Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  Afterward, one of the women hands you a mint-green booklet. “I just happened to pick this up. Would you like it?” Take the booklet and read the title: Lyme Disease and associated diseases: The Basics. “I’ve heard,” she says, “that Lyme can mimic bipolar disorder.”

  “You know,” you say, “I’ve heard that, too.”

  You did not expect to go home from the NAMI meeting with a Lyme pamphlet. But at home, you get into bed and find yourself reading it cover to cover. It is published by The Lyme Disease Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania. It does, indeed, say that Lyme is the great imitator. Another thing you didn’t expect: there, on page thirteen, in a list of “co-infections” and “associated diseases,” are the words “Morgellons disease.”

  Morgellons disease is an emerging disease that causes strange symptoms. It is the least understood and most controversial of the tick-borne diseases. One unique characteristic of Morgellons is the appearance of fibers growing out of the skin, accompanied by severe itching. Morgellons patients often experience sensations of something crawling under their skin, which leads many doctors to conclude that the patient has a psychiatric problem. However, experiments have shown that dogs can have the same fibers and symptoms.

  New organisms such as viruses and microscopic worms are being discovered in ticks. Their role in human illness is not yet known.

  * * *

  “I think you have Lyme disease,” you tell your husband. “And I think you really do have fucking Morgellons.”

  He waves his hand. Morgellons is bullshit, he says. He still thinks Morgellons is the invention of paranoid people.

  But people think you’re paranoid, you point out.

  “Do you think I’m paranoid?”

  Show him the booklet. “I think Morgellons is real.”

  He’s not so sure. What about this? you ask. What about this? What he has come to believe he has, simply, are parasites.

  Why is it so difficult? Like convincing someone purple is blue? And who’s to say your blue isn’t purple? Who’s to say you’re both not right?

  It’s a contradiction you can’t quite get your head around. You have caught up to him, to his reality—there is something real inside me—but now you have moved past him, into some other dimension of righteous, persecuted belief. Now you believe more than he does. But according to him you’re believing in the wrong thing.

  You’ll wait for a better time, a time when he’s more receptive. Leave the booklet in the bathroom for him to read on his own, one of your dad’s pipe cleaners tucked between the pages, marking your spot.

  * * *

  Buy the Morgellons book on Amazon, the only book on Morgellons, by Dr. Ginger Savely. Morgellons: The Legitimization of a Disease. You cringe a little to see the giant margins and glaring misspelling (Part One: Truth is Stranger Then Fiction), the fuzzy grayscale photos. But the writing is good. Dr. Savely isn’t an M.D.; she’s a nurse practitioner with a Ph.D.; her dissertation was on Morgellons research. And the photos could be of your husband. Underline the passages. Star the symptoms.

  Disfiguring, spontaneously appearing, slow-healing lesions.

  Blue, white, red, and black hair-like filaments extruding through the skin or seen just under the epidermis using magnification.

  Filaments that look like “feathers” because of the many fine projections from either side of the filament.

  Occasional black tar-like exudate from the pores.

  Metallic “glitter” on the face and other parts of the body.

  Crystal-like exudates from skin.

  A change in the texture or color of the hair.

  An awareness of tiny flying insects around the body.

  Fine markings on the skin that appear spontaneously but look like cat scratches or paper cuts.

  Slightly raised, linear “tracks” on the skin.

  Systemic symptoms including profound fatigue, anxiety, insomnia, joint and muscle pain, headaches, loss of balance, dizziness, and cognitive disturbances such as loss of short-term memory, and inability to concentrate or comprehend.

  The constant and unnerving aggravation of feeling as though there are bugs or worms crawling through one’s body, biting, stinging, and causing unbearable discomfort.

  Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check.

  Underneath this list:

  As if the symptoms of the disease were not challenging enough, patients are forced to endure ridicule and abandonment by family, friends, and health care providers. Typically patients have futilely consulted as many as twenty to thirty different clinicians. With no hope in sight, it is no wonder that most Morgellons patients have depression, anxiety, and/or suicidal thoughts and many have ended their lives.

  It’s kind of like reading a novel and seeing in its pages a narrator who has felt the same feelings and thought the same thoughts, which you’ve never recognized as your feelings or thoughts until now. Except now it’s not a novel but a reality, a science fictional universe: it is a world, that planet does exist, the horror is happening. Knowing that it’s not a dream, or at least that others are having the same nightmare: it makes the horror holdable.

  You choose the right time. A righter time. You’re in bed, he is showered and clean, sketching in his sketchbook. You read the passages slowly, with curiosity but short of conviction.

  My back felt like it was alive, living a separate life than my own.

  He raises his eyebrows.

  Interestingly, whenever an MD patient sustains an injury to intact skin such as an abrasion or even a paper cut, before long the injury becomes a new site of filament proliferation.

  “Wow,” Aaron says. This is why he doesn’t shave for long periods, avoids using sharp knives.

  “Now listen to this.” The clincher. “My hair is not my own” is something that I frequently hear from MD patients.

  How many times has he said these very words to you?

  Here he lets his sketch pad fall to his lap. “Holy shit.”

  “Right?”

  He says, “Maybe.”

  * * *

  “Daddy’s sick,” I say to the kids.

  “I’m sorry Daddy’s so sick.”

  “I hope Daddy will be better soon,” I say.

  My dad helps Nico with his math homework. My dad reads Henry Dog Man.

  * * *

  The summer wanes.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” he says.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I say.

  We say it to the doctors, to Stu, to friends on the phone, to the suicide hotline, to each other.

  There are two old Adirondack chairs out behind our house. Untreated wood, heavy and weather beaten from spending too many winters in the snow. I have taken to taking a baseball bat to them, when the knot in my chest needs releasing.

  Then, another appointment. This time it’s with a functional medicine health coach named Laura recommended by a friend of my friend Katie. “A miracle worker,” the friend said. At the miracle worker’s office, we are to remove our shoes. In the waiting room, our children tap the iPad, sharing a pair of earbuds. Laura wears a jean jacket. My bare feet sink into the plush carpet. In my hands, the paper cup of tea is warm.

  Aaron describes his symptoms, a song he’s long ago memorized. Anemic. Disoriented. Falling. Can’t concentrate. Can’t sleep. The flare every two weeks. The skin crawling. The stuff coming out of his hands. He shows her the purple scars of his lesions.

  He knows how to say it now. He doesn’t say, “I have parasites.” He says, “I feel like I have parasites.”

  Laura looks at him, shrugs. Later she will tell us that her son didn’t speak until he was five and a half. She learned functional medicine to learn how to heal him. Now, at twelve, he has a 98 average.

  “You probably have parasites,” she says.

  I meet my husband’s eyes.

  You think you have pretty much memorized Google, and then you learn something new. The life cycle
of a parasite? Two weeks. Every new moon, and every full moon, they lay their eggs. It is the first time anyone has ever been able to explain it.

  Also, this. “Have you heard of Morgellons disease?”

  I look back at Aaron. He’s already looking at me. Our look is like a swear word, like a dare.

  WEBLAND TERRACE

  2003

  There is a ritual in the life of many American newlyweds in which they must test the marriage rites by sleeping on an air mattress. The mattress must be made of velveteen polyvinyl, no more than six inches in height, and it must be designed with at least two, and perhaps hundreds, of invisible holes. The only tools at the young couple’s disposal are a sticky denim-colored patch and a battery-operated pump that sounds like a helicopter taking off. For over the course of each night, the mattress deflates steadily, almost imperceptibly. Slowly, the young couple sinks. Their bodies pitch toward each other, as though on an uneven sea. Some might stare at the ceiling, or close their eyes against the force of gravity, or get up to resuscitate the lifeboat once, twice, three times in the night, or reach out for the other’s hand. They might negotiate a balance: each of their bodies occupying just the right place on the marriage bed, a gap between them, so that they might buoy the other. No matter. By the morning, they will both be touching the floor.

  We slept four months on that mattress, having left most of our furniture in Florida. Most of it belonged to Aaron’s father, and none of it was dear to us. We had our books, our CDs and records, bulky desktop computers we set up on the floor of each of our offices. Our own offices! We had an enormous television and a coffee table, which we sat cross-legged in front of on the wall-to-wall Berber carpet while we ate meals and watched the TV. We had all we needed.

  My new friends found it strange, our extended period of furniture-less-ness. I kept promising to have them over as soon as we had some. They directed us to the secondhand furniture store in town, where they’d appointed their own apartments. For some reason I was set on buying everything new, from the IKEA two hours north. When we sold the condo, we’d take the check and go to IKEA and make the most of the delivery fee. I dog-eared the whole catalog. The MALM bed! The EXPEDIT bookshelves! The EKTORP couch or the KIVIK? Now I see that we were performing a regeneration.

  * * *

  I was determined, too, to undo the social exile of my college years. At Middlebury, I’d observed a short window, a kind of courtship period, in which students met, matched, and promised to be friends for life, appearing together in ten years, holding the MIDDLEBURY banner (where did one procure such a banner?) in the alumni magazine wedding pages. This window was no more than three weeks long, or approximately the span of time I survived on campus without my boyfriend. This was a mistake, of course. I saw that now. I hadn’t tried hard enough.

  So, in Charlottesville, I went to the parties, all of them. I went to the bar after workshop. I went to the professor’s house. I went to the poets’ apartment. I went to a friend’s room on the Lawn, the parties spilling out onto Jefferson’s brick-manicured campus, a few doors down from Poe’s restored room. Another friend, Sean, had a bunch of us over to watch Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He also had no couch yet, so we all sat on the carpet against the wall, eating pizza, and afterward, upon realizing he had no napkins, he offered us a beach towel to collectively wipe our mouths with, and from then on we were bonded.

  Aaron went to some of the parties. He was friendly with my new friends, and to our delight, he wasn’t the only trailing spouse. Most of the students in my cohort were married. A couple even had kids. Many of the parties featured copious breastfeeding, and on one occasion, a drinking game that involved breastmilk. My friend Meredith had been married even more recently and had been with her husband even longer than I had. When we finally filled the house with furniture, we had them over for dinner, and I upped my culinary game, making gnocchi and not just potatoes, though I had to microwave them in the end.

  We wouldn’t sell the condo yet, we decided. It was a place for Aaron to stay when he visited his dad. It was, maybe, I see now, a way to hold on to Florida, to leave a door open. Instead, we sold the house on Ixora Circle, the house where Aaron had lived when I met him. It was an abstraction to me by then. Aaron signed the papers, and then it was gone, and then we had another abstraction in our bank account, a big lump of money. We drove straight to IKEA.

  There is a ritual in the life of many American newlyweds in which they must test the marriage rites by assembling a house full of IKEA furniture. This was a challenge we passed with ease. We’d had practice. We were no slackers. We were committed. We were in it to win it. This was what we had in common: we didn’t like to admit defeat. The badass stubbornness that was in us, the parts of us that were at various times vegan and straight edge, the part of us that married young and would be married forever just to show everyone we could, manifested itself in marathon evenings of hardcore furniture assembly. Marriage was like dating, except with even more Allen wrenches.

  At the close of the first semester, Aaron and I threw a Christmas party, and in preparation I made pesto and cut my bangs and bought a tree, and everyone played with our cats and drank PBR and admired the two khaki love seats. It was all maybe a little square, but our house was warmed. I felt full. But also scared. Like the Christmas tree and all its artfully arranged ornaments could come crashing down, if they were to see what a farce it all was, a life ordered out of the IKEA catalog. “Is it even real furniture?” my friend Sean asked.

  * * *

  I wanted Aaron to go to therapy.

  “I think you’re depressed,” I told him.

  Oh, he was, he admitted. But he wouldn’t go to therapy. Every few weeks we had the same conversation.

  “Don’t you think you’ll feel better,” I asked him, “if you tell someone?”

  We both knew what I was talking about, but neither of us said it.

  “I’m never telling anyone,” he said.

  * * *

  He was a dark cloud. He was angry and isolated and he cried at car commercials. He was also fun and funny, and funnier when high. On most days I couldn’t really tell if he was high. I mean, I just assumed. He had found a source through Sean. Part of me, the part that had taken the D.A.R.E. program very seriously, was afraid to talk to him or to ask. I was worried and ashamed and also glad when he was soothed, when the cloud was calmed. I was like a mother from a hundred years ago with a colicky newborn: just a thimbleful of whiskey in the formula …

  Then I went to all the parties and occasionally I took a toke of a joint going around a coffee table. I didn’t really like it but I guess I was trying to close the distance.

  * * *

  Another way to close the distance: I was writing a novel about him.

  Well, not about him, exactly. But about New York, and straight edge kids, and drugs and hardcore and teenagers getting into trouble in the eighties on St. Marks Place. I lifted the stories he’d told me like he’d lifted Star Wars figures with his friend Ashmat, slipping them into my sleeve to resell on the street. If asked if the toys were stolen, Aaron and Ashmat would deny it up and down. These are mine, Aaron would say. And so they would be.

  That year, I wrote and wrote. I submitted chapter after chapter to workshop. My readers were eager, and kind, then bitter and bored. The pages piled up. In the spring semester, one workshop mate wrote on the back sheet of a chapter: “Dear Eleanor, What can I say? You are writing a novel, and it is going well.”

  After I got married and started grad school, I had stopped going by Nell and started going by Eleanor. It felt like a real name, a perfectly good one just languishing on my driver’s license, and the one I hoped to see on the cover of the novel I was writing. But I suppose it was also another way in which I wanted to hit restart. Aaron had a new name, and I did, too. A name is a kind of story. I wanted to rewrite mine.

  I wanted also to rewrite Aaron’s story. I could say the novel wasn’t his story because it wasn’t: it was the one I
wished for him.

  I had broken my hero’s heart in ways my husband’s had been broken—by years of drug use, by the failure of his parents, by the tragic loss of his best friend. But in my book, the boy’s estranged parent returned. The family was reconstructed. It was a redemption song.

  I pretended to myself that the only thing I was borrowing from Aaron was his record collection. I would cross the hall and knock on his office door and ask, “What band would have toured with Verbal Assault in, like, the fall of ’88?” And he had the answer.

  “What does Aaron think of your novel?” my friends would ask. They had read the same paragraphs over and over again, axed adjectives, skated through pages of his reimagined history.

  “He hasn’t read it,” I’d say, shrugging. “Yet.”

  * * *

  My friend Callie was seeing a therapist; she said it was the best decision she’d made in her twenties. She had, from all appearances, a very nice life! I did not know at that time a lot of people who went to therapy. I had a thought: I could go to therapy.

  Going to a therapist for the first time is like visiting a new country for the first time: How will they speak? Will you look stupid? Will you be transformed?

  The therapist’s office was over a garage. I climbed the outdoor stairs. Inside, he sat at a desk in shorts and Birkenstocks and a golf shirt that strained against his big belly. I sat, very far away, on a couch, and immediately cried. Why was I crying?