Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  * * *

  It went on like that for months, years: believing, not believing, hoping, not hoping, praying. Not praying. Could my whole life up to this point be captioned “Not praying”? When I didn’t need to pray, when the curse lifted, I stood and ceased praying. I believed when I needed to believe. Witnessing Aaron’s agony was the closest thing to a spiritual crisis I’d undergone, the closest to a test of faith.

  One night, Aaron woke me in the middle of the night, absolutely certain that he knew what was wrong with his skin. He’d been up for days, unable to sleep, his arms and legs sleeved with a fiery rash.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Scabies.”

  His laptop lay open, the keyboard wet with droplets of his sweat. I put on my glasses and studied the images of the blood-colored bugs on the screen. “Mites! Parasitic mites. They’re burrowed in my skin.” His voice was shrill with panic and delight. “They’ve been laying eggs under my skin!”

  I looked between the screen and the shin he’d thrust in front of my face.

  “Look! See them moving?”

  I thought I maybe saw something moving. Or was it the light? “I don’t know, babe.” It was hard to tell. He couldn’t sit still.

  “All this time. Scabies!” He laughed. “The mange!” He was almost joyous.

  Maybe it was that joy I wanted to believe in. The allure of identifying a foreign invader. The warm relief of trusting my husband. He was as confident as a general with binoculars, watching the enemy march in.

  “It’s highly contagious,” he said. “It’s a miracle the kids haven’t gotten it.”

  I looked down at my left forefinger, which the day before had sprouted a ridge of white, itchy bumps. Did they look mite-shaped?

  I could practically feel my guard falling, our minds fusing, as I stepped over to the other side. All this time! He’d not been infected but infested.

  Aaron’s regular GP, Dr. Das, wasn’t available the next day, so we saw a nurse practitioner, who looked skeptically at Aaron’s shins. She didn’t see any evidence of mites, but to be on the safe side, she prescribed Permethrin cream. “You’ll both have to do a full treatment,” she said. “Just in case.” I nodded my head, as though accepting my religious duty.

  Before we left, I asked her, “Can you please, please give him something to sleep?”

  That night, we stripped to our underwear and painted our bodies with insecticide, neck to toes. We laughed, squirmed. It was a science experiment, a mating ritual. Aaron took one of the Ambien he’d been prescribed. Carefully we lay ourselves down on the clean sheets, palms to the ceiling, sunbathers slathered in holy oil. We waited for the rapture. We waited to be transformed.

  My friend Anna had once taken half an Ambien and it had knocked her out so completely that she woke up the next morning on the bathroom floor. My husband, he didn’t sleep one wink that night.

  I slept but woke up sticky with confusion and shame. What had I just done? Had it worked? I remembered the line from “The Devil’s Bait.” That should be obvious by now. My husband was still my husband, moody and sleepless and in pain. I took a shower.

  The next week, when his rash had not healed, he went back to the doctor’s office and saw Dr. Das. He pointed to the bug crawling in the sore on his shin. His doctor looked at him and said with absolute certainty, “There are no bugs in your skin.”

  “Oh,” Aaron said.

  Folie à deux. It means, literally, “madness of two.”

  I’d done more research on folie à deux after reading about it in “The Devil’s Bait.” It was once known as Lasègue-Falret syndrome, named for French physicians Charles Lasègue and Jean-Pierre Falret in the mid-nineteenth century. They identified two kinds. Folie simultanée is when two people, each vulnerable to psychosis, simultaneously undergo a similar delusion. The other, folie imposée, is when one person, the “inducer,” undergoes a delusion and imposes it on another person, the “acceptor.” Without the inducer, the acceptor would not have been susceptible to delusion. She consents to madness.

  Perhaps every marriage is a madness. To agree to see the world the way another sees the world—what is that vow but a shared delusion?

  When I rinsed my body of that insecticide, though, I stepped back onto the other side, and I left Aaron there, alone. No matter how much he showered, he could not wash off the evidence of his folly.

  THEORY 4

  I got on intrauterine birth control and stopped getting a period. Then Aaron started getting it for me. Between vomiting and shitting and bleeding from his skin, I’d say he loses about seven teaspoons of blood every month, the same amount the average menstruating woman loses. His cycle is about as regular as mine ever was, which is to say, not very regular. The body must shed its excess. It must shed what is not biologically useful.

  Say this is impossible, or say it is witchcraft, but what do we call it when women under the same roof begin to bleed at the same time? How are their bodies listening to each other? How is my body, lying next to Aaron’s, listening to his? How is his body listening to mine?

  THEORY 5

  Or perhaps there is no such thing as disease at all. There is no diagnosis. Why should I assume that any pain I feel approximates the pain you feel? The field of medicine relies on the idea that understanding one person’s body will help me understand another person’s body. But it seems to me as unreliable a concept as looking inside a radio, or a flower, or a black hole, or a frog, and expecting to see a human heart there.

  But the thing is, you kind of can.

  Have you ever seen a glass frog? Its skin does not reflect light. You can see everything inside it, and everything reminds you of something else. Its green-spotted back is a city viewed from an airplane at night. Its limbs are the sticky hands your kids get from gumball machines and toss at the windows. Its glowing belly is a translucent rice paper roll, and wrapped inside it are the sweet-pea caviar of its organs, the white cocoon of its intestines, or maybe it’s an electric spiraling light bulb, and its brave little berry of a heart pumps blood through a vein that looks like a red blade of grass. The glass frog dares you not to get metaphorical.

  “My willingness to turn Morgellons into metaphor,” Leslie Jamison writes, “—as a corporeal manifestation of some abstract human tendency—is dangerous. It obscures the particular and unbidden nature of the suffering in front of me.”

  Dangerous, sure. All suffering is not alike. All bodies are not alike. I don’t want to define my husband’s pain against my own.

  But doesn’t the glass frog long to be compared to its opaque cousin? To the amphibious and the mammalian? To the electric and the synthetic? Doesn’t the universe ask to be analogized? Isn’t that all it asks? You are like me. I am like you. I am another mortal creature.

  You better believe I dream that my husband is that beautiful glass frog.

  I dream I see his heart pumping, tar black. And then I give him my own.

  HOT MESS

  In our bedroom is a broken mirror. It’s one of the panels of our sliding closet door, installed a few months ago by an overpaid handyman. For years, a curtain hung in place of it. For years, the bedroom ceiling hung low and rotten along one edge, where an ice dam had damaged it. We could afford to replace the roof but not the drywall, and so the place where the ceiling met the wall was a foaming mouth of insulation and mold. We learned not to see it. When we finally fixed it, we had the overpaid handyman open up the whole wall of the room to reinsulate it, and we discovered that, as we suspected, our bedroom had once been a sleeping porch. The porch posts were still buried there in the wall, sheetrocked over.

  For a few months the room was intact again, the ceiling replaced, and while we were at it, a closet door hung. But now the bottom third of one of the doors is smashed through, like a mirror in a fairy tale, and as much as we vacuum we still find shards of glass in the fibers of the carpet.

  Tonight Aaron is not in the bed. I sleep on one side, in case he comes back.
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br />   He doesn’t come back. He sleeps the night—five hours, a good night—on the daybed in the playroom. I find him there when I come downstairs. He didn’t want to keep me up, he says. The skin on his left bicep was tightening all night, as though squeezed by a blood pressure cuff. “It was like catcher’s gear,” he says, gesturing from his bare chest to his belly. Now it’s better, he says; it’s just blotches of burns. They look like the lesions that have long spotted and scarred his torso, except for one, a slick little steak the size of a rose bud, shaped like Ohio. A few days ago, in bed, it sucked and smeared on my belly. “Sorry,” he said. “Want me to put a shirt on?” I shook my head no.

  Now these recurrences are as regular as rain. It’s weather. You see it like a storm, from far off. It will come eventually. There is little to be done.

  This time, he’d been called in for jury duty. His second summons; he’d ignored the first. For the second one, he was ready. He had asked his psychiatrist, Dr. Friedlander, to write him a note, like a kid who’d lost his homework, but she encouraged him to go. It would be good for him to try. It could be a fraud case, drug possession, and he probably wouldn’t even be selected. I’d been dismissed last year for a case involving a stolen flat-screen television. Yesterday morning, though, at the dentist’s office, I’d spotted an article on the front page of the local paper: “Jury still being filled for murder trial.” A man had been accused of killing another man over some marijuana plants. I had the bright idea of taking a picture of the article and texting it to Aaron. “Fuck that,” he texted back. But he walked down to the courthouse that afternoon, stood a few feet from the alleged killer, and when asked if anyone believed they were not fit to serve, he stood.

  “I don’t think I’m in the right mind,” he said.

  They dismissed him. On the walk home, he threw up, then walked some more and threw up again. By that evening, the Ohio-shaped burn had appeared on his stomach, ghosting the E and D in STRAIGHT EDGE, a rash that no amount of professional-proof vodka could abate.

  Now, the next morning, I’m on the phone with the dermatologist’s office. I’m not on his HIPAA, apparently. So I hand him the phone. There is an appointment tomorrow at three. We’ll make it work, I whisper. I can cancel Henry’s OT session. But he takes the appointment on November 6, two weeks away. In two weeks his skin could look like Ohio, California, Alaska. His ankles could be swollen. He could be infected. Or he could be fine.

  “I need to prepare,” he says.

  “I’m going to have to watch you suffer for two weeks.”

  He looks at me. “I’m going to have to suffer for two weeks.”

  * * *

  Nothing to do but wait. And read.

  I can’t think of schizophrenia without thinking of the song by Sonic Youth, which tells me that alternative bands of the eighties and nineties were really into mental illness metaphors. Does this say something about them, or about me? One morning I sit down at the dining room table and play Sister on my laptop while I page through the book that I’ve rescued from the toothpaste drawer. I keep the volume low so I don’t wake Aaron, who has gone back to bed.

  We like to use the adjective “schizophrenic” metaphorically. A whole with two parts that don’t belong together. People with schizophrenia don’t have multiple selves inside them, though, any more than other people do. They have hallucinations, delusions, paranoia. Often, the book tells me, they hear voices. Thoughts, emotions, and behavior are fragmented. From the Greek skhizein, “to split” and phrēn, “mind,” schizophrenia is a psychosis. The mind is split—not split into parts but split from reality.

  Is my husband’s mind split from reality? And if so, when did it begin? People don’t really develop schizophrenia in their forties. For most, it emerges in early adulthood—late teens, twenties. Has it been there since I’ve known him? Is it possible to be with someone for twenty years and fail to notice?

  I close the book. It’s the part of “Schizophrenia” where Kim Gordon is sing-talking over the swaying, rumbling, about-to-go-insane guitar:

  My future is static

  Static, as in: my future is over? Nothing to be done?

  Or static, as in: a buzzing. The music itself is a kind of static. A white noise.

  When I asked Aaron if he thought he had schizophrenia, he was resolute.

  “I’ve always heard things,” he said.

  When he was about twelve, he told his father, “It sounds like there’s a radio playing.”

  There was no radio playing.

  His father, alarmed, took him to the doctor. Nothing was concluded that Aaron can recall. His hearing was fine.

  Now his ears are damaged from years of live shows. His ears ring with tinnitus.

  But it’s more than ringing. It’s not voices, per se. It’s that radio of his childhood. Sometimes it’s the snowy murmur between stations. Sometimes it’s full songs, complete with lyrics that come with the clarity of a dream, like a song he has written himself, except he hasn’t.

  Aaron steps into the dining room now, a look of panic on his face. Is that a real radio, or in his head? I turn up the volume. The wailing white-noise guitar surges through the tinny laptop speakers. He sighs with relief. Hand to chest. This exchange requires no words.

  * * *

  “A diagnosis is a thing that helps doctors describe symptoms,” Dr. Friedlander tells us. We are sitting in her office in her vine-covered stone house, Aaron and I on a couch, she far from us in a chair in the corner, where the morning light coming through the window won’t blind her. This is the room where Aaron has sat once every few weeks for the past seven months. Seven months ago, when I first pulled into the driveway to drop him off, there was a foot of fresh snow on the ground, and Dr. Friedlander was shoveling the driveway. Aaron, introducing himself, took another shovel and helped her clear a path to the door. An hour later, he emerged from that door, shaking, shaken.

  “How did it go?” I said.

  “It’s bad,” he said. “It’s scary.”

  I knew then what it was. What other diagnosis could strike that kind of fear?

  Now I am here to meet her. I will give her some insight into Aaron. She will give me some insight into Aaron. My twenty years of insight, her twenty hours. I feel both hopeful and defensive, skeptical and cowed, as though I am at a parent-teacher conference, a parent-teacher conference where the teacher takes off one Birkenstock and sits with her bare foot tucked under her. She is sipping tea from a large mug. In the waiting room are bowls of rocks, framed photos of lily pads, and a knee-high stack of Poetry magazines. I am pleased by how closely she adheres to my fantasy of a psychiatrist practicing in Ithaca, New York.

  “A diagnosis is just a word,” she says. Psychiatrists like to argue about whether there are genes that determine these diseases. But right now there’s no test for schizophrenia. Any diagnosis, she says, is going to describe a wide range of symptoms. “If you have schizophrenia,” she says to my husband, “you’re an outlier.”

  If.

  It’s a comfort to me. Not because I am afraid of the diagnosis, not because I’m ashamed of it, but because it does not adhere to my understanding of who my husband is. Not all of who he is. It is a piece in an incomplete puzzle. What he is—she is right about this—is an outlier.

  “You’re articulate, bright, thoughtful, socially engaged.” I am nodding, proud mother. “You don’t present as most people with schizophrenia do. You wouldn’t know by looking at you that you have schizophrenia.”

  I watch Aaron. Is he disappointed? Would it be better, easier, to reflect the textbook? Seven months ago, when he got into the car on that snowy day, he was shaken, but he was also relieved: a diagnosis.

  “When I took your history,” she says, “it seemed clear to me that you had problems organizing yourself. You suffer from hallucinations. You hear things, see things. You second-guess yourself. You distrust yourself.”

  “Yes!” I say. “He distrusts himself. He distrusts everyone.”

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bsp; “And yet you’re exceptionally good at describing your feelings.”

  “He is!” I agree.

  “Which could actually make it more difficult for you to live with this disease, because you are so emotionally attuned.”

  “Not while it’s happening,” he says. “It’s like I’m being bombarded by my feelings. I’m being tortured.”

  “That’s what I’m most worried about,” I say. “This emotional agony he’s in.” Dr. Friedlander is studying me carefully. Schizophrenia—maybe, I say. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening when he’s up at night, convulsing in invisible pain. “The nights,” I say. “They’re really bad. He looks like he should be in a straitjacket.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he has to lie on his hands to keep from hurting himself.”

  “I don’t want to hurt myself,” he says. “I just want the pain to end. I just want to put my lights out.” In the morning, he says, he can see behind him, see what happened. But not while it’s happening.

  Dr. Friedlander nods. “That’s what you have to practice. Identifying the feelings while they’re happening. It won’t happen overnight. You might get good at it in five or ten years.” She smiles. “Oh, there’s my terror. There’s my dread. There’s my feeling. There’s my symptom. And”—is she looking at me?—“I don’t have to fix it.”

  Before we leave, she asks if there’s anything else we want to talk about.

  “I just wanted her to understand,” Aaron says, “that I can’t control this. That it’s not my fault that I can’t do some basic things.”

  She sits up and slips her right foot back in her Birkenstock. “I had two preconceptions about your wife before you came in. One is that she’d be patient and calm. The other is that she must love you very much.” She looks back at me. “Is that right?”

  I nod, blinking back tears. I have passed the test.