by Joshua Cody
The movie was presented by the Romanian Cultural Center—the foreign branch of the Ministry of Culture—and there was a random lottery for a DVD of another film by the director: a random ticket receipt was chosen; and I knew we would win, and we did.
Then there was a single glass of wine somewhere nearby the cinema, either before or after the movie, and she looked at me, apropos of nothing and everything, and said,
—if you have to go back in the hospital I won’t be able to help you now.
Her voice was low, and she was not smiling. She looked down, and up again.
This was her lovely professionalism. Nothing had happened, nothing had been breached, when I was in the hospital, when she was a member of my staff.
At some point soon thereafter I went to her apartment, ostensibly to make the acquaintance of her cat. She had an austere, almost clinical flat a block from the hospital; there was something elegantly minimalist about it, but also something of the anonymity of the Eastern Bloc, the big grey shoe-boxes just outside of Prague or Budapest. She had very few books, half a dozen, maybe. The place was spotless—hospital spotless. There was a couch and there was a single chair for her desk, and we looked at the couch and then the chair and then at each other. Do you want to take a walk? she said.
We walked along the river, which is, in that strange upper-east corner of the city, also to walk along a highway, and to walk under concrete pedestrian overpasses that connect various buildings of hospitals and medical schools. The water was beautiful and black, and the traffic was deafening, and other than that, there was only concrete, like what they thought, in the 1960s, things would look like now. At this point we weren’t saying too much.
We went back to her apartment. I moved the single chair to the middle of the bare room and sat down. She sat down in front of me, and I touched and then pulled her hair so that her head bent back. Then our bodies were pure as black water and as austere as concrete, as tight as the surface of black water.
So what were the signs, and when did they occur? In what order, what frequency? Was it she who revealed them, gradually, like a stripper revealing, and disassociating, parts of the body; or was it I, as my senses and my body and my mind gradually came back to life, who noticed them, one by one, part by part, reassembling the parts into a whole? We were in a café one morning, and she visibly tensed up, her almost almond eyes narrowing. A couple of good-looking TriBeCa guys had walked in; I had already vaguely recognized, without giving it any thought, that they were gay. She wanted to leave. So there were those kinds of things. One time we were walking down Canal Street, and we passed a trio of Hasidim, and she clenched my hand. We were having dinner outside at the Odeon one night and a friend of mine walked by. He lives in the neighborhood; he’s a television producer; he’s Jewish. I introduced him to Nothereal. I have no idea what transpired during the fraction of the second in which they exchanged glances, but he bid us goodnight and before he was half a block away I received a text message from him. It read
don’t walk run
At the same time, one night she came over to my apartment, crying, because she had met a new patient earlier that afternoon who was about to undergo a bone marrow transplant; she, thinking of me, could barely talk to him.
At the same time, she e-mailed me a research article about survival rates for patients in my situation. There were lots of variables, but as far as I could tell, the findings put my chances at 13 percent. This was, in a word, disappointing.
I printed the article out and showed it to my oncologist. “Hell is this?” he said. He scanned it, frowning. Then he was furious. “Who gave this to you?”
Of course I couldn’t say—your colleague, who is treating your patients: your colleague, with whom I’m sleeping. “I found it online.”
“Look at this,” he muttered. He was referring to the authors of the article, their credentials, the footnotes, their sources. “Bunch of amateurs. Listen to me. Don’t go online with this stuff. Promise me that. If you have questions, ask.”
And at the same time, the sex with her was more and more frequent, more and more frantic, more and more thrilling and impulsive, and then—compulsive? As were the adamant declarations of love. I chalked it up to the infatuation that I felt as well, my infatuation with her salt-bright beauty. But I also noticed that, increasingly, I was defending myself against vague accusations. Apologizing for not calling her right back. She’s vulnerable, I thought. But how vulnerable—vulnerable to the point of berating me for not calling her back within an hour? She said she was terrified when I wasn’t with her. That when I wasn’t there, it was as if I didn’t exist, as if an object in a room, temporarily obscured by someone standing in front of you, has disappeared. One morning I told her I was having a business meeting with an old friend, an author, a woman, and Nothereal said our relationship was over, that there was no way she deserved to be treated with such contempt. I apologized: I said I should have—what? I can’t remember what I said. Something about telling her things earlier, not springing things on her, I have no idea.
But the worst were the stares. Once, again at the movies, I felt the smarting sensation of burning on my cheek, and realized she’d been staring not at the screen but, fixatedly, at me. For how long? And then there was the time we were walking back to my apartment, and she was doing the same thing. (The French have a word for staring someone down, devis-ager, literally “de-facing.”) I looked at her, smiled, looked back ahead, looked back at her, puzzled. “This isn’t going to work,” she said.
“What?”
“I just don’t have to settle for someone who treats me this way. I deserve more.”
We’d reached my apartment. I was preoccupied by the results of the first big post-transplant CT scan, which were coming in a few days. If the scan was clean, that boded pretty well. Sara’s hadn’t been. She was a fellow patient I’d met in the hospital. Her story was pretty much the same as mine: she had the same thing I had, chemo didn’t work, so they did the same thing. But in her case the transplant didn’t work either. The first post-transplant scan was positive. They gave her six months, and she’d died in three. Nothereal was aware of this.
“You deserve more? Seek more, then,” I shrugged, and left her on the corner, alone; I didn’t look back, but just before I turned away, I’d caught the expression of incredulousness on her face.
She called the next day, had to see me. She came over. I’m in love with you, she said. Sometimes I go a little off.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Sometimes I go a little off. I need you to pull me back, like how you did last night. I need you.”
There was the sound of gentle rain in her voice, and our bodies were water again, that night, and the next night, at her apartment; there were defiant, tear-studded cries of love, dreams of children, voiced aloud; never felt anything like this ever never ever and she said she felt she was tipping over into something. I could feel her amber skin move over her skeleton; I wondered if it were our skeletons that were making love. Ever never ever.
I slept late the next morning, over at her place; she went to work. My phone rang: it was my brother, Matthew, who is three years my junior; he had moved to New York from Los Angeles after the death of our father in 2001. Like me, he was fooling around in the arts; he had studied music and had conducted concerts; he was an excellent conductor. Lately he’d been trying his hand at acting. He was calling to ask whether Nothereal and I would consider being extras in a student film he was involved with. The scene was to take place in a restaurant; there had to be diners dining in the restaurant for verisimilitude’s sake. It would be filmed in a couple of days, the night before I was to receive my scan results. I thought it might be fun, a distraction. I told him I’d ask Nothereal. I called her up and asked her if she was into the idea of sitting in a restaurant for a couple of hours, pretending to eat. She said sure.
I got to the restaurant first. She was late. She walked into the restaurant with an uncanny s
mile. Not her smile. Her gaze was steady, direct, preternatural. I already felt blood draining from my face. She wouldn’t speak. I asked her how she was. Silence. Just a smile. I tried engaging her in conversation. Silence.
Finally she spoke, an odd relish in her voice. She told me she had to be honest. She hated to tell me this now, because she knew I was worried about the results of the scan tomorrow, and how Sara’s results had been, in the oncologist’s words, “disappointing,” and how he’d given her six months to live and she died in three, and her lover had gone mad and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. But, Nothereal said, she just couldn’t keep the façade alive any longer. She felt I had to know the truth: that she didn’t love me, that she didn’t even like me; that frankly she could hardly bear the sight of me, it was so depressing. I started literally shaking. It crossed my mind that tomorrow I might be dead in three months.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
She went on. She had been lying to me about her love for the past few months out of pity, she said; but she couldn’t continue the lies. It was unfair to me, and, most of all, it was unfair to her; she deserved better than this. “Why are you saying this?” I asked. “Because if you continue, you realize, I’m going to walk out of here and never see you again, and I’m just not sure if that’s what you want.”
But it has to be this way, she said. Her face was immune, angelic, her eyelashes sympathetic and mocking, her chin defiant. “The disease came for a reason,” she said, “haven’t you realized that?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Staring into my eyes from a thousand miles away, she said,
—But surely you know, deep down, why you’re diseased.
She was one of my doctors. I stared back for a few moments, and then I got up and left.
She followed me outside, for reasons unclear to me. The street was busy; the sun was setting. She was laughing delightedly. She ran after me, touched me. “Don’t touch me,” I said. She laughed again, playfully, and tagged me, like a child on the playground.
I whipped around and screamed so loudly my throat went raw.
Get the fuck away from me!
Everybody on the street, all the extras, turned around on cue, and now her face was the slick wall of a tsunami before its glassy crash.
I walked away briskly. Six blocks later, I received a text from Nothereal. It read, simply:
Loser!
What happened then? Ah, let’s see. I ran into a bar and ordered a whiskey. I called a friend who lived nearby, told him what had happened. He came over right away. He didn’t understand it either. “Not only that but she’s your doctor!” After another drink, I felt a little calmer. We went to the restaurant next door. We happened to be seated next to Chelsea Clinton’s table; she’s the daughter of a woman who, once, was one of my adopted state’s senators who, like me, had adopted it, and who, like me, has since moved on to bigger and better things; and Chelsea’s also the daughter of one of my country’s former presidents. She was with three others; she seemed like an extremely nice girl, and in person was very attractive. My friend and I enjoyed a good meal. I had trout.
My friend got up to go to the bathroom. Suddenly, alone, I was seized with terror. I rose and ran out of the restaurant. And I mean ran. Chelsea Clinton was like what the fuck. I ran blocks, I don’t know how many blocks. I ran into another bar. My heart was pounding, of course. I ordered another whiskey, called another friend who lived nearby. (The nice thing about living in a small town like New York is that no matter where you are, you’re always about two blocks from somebody’s place.) I tried to explain what had happened; he came over, found the whole situation as strange as I did.
Finally, I’d calmed down. I walked back to my apartment, relaxed. I got inside and closed the door. Then I was alone again. There was no sound. I switched on a beautiful old glass lamp—Oriental, deep bourbon—I’d inherited from my father. There was still no sound.
It was about two in the morning. Scan results in eight hours. I sat down to write in my journal. That’s what my father’s advice always was: write it out, write it out. I started to describe a film I was thinking of making. Some notes about lighting: diffused light for the wide shots, conversations (over the shoulder) use direct keys with high contrast. And then a note about the form: a series of vignettes, which turn to melodrama.
But why would Nothereal have done that, if it wasn’t that she knew the transplant had failed, and, in love, made the break in a somewhat psychotic but, given the circumstances, somewhat understandable way? They already had the results. They’d had them for days. And Nothereal obviously had access. She’d looked already—How could she not look? How could she resist looking? Like Orpheus and Eurydice. Of course he’d look back—are you coming back up with me, or not?
This thought unsettled me—so I put on some music. The Stones. But now the dreadful rising crest had begun.
It hadn’t worked for Sara so why would it work for me. Sara—same diagnosis, same chemo, same not working, same salvage treatment, didn’t work. Sara—same thing, she was a month ahead of me, that’s all, I’d been following her from behind, like the second voice of a two-voice fugue: same thing, just a delay in time.
But there’s no reason to think that. Am I losing my mind? Write it out, write it out. Just keep pen to paper: I am trying very hard:
Ezra Pound spent most of his life working on a long poem called The Cantos. He told Yeats that when it was finished (he never finished it) the form would be “like that of a Bach fugue”—“no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse.”16 (Sorry to cut in for a second – but to a musician this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But that’s okay; he knew nothing about music; he was responsible for the revival of Vivaldi, for heaven’s sake, which might well have aided his insanity plea.) The poem was fragmentary. In the hospital, he wrote a note that wasn’t used in the poem but was in its style.
Problem now is
not to go stark
screaming hysteric . . .
And later
young doctors absolutely
useless.
And a little later
grey mist barrier impassible [sic]17
It wasn’t a poem, but a letter to a friend who consoled him. I was alone. “I could kill myself now,” I write, “like Jason,” my roommate, “in these horrible rages and I am being so good”:
But it’s just a goddamned nightmare of anxiety and adrenaline. That’s all.
But in a fugue, one voice follows another at some preordained delay. They gave Sara six months. She had her transplant before I had mine. But no—they gave Carmilla six months three or four or five or howevermany times and she’s fine—she’s drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes and sharing wonderful moments with people including me. So why am I not in a fugue with Carmilla? But why wouldn’t I be in a fugue with Sara? Because Nothereal knows I’m in the fugue with Sara, not with Carmilla, because she checked the records, and that’s why she left. And the Cantos was a fugue, and a guy who knows, Noel Stock, the critic, a very smart guy, said that “the Cantos is a tragedy.”18 But they gave Sara six months and there, the organs of her body stopped functioning, one by one. Three months in, she was having a tough morning. She was at home, in bed with her lover—she was a lesbian—and she started vomiting blood. Her lover called the hospital, called 911, called the ambulance, but Sara, who was supine, didn’t seem to care about any of that: she was shouting “I’m not dying, I’m not dying—I can get up, watch, I can get up by myself.” And of course she couldn’t. And her lover knew the ambulance wouldn’t get there in time. Sara looked at her and between pukes of blood repeated—I can get up by myself. But Carmilla is okay; but Carmilla cast her breasts, her torso, in plaster, and hung it on the wall. Sara’s lover bent down and kissed Sara and placed her hands around her lower back, and gently lifted her upright, lifted the torso upright like the torso of a Greek sta
tue might not be the original, it might have been from another one originally and later, in Rome, upon this one, that faces you, affixed—and gently lifted her upright and Sara laughed and smiled and said—see I told you I’m not dying, I told you I could sit up by myself, and her lover nodded, yes, you did sit up by yourself, you’re not dying, and Sara’s eyes rolled up: the top of the iris was eclipsed, then half the pupil, like the apparition of the sun setting upon a rim of water, but inverted, the water meeting the edge of the sky from above, which would make no sense, then the whole pupil, now the sun is down/up but there’s still light, but then the rest of the iris, black and gold and shimmering like an insect’s wing, copper and wine and the rest of the iris was eclipsed and she died. And now, later, her lover is a patient in a psychiatric ward just like Ezra Pound was, writing his fugues, and Yeats described the writing as
constantly interrupted, broken, twisted into nothing by its direct opposite, nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion . . . This loss of self-control, common among uneducated revolutionists, is rare—Shelley had it in some degree—among men of Ezra Pound’s culture and erudition.19
Whoops and here’s the break:
There it is—the loss of language, the reversion to the purely graphic, like the cavemen painting under torchlight at Lascaux. Mr. Tytell writes of Pound, arrested for treason, in the six-foot-by-six-foot “gorilla” cage, open to the elements, for three weeks, soldiers staring at him but no one speaking: then the breakdown.
In later years he characterized the experience by saying, “The World fell in on me.” Actually, the breakdown was a wordless catharsis . . . Hemingway had once told him that a writer needed to feel terrific pain before releasing his subject. The breakdown was an admission of such pain. Pound, the man of words, was now caught in the most overwhelming moment of his life without the power to summon language.20