The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  For an endless stretch of days—specifically, three—Peter and I stayed in a cabin on the shores of the Rio Beni, in the Bolivian Amazon, without booze or electricity. I lay on our bed, cloaked by mosquito netting, shrinking from his touch, watching huge cockroaches scuttle across our floors. I was restless. I was bereft, because there wasn’t anything to drink. I went to see if we could buy booze at the front desk of the lodge, but we couldn’t. There was just a wooden cabinet full of Kotex and Pringles.

  We trudged onward through the sober days. It was only once booze was literally out of reach—miles downriver—that I realized how essential it was. Now we were raw and unaccompanied. We ate a cousin of the piranha for lunch: stewed chunks of its white meat wrapped in banana leaves. We pushed an old wooden sugarcane press while baby pigs squealed around our feet, the size of muddy little apples. All of it was dirtied by our constant pull-and-tug, his desire and my withdrawal, and by my constant desire to drink: missing it, wondering why I missed it so much. Everything else was just a shoddy substitute. Beehives the size of dogs hung from the trees. My discontent found fault with ridiculous beauty: We hiked through the jungle and I became convinced my socks were full of ants. We went swimming in an idyllic secluded grotto and I started to notice a swollen mosquito bite on my ankle. I’d read about the botfly—a parasite that deposited its egg via mosquito, then hatched into a maggot under the skin—and became convinced I had one. We were made fools of by the macaws, who mated for life. They looked so impossibly regal, streaking twin arcs of color across the sky.

  I finally ended things with Peter in a humid motel room with a broken fan. It was the worst possible time—we were literally stranded in a tiny Amazonian village, with three days until the next flight to La Paz—but it was also a relief. Something was broken and now at least we weren’t trying to pretend it wasn’t. We had days to wait together, but at least we had a thatched-roof bar that served a drink whose name loosely translated as “Eye-Closing Dusty Road.” We started drinking early. We swatted flies from our eggs and played cards all day. My numbness confused me then—We just broke up, I told myself, I should be sad—but doesn’t confuse me now. The drinks were called eye-closing for a reason.

  When Peter flew home, I took a bus and a boat to Isla del Sol. There weren’t any liquor stores on the island, but there were cafés that would sell you a bottle of whatever they served. Around noon each day, I’d buy a bottle of Bolivian wine and drink it all. Then I’d go back to my concrete room and pass out on my hard bed. One day I actually ate lunch: trout from the lake, charred until its skin crackled.

  It was ridiculous good fortune to see this strange, cold, beautiful part of the world—a ragged Andean island, on borrowed cash—but I couldn’t even bring myself to stay awake for it. When I woke up in the early evening, I regretted that I hadn’t gotten drunk enough to stay passed out for longer. I would immediately check under my wool sock to touch my mosquito bite, now a hard cone on my ankle. An obscenely swollen ant bite on my other leg had collapsed into a deflated red circle, like a tiny fallen soufflé, and this actually made me even more panicked: Other bites were following their natural life cycles, why not the one on my ankle? There must be a botfly maggot in there. There was no other answer, logically speaking. I hadn’t talked to another human being in days.

  There weren’t any computers on Isla del Sol, so I couldn’t obsessively Google “symptoms of the human botfly,” as I’d been doing in dusty Internet cafés on the mainland. Thinking ahead, I’d copied these symptoms onto a piece of paper and folded it into the back of my passport. Pin-shaped breathing hole? Check. I’d pull down my socks to check the bite every hour: Is this hole more pin-shaped than it was an hour ago? The first stabbing pain came like a little knife in my ankle. I’d read about old wives’ remedies: You were supposed to smoke out the worm by burning cigarettes near the skin, or suffocate it with Vaseline until it got weak enough to pluck out with tweezers.

  I told myself to stop thinking about my possible botfly. Feel sad about Peter, I told myself. But when I woke up every day at twilight—bleary and chilled and still half drunk, scalp scratchy under my alpaca wool cap—I just wanted to fall asleep again.

  I returned from Isla del Sol to the Bolivian mainland to find an email waiting from Peter saying he’d gotten sick on his way home. I wrote him an email that spent about three sentences saying, I hope you are okay. Drink water. I am imagining your fever, and about twenty-three sentences saying, I really think I have a botfly maggot living in me. I was so self-absorbed there should have been a different word for what I was. Of course I would have loved that, if there had been a different word for what I was.

  It was when I got back to New Haven—hungover from months of heavy drinking, my ankle swollen from whatever was growing inside it—that I finally saw the maggot: a flash of white that bobbed out of my ankle and then quickly disappeared under the skin again. It was just past midnight. I took a cab to the ER, where the intake nurse asked if I’d recently taken any mind-altering substances. I thought: I wish I had one now. The on-call doctor told me that he’d never heard of botfly, that there was nothing he could do for me. Actually, maybe there was one thing he could do for me. I took his Ativan with gratitude. It gave me a lovely swimming sensation, and my only regret was that such a gracious feeling was being wasted on the beige cubicle of an ER exam room. When I turned my head, the motion was slow enough to hold the thought I am turning my head, as if the words were rippling through my muscles. Things were easy and liquid. There was a worm living in my ankle, sure, but that was just one truth out of many truths.

  A dermatologist eventually cut the botfly maggot out of my ankle, but almost immediately I grew convinced there was another botfly left inside—still moving around under the messy skin of the open wound. I wondered how much I’d have to drink before it curled up dead inside me.

  Now that we were back in New Haven, I told Peter I wanted to get back together. But he was wary. He thought, reasonably enough, that we should talk about what was happening. We had spent a year doing little besides explaining ourselves to each other, but these choices—splitting up, getting back together—weren’t things I wanted to explain. I responded to discomfort in sweeping, categorical ways: If it didn’t feel right to be together, I wanted to be apart. If it didn’t feel right to be apart, I wanted to be together. It was harder for me to stay inside a situation and repair it from the inside or wait it out. This was also the instant alchemy of drinking: It replaced one state with another, no questions asked.

  I’d purged something in Bolivia, I told Peter. I’d gotten something out of my system. Now we just had to get this second worm out of my ankle. My boundless self-absorption was seeking something bounded. It was easier to focus on the body of a hypothetical parasite than on the more nebulous question of why we’d spent so many nights crying in humid Bolivian motels. So we filled a vitamin-jar cap with Vaseline and duct-taped it over my ankle, left it there overnight, and then clutched a pair of tweezers in the morning, ready to extract the woozy botfly that I was sure would emerge, nearly suffocated, from its glistening prison. When no botfly emerged, I didn’t feel relief—only disappointment. If it had been there, I could have removed it.

  —

  V —

  SHAME

  A few weeks after my return from Bolivia, I went out for drinks with Dave—whom I’d first seen years earlier, with a guitar and a goatee, and who’d become one of my closest friends in New Haven since that first dinner party with my bandaged thumb. He got a single Red Stripe that night. It’s been almost a decade and I still remember it clearly, that single beer, because I limited myself to one drink as well—too self-conscious to get another if he wasn’t going to get another, but thinking, This is all we get?

  That summer, Dave had recently broken up with his girlfriend and moved out of their beautiful apartment—the one where I’d stayed as a prospective student, where his girlfriend had said, “We have a few different breakfast options.” Their lif
e had seemed like the epitome of what it meant to be an adult, eating artisanal granola in a sunlit linoleum kitchen, and the opposite of my own: filling plastic bowls with cigarette butts and watching laptop movies on a mattress, waiting till trash day to dump my empties in strangers’ recycling bins.

  After the breakup, Dave told me that their life had come to feel claustrophobic—but at the same time, when I stayed with them, it had seemed sophisticated and seamless—utterly enmeshed, the kind of stable unit I longed for. Of course a life never looks the same from the inside. “We were in these stable grooves of domesticity,” Dave explained. “It had gone stagnant.”

  Though I was trying to repair my relationship with Peter, I was also interested in the sense of electricity that lived with other men, in other conversations—a species of possibility whose natural habitat was a dim bar with good midweek specials. When I told Dave about breaking up with Peter in Bolivia, I tried to make myself sound reckless and dramatic, someone who was desired more than I desired back. That was my working definition of power: being wanted more than you wanted. I had less to say about why Peter and I had gotten back together.

  That fall Dave started inviting me over to his new apartment for dinner, and I started staying late, eating his massaman curry and his crème caramel. We did not admit to ourselves what we were doing, but we were doing it. In early November, he invited me to come on a road trip to Virginia to canvass for Obama with our graduate student union. We were going to swing the state blue for the first time in forty-four years. I framed the trip in terms of good-citizenship, but it wasn’t solely about that. It was also about the buzz I got in my gut from the guilt and thrill of imagining what might happen.

  This buzz blocked out everything else—like the fact that I still loved Peter, but didn’t know how to stick around in a dynamic that had become tense and opaque. It was easier to break the thing with a hammer and start over. I’d grown up in a family where almost everyone had gotten divorced at least once. It seemed like a law of nature that love would go rotten or run out, eventually. You did what you could, and then you fled the premises. This inherited blueprint made so much intuitive sense to me it had gone transparent. It seemed inevitable.

  The night before our first day of canvassing, Dave and I sat in a carpeted basement den, on a pullout couch, and watched a nature documentary called Animals Behaving Badly: the spitting frogs, the rampaging llamas. I drank water from a glass with a crab on it, glass after glass, as we crept further past midnight. It was an hour before we finally turned toward each other. When we kissed, he felt solid and alive. Guilt thrummed inside me like another pulse. This electric moment—crossing that first threshold, confessing desire—made me feel the same way a dirty martini did, so crisp and deadly cold, like it would leave you cleaner than it found you. I craved that sense of inner purge and renewal, no matter whom it hurt. It’s nothing I can blame on my drinking, but it came from the same place drinking came from.

  As we knocked on doors across the county the next day, and gathered with other union members in the motel lobby that night, I kept watching for a sign from Dave, that he didn’t regret what had happened the night before—kept watching him laughing in crowds, talking to others, and by the time we finally kissed again, I was desperate for that kiss as confirmation. I took a train back to New Haven from Newport News, Virginia, and somewhere on that train ride, somewhere near the bowels of Penn Station, at three in the morning, I got a strange pain in my jaw that wouldn’t go away, like something was burning all along the bone. It stuck around through Obama’s victory, and through the night after, when I broke up with Peter over a casserole dish of vegetables I’d roasted—withered broccoli, dark and crispy, as we liked it, red onions burnt to charred wisps, spindly fingers of carrot—and white wine, our old familiar magnum.

  Instead of guilt, I had a jaw on fire. The sensation endured for days. I was helping one of my graduate advisers organize a conference on postwar American literature, and when I drove up to the Hartford airport one night to fetch a hotshot young professor, my jaw burned all the way up I-91. After I met him at baggage claim, I pulled small talk out of my mouth like it was a nail I’d swallowed. Dave came over at two that morning. We ate grapes. Our newness was consuming. The next morning Dave sat with me while I smoked on my back steps, so Peter wouldn’t see. I hadn’t told him about us, and he still lived three blocks away. There was something I liked about that: the backyard smoking, the secret.

  I went to a doctor and told her about my mysterious burning jaw. She might want to check for lupus, I suggested. I’d been doing research on the Internet. She said it didn’t sound like lupus. She asked if I was getting enough sleep.

  My adviser gave me a French press as a gift for helping to organize the conference. I’d done great, she said. And there was leftover wine. I should take it home, if I wanted.

  In his diary, Berryman once wondered, in all capital letters, “WHETHER WICKEDNESS WAS SOLUBLE IN ART.” He believed his flaws might become engines of beauty, and he trusted that self-awareness was one of the key ingredients in this alchemy. Alcoholic self-pity wasn’t the secret engine of The Dream Songs, as Lewis Hyde had it, so much as their explicit subject. “You licking your own old hurt,” Henry tells himself, inflating his self-pity so he can puncture it:

  What the world to Henry

  did will not bear thought.

  Feeling no pain,

  Henry stabbed his arm and wrote a letter

  explaining how bad it had been

  in this world.

  This figure of a man stabbing his arm and “explaining how bad it had been,” using his own blood as ink, lives inside the wound and also mocks it. This is what The Dream Songs do: They play with the pain. They sing it. They tease it. They don’t dismiss it, but they know better than to take it at face value. Berryman asks us not to take everything so damn seriously.

  In “Dream Song 22,” we hear the disease announcing itself:

  I am the little man who smokes & smokes.

  I am the girl who does know better but.

  … I am the enemy of the mind.

  I am the auto salesman and lóve you.

  I am a teenage cancer, with a plan.

  I am the blackt-out man.

  I am the woman powerful as a zoo.

  Drinking is an enemy. (It harms.) It’s a salesman. (It convinces.) It lóves. (It offers solace.) It blacks out. It smokes and smokes. (So did he.) It knows better. (But.) Its power isn’t the power of any single thing but the power of a menagerie, powerful as a zoo.

  In many ways, Berryman knew himself better than his own mythologizers did, or at least he was wise to the appeal of certain mythologies. When he describes Henry as being “in the mood / to be a tulip and desire no more / but water, but light, but air,” he acknowledges the appeal of transcending physical craving—just as Life would praise his “true intellectual’s indifference to material things.” But he promptly deflates the fantasy. “Suffocation called,” he says, and confesses the “sirening” allure of his “dream-whiskey,” always beckoning. The man who wants to live on nothing but water is called back to another thirst. That desire never shuts up. The girl knows better, but.

  Henry is rarely proud of what he’s done. In “Dream Song 310,” he is “all regret, swallowing his own vomit, / disappointing people, letting everyone down / in the forests of the soul.” Henry doesn’t just have regret, he’s made of it. It’s all of him. He’s swallowing the aftermath of a binge.

  Lewis Hyde’s critique of The Dream Songs assumed a certain binary: that Berryman was either guilty of his drinking, or else his wounds were deep enough to sanction it; that he was either exploring the “epistemology of loss,” or else was just an alcoholic on his pity pot. But why are these mutually exclusive? Pain includes the pity pot. Pain spends time on the pity pot. Self-pity doesn’t mean the pain isn’t also real, and pain isn’t less painful for being self-inflicted.

  Nearly two decades after his critique of Berryman’s sel
f-pity, Hyde wrote a critical sequel to his reading of The Dream Songs, looking back at his own anger and calling it “the anger of anyone who has been close to an active alcoholic and gotten hurt.” He called it “anger toward an intellectual community that seemed unable to respond to the wounded one in its midst.”

  Things got very bad for the wounded one, eventually. Describing his physical condition just a year before his suicide, Berryman wrote:

  Diet: poor.

  Weight: bad.

  Digestion: often bad.

  Other functions: vomiting daily for weeks.

  This is no poem, just a set of replies to questions Berryman’s body was forcing him to answer. He was sick of letting everyone down, sick of wandering through the forest, sick of the forest itself. He was sick of the sickness in his mouth, where the words came from.

  Dave and I never decided to be together, we just were, eating scrambled eggs on long winter mornings. He was handsome in a way that was passionate, extravagant, sexual—not chiseled or pristine. He told me I should take calcium supplements so my bones didn’t break when he fucked me. How can I describe him? I could tell you about the dark mess of his curls, his big nose, his full lips. I could tell you he was olive-complexioned, wiry and athletic, just shy of six feet; wore button-down flannel shirts and jeans that cost more than he liked to admit. But what do these descriptions do? Better to say that my desire for him felt luxuriant, like a rippling piece of fabric folded over and over itself. Better to say that his eyes nearly closed every time he laughed. When he laughed that hard, it was an event. His pleasure—at the world, at other people, at the play and electricity of a single conversation—was sincere and contagious.

  A few weeks after we’d started seeing each other, I took a late train back from New York, where I’d been meeting with an agent about the possibility of sending my novel out to editors. I texted Dave to see if it was okay to take a taxi straight to his apartment from the station. I was eager to see him. I was always eager to see him. When he didn’t text back, I started getting anxious: Was this too much? I checked my phone on the escalator that led up to the main concourse: a soaring marble cavern with massive windows and dangling amber lamps. The station was empty at midnight, echoing and dim, but as the escalator rose, I could see Dave sitting cross-legged on a blanket he’d laid across the marble floor, spread with fruit and cheese, a piece of cake, dark chocolate broken into triangles. “I made you a picnic,” he said. He handed me a tiny bowl of pale vitamins. “For your bones.”