by Meghan Daum
It started with a fever. Actually it started before that. Of course it did. Nothing ever begins when you think it does. You think you can trace something back to its roots but roots by definition never end. There’s always something that came before: soil and water and seeds that were born of trees that were born of yet more seeds. The fever may have been the first thing I bothered to pay attention to but there was so much before that. It’s possible I’d been getting sick all along, that my immunity had begun slowly eroding from the week my grandmother died and my mother became a cancer patient. Throughout it all, I hadn’t so much as gotten a cold. But in October 2010, right around the one-year mark of the wedding and the screaming at Thanksgiving and the buying of Depends and the administering of the morphine and then the Haldol and then the methadone, I returned to New York for a visit. I wanted to attend a friend’s wedding, see the leaves, escape the taunting, pitiless heat of autumn in Southern California. It was my first time back in New York since my mother had died and I thought it might be possible to claim the streets as my own again, to seal the preceding eighteen months in plastic and toss them in a trash can where they could await collection alongside the Greek paper coffee cups and the dog shit.
The fever was perplexing, as I am rarely sick, so rarely in fact that I didn’t have a primary care doctor at home in Los Angeles, much less in New York, where I’d lived during my entire twenties without health insurance. Not that there seemed any need for one. It was the flu, obviously. The only cure was time and fluids. For three days I staved off the fever with aspirin, huddling under blankets in a friend’s Brooklyn apartment and canceling one plan after another. But time was curing nothing. Each day I woke up to more weakness and more fever, body aches that felt like I’d been thrown down the stairs the day before, thirst that no amount of orange juice could quench.
The day after returning to Los Angeles I went to a walk-in clinic, where I was put on an IV for rehydration, told I had a nasty virus, and sent home. The next day I couldn’t stand up and my eyes were yellow. I returned to the clinic and was put on another IV and then in an ambulance to the nearest hospital, where I was asked what year it was and couldn’t think of the answer. Formless, meaningless words rolled out of my mouth like worms. There was no grabbing on to them. They had no edges, no consonants, no meaning. A doctor came and held his fingers up and asked me to follow them. He furrowed his brow as he wrote notes in his chart. When my husband showed up from work I was suddenly compelled to express grave concern for a friend back in New York. She was the last person I’d seen before I got the fever. We’d had dinner in Carroll Gardens and then I’d stopped at a drugstore for vitamin C pills. Now, after closing my eyes in a hospital bed and then waking from a half-sleep involving some half-dream in which this friend was being held against her will (metaphorically speaking, that is; it was as if I were witnessing her life from afar and seeing all the ways in which she was an indentured servant—to her husband, to the publishing business, to New York City itself), the words fell from my mouth like food dribbling down a baby’s chin. Somewhere in my mind there was a concept, an urgent, hulking, planetlike idea that I had to get out. But it seemed composed of invisible gases. It was an abstraction within an abstraction and now it was sliding out of my line of vision the way the landmarks drift past the windows of an airborne plane. Still, I had something to say.
“Listen to me,” I slurred. “I need to tell you something. We have to help Sara.”
The words came out as lishen to me and we hava help Shara.
I do not recall being in any pain or even being terribly anxious. Instead, I was mortified. I sounded exactly like my mother. The voice coming from my parched mouth might as well have been a recording of her voice on the day she rubbed her cane in my hair. Even in my delirium, I cringed the way adult children cringe when they look down and realize the hands sticking out of their arms are actually their parents’ hands. I remember thinking that everyone was onto me now. My husband, the doctor, whoever else was there: they all knew not only that I was my mother’s daughter but also that I was no different from her. Just as she had outlived her own mother by less than a year, I, too, would be denied a life outside of her shadow. The message was so obvious it might as well have been preordained: no woman in this matriarchal line would escape punishment for not loving her mother enough, for not mourning her mother enough, for not missing her enough, for refusing to touch her. None of us would be allowed out in the world on our own.
Apparently this had all happened on a Wednesday. It’s the last thing I remember before waking up on what I was told was Sunday. It would be several more days before I understood that they’d put me in a medically induced coma and I’d almost taken things a step further by dying.
People who’d been milling around the hospital, bringing my husband food he couldn’t eat and asking questions no one could answer, would later want me to tell them what had happened during the four days I was out. Had there been a white light? Had I encountered any dead relatives? Had I experienced anything that would move me to radically change my life? When I couldn’t come up with anything interesting I started to wonder if the random thoughts I’d had in the half-awake state of the postcatatonic, prelucid days that followed my transfer out of the ICU were actually remnants of a near-death narrative. In those days I’d started to think, for instance, that if I survived whatever had happened (and we didn’t know what had happened until my ninth day in the hospital) I’d get my act together and behave like an adult. I would, for instance, stop being so bratty about finding the perfect piece of real estate. (My last conversation with my husband, before I grew too sick to converse, had been yet another argument over how much we were willing to overpay to remain living in the inflated, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood where we’d recently sold my tiny, rather ramshackle single-girl house and which I believed to be the only neighborhood in the continental United States where I could be happy.) I’d forgive my father (who’d gotten on a plane for L.A. around the time I’d been put in the coma) for complaining about his foot. I’d make an effort to be closer to my in-laws, who I’d heretofore never thought to call on my own volition. (My father, for his part, had managed to go his entire married life without ever initiating a conversation with my mother’s mother or even addressing her by name.)
I even, to my great shock, entertained the thought of having a baby. I’d never really wanted one. For about a million reasons, it had barely scraped the bottom of my to-do list since approximately the seventh grade. My husband knew this, but I’d always suspected that one of the pacts of our marriage was an unspoken belief that I might change my mind. And the more I learned about how sick I’d been—it seemed I’d had swelling of the brain, multiple organ failure, and a severe platelet disorder that required several transfusions; it seemed my wrists were bruised not because of medication, as I’d suspected, but because I’d been placed in restraints after trying to pull out my breathing and feeding tubes; it seemed there’d been a very real possibility that I’d die and an even greater possibility that if I didn’t die, I’d have brain trauma that would require long-term rehabilitation; it seemed that throughout all this my husband had left my side only to use the bathroom and to phone anyone he could think of who might know who the best brain trauma specialists were—the more I thought that refusing to have a child was fatuous at best and gratuitously defiant at worst. After all, who says I’d be as negative and judgmental a parent as I’d always assumed I’d be? Who says I’d shudder at the sight of toys in my quiet, uncluttered, grown-up rooms? Who says I’d be as nervous and angry as my own mother had been, that the damage incurred by her own mother would trickle down and sting my eyes just enough to blind me to the damage I myself was inflicting? Who says my old maxim on this subject would turn out to be right, that if I had a child I would certainly love it but not necessarily love my life. Who was saying this but me? No one, of course. And who was I to be trusted?
Miraculously (this was the word they used), I got bett
er fast enough to leave the hospital after eleven days. The diagnosis, in a nutshell, was freak illness. A bacterial infection gone terribly awry. I went home and slept for two weeks. Two months later my husband and I bought a house in a neighborhood other than the one I’d insisted on living in. It had twice as many bedrooms as we had people in our household; it was owned by the bank and we got it for cheap. Within a month of moving in, a few weeks after my forty-first birthday, I was pregnant.
I was neither excited nor dismayed. I told myself that now that my mother wasn’t around to make me feel guilty for not being sufficiently impressed with her, I could find it within myself to be impressed with a child. I told myself there was plenty of room in the house, that I wouldn’t have to give up my study if we could combine the den and the guest room, that it was perfectly acceptable to be sixty years old by the time your kid graduated high school. I told myself I’d raise the kid to be strong and independent and to not need me. I’d send it to summer camp and maybe to boarding school. I’d encourage it to make the kind of friends who stick around, to find a community and stay there, maybe even to marry young. I’d ensure that if I died at sixty-seven the kid would be able to pack up those George Kovacs lamps around my decaying body and not feel too bad about it. I thought of it as “it” even though I was sure it was a boy. I was also sure all these provisions were unnecessary because the thing itself wasn’t going to stick around.
It didn’t. It was gone after eight weeks. I was neither relieved nor devastated. There’d been an element of impostordom to the whole thing, as though I’d spent two months wearing the wrong outfit. The lab results came back the way they usually do for forty-one-year-olds who miscarry: chromosomal abnormalities, totally nonsurvivable, nothing that could have been done. When I asked the doctor if it was possible to know what sex it would have been, she told me that it would have been a girl. I was shocked for a moment but then not. Of course it was a girl. It was a girl and of course it was dead, another casualty of our fragile maternal line, another pair of small hands that would surely have formed furious fists in the presence of her mother. Except this one was gone before she even got here. Maybe she’d joined the others somewhere. Maybe she’d already become a bird. Maybe she’d circle back to me someday and reattempt her landing. Or maybe, better yet, she was the quick, quiet epilogue at the end of our story. Not that I’ll ever know what this story is about. I know only that I’ll probably never finish telling it and it most certainly will never be whole.
THE BEST POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE
I once dated a man who read astrology books, believed in chakras, and worked regularly with a spirit guide, a communion that involved visiting a “spirit guide counselor” at her modest townhouse near San Diego and paying her to chant and beat drums while he lay on a massage table wearing flashing LED sunglasses. This man was very spiritual. He spoke often of his “teachers,” by which he meant not high school or college teachers who had exerted particular influence but various yoga and meditation instructors who I now suspect he’d had sex with. He went to the Burning Man festival every year in a giant RV. He had a “home yoga practice” that chiefly involved lying on the floor of his bedroom and “centering his energy.” He was a student of erotic massage. He was into “breath work.”
He took me to the spirit guide counselor one time. He said he wanted me to understand him better, and because my anthropological curiosity often trumps my common sense (and because he was covering all costs, including the scenic Amtrak ride down the coast from L.A.), I agreed. The counselor, who, if I recall, charged $200 for a forty-minute session, asked me a few things about myself: what were my greatest fears, what was my most cherished memory, what were my most pressing issues at the moment. Though my most pressing issue was that I was dating someone with whom I had spectacularly little in common and somehow hadn’t yet gotten around to breaking up with, I told her that I had “commitment issues” generally. She handed me the glasses and had me lie down on the massage table. She told me to tell her what colors I became aware of as she chanted and beat the drums. The visual effect was a lot like what happens when you press down on your eyelids. I told her I saw a lot of black and some yellow. She took out a steel triangle and struck it with a mallet. She took out a cowbell and rang it several times. After about half an hour she told me to go into the living room and wait while she received the message from my spirit guide. My gentleman friend was sitting on the sofa flipping through the most recent issue of Variety, which he’d brought with him. He explained that the counselor always provided a full-page, single-spaced report that she typed up on her computer in a postsession fury of divine dictation.
Soon enough she came in with the results. She said I was the reincarnation of the spirit master Lord Lanto, an ascended master who serves as the ruler of the Second Ray of the solar presence. This is the ray of wisdom, and it vibrates as the color yellow. On the train ride home, I read my report:
Blessings and praise to you, Divine Meghan. You are indeed a star child. But you are so much more than that. You are an ascended master who has chosen to incarnate this lifetime to assist the planet in its time of transition … Life on earth has been a little bit difficult for you to adjust to. You come from a much more advanced civilization and it is hard for you to understand how humans can do the things they do to one another in the name of God and in the name of love. This is why you shy away from committed and close relationships … It will be good for you to see the spirit guide counselor again as soon as possible because she is the accelerator and the awakener. You need to have a private session so your needs can be more easily met.
That’s just an excerpt, but you get the gist.
My paramour seemed pleased by this, as Lanto was known to emanate an intense golden aura from his heart center, which was visible to those who had “learned through deep practice how to see,” and which he had noticed on me recently while we were watching television. For his part, his work with the spirit guide counselor had long ago established that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
This man was one of those people who don’t just think or believe in things but are about things. Let me tell you what I’m about, he said on one of our earlier dates. He was about “spontaneity” and “acceptance.” He was about “being in the moment.” One time, in the midst of a discussion over how I should design my new business cards, he suggested I incorporate a pattern of circles, such as he had done on his own self-designed cards. When I said, “I don’t like circles, I like squares,” his body caved in a bit, and he looked hurt. “If you don’t like circles,” he said, “you don’t like me.”
Like most of us, this man was full of contradictions, though whereas in some people contradictions can add to overall interestingness, the effect in his case was mostly exasperating. For all his disciplined mellowness, he erred more than a little on the side of obsessive compulsion. Though it’s hard now to believe our relationship advanced to the air-travel stage, we ended up taking a trip to New York, where we stayed at the Hilton Towers in midtown Manhattan. Upon our arrival, he decided he didn’t like our room and requested a move to a higher floor. He made this decision after we’d been in the room a solid fifteen minutes, enough time for him to unpack his suitcase and not only hang his shirts and pants in the closet but also fold his socks and underwear and sweaters into neat stacks in the dresser drawers. When I suggested to him that all of the rooms in this thirty-six-story hotel were pretty much identical he told me that we were paying guests and deserved our money’s worth (which happened to be $140 per night via Priceline.com). He called the front desk and requested a room change and soon a bellman arrived to escort us to a higher floor.
Upon inspection of the new room, my friend decided he didn’t like the desk chair in the new room as much as the one in the old room and asked if they could be swapped out.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked.
“I just want to have the best possible experience,” he said.
“Well, you are not
asking this gentleman to go switch the chairs,” I said, glancing sheepishly at the bellman.
“Then I’ll do it myself,” he said. He then rolled the chair out into the hallway and accompanied the bellman down the elevator to the first room. Ten minutes later, he returned with the previous desk chair, which had armrests whereas the other did not.
I’m a little hazy on the details of the rest of this trip. However, I do remember sitting in silence at the airport while Desk Chair, a perfectly able-bodied forty-year-old, insisted on preboarding our return flight along with “those in need of special assistance” because he wanted to secure more overhead space and was not above lying about having a back injury. (I refused to partake in this scheme and we boarded separately.) And though I have tried many times to forget, I’m afraid I also recall quite vividly that, upon our arrival in L.A., I somehow ending up riding in the backseat of my own car as we left the airport.