This is how I found Anne.
Anne and I walked, holding hands, up to the roof of the parking garage. She was talking about a presentation she had had to give on Foucault and how she was never sure how to pronounce his name, so she had attempted to give the presentation without ever once saying it. I was amazed at how easily she let herself be driven by me, as if my competency as a driver was never in question by anyone. I could feel the thrum of the tires on the highway through my palms. She listed people who wished me well and who were eager to hear exactly how I was doing.
Anne started talking about the magazine she edited and told little anecdotes about the crazy things crazy people write, and how she was always at her most diplomatic with the crazies.
I watched her out of the corner of my eye as I drove. I tried not to think of Geeta and felt guilty that I had to make that effort.
At home, Sally immediately recognized Anne and squirmed in ecstasy at her arrival. My parents hugged Anne and welcomed her, my dad taking her backpack and putting it in my room while my mom made her a cup of tea. We ordered pizza that night from a place my mom called my favorite and watched a basketball game. Anne told stories about growing up watching Packers games in her tiny town in Door County, Wisconsin. It all was so easy, to sit and talk and watch basketball. Why had I left all this to go to the other side of the planet? The ease of the night was strange: everyone leaning forward to hear each other precisely, everyone eager and pleasant. I had three scotches. Anne talked about the magazine some more, and then we went to bed.
Anne and I undressed on opposite sides of the bed and climbed in with the lights off, red electric light coming in the window from the grocery store sign across the street and spilling onto the carpet. I put my arm around Anne. She said we didn’t have to do anything if I didn’t feel up to it, that she was happy just to be there and see that I was okay.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Scared and disoriented, I guess. But okay.”
She kissed my chest and said that she loved me. I said that I loved her, and we fell asleep, her warmth next to me strange and wonderful.
I woke up in the middle of the night, and the world wasn’t behaving. The dark corners of the room were full of bats, and if I moved, they would all wake up and attack me. I stood paralyzed in the middle of the room. I moaned. The room felt disconnected from the house, and it was floating in space. I could hardly breathe. My chest was collapsing and crushing my lungs. The room changed again and again. The black places in the room were liquid antimatter and would freeze me if I touched them. The black places in the room were sentient malignant masses of teeth. The black places in the room changed over and over into different things, but they were always malicious and angry. The only safe place was the one strip of carpet lit up from the grocery store’s sign. I stood locked on that strip, whining and trembling. Anne jumped up, put her hands on my shoulders, and guided me back to bed, pushing my hair back and telling me that it was all going to be okay. Scared and ashamed, I blubbered and told Anne she was the only thing holding me back from all the nothingness.
The next morning, my mom took us across the street to have breakfast with Dad, who’d been sipping coffee and holding court at the grocery store’s café for at least an hour. Back in Ohio, he was bombastic and charismatic and seemed to know everyone. When he talked to someone, it seemed like he was talking to everyone in earshot at the same time. Not wasting that charm talking to individuals, he broadcast it to the entire room. We sat at his booth, and when the waitress came over, he chatted with her about her softball team and her recent knee injury. She was a bubbly woman in her late twenties, and she took orders from Mom and from Anne, and then snatched my menu away from me and told me that she knew what I wanted, reciting exactly what I was going to order.
“She’s good,” my dad crowed.
After the waitress left, Mom laid out a plan for us for that day. We’d take Sally and go out hiking at the dam, and then maybe go see a movie and go out for dinner. Still reeling from the night before, I clutched Anne throughout breakfast. Mom asked if it was okay that we spend the day with them. Anne told my mom it sounded terrific.
The waitress came back with our food and pulled a bottle of Tabasco out of her apron and handed it to me.
“I don’t know how you eat that stuff, Dave,” my dad said. “Just looking at it gives me heartburn.”
I took a bite out of my bagel sandwich, and then immediately took it apart and doused it with Tabasco.
On the hike, I pulled away from the group to smoke. It was sunny and brutally cold. We were all wearing our winter gear, February clothing for October weather. I watched Anne. She was perfectly nice. A perfectly nice woman. She was giving and sweet and laughed at my dad’s jokes. I found myself being aloof with her and felt guilty about it. Pulling away from someone who loved me; I was watching it happen.
Sally loved Anne and came to her as easily as she came to me. We scrambled down a hill of limestone rocks to watch Sally swim after sticks in the small creek leaking out of the dam, her dog cheeks chuffing as she swam.
Mom came up to me and whispered, “We really like her. She’s good for you.”
“I know,” I said.
We skipped the movie and ate at a chain Italian joint near the intersection of 270 and 315. The place had a vast open kitchen, and so we watched the youths working there spinning dough in the air and the blackening chickens rotating in the giant open ovens. Clouds had slid in, and the day had turned gray. We ate plates of spinach salad, gooey artichoke dip, and pasta, chasing it with wine. My dad told a story of the first day at the restaurant he used to own and the first time someone had ordered wine there.
“This was small-town Ohio, you understand. I wanted to make a big deal of it. Show the people some class. So I took a napkin and draped it over my forearm and cradled the bottle and made a show of displaying the label, then unfolding the little knife from the wine opener to pare away the foil. And I took that knife, and as I was peeling the foil away, the knife slipped and went straight into my hand, right between the thumb and index finger. This was our first bottle of wine at our brand-new restaurant. I bit my lip, wrapped the napkin around my hand, and poured the wine into everybody’s glasses, placed the wine in the center of the table, went into the kitchen, and cursed like hell.” My dad’s eyes glinted as he told the story. “One of the waitresses came up to me, shocked, and said, ‘I didn’t know you knew those kind of words, Mal.’”
We all laughed. Then I realized that I didn’t know what my dad did for a living currently. I panicked, and my mind telescoped away from the moment. I became nostalgic for the moment happening right in front of me. If my amnesia hadn’t been because of the Lariam, if there was something biologically wrong with me that the doctors couldn’t find yet, and whatever it was happened again, then this moment would be gone, a neural chain of memory scattered through my brain, like a jar of marbles spilled out into a ballroom. I’d have to begin the long process of collecting each marble and making sure it was in its right place inside the jar. If I lost my memory again, someone would have to tell me the story of Dad telling the story about the wine.
Each moment of happiness was now prey to this melancholy. What use was a specific moment of happiness if it couldn’t be recalled, exhumed from the gray matter of the brain to relive the happiness? I excused myself and went outside for a cigarette.
That night Anne and I undressed and climbed into bed. She was wearing white cotton underwear and a white cotton bra, and I took them both off her, sliding the panties down with my toes into the cold foot of the bed. We kissed, and she wanted to know if this was going to be okay. I wanted to screw her. I wanted to screw her to prove that I was okay, that I could handle it, that I was still worth screwing. I wanted to see if sex with her made me remember having had sex with her. It was awkward, and I didn’t know if it was okay for me to laugh at the awkwardness. I told her I had a condom. She reminded me that she was on the pill and we’d stopped using condoms age
s ago. We rolled around, and it was nice. Not cathartic or exhausting, but more of the same kind of pleasant. She fell asleep with her cheek against my chest, which kept me from getting up to get a cigarette.
I lay there awake, wary that the darkness would begin to mutate. My anxieties kept my brain alert and spinning. Anne had just slept with me, but I wasn’t the same me from before, so she had just cheated on me, with me. How many of us were there in the bed? The me she thought she knew, the me who I was, the me who I was afraid of being, and her, both the her she thought she was and the her I saw her as right now (and maybe even the her she thought that I thought she was). That’s at least six of us. I’m surprised the bed could stand it.
The next day I took her to the airport and had coffee with her at the Chili’s after she checked in. I felt terrible. I didn’t want her to go. If she stayed with me, I’d know some of the outlines of who I was as an adult. We chatted about my plans, about her plans, about India. She produced a book from her backpack.
“It’s for Veda,” she said. “You said he needed this for his dissertation, so I stole it from the library.”
I didn’t remember asking her for it. It was a poetry anthology from the 1950s, all British modernist poets. The pages were yellowing, and the cover was the kind that libraries use when the original one has gotten too worn. Anne pointed to where the magnetic strip had been ripped out of the book. She was sneaky.
I thanked her, and she checked her watch, shouldered her bag, and hugged me.
“You’re going to be all right, baby,” she whispered in my ear. “We’ll get through this thing.”
I stood by the arcade, where kids stood in front of bleeping shuddering machines, and watched her go through security.
A week later I wrote Anne an e-mail. I told her that I was going through a tough time and that I didn’t think I could be what she needed in a boyfriend. The truth was that she had seen me weeping and trembling, seen me terrified to move off a scrap of lit-up carpet, seen me at my worst, seen me at my weakest, and I couldn’t forgive her for it. Or that was a part of the truth. The more I found out about myself, the more frustrated I was with who I turned out to be. I had tried to be a good boyfriend to her that weekend, but it never felt more than a role in which I’d been poorly cast. It just felt so obvious I was faking it. If I was going to be someone better than I had been, then I needed to be honest. While I didn’t necessarily know what the exact parameters of my truth were, I did know that being with her hadn’t felt like honesty.
I didn’t say any of this in the e-mail. I just broke up with her and apologized for having failed her.
For most people, Lariam does exactly what it’s supposed to do: it concentrates in the bloodstream and stops the malaria parasite from developing. But for some, through a hiccup of neurochemistry, Lariam pools in the brain. When this happens, usually the worst side effect is a string of extremely vivid dreams and perhaps some mild confusion.
What Lariam is very good at is crossing the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier is an incredibly effective, tightly knit fence of capillaries that keeps the majority of the world’s evils at bay. There are, as a proportion of the world’s diseases, really very few that can infect the brain directly (syphilis, meningitis, and multiple sclerosis being three of the most notable), and when the brain does get infected, it’s just as difficult to get medicine through to treat it. Very few chemicals can slip past this barrier, but most of those that do, we know well: nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol.
When Lariam pools in the brain, it begins to act as a neurotoxin. It can interfere with synaptic activity by interrupting two very specific kinds of protein gap junctions. These protein gap junctions are small channels created between the cytoplasm of two adjacent cells, enabling superfast communication. Scientists type these junctions by their size, and Lariam affects two very specifically sized ones. One is found in the areas that process information from the eyes, and the other is in the vestibular system, the system that processes all the data from your senses and establishes your balance and body’s response to them. Lariam can nestle into these protein gap junctions and scatter the data that passes through them, like putting your thumb over a hose’s spray.
This is just a hypothesis. It’s hard to know what Lariam is doing as it accumulates in the brain, because in order to measure and study it, the patient must be dead. What is being actively studied is the many possible mechanisms in the brain by which Lariam can cause damage. The weird upshot of this is that scientists are learning more about how the brain functions by analyzing how Lariam damages it.
When a person is susceptible to Lariam’s worst side effects, he sees things that aren’t there, and his body’s reactions are skewed at the same time, like being in a house of mirrors while taking LSD. Input and output are affected. You can’t be sure of what you’re seeing or how your body will react. Receptors are clogged and the brain is poisoned.
It was my last week in Ohio. In preparation for my return to India, I pulled a copy of the project I had proposed when I applied for the Fulbright grant. It was lengthy, and I tucked it into a folder and walked the mile and a half to the small strip of downtown businesses. I parked myself in a coffee shop. Rutherford B. Hayes, the president, was born in my hometown. His childhood home had been torn down in the 1980s, and in its place was a BP station. In the front was a small rock garden with some anemic trees surrounding a plaque that designated the historical significance of the location. The coffee shop was right next door to the plaque.
I got a coffee and flapped the file folder open. I read the letters of recommendation first. I was praised as being competent, quick-witted, genial, and a perfect fit for the kind of research I was going to do. I read my proposal and was quickly confused. It was full of jargon that I skimmed over. I had been working on a novel that had many scenes set in India, and so I wanted to do a series of interviews to establish the spoken grammar that Indians used when speaking in English. I would accomplish this by doing grammatical analyses of the other languages the speakers spoke and see how those grammatical structures influenced the way they constructed their sentences in English.
None of it made sense to me and now was doubly daunting. I was getting an outline of some things that I for sure didn’t know any longer, and I hadn’t known until I opened that file that I hadn’t known those things. There were phrases like “dental plosives” and “nasalized vowel sounds.” This application was like the list of intimate details from my ex-girlfriend Ariel’s letter: words that I couldn’t find places for in my brain. This task of reclamation was so much more difficult now. I went outside to smoke a cigarette.
While I was outside I noticed that across the street, men in white pants and white short-sleeved button-down shirts were going inside a bar. It was nine in the morning.
I went back inside, packed my stuff, and crossed the street to do the same. It was a narrow but long place called the Backstretch. Tin signs advertising beer-branded race car teams hung on the walls. There was a pinball game in the back. Ashtrays dotted the bar, so I pulled up a stool and lit up a cigarette, glad to be smoking and not shivering.
The bartender came over, and I ordered a beer and a scotch. I flapped the file folder open again and read my statement of purpose. When the woman put the drinks in front of me, she asked me if I was Dave MacLean.
It must have seemed like a simple question to her.
I looked at her.
“It’s Debbie. Cat’s sister,” she exclaimed, and then came around the bar and wrapped me up in a hug.
I told her that I didn’t know she worked there, which was the truest thing I could’ve said, and then she went into a long story about the chain of events that had led her there. She had two babies with Mark, and they traded off shifts at the bar and were thinking of buying the place from the old woman who owned it. She wanted to know all about me, what I’d been up to, what I was doing back in town.
I told her that I was back for just a bit before returning
to India on a grant.
“India. Wow. That must be really intense.”
“You have no idea.”
She lit up a cigarette. “I’m supposed to be quitting, but it’s so hard working here and everyone is smoking.”
“Who are these guys in the white uniforms?” I asked.
“They’re Honda guys. They work the late shift and come here right after.” She stubbed her cigarette out and pushed the ashtray away. “You worked there, right? That year you took off between high school and college?”
I nodded in what I hoped was a convincing fashion.
“Between these guys and the college students, this place can make some real money.”
“Could I get some quarters for the pinball machine?” I asked.
She picked up the cigarettes and almost had one out of the pack before she caught herself and put it down. “It’s broken. I need to call that guy.”
She went to the other end of the bar and picked up a cordless, punching in numbers off a card taped to the bar.
I went back to reading about myself. I had been very confident that the opportunity of the grant would allow me the time and resources to flesh out a novel in a way that wouldn’t perpetuate in American popular culture the stereotypical depiction of the Indian accent. I finished my drinks and left two singles on the bar. Before I left, I slid the lone quarter I had into the pinball machine. It spun through the dead machine and clunked in the empty coin box.
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me Page 10