I nodded. Like a little boy would.
She knelt down and dipped a hand in the pool. And splashed me.
“Hey!”
“Did you feel the water? The real water?”
I rubbed my wet arm.
“Feel the wetness?”
I nodded again.
“I have always loved you, Rodrigo,” she said.
Then she plunged into the pool. It was a graceful dive. I saw her swimming underwater, doing the breaststroke to the deep end, and she dove farther down near the drain. A bubble came up. She was at the bottom of the pool. But not really swimming now. She was down there hovering. Floating. She was holding her breath. She stayed down awhile. Testing her lungs. And her breath.
She’d stayed down there over a minute by now. She looked like she was really floating, almost like a rag doll. Ten more seconds . . . I started to have other thoughts. Like nervous thoughts. She was hovering below somewhat lifelessly. Not really moving.
. . . Another fifteen seconds . . .
A few more damned bubbles came to the surface. They came from her. I started to get really nervous. Was she drowning? How could she still be down there? Come up, Julia! Come up! I thought. What was she doing? She’d always had a flair for the dramatic, but . . .
Another half-minute . . .
Was she losing precious seconds? Was I losing precious seconds? She’d been down there too long! Too damned long!
I started yelling. “Come up! Julia, come up!”
But her body wasn’t moving. Not at all. Dammit! Dammitall! This was terrible. This was no dream.
“Come up! Please, come up!” I was sobbing, then crying. “Gods, please make her come up! I’ll do anything, anything at all! I’ll go to New York if you just get her to come up! She doesn’t deserve to die! She deserves to live! She’s worked too hard! She’s too young! Gods! All of you! Please!”
I could not stand it anymore. Even if it was a dream. A very bad dream. And what if it wasn’t a dream? What if I was wrong? What if it wasn’t a unified universe? It wasn’t worth proving her wrong! It wasn’t worth being right! And maybe I wasn’t right!
I vaulted into the water and duck-dived to the bottom and clutched her arm, and kicked wildly, and hauled her body, and pulled her up, up to the surface. I got her head above water, and she didn’t seem to be breathing. I swam her to the shallow end and pulled her up the steps. She was deadweight, and it took all I had to get her up and over and onto the granite on her back. I bawled as I pumped on her chest, on her lungs hard, very hard, and I turned her head to the side and water came out and then she coughed and coughed and her eyes opened and I was crying my eyes out.
She opened her eyes all the way, and a faint smile came to her mouth. She whispered, “Rodrigo . . .”
She was squinting, and she had a dazed, weak smile. I clasped her hand. And I held her head up.
“What, baby?”
“Rodrigo . . .”
“Tell me. Speak to me, Julia, please.”
“Try . . . and . . . get someone . . . in your . . . dreams . . . to die for . . . you . . .”
I clutched her head and held her so close and cried like a baby for the next hour. And I got clothes for her and we stayed there by the pool a long while. I was happy to watch the sunset and we gazed at the sky for a long, long time.
That night I called Carlotta and told her I needed to do some errands in New York, and I invited her to join me. She said she would come, and we planned to go shopping and spend a weekend in Montauk and Shelter Island, doing some wine tasting on the North Fork. We were looking forward to it. I was relieved she was coming, because I hadn’t been to New York in a while and my memories of it weren’t so hot and it would be good to have her with me. I would need her support to go through the tests I had promised Julia and all the gods that I would take. And if Carlotta was there, it would prove she was real, and not someone who existed only in my dreams—and Julia would see that she was wrong.
41
TAXI BLAST
I woke up in the middle of the night, disoriented. I saw a big black box ogling down at me. I looked left and there was a door. Though it was dark, there was an amber night-light plugged into the wall. The room was white, totally white. The black box was a television, angled up high, staring at me. I had gadgetry on my bed. Remotes. I pushed a button and the bed started moving. My arm was attached to something. An IV hookup. Everything I spied was in English. And the wall sockets were American. Then I heard a signature taxi sound below. That irrepressible New York taxi blast.
Fuck. I was in a hospital.
“Rodrigo?”
The voice startled me. Deep in the corner I saw Julia, slumped in a chair. She’d been sleeping.
“Man, am I glad it’s you. Did you sleep here, too?”
“Yes.”
“Am I okay?”
“You haven’t had any tests yet. Other than blood.”
“How long have we been here?”
“Two days. You’ve been sleeping a lot.”
I motored the backrest up to see her better. “I feel so groggy . . . foggy.”
“They gave you sedatives. You needed rest. They didn’t think you were in the best of health from a nutritional perspective. Your cholesterol levels were very high.”
Then a shot of pure panic and terror hit me. “Where’s The Universe?”
“What?”
“All my work!”
“Packed up. I personally saw to it. Everything was sent to a warehouse in Brooklyn. Only you have a key and access to it, no one else. I took photos of each.”
“Perfect. How many pieces?”
“One hundred and six.”
“Sounds right. Was Salvatore there? In the Tuscan vineyard sunset? ’Cause that’s a gift . . .”
“I think so.”
I tried to organize my thoughts, but one predominated. “What . . . Why are you doing all this for me?”
“Why do you think?”
“You know, I dreamed you almost drowned. It was a nightmare. But there was something very beautiful about the way you hovered in the water there, deep down. I thought to put it to canvas—if you don’t mind.”
“I do mind. Very much. And I did almost drown.”
I laid back then, and some wind was released from my chest. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
She approached the bed and looked down at me. She wore no makeup and the night-light exposed her weariness. I extended my hand and she clasped it. Then she handed me my spiral notebook. “And here are your poems.”
I smiled lovingly at her.
“And your key. The only one. So don’t lose it.”
“You’re an angel.”
“No. I’m just a friend.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. But if you don’t mind, I have some things to do. You’ll be okay here. No visitors for now, then you can provide a list of names. Dr. Jeffrey Wincott is your doctor. Highly reputable. He’s a colleague of my friend. He’ll be seeing you later today, after your tests.”
I hesitated a long while, and we gazed deep into each other’s eyes. “Thank you.”
She kissed me on the forehead and turned around and headed toward the door.
“Did you read any?”
She nodded. “I hope it’s okay.”
“What do you think?”
She sighed. “I think they’re beautiful, Rodrigo. There are ‘waves.’ Of brilliance.”
I could see a glint of tears in her eyes. Then she walked out. I’d put her through hell. More than hell. Turbo hell. With a boost.
Julia’s sudden appearance in my life was something I could build on while I was in New York. I could feel it running through my system. Julia had given me a lead on something so very precious.
Hope.
42
WARHOLIAN MIND
They tested me for days. Scans, scans, and more scans with the most colorful wires and electrodes, a veritable high-wire circus act of
technological receptors. And lab samples. And blood. And I must say, with the IV hookups, I was getting stronger. They wouldn’t let me walk in the park or even go outside. But I was buzzing about, scampering around the room like a meerkat, collecting all sorts of medical paraphernalia, IV tubes, sanitary bags, food packets, clipboard forms, plastic gloves like Francis Bacon used, plastic hospital bracelets, anything I could get my hands on. Every day Josie the Caribbean nurse from St. Vincent asked me where my identification bracelet had gone. I slyly smiled. And she smiled back. She knew. She thought I was a French collecteur and collagiste and I needed the items for my new art. For this hospital series, I was using the bracelets instead of my signature to sign the works. I gave Josie a sketch of herself to hold fast our oath of secrecy.
Carlotta had delayed her trip to the States. I had let her know I had appointments and such, dental and medical. And she had so much to do, with the planning, the invitations, and the guest list, I suspected. Even though she hadn’t officially accepted my proposal. I hoped she would select one of those cool churches in the Chianti Classico subregion. She had such good taste, I’d let her do it with her own unique Tuscan panache and charm—with a dash of Panther nobility and fearlessness.
After one week of tests, I was allowed to have visitors. I chose only one. Alfonso. It was good to see the dutiful man. And Alfonso brought me my art supplies from Ronda and New York. I initiated some small canvases—sketches first, then the oils.
I was so tempted by the walls. The wide, flat, white, white walls. They were all so virgin-pure and clean, tantalizing me, and I wanted to deflower them all. But I was advised not to. So I held off, but, man, were those walls calling me. If only . . . Whether sitting up in my retractable bed or standing nose-to-nose with their whiteness, I was licking my chops, wide-eyed and unblinking like a spotted big-eyed Bengal cat patiently eyeballing a plump canary in a cage. I felt sad for the walls. They were in a cage. If only they would let me liberate them.
I was eating the hospital slop, but the meals could have been worse. I’d met Dr. Wincott, and he seemed pretty okay—John Lennon round-rims, forties, and preppy handsome. He was scholarly and amicable, and he seemed to understand me. I told him a lot of things, mostly everything, about my two competing but melded worlds and the friends who inhabited them, including my lovely wife-to-be. He gave me some meds, and I seemed to have a pause in unified universe thoughts and brain activity.
Dr. Wincott was very twenty-first-century, a cutting-edge full representative of the technological age, as well as a proactive contributor to the leapfrogging in progressive theories and treatment advancements in his field of neuroscience. I learned from Dr. Craig Olsen, Julia’s friend, as well as other colleagues with their clipboards, polite smiles, and subtle probing interrogatives, how Wincott had written extensively in medical journals on his fields of study: brain abnormalities and personality disorders, for the most part—including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and schizophrenia, with the sidecars of obsessive compulsivity, bipolarity, avoidant personality, and hypersexuality.
Dr. Wincott couldn’t give me the full-blast or even petty diagnosis on whether I had a condition—and if I did, what it was—until he had the full measure of tests. The festival of electrodes and hookups marched on, eventually concluding days later with a simple tap-dance on the scale indicating that my weight was appreciably up for the better.
And then he did have a diagnosis.
He stepped in midmorning with a flock of other white-coated and -winged doctors. I asked if we could go one-on-one for this initial conference, for privacy, and the good doc complied. The accompanying squadron lingered a bit to give themselves their own private showing of the Uptown Hospital series of collaged art. Then they raised their proud clinical beaks and flapped off.
“Rodrigo, what I’m detecting in the numerous fMRI scans is a considerable loss of gray matter in the frontal and temporal lobes. The damage started in the outer or parietal region and spread beyond. You have enlarged ventricles, increased CSF indicating enhanced neurological abnormalities, and there have been decreased prefrontal brain functions as we tested those brain waves . . .”
“No waves,” I said with intent.
“Fewer waves. But the cause for concern is the pervasive, unrelenting wave of tissue loss that can sweep forward like a forest fire. It likely started in your teens. Average teens undergo extensive pruning in which one percent of gray matter disappears each year. That’s normal. Schizophrenia strikes at this time and causes an exaggeration of normal pruning, like a gardener gone wild. And those afflicted can lose twenty-five percent of their gray matter in certain areas by the time they’re eighteen. And how old are you, let me check—?”
“Forty-nine.”
“But the acceleration of brain tissue loss appears mostly at the beginning of the illness, and less so over time—for you, a while back—and it would appear an all-out forest fire never happened. This explains why the damage to your brain is not more extensive.”
“Bravo.”
He showed me from his stacked clipboard a slice image of two brains in black-and-white, the normal one and mine at right. The enlarged ventricles were clearly apparent. Then he showed me another PET scan image of two comparative brains, black with electric yellow and fiery red trim: the normal and mine. The enhanced bright red and yellow areas on mine indicated the abnormalities he was speaking of.
“My God, they look Warholian. So colorful. I actually like my image more than the ‘normal’ one. Can I get copies?”
The doctor nodded and smiled. “Sure. The PET scans are rather colorful. But color can be deceiving in this case.”
Then he showed me more black-and-whites, X-ray–style, accentuated with more red and red-only amoeba-like shapes. “These correspond to the PET scans and show the results of decreased brain activity as compared to the normative.”
“You mean less red means less brain activity in mine at right?”
“Yes.”
“I like the normal patient image better in that one.”
“And this last one is a three-dimensional profile of gray-matter loss using image analysis algorithms.”
It was the full 3-D brain image in brilliant, electrified sapphire, turquoise, aqua, lime green, yellow, and red on top—which indicated the damage.
“Dios mío, that’s a masterpiece! Can you provide me digital copies of all of these?”
“Rodrigo, I appreciate your creative and visual analysis, and I find it refreshing. But I must say, the neuropsychological abnormalities caused by this gray-matter loss result in considerable deviations: compromised cognitive function, information processing, verbal memory, planning, introspective and self-reflective capacities, and impaired awareness, especially when it comes to belief of any illness. Denial. Closely associated are paranoia, distrust, avoidant social drives, a dependency on drugs and alcohol, hypersexuality if not sexual deviancy—”
Here we go, I thought. So I figured I would quell his enthusiasm. “That’s me,” I confessed. “But can we please leave my sex life out of this?”
“I’m speaking in general terms, but—”
“As for paranoia, you know what the Beat poet William S. Burroughs said: ‘Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts.’ I’ve always thought my paranoia is reality on a finer scale. Or greater detail. Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. I’ve often wondered, am I paranoid enough? There’s a hidden order behind the visible. I believe that. Paranoia’s a gift. And the truly paranoid are rarely hustled.”
“Perhaps,” he deflected. “But there may be an element of fantasy-prone and maladaptive daydreaming that is personal to you.”
“How so?”
“A person who is prone to intense schizophrenic fantasies can also have paranormal and religious experiences, and be susceptible to false memories. Extreme or compulsive fantasizers cannot distinguish the difference between what’s real and what’s not, and they may experience hallucinations. They create paracosms: extr
emely detailed, highly structured, and immersive fantasy worlds that may be dissociative, or out-of-body, or sexual. They become absorbed in their vivid and realistic mental imagery, have intense sensory perceptions, and experience imagined sensations as real. The fantasies include the perception that the world at large is unreal—prompting the assumption of a new identity or self—and the fragmentation of identity or self initiates, if not forces, separate streams of consciousness.”
“And why would one do that?”
“To escape the harshness of reality. To create a happier world to reside in that’s positive and survivable. Or because they’re exposed to abuse from which fantasizing provides a similar flight; or they’ve endured severe loneliness and isolation, and fantasy alleviates the boredom. From what you’ve told me about your life in New York, it’s clear that you felt the alienation romantically, socially, and professionally. And if you were feeling surrounded by duplicitous and greedy people, you could have constructed a paracosm to escape all that—one that made you happy, spiritually connected, in love, sexually satisfied, creatively inspired, fulfilled in all ways—essentially, your perfect world.”
“Carlotta is real, Doctor. There’s too much detail. Perhaps you’re a dream.”
“The creative mind does have this openness, yes. And coupled with your condition, anything seems possible. Perhaps we exist in another dimension and multiple realities. In that school of thought, I’m out of my league. And we have no way of testing its veracity.” He smiled.
“Thank you,” I said, even though I knew he was indulging me. “So much for twenty-first-century tech.”
“But harnessing the best science of the day, from a medical standpoint, dynamic brain imaging has helped identify some of the faulty genes that predispose people to schizophrenia. The enzyme calcineurin is involved in memory, and if that enzyme is hampered or deleted by a faulty gene or a risk gene, the likelihood of not only memory loss but also the advent of schizophrenia is much greater. You have one of the four risk genes that encode calcineurin.”
I processed it like a narcissist would. “With all this going on, Doctor, I may well be at my absolute creative peak. I mean, this condition may be the source of my duende, the little fairy spirit of creativity that flies around inside me—”
The Beautiful Dream of Life Page 22