Lying

by Lauren Slater

  What happened is this. The rest of the world began to feel far away, a land I no longer knew how to live in. I felt bad for everyone in this land, and I looked at them with scorn.

  Instead of learning to live in the land, I went to the doctor’s almost every day after school, and once or twice a week I slept over at the hospital, packing my red carrying case like I was going to a girlfriend’s house. I looked forward to socializing with the nurses in the solarium. When I wasn’t there, I missed them and thought about when I’d go back. I started to have a daydream in which it was always winter. Dressed in a Lycra skirt, bright white skates laced around my petite legs, I looked as perfect as a toy. In my daydream I skimmed over the ice, cold shavings flying from my blades while people stood in the bleachers and clapped. This was the Olympics, and I was winning the world. People clapped as I jumped into the air, came down on a rose tossed into the rink. My balance buckled. I was not at fault. I fell like a winner, like a warrior; I fell with all the innocence of a victim. When I woke up, I was in a hospital and a doctor who spoke French was healing me with his hands. With his hands he worked my broken bones like they were Lincoln Logs, snapping me softly into place. He fixed everything except my left leg, which instead he plastered in a cast. I went back into the world like that, and everyone who saw me said, “Oh. Oh. I’m sorry.”

  Sometimes, if I had this daydream in bed, I would fall asleep before it was finished. Other times I would get to the end only to start the story all over again, only this time I had broken not only my bones, but many of my organs too, and the doctor who spoke French had to work on me using many experimental cures.

  Understand, I would have told no one back then. The experimental cures involved pins and touch. Maybe I was becoming mentally ill. Actually, I was becoming mentally ill. If you’ve read my other books—and I have written other books, Prozac Diary and Welcome to My Country, which I suggest you rush out and buy—you would know that mental problems have been issues throughout my life.

  Is epilepsy mental or is it physical? A long time ago, when van Gogh was alive, people with epilepsy were put in insane asylums, where I’m sure, with their froth, they fit right in. In my own life, even though she pooh-poohed psychoanalysis, Dr. Swan had once told me my seizures were the result of repressed things, and if I could just let my feelings fly free I would get better. I had asked Dr. Neu about that and he said bosh, and he’s brilliant, whereas Dr. Swan was merely bright. But still. When I look back on myself now, from the vantage point of many years, and see myself as I was, all thrash and spasm, I have to wonder what it meant, if my sickness was like longing for things in the past I had never had, and for things in the future I was too afraid to try.

  • • •

  “We might be able to cure you pretty soon,” Dr. Neu said to me one day.

  “What?” I said.

  “Cure you,” he said. “I think you have the type of seizure that would respond well to a sectioning of your corpus callosum.”

  I knew the corpus callosum from the model in his office, a creek that cuts through the middle of the brain, where thick bands of fibers connect the separate sides.

  The operation didn’t scare me, but the hospital, that I might lose the hospital. “I’ve been feeling,” I said, “significantly worse, you know.”

  My voice had a thick sound, as though coming up through clots in my throat. Don’t cry, I thought. Whatever you do, don’t cry.

  “Oh,” he said, sitting down in a chair, “how is that?”

  Lately, in my spare time, I’d been going to the library and reading about my disease, and now I started to pull out phrases I could recall. While I spoke I watched my doctor’s face, the living red beard, the wide, kind hands. Don’t leave me, I was thinking.

  Don’t cry, I was thinking, because, you see, I did not want to give myself away.

  “The seizures,” I said, stretching my memory, “the, the neural discharge, it’s been far faster. More rapid,” I said, because that was what I had read in a book.

  “Rapid,” he said. “More rapid?” A small smile formed on his face, but I was so desperate it didn’t occur to me he could see right through me; I took the smile as a sign of interest.

  “Yes,” I said. “I have terrible headaches. Terrible! Terrible! There may be a tumor too.”

  “Where?” he said, leaning forward. “Where, Lauren, do you think this tumor is?”

  “I feel it here,” I said, touching the crown of my head, the place where long ago the plates of bone should have grown together, but, on me, a soft spot still.

  • • •

  I went home on the trolley, holding hard to a steel pole while the car clattered over tracks. At every station-stop I stared out the grime-speckled windows and saw the world through a scrim of speckled grime; ugly. At last we left the city behind and climbed up out of the underground, into the air of green neighborhoods, where children swung a rope and sang:

  Old Mr. Kelly had a pimple on his belly

  His wife bit it off and it tasted like jelly

  So this was the world out there, no thank you. And yet, my seizures were exhausting, and when I saw certain boys, truth be told, I did get a funny feeling in my mouth and in my innards, like maybe there was something to want out there, in the frightening but occasionally pretty place where girls swirled with color and people held hands.

  • • •

  I got off at my stop—Waban—and started home, the same way every day, past the baseball diamond and then the Newton-Wellesley, a small suburban hospital. On this day, though, I didn’t pass the Newton-Wellesley. Instead I turned right and went into the emergency room.

  In my hands, that feeling, like I wanted to steal. The pneumatic doors parted. In front of me a woman slouched in a plastic chair. In the far corner I saw another woman, altogether happier looking, a baby snoozing in a car seat by her side. Oh, that baby was cute. Even from the distance I could tell.

  I went closer, close enough so I could see the small sunsets in each of his pale fingernails, and the little dark dots of his nostrils.

  The mother smiled at me.

  “Mrs. Carney?” a nurse said, and Mrs. Carney got up, looking back once at the baby while she crossed the room to the reception booth.

  What I had: a desire to feel the flesh of the baby, so plentiful I could smell its talc. I liked the baby’s mouth, the red spurt of its smile, and its booties, with just the tiniest bells sewn in. The baby kicked, and the bells went off. Such a merry thing. I wanted the baby, or at least its booties, and I saw how simple it would be to steal it.

  I could just pick up the baby and go. Apparently, all you had to do to steal a baby was to pick it up and go. If so, then maybe all you had to do to become a baby was, was to pick it up and go? To steal a baby? To steal its booties? Understand, I am mentally ill. I didn’t want the baby, but to be the baby. I crept closer still, and then, just as I was getting up my very troubled guts to do something with either the baby or the booties, the mother came back, saying, “Okay then, Miranda, we’ll see you next week,” and she swooped up the child and left through the circling glass door.

  I got mad. I have a lot wrong with me, psychologically speaking, but I have always been a sweet-tempered person. After the woman left, though, I felt rage inside of me, and I thought, Fuck fuck fuck.

  I gripped my hands hard. Let me have a seizure, I thought. I started it myself. I’d never brought on a seizure before, and I hadn’t known it was possible. I swayed back and forth and squinched up my eyes and I thought of rubbing rocks together until a small spark catches, and crackles, I went. One. Two. Three. I caught. I sank myself down and started it myself, arsonist of the flesh. Wind rocked through me and pollution poured out my ears, and when I awoke, what do you think?

  Doctor of my dreams, he was standing over me, with another doctor, and several nurses, and a private curtain making the cubicle my own.

  “What happened?” I said, even though I knew.

  The nurse drew blood. S
he nosed a needle under my skin and I watched the tube fill. My blood seemed especially red that day, like it was ashamed and excited, both.

  Someone called my mother, who came to pick me up, and in all the hubbub no one thought to ask me why I was in the ER in the first place. What I was doing was no different than stealing, really. Instead of taking things, I was taking time; taking attention—

  Taking touch.

  • • •

  And so it happened. Our heroine began her criminal career lifting small concrete tchotchkes from small suburban houses, and she ended it in the abstract, stealing things beyond weight, beyond measure. I was a very Piagetian thief. After the first ER, I made my visits regular. I lived in Boston, where there are almost as many hospitals as there are people to fill them. The Deaconess, the Children’s, the Peter Bent Brigham and the Lying-In. The Mary Saltonstall, Mount Auburn and Mass General, the Lindemann and the Dana. After school, I would drop in to different ERs, and stage a seizure, and wake up in that wonderful way, wake up in a blizzard of nurses, a cup of cool water held to my lips, oh.

  Oh.

  “I’m okay,” I would say, struggling like a heroine to sit up.

  “No no. Stay still. Lie down. Rest.”

  The Saltonstall, the Peter Bent Brigham, the Lying-In, all wonderful, rhythmic names, all old brick buildings with twinkling views of the city.

  “I can get up,” I would say again. I had, after all, gotten what I’d needed, and now I knew I could leave.

  “Where do you live? We’ll call your parents,” the nurses would say.

  I’d figured this one out. Certainly I couldn’t have my mother called each time; she would have caught on. Instead, I gave the nurses the number of a pay phone by my town’s trolley stop. The decrepit-looking pay phone hunched by itself in a corner, a phone no one would answer when it rang. It must have rung and rung in the nurses’ ears. I pictured the phone ringing in the late-day dark of June, and sometimes, despite myself, I would hope a person might answer—hello?—and I would have to say, “Yes. Hello. My name is—”

  Lauren. Lauren.

  I live at—

  But I didn’t live as Lauren. I lived, in those emergency rooms, as April, Bobby, Maria and Juliette.

  “I am epileptic,” Juliette said. She showed the nurses her epilepsy bracelet. “I have seizures all the time. I’m fine. Really. I can go now.”

  And so they let her go. Sometimes, they gave her money for a cab, other times a trolley token. Whatever she got, she saved in a silver pig.

  • • •

  Munchausen’s is the name. A long time ago there lived a man named Munchausen, a German gentleman who traveled from town to town, faking illness. Mr. Munchausen had a waxed dagger mustache, and his hair, swept off his high forehead, made him look as though he faced a forceful wind.

  Even though I have never met Mr. Munchausen, and many differences exist between us, he a man with a mustache, I a woman with pierced ears, I feel I know him. I know his wandering from place to place, his desire for a doctor always. He was so good at illness, a whole disorder has been named for him, Munchausen’s syndrome, otherwise called factitious illness, the patient faking not for money but for things beyond weight, beyond measure.

  Now we get to a little hoary truth in this tricky tale. The summer I was thirteen I developed Munchausen’s, on top of my epilepsy, or—and you must consider this, I ask you please to consider this—perhaps Munchausen’s is all I ever had. Perhaps I was, and still am, a pretender, a person who creates illnesses because she needs time, attention, touch, because she knows no other way of telling her life’s tale. Munchausen’s is a fascinating psychiatric disorder, its sufferers makers of myths that are still somehow true, the illness a conduit to convey real pain. So you will understand Munchausen’s syndrome better, here are some quotes:

  FROM: The British Journal of Psychiatry, VOLUME 1, PP. 227–35

  We have treated a woman by the name of Sheila, a 34 year old single white female who lived at the time with her mother in a rowhouse in Leeds. Sheila had been engaged to be married, and she claimed she had loved her fiancé “with all my heart.” She describes herself as subservient to the point of ego extinction, cleaning, cooking, trying to anticipate his every wish. When, one day, the gentleman announced he was breaking the engagement, Sheila was devastated. Shortly after that, she announced to her office mates (she worked as a typist in Leeds) that she had breast cancer, and so her performance might not be up to par. Everyone rallied around Sheila, and they even took up a collection for her, but she refused the money. “I can do it on my own,” she told them, and her seeming stoicism only made her cohorts admire her more.

  Sheila joined a breast cancer support group, shaved her hair so as to look as though she was having chemotherapy, and lost seventeen pounds. She devoted hours and hours to sculpting the life of a cancer patient, and appeared to derive great sustenance from the sympathy offered her by her colleagues. Two years passed, and Sheila sensed that people were beginning to lose interest in her plight. It was at that point that she began to bleed herself on a regular basis, causing her alarmingly white complexion, her chronic fainting fits, and her low cell count.

  FROM: The Journal of Existential Psychiatry, VOLUME 112, PP. 9–24

  Dr. Ford treated a man with multiple skin lesions refusing to heal. He had over forty hospital admissions for bloody nodules on his thighs and buttocks. One afternoon, a nurse observed this man with a syringe, and a more thorough search of his room revealed several syringes plus cornstarch, with which this patient was willfully injecting himself, so as to cause chronic bacterial infections.

  FROM: The Annals of Psychiatry, VOLUME 98, PP. 38–44

  We have noted that epilepsy is one of the illnesses frequently chosen by Munchausen’s patients, and that, despite the stubbornness with which they cling to their illness facades, they also desire to be revealed. They at once deny their perpetual chicanery while, at the same time, leave clues as to the truth. For instance, we have recently treated an adolescent girl whom we shall call Jean Levy. This girl had absolutely no physiological evidence of any epileptic activity. On the one hand, she rather masterfully succeeded in convincing people that she suffered from temporal lobe seizures, to the point where she wrote and published an account of her illness, and yet on the other hand, she prominently placed a book entitled Patient or Pretender on the shelf in her hospital room. This child was bright, engaging, and extremely convincing; like most Munchausen’s patients, she was an excellent storyteller, well versed in what Adorno so aptly called “the jargon of authenticity.” Munchausen’s patients have learned to convey authenticity to their audiences precisely by admitting to a limited number of lies. This young girl, for instance, admitted to exaggerating some of her epileptic seizures, but she maintained the baseline veracity of her disorder. In the case of this young patient, and of the many other Munchausen’s sufferers, epilepsy seems to be the disease most able to capture and express conflicts with repressed sexuality, poor body image, and deeply impaired sense of self mastery.

  Well, that should prove my point. You can fake epilepsy. I admit I sometimes faked my epilepsy, but I also really had it. Still, once I realized I could set off seizures at will, I did it at all the right times and in all the right places. The Peter Bent Brigham. The Lying-In.

  Tiring. And how dislike yourself. From my bout with Munchausen’s, I now know for a fact we are moral creatures, and that to be anything but is to violate our most basic physiologies. The lying hurt, physically. My head felt on fire, and yet my skin seemed snowy and far away. I started taking baths, long hot soaks, my skin turning tender and red; here I am.

  I fixed my face up carefully when I went to see Dr. Neu. Back then there was a line of products called Love’s Baby Soft. I used all Love’s Baby Soft products, rouge in two small circles on my cheeks.

  Is it possible that Lauren loved him if there was no Lauren? Was it Juliette who loved him, or Bobby with her floral smells? Who cried in her
heart when he touched her head? Dr. Neu was Dutch, and his words had a feathery feel to them. I loved him for no other reason, perhaps, than his voice, how he made every word warm.

  My mother, father, and I went in for a meeting with him one Tuesday at 3:00 P.M. Summer had arrived, and the air was so hot it hung between the trees like breath.

  I remember the heat, and I remember the cool clasp of air as soon as we entered the lobby, the switch so sudden it was almost painful.

  “Come in,” Dr. Neu said. He took us not into his examining room but into his office, where serene music played.

  “Sit,” he said.

  “She needs an operation,” he said. “I have thought about it carefully. I have explored the physiology of her seizures and, despite their eliopathic nature, I think a sectioning of the corpus callosum is warranted.”

  “Oh,” we all said.

  He went on to explain. He would cut the corpus callosum in my brain, thereby disconnecting the left and right hemispheres, a very common procedure in epileptic children with some, but few, significant side effects. With the brain split, the seizures starting in one side would not spread to the other, and so I should experience a real reduction in illness.

  But wait a minute, I wanted to say. I’m not as ill as I seem.

  “You mean to tell me,” my mother said, “that you want to perform a lobotomy on my daughter?”

  “It’s not a lobotomy,” he said. “Surgery is sometimes the method of choice when the pediatric patient does not respond to medication. The procedure will have no effect on her IQ or on her social skills. The side effects are very subtle.”

  They all had a long conversation then about subtlety and side effects, but I had stopped listening. I noticed my mother looked worn down, and sometime, over the years, grooves of disappointment had deepened by her mouth. She had had such high hopes, she must have entered life with such a lunge, and now, at this midpoint, what? A daughter with a brain disease, a husband in the bakery business, and all the while she with the scent of perfume that trailed her like a scarf. Once she had fought my illness with fists and money, but I had been younger then, and so had she. Once she had watched me seize with something like love in her eyes. But I had been younger then, and so had she. I think, that day in the doctor’s office, she just decided to take a rest. I applaud you, Mom, at least the left side of me does, while the right wonders why, why did you let them do it? Why did you let me go? I saw her lie down on the ground. In my mind I imagined her stretching out on Dr. Neu’s cream-colored carpet while in real life she nodded, tilted her head, talked to the doctor and my father, and sometime then or a few days later, she said yes to the surgeon; yes to the slice.