I ended up having a car for the rest of the week. Dad was able to carpool with Mom, and my range was extended considerably. The Gold’s Gym on 23 was having a special where you could get a two-week trial membership. I went in and signed up, figuring I’d work out every one of my last days in Ohio. I filled out all the forms and was given the tour. At noon on a weekday, it was packed with retirees. I was the only person there under sixty. After pulling on my shorts and shoes, I made a cursory attempt at lifting weights, then started up one of the treadmills. Almost immediately my body fell into rhythm. The weights had felt alien to me, but running felt preternaturally easy. I plugged in my headphones and listened to My Aim Is True by Elvis Costello. I kept pushing the machine to go faster and faster. Time slid by, as did my anxieties. I kept punching the buttons, making the grade higher and higher. My legs moved easily. They were strong and able and happy with the thud thud thud as my feet struck the black conveyor belt over and over. By the time I finished, I was drenched through with sweat and my lungs burned, but I was maniacally happy. I ran for a little over an hour that day and did eight miles. I blasted the Elvis Costello album on the way home, the windows in Dad’s car down as I smoked.
The next day I woke up, and it was like someone had driven icicles into each of my shins. I hobbled downstairs and stretched them out, throwing my workout clothes in a plastic bag. I ran again for eight miles, then went to the Backstretch and had drinks and cigarettes with Debbie.
Running, smoking, and drinking. The rest of the week melted into this pattern. Here were things I could control. I was addicted to them. I could exhaust myself by punching the appropriate buttons on the machine, and I could mediate the chemicals that came into my body through the cigarettes and scotch.
The Friday before I left, my dad and I went to a matinee of some terrible action flick, and then went to a bar and drank scotch. I was limping a little, and my shins were killing me. Dad told me that I didn’t have to go if I didn’t feel ready. I told him that staying in Ohio was not an option. I needed to get back to my work, I told him. I didn’t understand what my work was, but I hoped that if I started doing it, I’d fall into a groove.
“When did I get so interested in India?” I asked.
“College. You first went with two of your buddies after you graduated. They were there for two months, and you stayed an extra two months after, bumming around.”
“Was I on a program or something?”
Dad signaled to the bartender and got us two more single malts. He liked to call them “drams” when ordering in public. He crunched the ice of his empty drink while he waited for the refills. “You were just out there. You’d call every once in a while and tell us you were okay, but we didn’t know what you were doing other than that. You read a lot. Even that James Joyce book that no one can read. You read it in three days on a train trip from the north to the south.”
“Were you worried?”
“Not really. You always took care of yourself. This was before everyone had e-mail, too, and so we were used to being out of contact more often.”
The bartender came over with the bottle, filled our drinks, and asked us which one of us was driving. My dad signaled that he was, and the guy tipped the bottle up for an extra splash in my glass.
“Why India?” I asked. “Was I into religion or yoga, or something like that?”
“No. Not that stuff.” Dad took a sip out of his drink and laughed. “You said you liked it because it was the farthest place away from Ohio.”
On Sunday, I walked along the dam with Mom and Sally. Sally bounded up and down the earthen mounds shored up to contain floodwaters. Mom didn’t want me to go back to India unless I was positive that I was all right.
“I knew something was wrong right when you started taking that drug. You were acting so weird,” she said, her eyes wet. “I hate that I didn’t say anything.”
“I was probably stressed out. I don’t think the drug was affecting me that early.”
“You were just acting so strangely. I should’ve seen it. I should’ve said something.”
“This is when I threw the book?”
“You’ve always been high-strung, but this was different.” The wind was bitterly cold, and it came up off the lake, icy and mean. There were tears in our eyes as we blinked through the wind. She sat down and stared at the sluggish water. I hunched down behind her, and even then it took me three tries to successfully light my cigarette.
She grabbed the pack out of my hand. “Camels. These are what my dad smoked.” And she tapped one out of the pack and smoked with me.
My dad contacted some lawyers about suing Hoffmann–La Roche, the maker of Lariam. The lawyers told him that for years people had been trying to put together a class action suit, but the side effects were too varied to be consistently linked to the drug. Since most people were prescribed the drug before traveling, the symptoms would evince so far away from the prescribing doctor that causal connections were difficult to establish. There have been only a few settlements regarding Lariam, including an Ohio man who came home from a safari acting strangely. He went down to the basement for a gallon of milk and instead grabbed a shotgun and killed himself. Roche settled with his spouse for an undisclosed sum.
Lariam poisoning often sneaks by doctors and gets diagnosed as something else, such as schizophrenia, which usually manifests itself in the sufferer’s early to midtwenties and has some of the same symptoms (hallucinations, disassociative behavior, suicide). The Peace Corps, ground troops of the military, and travel abroad programs are peopled nearly exclusively with the young, and cases of odd behavior often get attributed to young people reacting to stressful situations.
My parents and I sat at the Chili’s in the Columbus airport sipping coffee. I had checked my bags and now clutched my paper ticket. My mom had her hand on the back of my neck, and then she was tucking my hair back behind my ears and pushing her thumb on the crease between my eyebrows that formed when I was nervous. We traded passing bits of minor importance: Ohio politics, basketball games, my dad’s new dietary restrictions. I had a layover in New York for seven hours, so Betsy was going to pick me up at the airport and make me dinner. Mom wrote Betsy’s phone number and address on a scrap of paper she tore from her address book. Before she handed it to me, she wrote her own address and phone number on it as well.
“Keep this in your wallet,” she said.
“I should get it tattooed on the bottom of my foot,” I joked.
Mom excused herself and went to the bathroom.
While she was gone, Dad asked if I wanted to split a plate of nachos.
“When she comes back, say that you ordered them,” he advised.
Mom came back and gave a disapproving glance at the appetizer in which Dad and I were wrist deep. Sometimes, you can actually see, like a neon scar across her forehead, my mom picking her battles. She let this one slide and folded her hands neatly in her lap. When the waitress came by, my mom said she’d enjoy a refill on her water.
My mom was fiddling with her black butterfly sunglasses, opening and closing them, examining the tiny hinges.
“Those are mine,” I told her.
“They most certainly are not.”
I wiped the cheese grease off my hands on a napkin and reached for them. She pulled them out of my reach. “C’mon,” I said.
“David, these are mine.”
“I can’t believe you’re being like this. I’m going to India, and you’re not letting me have my sunglasses.” I exhaled noisily and said, “Classy.”
My mom, her cheeks flushed, leaned forward. “I have the receipt for these up in the car. Do you want me to get it for you?”
“Whatever. Keep them. It’s not worth it.” I busied myself zipping up my backpack and checking the straps. “I should get going.”
“We have time,” Mom said. “I’ll get the receipt and show you. I’m not stealing from you.”
“It’s fine. They’re yours. Whatever.” I stood up a
nd gestured to the desiccated remains of the nacho plate. “You want me to pay for those?”
Dad pushed back from the table. “We’ll get it.”
“Okay. I’m going.” I leaned down and hugged Mom and then Dad. “I love you. Thanks for everything.” My voice was pulled down by the argument, and so everything sounded sarcastic.
“If you want them, take them,” Mom said. “Don’t leave like this.”
“It’s all fine. I’m fine. I love you both.”
Brittle and argumentative, I was furious with them. How in the world could they allow me to leave? Should I have thrown a book across the Chili’s to get their attention? My parents needed to stop me. I wanted to be back in a hospital, strapped down, with nurses who fed me and thought everything I said was funny. I was safe there. I wanted to be safe. I wanted to be surrounded by people who acknowledged the very simple and obvious fact that they knew what was better for me than I did.
As soon as Lariam was made available, reports of extreme behavior started popping up. In 1992, a Canadian soldier in Somalia savagely beat a civilian to death and then attempted suicide in a holding cell, resulting in permanent brain damage. The Canadian soldiers in his unit referred to the day they were supposed to take their weekly dose of Lariam as “Psycho Tuesdays.”
The first time I went to India was in 1998, after my graduation from college. I traveled with two buddies, Duncan and Emil, visiting shrines for a couple of months, and then traveled by myself for a couple of months. I was prescribed Lariam by the doctor I saw at Ohio State University’s Travel Clinic. She told me to take it every Thursday. She called it the Seinfeld drug since that was the day NBC broadcast the show.
I was three months into my trip. Duncan and Emil had gone back to the States a month before. I was in the southernmost state of India—Kerala—and I was coming out of a dance recital when a man shoved a flyer in my hands. It was for an ecotourism lodge a bus ride away. He and his mom ran the place. I was heading that way anyway, so I told him I would get a room for the next week.
It took a bus and a mile walk, but I got to the lodge and found it was a house—their house. I was greeted by the mother, who’d been told to expect me. She gave me a tour of the grounds. It was a speculative tour: Here was where the second house was going to go. There was where the garden was going to go, which would provide all the vegetables for the meals. Right here, she told me, she thought she’d have a row of hammocks for people to take their rest.
I had been reading The Catcher in the Rye. While she gave me the tour and I nodded politely and gave my opinion as to what exactly we Western Tourists wanted, there was a voice in the back of my head that sounded a lot like Holden Caulfield’s. It was calling me a phony.
The woman lent me a bicycle, and I rode on the flat roads for miles, trying to exhaust myself. My thoughts were beginning to spin. I rode back to the house, and without changing clothes, I jogged through the large rubber tree forest. The giant trees spread out in a green canopy, each with a tube hammered in its side and a bucket collecting the slow, steady drips. I stopped, folded over, gasping for breath—and I felt something in the forest, something with teeth, that was looking for me. I sprinted back to the house.
When I got back, I was afraid of the book. I took the copy of The Catcher in the Rye and shoved it between the cushions of the living room sofa, and I locked my door to keep it away from me.
I knew where the knives were. She’d shown me the kitchen. We were alone. Her son was still in the city up north, handing out flyers. I could kill her. I could get away with it. I’d do it if I wasn’t such a phony. I could see her dead already in my mind. It was like I had already done it, was already guilty of it, and all I needed to do was finish it. Go to the kitchen, get the knife, and stab the old woman. It had already happened. All I needed to do now was start it.
I took my ballpoint pen out. I shoved the tip of it underneath my thumbnail. It left a mark a quarter of an inch long under there. The pain was excruciating, but it centered me. For the rest of the night, as soon as I felt my thoughts spinning out of control, I pushed down on my thumbnail until tears came to my eyes.
I made it through the night like this. The next morning I asked the old woman for a Band-Aid, and then I checked out.
I had never had homicidal thoughts in my life before that night. I told myself it was because I had been alone so long. Solitude was what was driving me. I figured the Lariam had something to do with it, but only because it gave me such crazy dreams. I blamed myself; I felt terrible; the images in my head of her bloody corpse were too vivid. I was ashamed that my brain could produce such things.
From 2002 to 2004, two UPI reporters, Mark Benjamin and Dan Olmsted, filed over forty articles about Lariam and its effects. The reports describe the men and women who served in the US military in malarial regions, such as Iraq, Rwanda, Liberia, and Afghanistan, and then came home and killed themselves and sometimes their family members as well. One soldier in Colorado held his wife at gunpoint in their backyard and told her she had to watch as he shot himself in the head. Police responded to the scene, and when they heard a gunshot, they fired, striking the man after he had already shot himself. Their bullets hit him as he was falling.
In the summer of 2002, three Special Forces soldiers murdered their wives at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. All three had just returned from Afghanistan, and all of them committed suicide soon after the murders. In December of that year, another soldier who had returned from Afghanistan came at his wife “like a linebacker,” pinned her against a tree, and tried to strangle her. The woman’s seven-year-old daughter tried to protect her mother with a kitchen knife.
Three other Special Forces soldiers who had served in Afghanistan killed themselves that year.
The Department of Defense (DOD) denied for years that Lariam had anything to do with these deaths. The DOD, when confronted with questions, pointed to Lariam’s FDA approval and that the Centers for Disease Control hadn’t withdrawn its support of the drug.
Olmsted and Benjamin dug through thousands of Roche documents related to the drug and found that in Roche’s Safety Report for 1994, the company did address the suicides that were being attributed to the Lariam. The report said that while Lariam could cause depression and that depression could involve suicidal ideation, the suicides themselves were more likely the result of “the progressive breakdown of traditional values” and not of Lariam use.
PART 4
I can’t even hardly remember what happened. It’s like a gap. But it left me alone in a way that I haven’t gotten over. And right now, I’m afraid. Afraid of walking away again.
—Travis Henderson, Paris, Texas
I drank scotch throughout the three flights it took to get to Mumbai, the little empty bottles of Dewar’s filling the seat pocket in front of me. I studied my brain. I wanted to catch it slipping. I wanted proof that I had no business going back to India, proof that would permit me to run away from the next connecting flight. I wanted to be thrown back into the arms of the people I’d left in Ohio. I was practically begging the flight attendants to intervene, or at the very least cut me off. I ran out of money before they got their chance.
We touched down in Mumbai at one a.m. They cracked the door, and the cabin was filled with humid air tinged with diesel exhaust.
I filed off the plane onto the tarmac and followed the line of travelers into the airport to claim our luggage and attend to the demands of the customs agents. Sleep deprived, jet-lagged, and a little drunk, I queued up in the long line of exhausted, sweaty, wide-eyed white people. The line for Indians moved much quicker. Each one of the foreigners presented themselves to one of a long line of belligerent agents. I stepped up when it was my turn and molded my face into a mask of unthreatening affability. The man, in his white shirt, barely looked at me as I fed him my passport and declaration forms.
“You’ve come back?” he asked.
I nodded, then realized that he wasn’t looking at me. “I had a medica
l thing, but I’m all better now.” Why was I telling him this? Was I asking for him to not allow me to enter the country? “Everything’s fine,” I continued rambling. “I’m all checked out.”
“Profession?”
Now my flop sweat was added to the sweat of standing in that humid, hot air. “I’m a writer.”
“A writer,” he repeated. He seemed to be testing the word. The man peered at me over the top of his glasses. “But you’re on a student visa.”
I stumbled for a second, ready to feel a hand clamp on my shoulder and lead me away to some small cell deep in the airport. “I’m a student studying writing. I’m on a Fulbright grant.” I was saying everything like a question, the ends of my sentences rising up and flaking away.
The man unfolded my passport and smashed it flat on his desk. He typed into his computer and studied the passport for several seconds like he’d never before seen such a blatant forgery. He grabbed a large silver contraption and stamped my passport in three different places. He didn’t say anything when he handed it back to me. I lingered there for a few moments, waiting for some sort of final word of officialese from him.
He looked up and was surprised to see me still hovering above him. He waved his hand at me, as if he were clearing a fly from the top of his drink.
The flight from Mumbai to Hyderabad was bumpy, and the man sitting next to me was unnaturally calm through it. He was young, and the heavy black frames of his glasses were clearly expensive. He had a manila envelope open on his tray and a scientific calculator that he punched in little flurries as he paged through documents. The plane would bump and shake, his calculator would clatter to the ground, but he was unaffected by anything that was going on. I suspected I knew something about physics that he did not. We were heavy and air was light; air was nothing and we were something. I braced myself for the plunge when the world finally figured it out.
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me Page 11