smoked any pot.”

  “It’s terrible for the immune system, unfortunately,” she replies. “One joint is equal to sixteen cigarettes. I’ll give you a couple of moxa sticks to take home, and show you where to use it. Also, you should take baths in Dead Sea salts. They’ll help release the toxins through the skin. You can buy them in the health food store.”

  “A whole new world is opening up.” I wonder, in fact, if my body’s inner map is shifting into the alien design I saw on the waiting room wall.

  “It’s very pleasant. You’ll see your arms float. I think you might like that.”

  While the hair-thin needles are poised over my skin (“That which has no substance enters where there is no space”—I checked out the Tao te Ching after I got the teacher’s note), and the drifts of pungent smoke move between us, she asks many questions. Where I was born, childhood diseases, eating and sleeping patterns, work, exercise, tastes and distastes. Not since I first met Q. has anyone taken such an interest in my personal habits. With each response she nods as if she figured as much, making an occasional note on the diagram of a nude body she holds on her lap, on which she’s marked x’s here and there. After twenty minutes her knowledge of me is encyclopedic. Quite unlike Dr. A., the tongue doctor, whose curiosity was limited to whom I had recently sucked off.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I keep dropping things.”

  She explains this as a loss of yang, which she pronounces so as to rhyme not with “bang” but with “gong.” “Health depends on the proper balance between yin and yang. If one or the other becomes too powerful, you’re thrown off balance, and you can feel it.” Yang, she says, is the grasping or holding-on faculty, as distinct from yin, the unfurling, receptive faculty.

  “In other words, I’m losing my grip.”

  “You could put it that way. It could be you went through some experience recently—physical or emotional or even professional—that required you to hang on too tight in one way or another.”

  A witch.

  “As a matter of fact ...” Under the spell of the moxa—mock-pot—and the needles that sway like palm trees over my smooth terrain, I find myself telling her about the shoot-out on the Bronx street and the grand jury that refused to indict anyone.

  “Ah,” she says. “That could certainly weaken you. I’m so sorry.”

  “So how can I strengthen my yang?” I must be bewitched. If she tells me to avoid stress, though, the spell will be broken.

  “There are exercises, but at this point I don’t think you should try anything strenuous. The Tai Chi is enough. What you should definitely avoid are cigarettes, alcohol, sugar, and caffeine.”

  That sounds familiar. “All of them?” They always helped keep a grip on things.

  My dismay amuses her. “As much as you can. Start with one or two. And you should eat foods that cohere tightly around a core, budlike foods. Brussels sprouts, cabbage. Tight foods.”

  “Tight?”

  “Yes. Rather than foods that open outward, like spinach or kale.”

  “The Tai Chi teacher said to eat watercress.”

  “Watercress? No, I’d say just the opposite. Foods have certain properties, and when you ingest them you ingest their properties as well. I’m not suggesting you change your diet completely because I can see you’re not the type who’ll do it, but at least eat things that aren’t too processed. The shorter the distance the food travels from its natural state, the better. It’s the same as with people—the more you try to alter their nature by processing them, the less authentic they get.”

  Full of metaphors, no less. “Yes, well, I don’t mind eating fresh vegetables. I like them. It just sounds . . . you know.”

  She smiles and leans over to remove the needles, which she drops delicately i
n the toy garbage can. Her fingers are long and thin, too, tipped with red. “You don’t need to believe anything. Just eat the stuff, okay? Also, I’ll give you some oils to rub in, and herbs which should improve your energy. They’re in capsule form. I like to brew them myself, but not everyone has the patience. Oh, and another thing. Walk.”

  “Walk?”

  “Yes, a little at a time. Walk where there are trees. For the oxygen.” “Can I move now? Are they all out? I feel a little spacy,” I say, sitting up.

  “That’s the energy moving in unfamiliar patterns.”

  “You’re the first person who’s offered any real help.” I toss the jars of herbs into my bag. “One of the worst things about this is that no one believes me, especially with so many people dying of AIDS and other terrible things. Well, almost no one. You know what people think—they make you feel like a fool.”

  “Yes, the virus that dares not speak its name.”

  A very literary witch.

  8

  “The lighthouse is falling into the sea,” I told Jilly as she came panting toward me. I had driven over, while she chose a three-mile run through the fields and over the dunes.

  “What do you mean? It looks perfectly fine to me.”

  It was our first full day on the Cape. We stood before the classic lighthouse, white with black trim. Beside it, the red-trimmed lighthouse keeper’s cottage looked the same as when I’d last seen it three summers ago, the same as years ago when I’d first come, its yard still dotted with bicycles and toy cars and trucks as if the children had not aged, or else more children kept being born to inherit them. The only addition was a new red skateboard.

  From the high dune we watched the black sea below, “graveyard of ships,” as this patch was called before the lighthouse was built. The sea appeared secretive as befits a graveyard, and nonchalant about its own beauty. A half dozen or so surfers rode the waves, making patterns like a Busby Berkeley musical against the stately dance of ripples and foam.

  “It’s not falling right now. It’s moving about three feet closer to the edge each year. Look, it tells you right here. Actually it’s the cliff that’s eroding. The ground is slipping out from under it.”

  We stood before the classic lighthouse, white with black trim. Beside it, the red-trimmed lighthouse keeper’s cottage looked the same as when I’d last seen it three summers ago.

  “I figured that out, Laura.”

  A hand-lettered sign appealed for help to save the lighthouse. In 1961 it had been two hundred thirty-two feet from the cliff and in 1990, one hundred twenty-eight feet. “At this rate it won’t be long,” I said.

  In the museum down the road we bought raffle tickets, adding to the fund to move the lighthouse farther back on the dune. Given the nature of erosion, the venture would have to be repeated, but we needn’t worry about that. Jilly’s great-grandchildren would contribute to the next move.

  “What’s being raffled off?” Jilly asked the woman at the desk, an elderly pastel woman, all pink, white and blue.

  “First prize is a copper rooster from the Town Hall Weather Vane and second prize is a picture by a local artist. The drawing is after Labor Day.” She smiled with pink benevolence. “Good luck.”

  “I was hoping it would be something like a car,” Jilly said as we trudged back up the hill. “I’ll need a car in the fall to work with this theatre group in Center City. We want to rent space in a storefront gallery for a protest piece on the famine in Somalia. We’ll take turns sitting there, two at a time, wearing rags and eating grains of rice with our fingers out of wooden bowls. Isn’t that a great idea? Anyway, speaking of cars, I’ve got to bring Grandpa’s old pickup back to life because, well, I have a job waitressing in Provincetown. Six days a week. You’ll be alone a lot. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not. I didn’t expect you to baby-sit. How’d you manage that so fast?”

  “I heard about this new upscale place, Chez Louise, in the East End, so I called and said I was an experienced waitress and almost a local person, my family was from here, and she said okay, come see her tonight. I’m pretty sure I’ll get it. Those places are silly but the people are big tippers.”

  “You’re very enterprising. The truck looks pretty dead to me, though.”

  “No problem.” She waved a hand airily. “Jeff taught me a lot about engines. I’ll make it run. Or I’ll ask the guys at the station to come and help. I have to hunt up the keys. Oh, did you ever go to the health food store like I told you?”

  “As you told me. Yes, I got the bee pollen.” Got it but hadn’t yet taken it.

  “Good. I bet you’ll improve up here. The sea air and all.”

  “Maybe.” Meanwhile, I still felt filled with sand. If my skin were peeled off I’d be a shapely dune like the ones undulating around us. How well I fit in the landscape—sand washed over by tides of memory.

  “I know lots of people who’ve had this, Laura. In fact it usually hits younger people, so you see, it took you for a young body. There must have been half a dozen in my dorm last year. It’s like mono—you know how many students get mono from overwork or overexcitement or whatever? It could even be an aftereffect of mono. Did your doctor say anything about that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Everyone I know got better. It just takes time.”

  “They were young.”

  “You’re young, too. Forty is pretty young.”

  “Forty-one.”

  “Whatever. You feel old but that’s the illness. Let’s go get some clams for dinner. You rest and I’ll cook.”

  SHE SET OFF THE NEXT DAY, the truck cleaned up, its engine thrumming. “Off to join the labor force,” she called out the window.

  Even though I’d watched her grow, I was always a little surprised at how lean and rangy Jilly had become, a firm-boned girl with long legs and large eloquent hands. With her tanned face and her dark hair in a heavy braid down her back, she might have been one of her Portuguese ancestors, a fisherman’s wife, perhaps. Apart from her work outfit, that is, a denim miniskirt and white tank top.

  Ev’s family were among the many who came from Portugal a century and a half ago, some keeping their alien names, others lopping off a final vowel or shifting a syllable to transform them into Yankee names. Those who worked as indentured servants took their masters’ names, so that reading a town roster today, you’d never imagine the names and their bearers had traveled so far. The language survived, though, with some families still speaking Portuguese among themselves. And in the groceries, even in convenience stores like the one Ev’s parents ran at their gas station, amid the lackluster Protestant bread and canned tuna and sliced ham, you could find Portuguese breads and sausages, and on lucky days sweet malasadas, wanton, doughnut-like delicacies with no hole, whose racy spices melted on your tongue.

  Jilly’s eyes, though, were New England blue, earnest and serious. Her mother’s, no doubt, the woman who admonished her children that every appetite passes in twenty minutes. Jilly had a streak of that unlovely stoicism, too.

  After she left I visited the local library, a white frame house no larger than my apartment back home, to find books about the town and especially about its tides. The tides were mysterious and overdetermined. It was important to get a sense of their movements and rhythms, and not only for my languishing book. The mysterious thing that possessed me—virus, spell, or planetary decay—felt like a tide, too, advancing and receding, eroding then relenting, an inner flow and ebb that inundated then parched the cells. A tide of blood and heat.

  Ask anyone what causes the tides and chances are they’ll say something about the moon’s gravitational pull on the earth. That was what Ev’s father answered years ago on my first visit. When I pressed him for exactly how it worked, he put down his knife and fork patiently, cupped his gnarled hands before him and tipped them gently from side to side. “You’ve got to think of the ocean floor like a big bucket, or a basin,” he said. “The earth spins around and the basin tip
s, just like if you were carrying it and running in circles at the same time. The water sloshes around. High tide here—” he nodded toward the hand tipped low, “and low tide there. You get it?” Yes, I nodded back, though I didn’t see what that had to do with the pull of the moon.

  I was struck, that first time, by the ugliness inside the house. The furnishings, that is. Not the dreary sort of ugliness that pains the soul but an amusing, senseless clutter that tried to cover every inch as in a primitive painting, perhaps in a misguided attempt to enliven or fill up the blank beauty of the surroundings. Every inner door had a doorstop against the constant winds, and every doorstop was a pug-faced porcelain dog. The large pair of lamps in the living room were, and still are, statuettes of fishermen wearing yellow sou’westers, braced for a storm. Each stout piece of furniture was robed in a print slipcover, and even the kitchen chairs wore seat pads decorated with tropical birds and tied to the chair backs with ribbons. The potholders and dish towels bore pictures of kittens, the curtains pictures of fishing boats. The oval hooked rugs on every floor were the colors of mud and old blood, while the chenille bedspreads were pastels. Yet for all that the house was lovable, the air blowing through it cool, fresh, faintly salty.

  It was Ev’s great-grandfather who built the house on a low rounded hill (truly in 1877 as I wrote in my tentative pages) for his growing family. He must have been grateful to have a family to house, for he was one of the few men of his line left after the great gale of 1841, known to this day as the October gale. It had sprung up unforeseen in midday, after an innocent morning promising fair weather and mild seas, and destroyed a fleet of seven ships. Fifty-seven fishermen, some as young as twelve years old, were lost at sea. An overwhelming loss for a small fishing town of several hundred people. Ev’s great-grandfather had been an infant at the time and the family newly arrived. The storm took his father, two teenage brothers, two uncles, and three cousins.