* * *
I am startled to learn that “too much fire,” in traditional Chinese medicine, is simply another term for yang. When you are “on fire,” you have too much yang, or masculine energy. When you are “taking cold,” you have too much yin, or feminine energy.
Brother Sun, Sister Moon.
“Your face is so cold,” Aaron used to tell me.
The opposite of too much is not enough. When I was in seventh grade, when asked in Spanish class to translate “too much,” I wrote on the worksheet demasiado mucho. I had a feeling I’d gone too far, gone too literal, stuck in my English. I went to the front of the class to turn it in. My teacher smiled, stopping herself from laughing. Then she crossed out mucho. “Just demasiado.”
Too much too much.
In seventh grade, like all the wannabe surfer white girls, I liked to draw yin yang symbols on my notebooks. I still feel like that girl, Google-translating the world, stealing a phrase I haven’t bothered to fully understand. Not enough.
* * *
A 2007 article in the journal Immunologic Research posits that chimerism, the presence of two genetically distinct kinds of cells in one person, plays a “possible role” in autoimmune disorders. The idea is that when a human is made up of more than one human—a vanished twin, for instance—his body rejects the Other.
* * *
In the upstairs bathroom, in a basket by the toilet, is a book by Dr. Gabor Maté called When the Body Says No. Little orange Post-it tabs poke out of its pages. “We want to describe human beings,” one page says, “as though they function in isolation from the environment in which they develop, live, work, play, love and die. These are the built-in, hidden biases of the medical orthodoxy that most physicians absorb during their training and carry into their practice.”
The body is connected to what’s outside the body, just as holistic medicine insists that organs are connected within the body. They orbit each other in their own bloody galaxy: liver, kidneys, thymus, heart; pancreas, stomach, esophagus, lungs. The largest organ, the skin, is a kind of gravity, saying, we belong together.
* * *
“Some stories of the Moon’s influence are baked into language,” Morton writes in The Moon, “in words like mania, and lunacy, and menstruation. This does not make these stories true. Women’s monthly cycles are close to the duration of the Moon’s, but they are not synchronized to it. Nor is madness, at least as measured today, which shows no relation to the phase of the Moon.”
But, Morton continues, “is there anything madder than a light that makes things look different and only comes in darkness? And if there is a cycle of the womb and a cycle of the sky, do they have to be in lock-step to be some sort of same? Stories can be true and untrue at the same time; they can mean one thing and also its opposite.”
* * *
If the gravest harm has been done by human hubris, by the folly of attempting to play God, to control, conquer, cure, then I suppose it’s humility I must seek, acceptance. Stop resisting. Stop fighting gravity. Let the earth, our bodies, be. Close the laptop. Put down the microscope, the telescope. There is no portal. There is no world better than this one. This is what my love is trying to tell me, if I listen.
“People are missing the point,” he says, walking in the yard one evening. It’s November. The trees have emptied, and the tall grasses have gone brown. “They should take a hint.” We hold hands. The moon peeks through the clouds, a hint of it, over his shoulder. He says, “We’re not supposed to live forever.”
THEORY 10
He has all of it, or any of it, or none of it. Morgellons, Lyme, parasites, PTSD, schizophrenia, too much fire—all names for an unknowable thing. Not or but and. Nature and nurture. A boy was bitten, and broken.
Picture a planet in a galaxy far, far away. Undiscovered by human science. Picture tunneling the same distance, light-years, inside a human body. Then the same distance inside a tick inside that body. A worm inside a tick. A virus inside a worm. Something else, something smaller, nesting inside the virus, something subcellular we don’t have lenses or language for yet. Will we ever? Does it matter? Does the something in the virus have a purpose other than to poison something bigger?
Feel sorry for the something. Don’t bother asking its name. It doesn’t feel the wind. Only the polluted atmosphere inside the body it has made sick.
QUARANTINE
Aaron’s nose is bleeding. In the sink, in the car, little red drops that spot the kitchen floor, then the soles of our white socks.
He has an appointment with the neurologist, who refers him back to the ear-nose-throat doctor who did the surgery on Aaron’s deviated septum last year. The ENT doctor recommends a saline nasal gel, which I buy at the supermarket.
Dr. Queen also refers him to a rheumatologist, whose office is in the floor above in the same new shiny building, a building that did not exist when Aaron first got sick, and I think maybe there will be a new building built in some future year that will contain the office of a new specialist, the right one. Aaron is superstitious of elevators in buildings with only two floors, so we take the stairs, even though his joints are aching and he’s using a cane. The rheumatologist, Dr. Toscani, wears a bowtie with his white coat and uses “heck” in every other sentence. He gives us a full hour of his time, takes down all the symptoms. “I like to detectivize,” he says. He asks Aaron if he has oral lesions. Aaron says he does. Dr. Toscani wants to test him for Behçet’s, a rare autoimmune disease that causes inflammation of the blood vessels, joint pain, vision problems, neurological effects, and lesions. I allow myself to entertain the hope, Googling it as we wait to check out. Ba-shetts. Named after the Turkish dermatologist who discovered it. I imagine myself saying it at a dinner party, writing it down on a health form. “He has Behçet’s.” Those two syllables, how they might shape a rough structure we can live inside, a shelter of twigs and clay.
The labs must be done at the hospital. Aaron doesn’t like this, but he goes. I sit in the chair next to him at the intake, then watch his blood shoot into the nine vials. Labs is the syllable that shapes us for now, the blood a thing we can see and know.
* * *
On the afternoon of the snow moon—it’s February, on what feels like the day of deepest snow—we go to the Fire and Ice Festival at the Children’s Garden. Ithaca, land of festivals. Aaron says he feels like he’s in a Hallmark Christmas movie. Families parallel park their Foresters against the bank of snow, Christmas trees strapped to the top, then drag the piney carcasses to the bonfire and watch them bounce and blaze. Hot cocoa is ladled into earthenware mugs from a giant steaming cauldron. Toddlers in teddy-bear snowsuits toddle through snow up to their chins. The boys climb over the snow-covered tree stumps, through the snow-covered branch huts. On the giant snow-covered turtle, they reenact the finale of Revenge of the Sith, Anakin sliding into the lava lake, Obi-Wan standing on higher ground. Aaron laughs hard, steadying himself on his cane. He says, “I’m so happy right now.” At the snack bar we buy vegan lentil soup and hand warmers, which we take turns sharing, but our toes are frozen a half hour in. By the time the sun has dropped and the fire dancers begin, we are sitting in the car with the heat on full blast. The full moon rises across the lake, above the distant ridge of Cornell. It’s the color of a watchful eyeball, a little yellower than white, a little bluer. The kids use their mittens to clear a circle in the steamed-up window and watch the torches twirl in the settling dark.
At home, Aaron starts to fall apart. His ankles feel like they’re being crushed, he says. His head throbs. I fill and refill his Nalgene bottle. “I feel really weird right now,” he says calmly, leaning against the refrigerator. “You don’t look right.” He looks at me. “You don’t look like you should be here.” He says, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” The boys help me help him to the couch, where he lies down, falls asleep, and then promptly wakes up, mumble-shouting, “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know!” This goes on for an hour or so.
The boys take turns sitting by his side until they too have to go to sleep.
“He keeps waking up and falling asleep,” Henry says, shrugging. They muffle their laughter, delighted and concerned.
“He’ll be okay,” I say.
The next day, he is. It’s like he’s slept off a bender, except he wasn’t drunk. He laughs when the kids imitate him sleep-shouting.
“You smell like syrup,” I say, suddenly alert to him, getting a whiff of it from his neck.
“Great,” Aaron says, “thanks.”
I’ve noticed it for a day or two now. I thought maybe my own sense of smell was distorted; maybe I was hormonal. I first suspected I was pregnant when I woke up and Aaron smelled powerfully of mustard. But the next day Henry says, “You do smell like syrup, Dad.”
Aaron sniffs his own wrist. “God, I do.”
I sniff again, near his ear, his overgrown sideburns; there is no other metaphor: he smells like syrup.
“This is what I need,” he says. “To smell like an IHOP.”
That night, as I’m putting Nico to bed, Aaron texts me from the couch with symptoms from a medical website. What is Maple Syrup Urine Disease?
Omg. Did you google “Why do I smell like maple syrup?”
Maybe
I’m sorry I’m giggling
No seriously read it
I read it. A metabolic disease. I am not totally sure what this means. Genetic. A problem with amino acids. Apparently it’s mostly diagnosed in newborns, or even in utero.
Untreated in older individuals, and during times of metabolic crisis, symptoms of the condition include uncharacteristically inappropriate, extreme or erratic behavior and moods, hallucinations, lack of appetite, weight loss, anemia, diarrhea, vomiting, dehydration, lethargy, oscillating hypertonia and hypotonia, ataxia, seizures … rapid neurological decline, and coma.
Wow, I text back.
You think you know some things about the human body by now. You were not really paying attention during the unit on the endocrine system.
The next day, at Dr. McLovin’s office, I say, “You’re going to laugh, doctor. It’s okay. He smells like maple syrup.”
The doctor nods.
“You know what I’m going to say?”
He does. It’s rare, he says. But he once came across a family who carried the gene. One baby died as a newborn. The next baby was diagnosed but survived. The next child was not diagnosed but developed the disease at age ten. She had to be careful of what she ate for the rest of her life. “It’s definitely bizarre,” he says. “It’s a reach.” He plays his charade game, imitating the building blocks of proteins, of recessive and dominant genes. The genetic test is complicated. But they’ll start by checking Aaron’s amino acid levels. The next morning, he fasts and I drive him to the hospital and they draw his blood. He can come here now, to the hospital, without shaking.
* * *
We wait for the results. Every other night, it happens again. Evening coming on. After an outing, some exertion, he’ll sit at the dinner table and fade away.
“I’m disappearing,” he warns.
The next time it happens, he licks Nico’s face. Aaron is the exact last person who would ever lick anyone’s face. The next day, he can’t believe it. He cracks up, shakes his head.
“I licked your face? Oh, Bubba, I am so sorry.”
* * *
“Why are all these guns pointing at me?”
“I don’t want to go over there.” He wags a hand in front of him. Eyes half-closed. “Please stop shooting. I don’t want to but I’ll kill you back.”
“I’m scared.”
“I don’t know where I am.”
“I don’t want to go up. I don’t want to leave. Why am I leaving?”
“I’m going into space.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“What are you doing? Are you recording me? I told you not to record me.”
He’s like a parody of a guy having a bad dream, but the dream lasts for hours, and he’s half-awake, waking to shuffle across the room, to collapse again on the couch, to look in the refrigerator, to ask for water, to cry. When I come into the room, he looks at me like I’m a stranger. He looks like he’s trying to figure out why he hates me.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Henry says, petting his head. “You’re in your home. You’re safe.”
“No one is trying to shoot you,” says Nico.
I was recording him, though. Nico and I, aiming the barrels of our phones at him. We wanted it for later, when he was himself again. To tell him, this is what we saw. It was real.
* * *
We have decided to sell the house. The dream house we built in the country. The house I dreamed tile by tile, to distract myself from the nightmare.
Thing I’ve learned: The dream house cannot save you from the nightmare.
Thing I’ve learned: Magical thinking doesn’t work on a mortgage. Or a marriage.
We can’t really afford it, is the main thing. Every morning, beside my worry about Aaron, is another worry: How will we keep paying for this house?
Too much money, too much house, too far away. We feel isolated out here, the blank-faced mountains watching us like God. When we built this house, we didn’t know Aaron would all but stop driving, that my days would be filled with shuttling him to doctor appointments ten miles into civilization and back, that the stairs would strain his knees, his lungs, that it would be the perfect sick house, keeping him stranded on the empty acres all winter, a very dull boy, while I carried on my life in town.
We start to look for a new house. Something in town, a neighborhood, with a garden someone has already started for us.
Thing I’ve learned: I can come up with a lot of reasons to move. To start the story again.
I guess other people have affairs. I guess this is better than that.
* * *
The results for the Amino Acid Screen Plasma come back via the Patient Portal. Aaron texts me a screen shot.
“This is a normal profile.”
Not Maple Syrup Urine Disease.
* * *
Aaron is devastated, cries, says he doesn’t want to go on.
I try to make him feel better. We go to bed and make each other feel better. When he withdraws his face from between my legs, I see that it is covered in blood. He looks as though he’s been punched in the nose. Very red blood soaks his nose, his mouth, his very full beard. I think for a moment that it’s my blood, that I’ve spontaneously gotten my period, a period I don’t really get anymore. But it’s his nose that’s erupted, and his blood is on me, too.
* * *
It’s not Behçet’s, either.
Back at Dr. Toscani’s, though, we tell the bowtied rheumatologist about the new symptoms, the syrup smell, the way the hallucinations come on like a cloud. He looks in Aaron’s eyes and nose and mouth. “If it makes you feel better,” he says, stethoscope to Aaron’s chest, “I can smell it, too.”
Dr. Toscani asks Aaron to lie down and he feels his belly. His belly is huge, pregnant. When the nurse asked him to get on the scale, the number was almost as high as it was years ago, during the bad time, before he gave up drinking. “It’s kinda firm, isn’t it?” he asks Aaron, concerned. Is it firm because it’s soaked with alcohol, or firm because his body has ceased working like a body should? Casually, as though he’s squirting mustard on a hot dog, he grabs a wand from the laptop cart beside him and covers it with gel.
“Is that an ultrasound?” I ask.
“Yeah. I’m not an expert radiographer or anything,” he says. But he rubs the wand over Aaron’s belly, in the place where he has the pain. Is it his liver, begging for mercy? Or something else, begging to get out? The screen is a black hole. “It’s a baby!” Dr. Toscani says. “Just kidding.”
He cleans off Aaron’s belly and then sits down. “I’m an expert Googler,” he boasts. He is literally looking at Google on his phone when he discovers that the maple syrup smell can also be the r
esult of an “annoyed” liver. Annoyed by alcohol or annoyed by something else? He wants Aaron to get a real ultrasound, and some more liver testing.
Dr. Toscani says, “We gotta find out what the heck this is.”
* * *
In the imaging center, we sanitize. The first Ithaca patients have just been quarantined on suspicion of carrying the coronavirus.
Aaron lies on his side on a hospital bed. The tech, tiny-waisted in scrubs airbrushed with pink and purple swirls, churns an ultrasound wand over his belly. I remember my dad on his side, getting scanned, the cardboard-thin slice of him. Aaron is big today, his beard overgrown, his belly wide and full; his head aches. It is a full moon, the first Monday of daylight savings time, the ninth day of March. On the wall, the calendar is still flipped to February, four Valentine’s cupcakes perky with red candy hearts.
I had ultrasounds myself, of course, with each pregnancy, and the second time, to find out the sex of the baby. Once, during the months I was first trying to get pregnant, an unwelcome wand probed inside me for the source of my pain and infertility. It was during the first hours of my period, my uterus gasping with cramps. The ultrasound couldn’t read the endometriosis that grew in my tubes; that would be confirmed later, through laparoscopy. The wand just tore around, a blind moon rover. It felt long enough to reach my guts; it stirred a little white light in my brain.
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