I’ll tell you now that I fell in love with her at that moment. She jumped out. No dithering. I was turning to ask her what we should do, and she was already gone. She put the car in park and jumped out. I reached over, snapped off the ignition, and followed.
Emily went to the woman lying next to the motorcycle, and I went to the other woman. Her name was Alma. She looked about forty and was wearing high-cut jean shorts and a tank top. Most of the skin on her legs and shoulders was grated off, and her bare feet—she’d originally been wearing flip-flops—were swollen and blood soaked; her pedicure was chipped, and some of her foot bones were visible. Her boyfriend, Joe, was down a shallow ravine, sprawled next to their motorcycle and going in and out of consciousness.
What had happened was that Joe and Alma were out riding their motorcycle and were coming up the steep hill while the other couple, Philip and Gigi, were on their respective motorcycles coming down. Gigi took the turn too wide and strayed into Joe and Alma’s lane, sideswiping them. Joe and Alma skidded across thirty to forty yards of asphalt. Gigi dumped down herself a hundred yards farther down the road. Everyone had been wearing helmets, so this isn’t as terrible a story as it could have been.
Because we were first on the scene, Emily and I were in charge. Someone else had showed up and started to work on Joe. With no medical gloves, I tried to avoid any contact with Alma’s blood. She’d been propping herself up on her elbows and I was tentatively smoothing her hair back when she collapsed into my arms.
I spent two hours holding this stranger. The accident had happened in a cellular dead zone. The nearest working phone was twenty minutes away, and the nearest ambulance was much farther than that. Her shoulders were a tangle of gravel and flesh. Alma’s blood was on my hands, on my neck, in my hair—my favorite shirt was ruined by it. When the ambulance showed up and the paramedics put her on a stretcher and loaded her into the back, I was surprised not to be asked to go with her. The door was slammed shut, the sirens wailed, and she was gone. And I stood there as unthanked as any tourist police officer working the train station beat.
In the chaos of this world, where we carom and collide in the everyday turbulence, there’s something about the specific gravity of the helpless individual, the lost and the fractured, that draws kindness from us, like venom from a wound.
Lariam is a lipophilic (fat-soluble) molecule and has a long half-life. If the drug accumulates in the brain, which is 60 percent fat, it can remain in the body for a long time before it is eliminated entirely. If something dislodges the Lariam molecule during this time, it could end up clogging another protein gap junction. Some people have experienced side effects ten years after their last dose. This is one hypothesis. The other is that the Lariam outright poisons the brain and the resulting damage is permanent.
My last dose was October 10, 2002.
As I write this in September 2012, I am still afraid of lingering chemical instabilities; afraid of what might still be stuck in the wrinkles and folds of my gray matter; afraid of what might get dislodged, disrupting who knows what electrical signals; afraid of where I’ll wake up next.
At what point is this new language—protein gap junction, half-life, lipophilic—another kind of superstition, a peer-reviewed set of erudite notions that I’ve used to chase my boogeymen away? I started clutching at science, as if a specific enough diagnosis would work like a flashlight shone underneath a bed to prove there are no monsters. But even a child knows that any monster worth his fangs will hide until the lights are turned off again.
Octobers vexed me for years. The anxiety had metastasized from the container of the single anniversary day of the seventeenth to infect the entire month. I’d call in sick, stay drunk, and chain-smoke until Halloween showed up.
But on October 1, 2011, I married Emily, the woman who jumps from cars to help people, and her birthday is in the middle of October. Now this month is full of dinners out and present exchanges. I’m finding ways to rebrand October, to celebrate the life that I have while I have it. Some days, I feel perfectly fine and amazed that anything terrible has ever happened to me. Other days, it seems irresponsible that I’m allowed to cross the street by myself.
But this, in comparison to what I’ve been through, is everyday crazy, and everyday crazy is something I can handle.
In chapter 4 of The Great Gatsby, there is a three-page section where the narrator, Nick Carraway, lists all of the people who visited Gatsby’s house during that summer. It’s one of my favorite parts of that book. This list of people, with their semifamiliar names and attached anecdotes, acts as the adjective to the noun of Gatsby, the noun James Gatz, the poor kid from North Dakota, is trying so hard to invent in order to impress a woman. As these people wheel around at his marvelous parties, Gatsby is allowed to be the empty spoke.
There are beautiful people, wealthy people, fabulous people, artistic people at the party; the attendees confer shards of those identities to the host. The guests know nothing about Gatsby. He’s just a guy who arrived in West Egg and started throwing extravagant parties. At the same time, the guests know everything about Gatsby. They all have excellent information from impeccable sources.
“He’s a bootlegger,” said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. “One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.”
Those days in the Indian asylum where I was fed heavy meds, I was a lot like Gatsby, except I wasn’t aware or in control of who was invited to the party. People treated me a certain way, and I became the kind of person who was treated like that. All I had to go on for my identity was the reactions of the people arrayed around me. I assembled a working self out of the behavior of others.
Rajesh/Josh, the cop, told me I was a drug addict; I became a drug addict.
Mrs. Lee told me I was killing my mother with my behavior; I expressed regret for my awful actions.
Richard offered me cigarettes; I became a smoker.
My parents told me I was a Fulbright scholar; I tried to act smart.
Anne said she loved me; I told her I loved her back.
I allowed the people who showed up to define me. I didn’t have much choice, really.
Those days in New Mexico I was also a lot like Nick Carraway. I was constantly hearing about this guy named David. People told me stories about him. I was always trying to locate him in the crowd of strangers. I’d act like him in order to bring him closer to me.
I found my old comic books and made those stories tell me something about myself.
I studied old pictures of myself and mimicked the poses.
I found my books with marginalia written in my handwriting and sifted through them until I discovered what I had found so interesting in the first place.
I used the tools that were at hand: the possessions stored in my parents’ attic, the stuff piled in a storage locker in New Mexico, the entire albums of group photos I’d ruined by making faces.
I made myself wear a mask that resembled this other guy, and it amazed me when it fooled everyone.
Nick spends the party trying to find Gatsby so that he can thank him for the invitation. He and Jordan Baker tour the house looking for the host. Behind an “important-looking door” they find a lavish library, and in the center of it is a middle-aged “owl-eyed” man. Though he looks the part, large and alone in a room full of things, he is not Gatsby. This man is a drunk guest who is marveling over how well everything is put together. He had expected the books in the library to be fakes, but he holds one up in surprise and says, “It’s a bona fide piece of printed matter.”
Nick and Miss Baker exit and continue their hunt for Gatsby.
At the end of the night, Nick is sitting next to a man. The man says that Nick looks familiar, that he recognizes him from the war. The two men reminisce for a bit about “some wet, gray little villages in France.” Nick mentions to the man that he’s frustrated about not having met the host. You
know the story. This anonymous man Nick found himself sitting beside and chatting with—it’s him. It’s Gatsby.
You fight and search and fight and search, and when you give up, you find yourself sitting next to what you’ve been looking for. And it recognizes you before you recognize it.
This is a long way of going about saying that I was, of course, sitting right next to him the whole time. Me, I mean. I was sitting right next to me the whole time. Even if I’m as much an invention of myself as Gatsby is of poor James Gatz, there are some bedrock fundamentals: I have a talent with children (Amol at Woodlands mental hospital, the three boys on the moped); I’m a good teacher (good enough for a student to contact me a year later about his cancerous genitalia); I am frequently conflicted about any and all intimate relationships in my life; I can be funny (I was the most entertaining psychotic at Woodlands), and I can also use humor to keep people at a distance; I have worn absurd costumes and have a fondness for saying absurd things; I have a long record of screwing up group portraits; I have parents and two sisters who love me and whom I’ve loved back as best as I am able.
I am lucky.
Like Nick Carraway, I walked through the cacophonous disorienting party looking for the host, and at the end I was sitting right next to him. To me. I finally discovered this guy who was me.
After all of the talk and stories and lies, I’d never have recognized him.
Acknowledgments
This book owes a strong debt to Kathleen Lee. She is a great friend and encourager. Honestly, no one in the world is as much fun to be miserable with as Kath.
I was just a twenty-year-old know-nothing when I stumbled into a lecture by Robert Boswell. He has become, in the years since that night, a great mentor, teacher, drinking companion, and friend. The first time I met his wife, Antonya Nelson, it was ten a.m., I was fixing her toilet, and she told me the only polite thing to do was to pour us both drinks. She’s been keeping me laughing (and drinking) since and has challenged me in a million ways to become a better writer, reader, and instructor. I can’t thank these two enough for their warmth, their integrity, their brilliance.
Tony Hoagland taught me more about writing sentences than I ever thought possible.
I thank my agent, Eleanor Jackson. She’s funny and she likes running, whiskey, and literature. There is no better combination of traits possible.
I thank my editor, Lauren Wein. As soon as she and I sat down over lunch, I knew I had found the perfect person to help shepherd this crazy book through draft after draft.
I thank Sarah Koenig, Nancy Updike, Ira Glass, and everyone at This American Life for featuring my essay on their show.
Ladette Randolph runs Ploughshares, and her tenacious commitment to literature is something rare to behold. I count myself blessed to have been featured in that magazine.
Big thanks go to the PEN American Center for all the great work they do.
I thank Warren Wilson College, New Mexico State, the Fulbright Foundation, and the University of Houston for educating me and for introducing me to the finest colleagues a person could ever want.
The United States Education Foundation in India has some amazing people working there. Jane Schukoske and S. K. Bharti were always kind, patient, and helpful during the worst of the worst.
The Inprint organization of Houston helped me survive graduate school with several grants and teaching opportunities. They are a great group of people who do wonderful work.
I tell a couple of stories about terrible counselors in this book, but it was a great one, Dr. Allison Godby, who helped me to begin to tell this story without hyperventilating.
I thank Scott Repass and Dawn Callaway for being great friends. Scott and Dawn make me laugh, think, and work harder. They also make me drink better. One of the great things I get to do in my life is to visit Houston and drive around with the two of them making jokes. Or as R___ would say, “Ay-ohh!”
Thank you to Jamie Thomas, Noah Boswell, Alex Parsons, Mat Johnson, Eric Beverley, Jenn Stennis, Miah Arnold, Casey Fleming, Greg Oaks, Peter Hyland, Bradford Telford, Aaron Reynolds, Jill Stukenberg, Peggy Chapman, Connie Voisine, Rus Bradburd, Casey Gray, j. Kastley, Kathy Smathers, Jon Lillie, Laura Zebehazy, Karen Oh, Chris Rado, Miriam Carillo, Melissa Lillie, Tim Rice, Scottbutt, Sam Scoville (without whom nothing would’ve ever happened ever), Lillie Robertson, and Rich Levy.
Duncan Trussell and Emil Amos I thank for laying the groundwork for my fascination with India by traveling the country with me back in 1998. They’re also two of the wildest and most consistently original brains on the planet.
At one point in my writing life, I needed a kick in the ass. The generous Sarina Pasha was more than happy to provide a literal one during her happy hour shift at the Poison Girl bar in Houston.
Thanks go out to the Schnaars, the Hustons, the Runyons, and the Webers. As well as to all of my wife’s Chicago friends who have welcomed me and have become my friends: Mike Hawthorne, Paula Tordella, Lauren and Adam Nevens, and Josh Noel. And thanks to my new sisters (they came with the marriage), Deb and Madeline Stone.
I thank Jeanne Lese of Mefloquine Action (www.lariaminfo.org), a great virtual clearinghouse for Lariam information and a meeting place for those afflicted by the drug. For anyone looking for more information about Lariam, her website is a great starting place. I thank Dan Olmstead and Mark Benjamin for being dogged reporters. Their articles on Lariam and its effects are informative and harrowing. Sonia Shah’s book, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years is a great read on mankind’s long, long history with malaria. And Andrew Spielman and Michael D’Antonio’s book Mosquito: The Story of Man’s Deadliest Foe is also outstanding and a great read.
I thank my trio of scientists, Dr. Cindy Voisine, Dr. Rob Mitchum, and Lisa Jarvis, who helped me grasp the science documented in this book. And I am very grateful for the help of Dr. Remington Nevin, who gave the book a last minute fact-check.
I thank Jan O’Callaghan, who gave me her permission to reprint her son John’s suicide note.
I thank Errol and Susan Stone for letting me use their cabin as a writing retreat and for being excellent in-laws.
Big thanks to Veda, without whom I would not have survived.
Thank you to Rayna Gellert (the best damned fiddle player in America and whose album Old Light: Songs from My Childhood & Other Gone Worlds has a song she wrote inspired by my experience.); Brett Nolan (a man who’s never afraid to talk about the amount of time he spends spooning his cat); Gillian Flynn (Baguette Dork’s favorite aunt); and Shale Aaron and Stu Spears. An amazing and patient group of early readers to whom I owe much.
Thanks to Niko and Ezio—astonishingly good nephews.
Thanks to Lydia, my beautiful brand new daughter. Someday I’ll give you a full explanation of St. Frankenstein, if you’ll explain to me why Devo is one of the only bands that gets you to sleep.
Thanks to my family. I woke up to a life in progress and found that I was lucky enough to have you all in my life. Mom, Dad, Katie, Betsy, Eric, Candymom—I love you all and am lucky enough to know how lucky I am to have you in my corner.
And finally, thank you to my wife, Emily Stone. I’m looking at the back of her head as I write this, and it’s Saturday morning, and I can’t think of anything more fortunate than to get to spend an entire Saturday with her.
Chicago, Illinois
April 2013
About the Author
DAVID STUART MACLEAN is a PEN/American award–winning writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Ploughshares, and on the radio program This American Life. He has a PhD from the University of Houston and is a co-founder of the Poison Pen Reading Series. He lives in Chicago with his wife.
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The Answer to the Riddle Is Me Page 20