I look at Aaron. I swallow a laugh.
How to answer this? I’m not sure if this word now lives somewhere on Aaron’s chart or if this doctor actually knows and accepts Morgellons. For a long time, all I wanted was to find a white-coated doctor who would speak that word. But now, I don’t even know if Aaron believes in Morgellons anymore. He longs for the language of Western medicine, and speaks the language of metaphor, but seems to have time for little else.
“Maybe,” I say.
Dr. Queen says, “I’m trying to get a read on you two as a couple and I’m having a hard time.”
We laugh, loosen up. “We’ve seen a lot of doctors,” Aaron explains. “We’re a little cautious.”
“I understand,” Dr. Queen says. “Look, it’s clear there’s a psychiatric component and a physiological component. What’s harder to tease out is how they’re related. Which is driving the other?” He points at me. “What do you think?”
I look at Aaron. Does he want me to answer? Is it the last thing he wants? Doctors have been looking to me to read Aaron since the beginning. I want and don’t want to be asked. But there is a sincerity in the doctor’s voice. He wants my opinion. And Aaron’s face is open.
“That’s the question,” I say.
Dr. Queen nods. He understands the bigness of the problem. Maybe this is all we need today: someone to acknowledge its size, the work we’ve put into it together. He smiles. “A few things are clear to me.” He counts them off on his fingers. “One, you’re not crazy. Two, you’re suffering. Three, you’re honest. And four, you want to get better.”
Aaron nods. He agrees!
“We’ll start with an MRI,” the doctor says. “Eliminate some things.”
“Is that at the hospital?” is Aaron’s first question. “I can’t go back to the hospital.”
It’s at the imaging center affiliated with the hospital. But not at the hospital. Aaron lets out a breath.
Dr. Queen is worried that it won’t turn up anything. Then what? Maybe a spinal tap. His concern is that Aaron will be shuffled along from doctor to doctor, medicine to medicine. He’s seen it, chronically ill patients who undergo the same testing again and again, and end up in the same place in a year. He is bracing Aaron and apologizing.
Aaron waves a hand. He hasn’t come here expecting a diagnosis. That would be a bonus. “You’re refreshing, man,” he tells the doctor.
Then we push through the double doors into the summer heat and walk to Gimme! Coffee next door. Aaron tells me about the Neijing, the bible of traditional Chinese medicine he’s reading. Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor who reigned five thousand years ago, lays the foundation for holistic medicine by telling the story of the patient he cares for. Aaron says it’s so beautiful it makes him cry, and he starts to tear up here in the coffee shop, waiting for his double espresso.
* * *
The full moon comes, the Sturgeon Moon, electric orange and fierce. It’s been a year since Aaron’s first appointment with Laura, when we first learned to wait for the moon. But the moon comes and goes. Aaron’s skin does not break out. He pours himself little plastic cups of alcohol all day: vodka with an olive, red wine, a golden honey whiskey. “I’m sorry I’m drinking so much,” he says. We stand on the deck beneath the moon.
“So am I.”
He says, “This stuff is going to kill me. I feel it.”
“Then stop,” I say. “Or at least cut back.”
He says, “At least this way I can see it coming.”
Maybe it’s the alcohol that’s keeping the fire inside. Maybe it’s the meditation. Maybe it’s the mercury, or the Seroquel, that has been cleansed from his system.
But the alcohol is its own kind of fire. He feels it burning as it goes down. He closes his eyes, hangs a fist against his chest.
And just because the fire isn’t breaking out doesn’t mean it’s gone away. It’s just inside now, a contained flame. At the back of his neck, on his scalp, at the place where his ear meets his jaw, a white cream froths. It looks like foam from a fire extinguisher, the scum of ocean tide. He looks like a clown who’s washed his makeup off and missed a spot. This thing that’s happening to him: it’s a sickeningly endless gag bag of metaphors.
Aaron doesn’t like to talk about it anymore. He tries to keep it to himself. It’s a gift to us, I know, to me. But I can feel him seizing up, bracing himself against the current inside. Over the side of the deck, he vomits violently. Has he had too much to drink, or is it something else? Maybe both.
* * *
Aaron is worried he’ll freak out during the MRI. Being so confined, having to be still for so long.
But instead he falls asleep. His own snoring wakes him up, and then he’s laughing.
* * *
My husband’s belly grows. He is growing something in there. Something biblical, something unholy. It’s October again and he is showing the children all the horror films of his youth, It and Evil Dead and Nightmare on Elm Street, and they shriek with fear and delight. Nico is going to be the Joker for Halloween; Henry is going to be Pennywise.
Aaron approves. In his belly is a small child in a raincoat, or a Gremlin, or a nest of worms, the brainy noodles of Halloweens past. Touch it—“feel,” he says, lifting his sweater—and it’s hard as a beer belly but it’s not a beer belly. He’s had those before. It’s taut as a raft, the membrane thick as a waterbed’s. What it feels like more than anything is a pregnant belly, six months or more, a mass inflated inside an amniotic sac. It’s irregular as a baby, a knee here, a skull there. “There’s no more room,” he says, which is what I said, too, when the babies’ feet pressed against my lungs. Resting his forehead on the kitchen counter, he leans over and rocks his hips. He moans. Awake, asleep, he moans. On the couch, in the shower, he moans. The contractions come every few minutes, then closer together. A tightening. A bracing. I rub his back, if he’ll let me.
Four days in, he admits it: He’s on the antiparasitic that the parasitologist prescribed. The one I filled and left in the cabinet, just in case. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want me to know.
It’s the way it is these days: he can’t talk about it, won’t, until he can’t not talk about it. “Some crazy shit is happening,” he says. “I can’t tell you what it is.”
It feels like years, but it’s only been months since he stopped spending whole days in the bathroom, reckoning with the horror movie of his body. Now he reckons with it by lying flat on his back, eyes shut against the pain, or standing upright at the kitchen counter, alternating between shots of whiskey and shots of tea, which he pours into a sweet little glass that looks like it might hold a tea-light candle. “How are you feeling?” I ask him twelve times a day. “I’m fine,” he answers, hand to chest.
Then, the thirteenth time: “Okay. I have to tell you what this is.”
“You can tell me. What is it?”
“It’s my nipples.”
“Your nipples?”
He lifts his sweater higher.
“The foam,” he says. “It’s coming out of my nipples.”
The foam. It’s been pouring out of him. It built up in his head, weeks and weeks of headaches every day, until we finally went back to the neurologist. His MRI is perfect, Dr. Queen said. No problems.
“You didn’t mention the foam,” Aaron pointed out after we left the office, defeated.
“You told me not to!”
But I’ve seen it, frothing off of him in the shower, the unruly remnants of it still clinging to the bathtub hours later, a beach after high tide. The shower is the only thing that helps with the pressure. It has to come out. It comes out of his eyes, his ears, through his skin, but this—his nipples—it’s unreal. “It stings like a bitch.”
“Oh my God.” I cup my own breasts in sympathy pain. “Ouch.”
“I have so much respect for you,” he says. “Those things hurt.”
“What the fuck.”
“I’m lactating.” He gives a sad lau
gh.
For days, when I go to hug him, to climb on top of him on the couch, he says, “Careful.” I lift my head from his chest. He lifts his shirt again. His nipples have, in fact, scabbed over. They look like mine did when, after six weeks, I gave up on breastfeeding Nico. His lamprey latch had left my nipples chewed and bloody like sausages. Too late, we learned he was tongue-tied. I am a little proud of the scars, healed white now.
Later, I look it up. Men can lactate; it’s rare but it’s true.
Is Aaron yielding milk? Is it milk that seethes from every pore, hot human milk frothing from some secret duct? An evolutionary adaptation for the stay-at-home dad?
I try not to research. I go weeks without it. Then I get sucked in. I spend a day Gimme! Coffee, following the yellow brick road of Wikipedia articles. Galactorrhea, milk production that occurs outside of regular breastfeeding, can be connected to high levels of the hormone prolactin, in the blood. Then this: it can be caused by certain antipsychotics, including Seroquel. Galactorrhea, says my screen, can occur even years after taking Seroquel.
My brain screen starts to stutter and flash. Too many tabs open. Galactorrhea. Intergalactic. Milky Way. I imagine the milk flowing out of my husband, a teapot of it.
In Karen Russell’s short story “Orange World,” a new mother breastfeeds the devil to ward off harm to her child. It’s a rodent of indeterminate species, with sharp teeth that bite. I can’t read the story without my own nipples wincing.
Aaron’s devil isn’t outside, though; it’s still in utero. Does it want to be exorcised? Or does it want to keep him alive, to feed on him from the inside? The womb of parasites in his belly—what umbilical cord does it feed from?
The boys, like all children, want to know why boys have nipples.
“It’s one of life’s great mysteries,” we agree.
Henry breastfed like a champ. A soft little mouth that knew what to do. Still, I dream I am nursing my babies. I miss it like a country I can’t return to. Like many babies, Henry had slightly swollen breasts when he was born, from the hormone bath of the birth canal.
Galactorrhea can occur in newborn babies, girls and boys both. This is still sometimes called “witch’s milk.” It was said that the “familiar spirits” of a young witch—demon fairies that took the shape of animals, like rabbits—suckled the babies’ milk while they slept.
Aaron is watching the silent movie Häxan, made in Denmark in 1922, about witches persecuted in Europe in the Middle Ages. It’s perhaps the first movie to acknowledge the murder of thousands of mentally ill women—and perfectly sane women—under the justification of witchcraft. On the black-and-white screen, the naked women, crawling in a graveyard, look like they’re made of stone. The devil dances in the night. The witches come one after another and kiss his behind. They feed him babies. “This is the best movie ever made,” Aaron says, nearly weeping.
I’d be the surrogate mother if I could. I would nurse the devil to save my husband from this hell.
“Milk, milk, milk,” Henry would say, clutching my breast. It sounded more like “Muck.”
In Target, as a toddler, recently weaned, he wandered the lingerie aisle, pawing the bras. “Muck, muck, muck,” he mourned.
Now we wander Target together, the four of us. “Milk!” Henry says, pointing at the bras, laughing at his former self. In a nearby cart, a child is crying.
“Watch out, guys,” Aaron says. “I may start leaking.”
* * *
For months, the package of family photos sent by Aaron’s uncle has stood against a speaker in the family room. Now Aaron is cleaning up and he opens the box again.
In a manila folder, a word-processed document his mother has written, her life story. “The Painted Picture,” it’s called.
Aaron reads it. When he’s done, he tosses the pages on the table and scoffs, “She knows how to paint a picture, all right.”
Aaron is not in these pages much, it pains me to see. What’s mostly in “The Painted Picture” are misadventures, famous people who ate in her restaurants, beautiful things in her home in Manhasset, and terrible things she endured at the hands of men, including being terrorized by her first husband and neglected by her second.
There are a couple of anecdotes about Aaron. Giving him a bath with a neighbor girl. Waiting for the rain to stop so they could board a plane, Aaron impressing the other passengers in the terminal with his wit. “I want to sit next to this kid,” everyone said.
Were there other moments, quiet moments not worthy of remembering, let alone telling? Did she sit quietly in a dark room, rocking him in her arms? When he cried in the night, did she go to him? Did she delight in him? Did she love him?
In the box, there’s a picture of Aaron and his mother on Halloween. He’s maybe five. Soon his mother will leave, but now they stand on the elegant staircase. He is wearing a homemade Batman mask, a black cape, a black leotard, and black tights. She is a witch. She has made his costume, I am certain.
* * *
In the bathroom, a week before Halloween, I paint the boys’ faces. Their hair is pulled back from their beautiful foreheads with my cloth headbands. Without their glasses, their faces caked in white, they are stone-faced dolls. Their eyelids crinkle when I apply the black eyeshadow. I teach them how to stretch their lips taut when I apply the blood-red lipstick. Nico gets a long red smile across his cheeks. Henry gets a red nose and a spear of red through each eye. Their white masks dry and crack, the shadow of my fingerprints still on their cheeks. Henry gasps when he sees himself in the mirror. “I look just like Pennywise!” He hugs me, spotting my cheek with red, and I have to redo his nose.
Nico tells me I should be a makeup artist.
“Really? Thanks, honey.”
“You know why?”
“Why?”
In his sinister Heath Ledger voice, he says, “When you’re good at something, don’t do it for free.”
I laugh. “What?”
“It’s from The Dark Knight!”
When they fit on their wigs, one red, one green, they are transformed into perfect monsters. No store sells Pennywise costumes for children, so I’ve bought a craft-store tutu for Henry and fit it around his neck, a perfect clown collar.
Aaron has signed up to chaperone Nico’s first dance. He is in bad shape, unsteady, tired, in pain. “You don’t have to do this,” I say. “You can cancel.” But he says he’s not missing it. He dresses in his black Fred Perry and the only jeans that fit and his maroon, ten-eye Docs.
He asks Nico, “You won’t be embarrassed if I bring my cane?”
“No!” Nico says, like, of course not.
I drop them off and watch them walk into the middle school, Nico going slow, holding on to his dad’s arm. It’s my dad’s cane he’s started using. For months it hung in Papou’s room, and then Aaron took it off the hook.
The same night, Henry and I go to the Fall Festival at his school. I’m not really a costume mom, but for a moment I wondered if I should go as a witch. It’s an easy mom thing to do; we have the makeup. Aaron saw me eyeing the hat at Target. “Yeah, please don’t do that,” he said.
Afterward, Henry and I have time to kill before we pick up Aaron and Nico, so he takes off his wig and we help clean up, putting away the folding chairs in the gym. Henry, forty-eight pounds, can barely lift one, but slowly, with determination, he carries them across the room. When I cross the gym to get more chairs, he runs after me, howling. “I didn’t know where you were!” He bumps into me, his red nose now smearing my jean jacket.
“Henry! I was right here.”
“Tell me when you’re leaving.”
“I’d never just leave you,” I say.
Walking to the car, he stops and looks up at the dark sky. “Can we just look at the sky?” he says. When you’re eight, the dark is a novelty. “We never just like look at the sky.”
“Of course.” But he’s right: we never just like look.
The sky is a haunting Halloween sky, p
urple black, like the makeup in the Halloween makeup kit. A mummy’s gauze of cloud hides the stars. My son still loves to find the moon.
“Can we play on the playground? At night?”
“Of course.”
He swings on the swings, slides down the slide. We ride the seesaw together, but I’m wearing a dress and it’s cold on my thighs, so I just balance on my feet. I video him running toward me. He is perhaps the happiest I’ve ever seen him. He is eight.
I think of the way I love my boys and the way my boys love me. I think of the wound I would leave if I picked up and left now. What perfect little monsters I’d make of them. I think it isn’t that Sandra didn’t love Aaron. It isn’t that he didn’t love her. It’s that they did love each other, and then she was gone. And after that there was nothing else that mattered: it was the only part of the story he could hear.
Can you wish on the moon? I lean my head back and try it. I wish that our kids won’t be possessed by their parents’ story, the way Aaron and I have been by ours. That we won’t be the wrathful gods they worship and curse. I want to tie off our story, like I’ve taught them to tie a knot in a balloon. I want them to see it, sealed and secure, float up and away from them. I want them to be free.
AURORA STREET
2013
Do you know about the four M’s?” Kate asked me over coffee.
I shook my head. Being in Al-Anon meant admitting, finally, sometimes, I knew nothing.
“Manipulating, managing, martyring, mothering.” She smiled gently, a mother’s smile.
In Al-Anon, women spoke of their qualifiers’ little triumphs with a careful sort of pride. Whether they were talking about their children or spouses mattered little. The wives who were like me always sounded like parents, full of fear, watching them toddle out of the nest.
Aaron went back to school. That first summer in the new house on Aurora Street, still in boxes, still in group therapy and outpatient rehab, he walked downtown to the community college campus. I felt the seasons in my limbs, learned the rhythms, the winter of our discontent having given way to a spring of near-death and rebirth, and now the Ithaca summer stretching before us, possibility.
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