by Ben Lerner
There was a poster of Picasso’s dove in the first neurologist’s waiting room, watercolors of Manhattan sunsets where they sent him for blood work, photographs of orchids where he waited for his CAT scan, his MRI.
Finally he got in to see Dr. Walsh, famous in his field. Silver hair, rimless glasses, a purple tie under the white coat. He was always almost smiling, at least the corners of his mouth were slightly upturned, because his blue eyes were narrowed in a perpetual squint, enabling him to express a kind of optimistic concentration without seeming patronizingly upbeat.
When Dr. Walsh told him the findings, the author was looking at a print of a painting of a beach scene: two empty white wooden chairs facing the sea, a small sailboat in the middle distance. He had a “mass,” what is called a meningioma, located in his cavernous sinus; it appeared benign.
“Who chooses this art?” the author wanted to ask.
“The art?” Dr. Walsh would further narrow his eyes.
“Do you choose this stuff or does the hospital buy it in bulk? Where does it come from?”
Dr. Walsh would swivel in his chair to see the image the author was staring at, then turn back to the author, but not speak.
“I understand the desire to have some decorations that indicate this isn’t just a hospital room, that a patient isn’t just a pathologized body, that this isn’t purely the realm of science. I understand that the exclusive criterion you or the institution would have for selecting an appropriate image would be that it’s inoffensive—if not actively calming, at least not agitating. It’s supposed to prove that you are neither a machine nor an eccentric because it nods blandly to established cultural modes, the medium of painting and the clichéd instance of it. They are images of art, not art.”
“Three doctors at the hospital share this consultation room,” Dr. Walsh might respond, adjusting his wedding band.
“Let’s try to stay focused,” Liza would say if she were there, placing a hand on his shoulder.
“But the problem, one of the problems”—cold spreading through him, as when they’d injected him with contrast dye—“is that these images of art only address the sick, the patients. It would be absurd to imagine a doctor lingering over one of these images between appointments, being interested in it or somehow attached to it, having his day inflected by it or whatever. Apart from their depressing flatness, their interchangeability, what I’m saying is: we can’t look at them together. They help establish, deepen, the gulf between us, because they address only the sick, face only the diagnosed.”
Instead, he’d asked, a tremor in his voice, “Am I going to be okay?”
“It is entirely possible that the tumor will never grow larger and that it will remain asymptomatic,” Dr. Walsh explained.
“Is there a surgical option?” he heard himself say.
“You could consult with a surgeon, but I don’t believe so. No.” Dr. Walsh stood, walked to the adjacent wall, and slipped an X-ray onto the illuminator, which he switched on. “I believe the location of the neoplasm rules that out.”
“So what do I do?” He could not make himself join Dr. Walsh at the illuminator, would not look at the cross-section of his skull.
“Well, we don’t really do anything right now.” Dr. Walsh sat back down. “Except follow you closely. We will develop a strategy if and when symptoms present.”
Headaches, disordered speech, weakness, visual disturbances, nausea, numbness, paralysis. Prosopagnosia, pareidolia. The softening sky reflected in the water. Silver but appearing rose gold in that light. The momentary sense of having traveled back in time.
* * *
Say they join his family—parents, brother and sister-in-law, and their boys, two and five—on Sanibel Island, off the Gulf Coast of Florida, for the winter holidays.
It’s dark when they arrive at the rented beach house, turning onto a gravel drive. The warm air is redolent of jasmine, the surf audible, a sound he’s always found alien. He tries to remember the light snow that morning in New York, beads of precipitation on the oval window streaking as the plane took off.
The author carries his younger nephew, Theo, into the house, which smells vaguely of sunscreen, citrusy disinfectant. He walks with Theo, who has one thumb in his mouth and his free hand down the author’s shirt, up to the watercolors of seashells and starfish, recalling his confrontation with Dr. Walsh about medical art as though it had happened.
Theo finds and squeezes his nipple, which makes the author start and laugh; since Theo began to be weaned, he goes after the breast of anyone who carries him. He gives Theo a raspberry on his neck, which causes him to shriek with laughter, then puts him down and watches him waddle away toward his mother, who’s just entering with more bags, screen door slamming behind her. On the porch, Hannah is showing Cyrus her thumb trick.
Hannah goes upstairs to unpack, his brother and sister-in-law to establish the kids in their room. He sits with his parents drinking the Coronas the previous guests left in the refrigerator, his dad playing the cheap guitar he travels with.
“Have you been able to do any writing lately?” his dad asks, playing the chords of “The Golden Vanity,” a song he’d sung the author as a child.
“Just this.”
“I wouldn’t be able to write anything right now, either, if I were you,” his mom says. “With so much stress. But I really think you’re going to be okay.” The author looks at her. “I really do.”
He used to cry at the end of “The Golden Vanity,” when the boy who has managed to sink an enemy ship is left to drown in the ocean by a double-crossing captain, so his dad would improvise additional stanzas for the ballad in which the boy was rescued by a benevolent sea turtle and deposited safely on an island.
His nephews come running down the stairs in their pajamas, hair wet from the bath. His dad starts up a song about his two grandsons and their magical airplane pj’s.
His brother and sister-in-law follow. “Maybe your uncle will tell you a story,” his brother says, opening a beer.
“I know a story about the world’s biggest shark,” the author says. His sister-in-law had told him about Cyrus’s most recent obsession. “But I don’t know if the boys like sharks.” The boys insist loudly that they do.
The boys’ room is empty save for a rickety bunk bed on the off-white carpet, a large red suitcase open on the floor. He hears Hannah showering in the adjacent bathroom. The window is open; he smells the jasmine again. He lies down in the bottom bunk with Theo and stares up at Cyrus’s mattress. Cyrus is sucking audibly on the leg of the small stuffed “piggy” he still won’t sleep without. It takes the author a while to pick up the sound of the surf.
He tells the boys to listen for the waves and then to imagine that this bunk bed is a ship at sea in search of the world’s largest and most vicious shark. What does vicious mean, Cyrus stops sucking long enough to ask. It means mean and ready to eat people up. The moon is high in the sky and you can see its light on the water. We have to be very, very quiet because we don’t want the shark to hear us. We’re sailing out to sea to capture this shark and so we have to look very carefully in the moonlight for its fin. Its dorsal fin, Cyrus contributes from his bunk. That’s right, its dorsal fin, the author whispers, Theo’s hand searching in his shirt.
I see it, the author quietly exclaims, but then he encounters a problem with his tense. He doesn’t know how to continue the story in the present, at least not in a way that would put the boys to sleep as opposed to enlisting their participation in a kind of game. To his surprise, he feels the onset of panic, cold spreading through him. The particularly precocious author can’t handle the formal complexity of the bedtime story. He takes a long pull on the beer, which doesn’t help. The author is having difficulty ordering his speech.
He takes four deep, deliberate breaths, counting them out as Roberts suggests. Theo imitates him, inflating his little chest. This happens to him several times a day, this sudden fear that symptoms are presenting. Now that we’v
e spotted the shark, the author resumes, let’s put down the anchor of our boat and I’ll tell you all about him. He’s reassured by the sound of his own voice—no audible tremor. There once was a shark named Sam, who was thought vicious but ultimately proved to be brave and kind when he saved a family whose ship was sinking, et cetera. And he led the family to a sunken treasure, although Theo was asleep by then.
The author opened the door to his room. Hannah was towel-drying her hair in front of a long mirror, the reflection of her face blocked by her body, though she could see him. “I’ll be right down,” she said.
Downstairs he found the last Corona and joined the others. He was surprised to feel drunk already.
“We’re thinking of going to the beach,” his brother said.
“The old folks are going to bed,” his dad said. His mom was already in their room. He had no idea what time it was.
“Come with us,” his sister-in-law said.
He yelled up to Hannah to join them when she could. His brother found a bottle of red wine in a kitchen cabinet. They opened it and walked out back and across the moonlit gravel to a path that led around another bungalow and down to the beach. The path was covered in crushed shells and surrounded by low trees, mangroves probably. Small things fled their steps in the dark, lizards or insects. Then they emerged onto the beach and he was stunned by the panoramic sky, the impossible number of stars. The sand was brighter than he expected, glowing, and they walked midway to the water and sat down on it, passing the bottle between them.
There were a few small fires along the beach where people were camping. They tried to remember the last time they’d been on a beach together. Had it been ten years ago in Barcelona? No, there had been a wedding in L.A.
Then his brother asked, “Where’s Ari? Did she go to bed already or is she coming?” They heard what could have been the slamming of a screen door in the distance, and his brother said, “That must be her.”
But the author said, “She isn’t in this story.” He thought his speech sounded a little slurred, his voice issuing from far away. He heard laughter, and turned and saw the embers of cigarettes on the balcony of one of the beachfront condos.
“Why not?” his sister-in-law asked with disappointment.
He picked up the bottle his brother had screwed into the sand and drank. It took him a long time to say he didn’t know how to explain it, that if he knew how to explain it she would be walking toward them now, not Hannah. I’ve divided myself into two people. A cut across worlds. Footfall on gravel, then crushed shells, silence when she reached the sand.
There was the sound of clapping from the condo, and he turned back to see that someone had launched a balloon from the balcony. No, a lantern, an illuminated red paper globe, probably a threat to sea life. It floated slowly past them and out over the water. From their respective present tenses, they all watched the same turbulent point.
* * *
The day of the extractions, he had taken the train with Liza to the office on Madison Avenue near Central Park. They rode the elevator to the twenty-eighth floor. He signed in with the receptionist, and he and Liza hung up their coats and sat down in the cramped waiting room. He was embarrassed to admit how nervous he was, but Liza knew it, and reassured him by making gentle fun of him, asking if he had any manuscripts she should burn if he didn’t “pull through.”
It wasn’t long before a nurse called his name and he passed through the door beside the receptionist and was led to a windowless room. He tried to make himself comfortable in the chair as the nurse took his blood pressure and remarked on the weather and then placed some kind of monitor on his ankle. Soon a muscular male nurse in purple scrubs entered with an IV stand, untangled and attached various wires, and cleaned his arm with alcohol. The dentist appeared, smiled at the IV, and said in his Romanian accent, “Do I really scare you that much.” The male nurse finished setting up the IV, left, and returned with a stand of tools that he wheeled in front of the dentist. The author looked away while the first nurse sank a needle into his vein.
He was in the middle of asking the dentist how long the procedure would take when he realized he was hearing his voice from far away; he left the question unfinished. That was because he was also walking with Liza in the park explaining how he had been right to elect the twilight sedation, late light filtering through the lindens. He knew he was still in the chair and at one point heard the dentist ask, pausing the drill, if he was okay, heard himself grunt affirmatively, but he was also explaining to his mom on the phone that the procedure had turned out to be a nonevent. He was suffused with warmth; the universe was benevolent, the lamp positioned to shine into his mouth was the nourishing sun. He knew it wasn’t but it also was, and then the dentist was saying, “All done.” He had no idea if five minutes or an hour had passed. He realized the first nurse was giving him instructions and he became aware of gauze in his mouth when he said, “Yes, yes.” Then he followed her to the waiting room without feeling the floor beneath him and watched but did not listen as she repeated the instructions to Liza, who thanked her and helped him into his coat.
The dazzling sun cleared his head a little, and by the time they were in a cab his sense of time had stabilized, but he was still so thoroughly suspended in the warm glow of the drugs that he experienced the sudden starting and stopping of the taxi while they inched their way east as a gentle rocking motion. He felt no pain, and only the awareness that his tongue was numb was vaguely uncomfortable, reminding him of the wounds packed with gauze. Had Liza been talking this whole time? He turned and faced her as they merged onto the FDR Drive, and she looked beautiful, her arms raised to pull her light brown hair into a ponytail; he watched her chest rise and fall as she breathed, saw the thin gold necklace she always wore against her perfect collarbone. Then without transition he was looking at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the buildings growing larger and more detailed as the taxi approached, though he was not aware of moving. Then he was aware of moving at an impossibly smooth rate, and there was the Brooklyn Bridge, cablework sparkling. Liza was cursing at the little touch-screen television in the taxi, which she couldn’t seem to turn off, and he reached out a hand to help her and experienced contact with the glass as a marvel, like encountering solidified, sensate air. Then he was smoothing her hair back and she was laughing at this uncharacteristic intimacy, something he’d done only a few times in their six years. Now the view again, and it occurred to him with the force of revelation:
I won’t remember this. This is the most beautiful view of the city I have ever seen, the most perfect experience of touch and speed, I’ve never felt so close to Liza, and I won’t remember it; the drugs will erase it. And then, glowing with the aura of imminent disappearance, it really was the most beautiful view, experience. He wanted badly to describe this situation to Liza but couldn’t: his tongue was still numb; he couldn’t even ask her to remind him of what the drugs would erase. While he was distantly aware that Liza would tease him for it later, that he was being ridiculous, he felt tears start in his eyes as they merged onto the bridge and he watched the play of late October sunlight on the water. That he would form no memory of what he observed and could not record it in any language lent it a fullness, made it briefly identical to itself, and he was deeply moved to think this experience of presence depended upon its obliteration. Then he was in his apartment; Liza gave him a couple of pills, put him to bed, and left.
He woke around midnight and felt like himself. His jaw ached a little. He pissed, changed the russet-colored, saturated gauze, and took another painkiller with a full glass of water. He texted Liza and also Josh, who had asked how it all went. He smiled at how much time he’d wasted ruminating about the extractions; it was nothing. He streamed an episode of The Wire on his laptop and fell asleep.
When he got out of bed late the next morning and had his coffee—iced so as not to disrupt the clotting—he realized: I do remember the drive, the view, stroking Liza’s hair, the incommunicable be
auty destined to disappear. I remember it, which means it never happened.
THREE
I arrived at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in a cold sweat, could actually feel the urea and salts emerging from my underarms and trickling down my ribs. I had been worrying about this appointment for well over a month—ever since it had been scheduled—had worried about it so much and so vocally that Andrews had offered to medicate me; every few minutes riding the train uptown, I patted the inside pocket of my coat to confirm the presence of the pill.
The glass doors slid open to admit me and I walked through the atrium past the Starbucks kiosk to the elevators, which I took to the seventh floor. The reception area into which I emerged was unusually luxurious, more like what I imagined the office of a major executive would look like than what I’d come to expect from medical suites. The series of abstract prints on the wall—faint grids in different colors, Agnes Martin knockoffs—was merely anodyne, but the framing was museum-quality. The receptionist I approached had an easy smile I felt was a little misplaced—the smile of a woman who sold expensive jewelry, as if I were shopping for an engagement ring; there was nothing medical about it. I gave her my name and she entered it into a computer and then printed out a form she told me to take to the floor above me; “They’ll take care of you there.”