by Iris Smyles
Mood: Started reading Crime and Punishment last week and have detected a significant shift in the attitudes of both left and right subjects. They are brooding where they were once amiable. Catching sight of them in the mirror earlier, I noticed them eyeing me antagonistically. If they could speak, they’d bark: “The chicken crosses, so that I might kill and eat him!” But they cannot speak. Yet. Instead they sit squarely against me, peevish and silent.
8:23 PM
Worried about my finances, I take to the computer and visit my bank’s website to stare at my account balance. Finding I am very much broke, I decide to stay home for the rest of the week in order to save money. Bored by the thought, I start clicking on pop-up ads I usually ignore.
One thing leads to another, and soon I am hot on the trail of a free iPod Mini, with just a few minor purchases. I use my credit card to join the Tie of the Month Club and Wine of the Month Club, but think twice when it’s time to purchase an outdoor barbeque set. I have no room in my apartment for it—the paint thinner didn’t work. Damn! I can’t afford to lose this deal! I pass a half hour in front of the computer. I lose the deal. I shut the computer off and lie on my bed. When I close my eyes, pop-up ads flash before them. I open them. What demons possess me? What am I going to do with all these ties?
. . . you looked as if you were tipsy; you drew a couple of breaths, then out it came, and you forgot everything else in the bliss of the sensation. . . . [Sneezing] was the sort of pleasure life gave you free of charge.
—THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain, TRANS. H. T. LOWE-PORTER
Hey, Houdini
I WAS ON THE COUCH trying to work my mysteries when I spotted a cat close to the ceiling, staring right at me. Another, soundlessly, jumped up beside him and began eyeing me from the penthouse level of what Kevin, an emergency room psychiatrist and the man I was dating but hadn’t yet kissed, called “a cat condo.”
“I’m allergic to cats,” I told Kevin, who was in the next room, getting our drinks.
“Not my cats!” he called back. He walked into the room and handed me a beer.
“Thanks,” I said, and then, noticing a fifth of whiskey on his kitchen counter, added, “Maybe we should have some of that whiskey to wash down the beer.”
Kevin returned with two highball glasses and a pack of cigarettes.
“I have some Benadryl in the medicine cabinet if you want. For your allergies,” he said, sitting down beside me.
“No, thanks,” I said, swallowing a mouthful of Scotch and then cracking the beer open and sipping foam from the top. “I try to avoid over-the-counter medications. Worried too much about the liver.” I made my hand into a fist and knocked on my abdomen as if my liver were a cabinet I’d built out of wood. “Anyway, I can’t stay long.”
I looked at my watch: 6 PM. By 7 PM I would be out the door, I’d decided on the walk over. I needed to set a firm hour of departure, so as to not accidentally stay too long and with that dilute my carefully constructed air of mystery. I took another sip of beer then chugged the whole can.
It was Sunday evening and our second-and-a-half date. Half because it wasn’t an official date; I was only “dropping by” to borrow his gorilla suit. On Monday, I’d be launching my new literary magazine (in the future, everyone will edit a magazine for fifteen minutes) and had organized a panel of well-known writers to speak at Strand Bookstore. My plan was for the gorilla to sit silently among them. When I told Kevin of this, he offered his gorilla suit, leftover from Halloween when he dressed as Robin Williams. “I just wore the body suit with a tank top, pants, and rainbow suspenders,” he explained.
“Suit yourself,” he said regarding the Benadryl. He picked up the remote and turned the volume up on the TV. Side by side, we watched a Downy commercial in complete silence. I started to wonder if maybe I should have declined his offer of a drink instead of asking for two, if I should have just left after he handed me the gorilla hands and feet.
“Shoo, shoo, shoo!” Kevin yelled, interrupting my thoughts. The orange cat had sprung onto the armrest. I started from surprise. “You have to be firm with them,” he said, looking at me hard. “Anything you want to watch?” he asked, directing his attention again toward the TV.
“I like the TV Guide Channel.”
“Where they list what’s on all the other channels?”
“Mm-hmmm,” I said, suppressing a gag from the whiskey. “It’s my favorite,” I announced, as a way of suggesting, I can’t commit to one channel, no less one man! You’ll have to battle my commitment issues if you want to have a relationship with this hot ticket! It was my first time playing hard to get and I was struggling. I don’t actually have “commitment issues,” but I’ve met a lot of men who do, so I figured I’d pretend to have them, the way some girls pretend to be into sports, thinking maybe we could bond over it.
I stared happily at the TV. In the screen’s upper-right corner, in a small box above the scrolling channel menu, was a rerun of American Idol, season one. I stared awhile more, pretending this was what I had in mind.
I lit one of his cigarettes and tried to look sexy and confident as I did so. Then I realized I lit the wrong end. He reached for the box and offered me another, but I said, “It’s okay,” and pulled my key chain from my purse and used the nail clipper on my mini Swiss army knife to cut the singed end off the filter. I relit it daintily and exhaled a long plume upward, like a sultry French actress in Le Dragon Magique Puff. I asked him about work.
He told me about the patients he had seen that day in the ER, how his job was simply to talk to them and ascertain if they were actually dying or only having a panic attack, which reminded me of the bemused look on another doctor’s face when I visited the ER myself a few years ago.
It was a few weeks after college graduation. I’d just gotten high with my roommate when my generalized anxiety over what to do with my life manifested in an acute physical pain in my side and the firm belief that my insides were melting. My roommate walked me to the hospital a few blocks away, where I waited for eight hours for a very sarcastic doctor to admit me. After being examined by three more doctors and a small team of med students, it was determined that I had a yeast infection. They prescribed Monistat’s one-day treatment and suggested I eat more yogurt. A few weeks later, I received a bill in the mail for $700 and, since I didn’t have the money, had to call my parents and tell them about the yeast infection. My father reprimanded me about my wild lifestyle and told me I needed to get over these “commitment issues.”
I imagined Kevin’s face on the body of that sarcastic doctor and began to hate him, which naturally increased my attraction. I inched closer.
“Panic attacks can cause physical symptoms, like a raised heartbeat and shortness of breath, which contribute to the patient’s idea that he or she is dying,” he went on, as if giving a lecture. “Of course, the patient is not actually dying, but it can feel very real.”
“Like love!” I interjected.
“Once I’ve ruled out the need for urgent medical treatment, I just talk to them for a while and try to calm them down.”
“What do you talk to them about?”
“I’ll ask a series of mundane questions, simple stuff to help ground their imaginations and focus their attention on what’s real.” He swallowed a few fingers’ worth of whiskey and smiled.
“I once saw an ad in the back of the Voice about free experimental panic disorder treatments at Columbia University and was going to go—I had my coat on and everything—before I was like, wait, they want to subject me to ‘test treatments’? My heart raced at the thought, so I went back inside, sat down, and practiced my breathing a while.” I looked at him. “You know, I heard this story about some clinical trials they were running at a university medical center down in Texas. After being administered a new drug, the subjects began expanding, some of them doubling and tripling in mass before exploding!”
“Medicine’s a grizzly business,” he said, taking my cigarette, which now had a long ash. He tap
ped it over the ashtray, took a drag, exhaled, and smiled at me again, which is when I asked him about the possibility of my obtaining a prescription for Xanax, Klonopin, or any other fun anxiety suppressant. He shook his head, but I knew what he meant—the way I withhold sex from a man until I have his heart, he was withholding Paxil from me until he had my body. I sexed him with my eyes.
“What do you think is causing your panic attacks?” he asked, handing me back my cigarette.
“My liver,” I said. “It’s all I think about. I don’t take Tylenol or Advil or Benadryl anymore because I don’t want to agitate it. I endure the most horrific hangovers as a result, and sometimes this causes the attack. I’ll be hung-over and start to think my liver hurts and begin poking around and pressing on it.”
“You can’t feel your liver, you know.”
“Exactly. The fact that I can feel mine is what has me worried. Also, I have trouble breathing, especially when I try to sleep. When I close my eyes, my breathing feels uneven, which makes me nervous, and then my heart starts racing, and then I can’t breathe and have to get out of bed and walk around.”
He took my hand in his and looked at me. “Sounds like you have it.”
“Sleep apnea?” I’d Googled the symptoms earlier.
“Panic disorder,” he corrected me. “Just try to remember when it happens that you’re not dying, you’re just crazy.” He laughed and let go of my hand and turned back to the TV. “Law & Order is on twenty-six and thirty-eight,” he said, when, out of nowhere, the black-and-white cat jumped on my lap.
“Shoo, shoo, shoo,” Kevin repeated and, coming to my rescue again, picked the cat up and threw him to the ground. The cat landed on its feet and made a graceful exit into the next room. Kevin sat down. “Sorry about that.”
“Most of the time I don’t think I’m dying, but it’s hard to know for sure because I don’t have insurance. I try to examine my own urine sometimes, but I have no idea what I’m looking for,” I said, feeling suddenly despondent.
“How sad,” he said, placing a hand on my shoulder. He stuck out his bottom lip in imitation of mine. “A lonely girl and her urine.”
“A lot of people mind being called ‘poor thing,’ but not me.”
“You poor thing,” he said, feeling my cheek and forehead with the back of his hand.
“Do I have a fever?”
“No. But I could take your temperature just in case,” he said, finding my eyes. “I could give you a checkup if you want. I am a licensed MD.”
“Really?” I said, brightening, happy at how well the half-date was going.
“I’ll get my stethoscope.” And with that he disappeared into the bedroom.
“Actually,” I called out to him, “I’m not sure I want you to look at my urine just yet. I mean this is only our third date.” I stood up, feeling suddenly shy.
“Second and one-half,” he called back.
“I can do other tests,” he said, reentering the room with a stethoscope around his neck. He touched my back lightly and motioned toward the couch. “Lie down.”
First he checked my heartbeat against my chest and back. Then my lungs by asking me to “just breathe normally.” I gasped in and out. Then he announced he was going to percuss my liver. He began tapping my midsection, listening for sounds, and I had trouble not tensing my stomach each time. He told me I had to relax in order for him to be able to evaluate my liver. “But that’s how Houdini died!” I said, thinking of the story my friend Veronica told me by the coat closet in the second grade.
It was just after a successful show during which Harry Houdini had performed one of his most famous tricks, one that required him to endure a fantastic blow to the stomach. Later that night, passing by the docks on his way home, a shadowy figure approached the famous magician and said, “Hey, Houdini!” and socked him in the stomach before he had a chance to tense up. He died of internal bleeding, his magic his undoing.
“How’s my liver?” I tensed.
“Perfectly normal,” he said, and disappeared into the bedroom. He returned with his reflex instruments. “I’m going to measure the response time in your knees, elbows, and wrists.”
“What about my heart?”
“Testing the baroreflex requires a different tool.”
I sighed.
He activated my right knee. “Rather than just sighing, I like to say ‘sigh,’” he said, hitting it again. “And I like to actually pronounce the ‘gh’ sound. Most of the letters we leave silent were vocalized in Old English, you know. You need to lower the waistline of your pants now.”
“Oh.”
“I’m screening you for ovarian cysts. I’m going to press on your pelvis a little, and you tell me if you feel any discomfort when I do.”
“Okay.”
“I feel a special affection for the silent letters. Like the ‘p’ in ‘psychology.’” He pronounced the “p” carefully. “That’s how it’s pronounced in Greek. Comes from the Greek letter ‘psi,’ so really it’s incorrect when we Americans keep the ‘p’ silent. No letters should ever be kept silent,” he said, looking at me. “It’s terrible what people do.”
“Yes.”
“You’re okay,” he said, still kneeling.
I sat up. “What about my glands? I heard Parkinson’s has to do with the happiness glands not closing properly. I read somewhere that each person has a finite amount of happiness and the danger of drugs like Ecstasy is that it floods your system with them instead of rationing them out over time. It’s like a binge and then you have none left.”
He made circles with his fingers behind my ears. “Your glands are fine,” he said, gazing professionally past my face, just over my head, before shifting his eyes to meet mine. I smiled. “Don’t smile so much,” he said. “You’ll waste all your happiness.” He glanced quickly at my whole face before he straightened up and sat again at a polite distance.
“You’re in perfect health!”
“Thank you,” I said, both relieved and a little sad that the exam was over. “Aren’t there any other tests you can administer?”
He paused. “I could screen you for breast cancer.”
I thought for a moment. “My health is important to me.” I looked at him. “Shall I lay back down or sit up for this?”
“You can stay sitting up,” he said. “You’ll need to remove your shirt, though.”
I removed my shirt and then unclasped the back of my bra and folded everything neatly into a pile next to me.
He maintained a careful clinical eye on my chest and then blushed.
“Okay?” I asked nervously.
Applying his hands to my bare breasts, he began searching for lumps. I stared off into various ceiling corners watching his cats watch us. “Dr. Goldman usually does circles,” I noted, as he pressed with two fingers in a more vertical brush-like pressure.
“You can do it either way.”
“I was told once that you should never let a cat stare you down. That you should always make sure they look away first or they’ll think they’re your master. I always get stressed now when I look at cats.” The orange cat looked at me and I looked away first. “I can’t imagine dealing with that kind of power struggle on a daily basis. Do you always win with your cats?”
He sat back on the coffee table directly opposite me. “You can get dressed now,” he said, looking at the ground.
“Thank you,” I said, recovering my pink bra and T-shirt. I started to get dressed. “It is disconcerting to have no primary care physician,” I said, before feeling suddenly embarrassed. What if he thought I was rushing things, that I wanted him to be my primary care physician? I blushed. “We probably should have made use of your paper towels during the exam. We could have wrapped them around me like a hospital gown, you know, to make it more official.”
He sat down next to me, put the TV on mute, and looked at me. I looked at him and then at the TV, at Kelly Clarkson singing in the upper-right corner. Her mouth was stretched open real
ly wide, as if she were moaning something like “help” or “love.” “It’s too bad you haven’t any TB vaccines—”
Which is when he kissed me.
He lunged and his whole body was all at once on top of mine. I struggled to adjust myself; the remote control was stuck under my back. Noticing my discomfort, he shifted his weight onto his arms a bit. “Don’t want to puncture your organs,” he breathed hectically. After another minute, he re-removed my shirt and bra, and then, a few minutes after that, I started to have what I call the quarter-kiss crisis.
It’s that moment after you’ve been kissing awhile when you start to think, What now, what next, where is this going, and you begin second-guessing your decision to have majored in English in college as opposed to something more practical like computer science, before becoming angry at the whole university system in general, its exorbitant prices and the fact that no one bothered to prepare you for the real world—it wasn’t your fault you didn’t know what to do when you graduated, that you still don’t know what to do now. And you consider enrolling in secretarial school, some place nice and old-fashioned where you can learn to type forty words per minute on a typewriter while wearing white gloves, and then wonder if you wouldn’t have been better off being born in another time, in another place, and then decide you might have wondered the very same thing then, too, and that it’s not the year that’s the problem, but you. I struggled to push these feelings aside and began kissing him more aggressively while also scratching an itch on my neck.
Kevin kissed away, oblivious to my career uncertainty, so bewitched was he by my mysteries, I suppose, or perhaps he was undergoing his own quarter-kiss crisis and was wondering if he should have majored in linguistics like he’d wanted to despite his parents’ admonitions.
After another minute, I started to feel altogether too comfortable, which began to worry me further. Only the dead are truly comfortable. And so, with my left hand, I fished around on the floor for the remote I’d removed and tried to put it back where it had been—wedged between my lower back and the seat cushions—as a symbolic gesture, as a way of saying yes to life.