by Joshua Cody
Ligeti got out, I thought. I glanced out the door. Another pretend nurse walked into the room. She left the door open. She stood there, listening, saying nothing. I couldn’t see guards in the yellow hallway behind her. At first that was a relief—but then I realized that was worse. Where are they hiding? I silently calculated the time it would take to run on foot from Gellért Hill to Andrássy Street. It was midnight, so the streets would be empty. It was dark. I had to get to Valentina, get her out of here, head to—where?
I felt the first hints of panic. “We’ve got to get out of here, Mom,” I said, ripping the eight fake IVs out of my chest. Fake blood went everywhere. They really thought of everything, I remember thinking. “This is turning into a very dangerous situation.”
But it was too late. The pretend nurses grabbed me, forced me back into the bed. My mother, powerless. I thought about Valentina, our marriage in Bulgaria, the Kreutzer Sonata. I thought about Andy laughing when I said I wasn’t going to Vienna, and how we had a slightly similar night years later when he told me—in the same restaurant!—that he was working for the Resistance. And how his disappearances became first more frequent, then longer, and then he was gone. How superior, public executions. At least you know. His wife probably still hopes. Where was Valentina? I hadn’t heard from her in a while, I realized. Meanwhile, my mother was talking. She was holding me, going on and on, a calm, hysteric rant. How long had it been since I’d seen Valentina? I was sitting down on the bed. The fake blood was streaming down my chest. Too watery, I thought. Looks like red water. These special effects teams in 1963. How much are they being paid? Goddamn unions. (I sound like my father.) Nobody’s going to believe this, I said to myself, rubbing my hand against my slippery chest in fury. See, it’s slippery. It should be sticky. Effects will be so much better, won’t they. And then digital. In the 1990s. More pretend nurses now, holding me down. When was it—the last time I saw Valentina? Why can’t I remember? The pretend nurses are sticking needles back into my fake wounds, there are cables attached to the needles. The wonderful thing about Valentina is how beautifully she aged. That was a relief. You never know, when you marry a girl. When you date someone, you’re dating her present self, but when you marry someone, you’re marrying someone known only to your future self. It’s the bone structure. The Bulgarian mixture of Slavic and Russian and Greek and Macedonian and Tartar and Hun and Turk and God knows what else. The olive skin, the almond serious eyes. She could pass for Persian. She is a religious woman. I’m not. She goes to church. A believer, yes. She believes. The book of Job and all that. Question it poses is, why does it exist? Funny. It exists to pose the question of why it exists. Because it shouldn’t exist, a book like that. By all rights, it shouldn’t exist. So why does it exist? In order to ask that question. They’re pretending to inject me with something. I almost want to act as if I feel the needle going in. Play along. Needles are hollow things with mouths. My mother won’t stop talking, she’s over the edge now, like she said that night when she was crawling outside my bedroom in a black cocktail dress, wearing diamonds that gleamed in the blue darkness; soon she’ll be getting the time wrong, she’ll think it’s morning when the sun’s going down, I can see us in the future at a diner in America, me sitting across the little table from her aged wounded face, her blank eyes staring into the dull spoon she pretends to float like a ship on the surface of the coffee, a tiny wine-dark sea all her own, nestled in the bay enclosure of a paper cup ringed with a blue and white geometric band filled with meanders for fear of a void. More pretend nurses are running in. In their white gowns, they look ridiculous. They look like high school drama students somewhere in the American Midwest attempting Greek tragedy; they have the effortless, self-conscious beauty of awkward youth, rushing too quickly into a Greek vase pose, their anxious eyes searching for their parents in the overheated auditorium. It’s getting confusing. But I can use that to my advantage, as soon as I take a little rest; no, I’ll pretend to take a nap, the actors will relax, everyone will fall asleep, and I’ll just walk right out as if nothing happened. The only way to deal with these types of threats is to be utterly relaxed. Not even to seem relaxed, but to be relaxed. Just seeming isn’t enough. You can never petition the Lord by prayer. My father thought there were three good examples of English: Shakespeare and Eliot and the King James. But where is Valentina? My wife. I always wondered to whom those two words would refer. Valentina. She has faith. We never discuss it. We had a religious wedding, an Eastern Orthodox wedding. Is it Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox? Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic. So exotic. When we met and would make love she’d murmur in Russian. I felt like James Bond. I love the way her inner thigh bone joins her groin. She knows I don’t believe. She never brings it up, never tries to change me, to convert me. We’ll walk into a church somewhere and we’ll see the same icons but they appear differently to us. The fake blood coming out of the wounds, the painted blood on the painted sculptures, she sees all that differently. I know it’s fake when I see it. She thinks it’s real blood. She sees it as real. But I know it’s fake blood. But the thing is what’s New York? Because my mother’s saying as if it’s important “you’re in the hospital, you’re in New York, you’re being treated for
•
It was something about those two words—“New York”—that jolted me out of the morphine delusion. “New York” existed somewhere in a distant corner of my mind, but how did that jive with my studies at the Liszt Academy, my job, my editor, Valentina above all? And all of that crystalline detail?
When it came back, it came back block by block. Literally. I mean the first thing that came into my head was the intersection of Sixty-Eighth Street and York. So first was geographic location: the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Wouldn’t you think it’d be something else? Recognizing my mother, for instance? Or remembering my name? The self? No, it was where the self was positioned on the surface of the earth. I saw the subway map in my head, and I zoomed out, saw an overhead satellite image of the island, then the country. Then, for some reason, I thought of Columbia University. Bartók taught at Columbia. I was finishing a music degree at Columbia when I got the diagnosis, and I was teaching a class there. That was the reason I was in New York. Not really, but at this point, that would do. Then the year, I think.
Budapest and the Danube.
Then after that everything hit at once. It was a soft blow. I wasn’t happy to be in the hospital having a bone marrow transplant, vomiting thick green bile, being unable to swallow my own saliva, unable to move my mouth without cracking the calcified, thick-and-white-and-hard-as-porcelain mucus lining that coated my gastrointestinal tract, claustrophobic, perhaps dying, fearing insanity. But on the other hand, I liked my life; I liked my childhood, my parents, my brother, my city, my decade, my era; I liked the fact that I’d lived in France, my friends, the girls I’d dated; I liked growing up in Milwaukee, with its South Side that looked like Warsaw and its North Side that looked like Mulberry Street; I liked my friends in high school, my first girlfriend, that cute Armenian girl and the time we went out for Italian food and saw a double feature of The 39 Steps and The Third Man; I liked the fact that I was in my thirties, I thought that was a pretty cool time of life; I really liked how my father had taught me about writing, how he had shared these great books with me; I liked the United States, how it was a strange country in so many ways, but really had produced a lot of things we can be proud of; I liked the fact that Louis Armstrong (of whom that junkie deadbeat Billie Holliday, who can boast coauthorship of at most a handful of songs, unconscionably said, “Of course he Toms, but he Toms from the heart”; who gave away more than half his lifetime income in spite of the fact that he was born penniless, out of wedlock, to a son and a daughter of slaves; who as a child hauled coal in Back of Town, a squalid slum which he later called “the heart of good old New Orleans, something to live for”; who was one of MLK’s crucial financial patrons, and anonymously, out of modesty; who turned down State Department f
unding to protest what he perceived as Eisenhower’s inaction in the face of the desegregation movement; who was the musician that, at age sixty-three, dislodged the Beatles’ unique fourteen-week, three-song reign at numbers one, two, and three on the charts; who bought his first trumpet with a loan from a Russian Jew junkyard owner in whose honor he wore a Star of David pendant every day for the rest of his life) was American; I liked the fact that we had computers now, that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin had already come out; I liked digital recording techniques, and iTunes; I liked single malt Scotch, and rainy weather and fireplaces, and the fact that my father had taught me chess; I liked how I had put all the Mozart operas on my computer at home in iTunes, and had organized them by year—it was cool to see them arranged like that, to see how incredible it was that he wrote all that music in such a short span of time, really. Oh and that’s right—music! I really thought it was actually pretty cool that I had learned how to write music, how I had written these pieces—I did a quick inventory of them in my mind, ran through some of them in fast-forward.
But what about Valentina?
They took me off the morphine that night, switched me to fentanyl.
•
Another funny thing: not only my wholesale belief in the delusion, but the fact that I actually thought I’d been writing the whole thing down. In reality, here’s what I wrote, between May 18 and June 3, when I was on the morphine drip:
And my entire memoir, the history of my parents, my marriage, my imprisonment—let’s get a closer look at that:
Just two entries, scribbles. I wonder whether during the delusion I experienced the narrative the way I remember it, like a story; or whether the entire thing, present and past, wife and parents and grandparents, was created in a single, synchronous flash that overwhelmed my mind the instant before I tore the IVs out of my chest, and the nurses sounded the alarm.
Compare these pages to a page from my pre-delusional self’s journal, just a few days before, with a fairly accurate sketch from memory of the Bastille in Paris, where I’d lived, and where (I’d just been notified) there was some chance of having a new work of music produced, a sort of avant-garde opera (it ended up not working out, which is too bad, because apparently they were talking to David Lynch about doing sound design).
And a map I drew of my neighborhood:
Or Exhibit B, a diagram of the electromagnetic spectrum, in a minimalist style. Light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Most radiation treatment in the context of oncology uses X-rays, which fall near the top of the piano keyboard of the electromagnetic spectrum: Uranus between the Saturn of ultraviolet and the Neptune of gamma rays. (Remember that—as I note in extremely disciplined hand, since I’m talking about science here, not art—the electromagnetic spectrum is thus called because its waves have both electric and magnetic components; and the physics controlling these waves is electrodynamics. This represents my sum total knowledge of this subject, so we shall move on.)
Now were we to approach the delusion as a dream, and if we were to some extent Freudians (which we are, of course, we eminent Victorians), many elements are clearly recognizable as “residue,” as Freud called the distorted figurations of objects we fear or desire that our waking selves refuse to acknowledge, leaving that task to the unconscious, including Dorothy Gale’s unconscious in The Wizard of Oz. In this film (premiered, incidentally, in Wisconsin, in 1939), a twelve-year-old girl, traumatized by the realization that she is homosexual, experiences an elaborate delusion in which her dreary, homophobic relatives and friends in Depression-era Kansas are transformed into celebratory marchers in a sort of gay pride parade in Technicolor. (Now I’m mixing Jung in with Freud, but who cares. “I’m a writer, not a psychologist,” he growled from downstairs; and she, just like the time before, and surely just like the next, sighed and pretended not to hear him. Wait, hold on, I’m not writing fiction.)
In real life, my mother is a gifted musician, just as she was in the morphine dream; and she suffered an emotional breakdown not unlike that experienced by my Viennese mother. The thing about my European family living in pre–World War I Alexandria was unconsciously cribbed from Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire, a book I’d been reading in the hospital. My father hadn’t been killed, but he had died. Budapest? A city I love, where I’ve eaten deep-fried calves’ brains for dinner, and heard folk musicians playing hammer dulcimers. I’d had a good friend in high school named Andy, who was a gifted musician but went on to study law. The Liszt Academy stands in for Northwestern University’s School of Music—a separate school, rather than a department, thus nearly a conservatory, rare for universities. Valentina was based on a college girlfriend who really is Bulgarian, really is a wonderful pianist, really is exceedingly lovely. The composers are real, I’ve met both of them; their stories are real; I’ve really written music journalism. Et cetera.
In other words, the morphine acted as the classic unreliable narrator, unleashing this elaborate yarn in the great tradition of Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, and David Fincher. But if the elements of the story—the characters and motifs, the place settings and odd little details—are distortions of things I fear and desire in real life, then, as my father would have said, what’s this movie about?
It’s about guilt. I’d transferred the notion of hospitalization for treatment of an illness to imprisonment for having written an article about music. My own ambivalence about life choices—that is, the pursuit of a career in the arts and humanities, rather than in finance—thus surfaces in a classic twist ending, in a most unexpected, colorful, and terrifying manner.
The guilt of the ill—especially the guilt of those who have done nothing to help create their state—is a theme on which we’ve touched, and on which we’re sure to touch again, but for now consider the interesting notion that if a person finds himself or herself in a situation for no reason, he or she will go to quite extraordinary lengths to create a reason. If there is no agency, we will create an agency—even (especially!) a malignant one. My illness had nothing to do with lifestyle; it was a roll of the dice, as the poet Mallarmé would have put it; it was a numbers thing, a genetic mutation somewhere that surfaces so rarely that natural selection grudgingly opens the velvet rope. I am not responsible for my illness, nor was I ever responsible; rape victims are not responsible for being raped; civilians who are captured and tortured by despots as a show of power are not responsible for being captured and tortured: we should have learned this by now. This is why God told Saint Beckett to walk the lands of the earth, preaching the Christian doctrine of Absurdity: to absolve His children of our sins, of our guilt. But we wouldn’t listen, so God was forced to do more. God found a Parisian pimp named Prudent and asked him to murder Saint Beckett, for no reason. At first, Prudent refused: he had no prior relationship with the saint, and had absolutely no motive for doing him harm. But it was, after all, God’s order. So Prudent sought down Saint Beckett and stabbed him in the chest. The reason God did not let Saint Beckett die was so that Saint Beckett could confront his attacker and ask him, why? And God had Prudent reply,
Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m’excuse.
In English:
Dunno. Sorry.
•
There are several consequences for all this.
We’ve covered Freud and Darwin. So that just leaves Nietzsche. The crystalline clarity of this morphine delusion proves, perhaps, the Nietzschean maxim that “some situations are so bad that to remain sane is insane.” I had always enjoyed, even as a very young child, a rich dream-life. Many of my experiences in dreams, in fact, have been far more vivid than some real-life experiences; not only do dreams account for some of the most emotionally engaged moments of my life, but—and this is somewhat embarrassing to reveal, but I’m being perfectly honest—they account for every moment in my life in which I’ve felt politically engaged. It’s a feeling I’ve never been able to recapture in waking life, to my great disappointment.
(Then again, if I spent 1 percent of my time actually reading about politics, informing myself as a responsible citizen, instead of writing all the time about nothing, and reading books about Ezra Pound, whom nobody even knows anymore, let alone cares about, I might be able to fulfill this part of my life.) And primarily it’s for this reason that I’m typically tempted to consider dreams as unmediated, sacrificing intellectual gradations for intensity. But so many moments in waking life are unmediated as well—love, states of intoxication, listening to great music, et cetera—and I’ve had, on the other hand, analytical dreams, dreams that continue the day’s work, problem-solving dreams (these, to my mind, are failed dreams). So what, exactly, separates a sharp memory of early childhood, say, from a morphine delusion, or an image seen in a dream from an image read in a book? They’re all equally tangible, equally intangible products of electrochemical signaling. About twenty minutes ago, for example, I awoke suddenly, for no apparent reason. It’s about four thirty in the morning. I often awake like this now; I have ever since the transplant. I opened my eyes and the blue-grey light of early dawn, dim but secure, was distinct as porcelain. Then I realized it wasn’t daybreak at all, but fluorescent light emanating from one of the tallwindowed artists’ studios (wait, there are still artists in New York?) facing my apartment, across the narrow canyon of lower Broadway. (In the original draft of The Waste Land, Eliot writes of sailors seeing by starboard “something which we knew must be a dawn—/a different darkness,” and his friend Mr. Pound excised the line.)7 That was the first realization, the thing about the light. The second: for the first few moments of wakefulness, I had entirely forgotten my hospital experience, the very subject of this book; and I’d only realized I’d forgotten it at the sudden appearance in my mind’s eye of the image—as vengeful as an illusion—of my hospital room’s wall, and at first I interpreted the image as a dreamt one. But the hospital wall was and is no dream, it was and is memory, and for the subsequent few moments this fact was dumbfounding; as the false dream gradually took proper form as true memory, it seemed to be a memory impossibly distant, a memory, perhaps, belonging to someone else. It couldn’t be my memory. Not yet. Pound once wrote a poem called “Envoi,” which begins by addressing a “dumb-born book,” and goes on to have a female voice quote or echo or rewrite or pay homage to or rip off another poem by the seventeenth-century English poet Edmund Waller. And Hugh Kenner, that wonderful aforementioned critic who people don’t read enough of these days (people couldn’t possibly read him enough, but alas, they live their lives as responsible citizens, reading about politics), describes the poem as “in a time so far declined from Waller’s that the lady singing Waller’s song does not know his name.”8 Pound is not the lady, and the lady doesn’t know Edmund Waller; but she sings his song.