I’m not sure what movie I had rented that day, but I was sitting there with my coffee and my samosas when a moped pulled up next to me. The US State Department was releasing alerts nearly every other day warning travelers in Muslim areas to be highly aware; they stressed that I was supposed to vary my routine in order to keep myself protected. It was early 2003. The Iraq war was in its first motions, and North Korea had kicked out the UN weapons inspectors before they could say whether or not North Korea was developing nukes. Paranoia was a side effect of being an American abroad.
The moped pulled up close to my table, and a boy’s voice called my name. Three boys I didn’t recognize were stacked on the old rattling thing, which was rusty and held together in places with wire. They were street kids with torn clothes. The largest boy, the one driving, was no more than eleven. The one in front of him on the banana seat was five, and the boy sitting in the back was no more than nine. The three of them were very dirty. They’d clearly been joyriding all morning.
“David. How are you, my friend?” The boy in front picked his nose; the one in back smiled at me and waved. “Where have you been?”
“Have we met?” I asked.
“You promised you would come back, and you never have.” The middle boy shouted in order to be heard over the traffic.
“I don’t think you have the right person,” I said. I was wary. Were these boys from that time I couldn’t remember? Supposedly I had slept somewhere that night; was it at these boys’ house?
“You’re Mr. David, the writer.”
Panic closed me up. Everything was available and verifiable except for those hours between leaving my apartment and waking up at the train station. I woke up that next morning feeling so guilty and ashamed, and all of my hallucinations had been about my inadequacy and failure as a soul. Was there something I wasn’t allowing myself to know?
As much as I liked to think I was an intrepid detective trying to put my life together and discover what went on during those missing hours, when a moped full of eyewitnesses stood right in front of me, I couldn’t breathe. There had been children? I carried around a pair of white cotton panties, and I’d hung out with street kids?
“You have the wrong person,” I said. “I’ve never met you.”
The middle boy sucked his teeth and said something to the boy behind him, who stared at me in shock. The middle boy revved the bike, and the boy behind him spit on the ground as they took off, wobbling a bit before joining the constant meteor shower of traffic.
Soon thereafter, another Fulbright student in a different part of town needed a roommate, and I left my tiny apartment under the elevator engine in Tarnaka. I came back only a few times to have dinner with Veda.
I never saw those boys again. I had the chance to find out how I spent the hours now permanently blanked from my brain, but I could not do it.
I was a coward.
Veda and I were at the dark restaurant full of mirrors. We ordered both rice and naan. I drank beer, and he drank water. It had been over a month since I’d last seen him. I was nostalgic for our old routine.
My new apartment was great; it was near a nightclub and a bar that had “Heavy Metal Wednesday” nights. My roommate was another Fulbright student. Eric was his name, and he was getting his doctorate in history from Harvard. We talked basketball, and he had a TV, which aired the NBA playoffs. Eric and I shared an office, and we’d chain-smoke and type during the day, then at night drink beers and babble about Tim Duncan’s perfect but boring style of basketball. Sometimes Eric’s girlfriend would visit, and the three of us would play Hearts until four in the morning. Time just slipped out of my hands. I was nearly done with my grant.
Over dinner, I thanked Veda again for being such a good friend.
He pushed my thanks away with a crinkle of his nose. “For a while when you were in the hospital, I did not believe what was going on.”
“You couldn’t tell I was out of my mind?”
“You would seem perfectly lucid one moment and then be very disturbed the next.” Veda called the waiter over and ordered a Pepsi. Turning back to me, he said, “To be honest, I thought you were faking it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I thought you were doing research on mental health hospitals.” He held his hands up in the air, blocking out a headline. “Indian Psychopaths: An Inside Look. I was very impressed with you.”
“When I pissed myself, you dropped that idea, right?”
“I thought you were very, let us say, committed to your plan,” Veda said, delighted with his wordplay.
The steaming silver bowls of food came out. I piled rice and dal on my plate, then yanked off a piece of garlic naan.
“How would I go about finding Rajesh, the police officer from that day?”
“He works at the train station,” Veda said in between mouthfuls. “You go down there, and if he is not working you ask when he will be scheduled next. That seems to be the easiest route.”
“Should I bring him something?” I asked. “What would be appropriate for this kind of thing? Like, should I give him some money or flowers or something?”
Veda thought for a while. “The best thing you could do would be to write a note and give it to his superior, describing what he did for you. Then when he comes up for promotion, he’ll have your note in his file. It would be very helpful for him.”
I chewed and nodded. Veda was always very logical about these things.
The check came, and Veda tried to split the bill with me. I paid. We said good-bye in the parking lot. Both of us were on scooters. It was very dark, and Veda told me to be careful because there were crazies out on the street.
By the time I had finished my grant and left Hyderabad at the end of July 2003, I left a city that I had fallen in love with. Hyderabad was where I had spent the spring going to the nearby nightclub on hip-hop night, dancing with all the West African kids who were sent to India to study. It was the town where I had written a draft of a novel in my new apartment, and when the summer was at its worst I had become nocturnal and slept through the sticky heat during the day. It was where I had eaten lamb biryani nearly every night. The city where I had stolen a giant gold Styrofoam cricket ball from a bar, and when I had spent nights writing, I sat on the thing. It was where, on my birthday, I had accompanied Veda to a club to go dancing with the Russian exchange students and had gone to the bar twice to get Long Island Iced Teas for him, getting him drunk for the first time in his life. It was the town where, when things would get a little brittle at the edges of my mind, I would go down to the Charminar and listen to the arrhythmic sounds of the men who used hammers to beat silver thin.
I’d had other adventures as well before I left India. I had gone to Calcutta and attended a wedding, caught a stomach bug, and lost ten pounds in a couple of days. I had gone to Delhi and climbed a gate to escape a pack of dogs. I had gone to Mumbai and helped a friend who had broken her arm in a rickshaw accident. And I had eaten the dinner buffet at the lake-castle of Udaipur, which had been featured in the movie Octopussy.
I never went back to Goa.
During all of these travels, I carried the white cotton panties with me. I’d finally figured out that they were Anne’s (the same brand, style, and size she’d worn when we were together in Ohio), a token of hers that I had taken with me when I originally left for my Fulbright. An e-mail exchange with Anne confirmed it. Now I carried them everywhere I went, stashed discreetly away in my luggage. If anyone had ever found them, I would’ve more readily admitted I kept them with me for masturbation instead of explaining the truth, which was much more embarrassing: I suspected they might’ve been part of what kept me safe during that night I couldn’t remember. There was a slim possibility that they were magical, so I kept them close during my travels as a protective charm.
I had spent all of 2003 going out of my way to distract myself. I had ordered a suit made that was a copy of the one Bruce Lee wore at his sister’s and mother’s graves
in Enter the Dragon (I brought my laptop into the tailor’s and showed him the scene in slow-motion). I had posed as a journalist with a friend and attended the Gowd Brothers’ Miracle Fish Cure, an annual event where each participant buys a pinky-sized live murrel fish and then stands in line. When you get to the front of the line, a small ball of yellow medicine is placed in the mouth of the fish, and then you swallow the whole concoction. It’s supposed to cure asthma. The year I was there, with pollution in India so bad, it was the largest number of participants the Gowd Brothers had ever had.
I had stopped telling people about what had happened to me. I did my very level best to forget my amnesia, to ignore the anxiety, to banish the paranoia. I bought Valium at the local pharmacies for when it got bad and told myself that these pills were an extracurricular indulgence rather than a necessity. I had three different pharmacies that I circulated through just so no one would get suspicious.
I was fine.
The incident was the result of the Lariam, and the Lariam was out of my system. It had to be. Almost a year had passed. I was fine now.
I had to be.
The novel I’d written was funny and irreverent and had characters from India and central Ohio, and it revolved around a guy who went to India and got totally messed up, but it wasn’t autobiographical. The story was told from his ex-wife’s point of view. The man was near catatonic, and he babbled incessant nonsense, and in the book he is central to the plot but only felt peripherally in the scenes. If that main character was me—if I was lying when I claimed it wasn’t autobiographical—then the thing I had written was about how I had figured out a way not to pay any attention to myself. In the end, the man gets locked away in a hospital and all of the other characters go on without him, their lives now free of his babbling.
When I was packing to return to the States, I pulled my desk drawer out and dumped the contents onto the bed. Among the detritus of pens, scratch paper, and matchboxes, I found a train ticket. It was dated October 17, 2002. It was for passage to the Vasco Da Gama Railway station in Goa. I had bought the ticket on October 9. So when I had left my apartment the day before with nothing but a pair of women’s underwear, I had believed I was on my way to visit Geeta in Goa—carrying something from the woman I had left in New Mexico. When the Lariam pooled in my brain, nestling into my protein gap junctions, I was planning on cheating on my girlfriend. I was a divided self already.
According to the ticket, it was purchased on October 9, so I had spent a week and a half feeling conflicted before the chemicals in my brain went haywire. When I woke up, I wasn’t the blank canvas I thought I was. The threads of shame and desire were already sewn through.
In the life I had woken up to, I found that I was often split between who I was and who I wanted to be. I grew up in small-town Ohio, but I wanted to be a world traveler; I went to small unheralded schools, but I wanted to compete with the country’s best academics for a Fulbright scholarship; I was dating Anne, but I wanted to be the kind of guy who dated someone like Geeta. These aren’t such unique fractures when compared to anyone else on the planet, but it was into these fractures that the Lariam nestled, and instead of being merely divided, it blew me apart from the inside.
I never wrote the note for Josh. I never went to the railway station to shake his hand and thank him.
I left India and didn’t thank the person who’d found me and been the first to help me. The one who started the relay of people handing me off, making the decisions in my best interest when I was incapacitated. I couldn’t face him. I owed him too much. I shut the whole business out of my head.
Like I said, I was fine now.
PART 5
I know God will forgive me. No one could live with how I am feeling now. I know I will never forgive the bastards that gave me Larium. I am now the same as when I first had it—fully spinning can’t even walk properly—the walls are moving. My head feels like someone let a box of ants in it, extreme pain in my head. I am fully losing it. What does the future hold—“psychiatric wards” no way. I know I’ve always been a little bit different even before I had Larium but since it first blew my brains apart and then settled down I have never been the same, always dazed and confused, always physically sick. I never thought this could happen to me. Sorry Mum, Dad
—Twenty-nine-year-old John O’Callaghan’s suicide note, two years after being treated with Lariam
The body has its own calendar. I became so adept at putting the previous October out of my head, I actually couldn’t have told you the exact date I went missing. But as the anniversary approached, my body knew and was executing its own countdown.
At the end of July 2003, I returned to Ohio, spent a week there, and then drove to New Mexico with my dad and Sally the dog in my blue 1987 Toyota Camry station wagon. We stayed at a La Quinta in Las Cruces, apartment hunting during the day and drinking at the bars in the old adobe square of Mesilla at night.
I took my dad to the building that housed the English Department at New Mexico State University. I figured I could use him as a shield if anyone I didn’t recognize came up to me to say hello. My dad would introduce himself to the new person immediately, and then at least I’d know a name. But my plan was worthless: the building was abandoned and the office locked. He and I walked the halls of the place, and we found a corkboard with departmental successes thumbtacked to it. On a square of newspaper was a picture of me and an article about my grant. It was written in May 2002. Dad looked up and down the hallway, then unpinned the article, folded it, and pushed it into my jacket pocket.
“They won’t mind,” he said.
We found a small house in my price range with a view of the Organ Mountains out the front door. It was just a half mile south of Mesilla, and I imagined a year of walking to the quaint and hard-drinking adobe town square every night for green chile enchiladas and cold cans of Tecate.
Dad and I returned to the hotel for our last night before we started moving things out of my storage shed and into my new house. It had been a sweaty day, so Dad jumped in the shower as soon as we got in the room. I pulled from my jacket pocket the article he’d stolen from the corkboard. I stared at the picture. I had a goofy smile that showed off my one screwed-up tooth. Me before Lariam. Could I send this guy and his dumb smile a warning? Because he had no idea what he was getting himself into.
I grabbed the hotel pen and blacked out the tooth, then blacked out another one. I drew glasses on the picture and added devil horns. Dad came out of the shower. He saw what I was doing and yelled at me.
“That was going to be for your mother.”
“It’s a picture of me,” I said. “I get to do with it what I want.”
“It was a nice picture of you, David. God forbid she should have one nice picture of you.”
Back in the States, there were more things that fed my memory. During the week I spent in Ohio, I’d go on a run, and as I ran past a house, I’d remember the time I’d been at a sleepover in seventh grade there and had been locked inside a bathroom. I’d had a tantrum and torn the towel rod from the wall and kicked a hole in the drywall. Or when I was carrying groceries across the street back to my parents’ house, I remembered having been a participant in a hog-calling contest when I was in elementary school.
Other memories surfaced. I remembered being in charge of my college’s homecoming halftime show and having people dress up like Fidel Castro and Gandhi. They did a series of dirt-bike tricks before embarking on a choreographed dance to Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” I remembered the time I’d stood on a sidewalk in Chapel Hill, handing out absurd flyers I’d made at my boring office job about how the smell of Pepsi One made puppies go feral and eat children.
I’d bounce into things that I didn’t remember from before that time and then fret over whether or not I’d have remembered it if the Lariam hadn’t scrambled my brain. I was still afraid of the hollowness that I felt at the edges, afraid of what I didn’t know that I had forgotten, afraid that it’d all ha
ppen again. But cigarettes helped with the anxiety. Alcohol helped with the insomnia.
I had one more year left of my graduate studies, and I put my books up on shelves found at a yard sale, bought a cheap laser printer, and got back to work. I worked on the novel that had the guy who went to India and came back to central Ohio insane and incomprehensible. I put in a lot of swearing and poop jokes.
The old adobe one-floor house I had rented had a big side yard with a pecan tree that I could tie Sally to. Inside there were four equal-sized rooms set up in a square, with a very small bathroom off the bedroom. When I told her that we were going on a walk, Sally did laps of the entire house. My landlord had grown up there, and when he came by, he would light my cigarettes for me. His dad had smoked when he was growing up. He seemed eager to have the smell of it back in the house.
The first week I was back in New Mexico there was a graduate-student party at a stranger’s house. One of the guests there was a white guy from New Zealand with tribal tattoos and dreadlocks. Someone assured me that I had never known him and that he was just visiting, so I didn’t need to know him now.
This was something I was preoccupied with now—determining who I knew and who I didn’t. In the small three-year graduate program I was in at New Mexico State University, the class I came in with had graduated, and now I was in the class of the people who were formerly a year behind me. In the perpetual turnover of graduate programs, they knew the people the year behind them (who were all strangers to me), and then the brand-new class was full of certified strangers to everyone, even to each other. I spent most of the party trying to ascertain who was a genuine stranger to me and who just felt like one.
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me Page 15