Prognosis

by Vallance, Sarah

  I called Laura as soon as I hung up the phone.

  “I have zero chance,” I told her, trying to manage her expectations. These were clever people. I couldn’t fool clever people. I toyed with the idea of pulling out.

  “Pull out and I will never speak to you again,” Laura said.

  “Fine!” I exhaled.

  I don’t remember the interview, except the chubby, bearded face of the senior government person, who kept tilting his head and looking at me as though he was examining his first dead body. I had taken a beta-blocker an hour before the interview to ensure I didn’t experience a repeat of the Gosford Aged-Care Conference Frozen with Terror Incident. I may well have looked like a moron, but no one was going to accuse me of looking like a nervous moron.

  Two weeks later I was driving home from work when my phone rang. It was the chubby, bearded man calling to congratulate me. I had won a Harkness Fellowship. Their recommendation was that I go to Georgetown University for a year, but that was a matter for further discussion. They would send paperwork in due course and I’d apply for a visa. I was expected in New York for an orientation in early August.

  At the time of the call, I was driving around a curvy stretch of road and nearly slammed my car into a sandstone wall. I pulled onto a quiet street and called Laura. I could barely speak. She screamed so loudly that I dropped the phone onto the floor of the car. By the time I picked it up and said goodbye, nausea had crept up through my insides. I nursed the phone in my lap and waited for it to ring, for the chubby, bearded man to let me know he’d made a mistake. It didn’t ring.

  At home I called my mother.

  “Well, that’s lovely, darling, but who do you suppose will look after George?”

  “I was hoping you might.”

  “Were you,” she said, as a statement not a question.

  “Well, yes. It’s only for a year.”

  “Only a year?” I had hoped my mother would be so astounded that I had gone from being on a disability pension to winning a scholarship to America for a year she would have happily taken George. I hung the phone up on her and burst into tears.

  When I managed to compose myself, I thought of my father, who would have been thrilled with my news. Delighted. Proud. He would have insisted that they cared for George while I was gone.

  In the absence of my father, my secret weapon with my mother was Laura. My mother adored her. Laura was thoughtful and well-behaved, and never said things like “fuck off,” except to me, and my mother never saw that. My mother, highly critical of almost everyone, couldn’t find fault with Laura.

  My mother and Laura had lots in common, including wanting my dog dead. “Oh, putting down Bess was the smartest thing you ever did!” my mother said, causing me to explode, when she saw us a couple of weeks after Bess had died. “Nobody can be expected to live with a dog like that!” She rolled her eyes for emphasis.

  They talked about the theater and books they were reading. I felt left out, but I was happy to have an ally, someone who could negotiate with my mother. I felt like I was Palestine, my mother was Israel, and Laura was President Clinton.

  “You have to help get her to take George!” I told Laura. “Otherwise I’m not going.”

  “You’re an idiot if you don’t go!” she shouted.

  “Please ask her to take George. She listens to you. She loves you!”

  Laura called my mother and invited her along to an organic food market on Saturday morning. She looked at me and winked while she made arrangements to collect my mother.

  At lunchtime, Laura returned home from the market with three bags of fresh produce and a big smile. “She’s taking George!”

  I threw myself at her and we nearly toppled over.

  “You know the reason you and your mother don’t get on?” Laura asked as she unpacked the groceries.

  “She hates me.”

  “She’s jealous of you. Not of your brother, just of you. Because you’re the girl. You’ve had the good jobs, you’re doing the PhD, and now you’ve won a Harkness Fellowship. She gave up everything to become a mother. You represent everything she sacrificed.”

  “If she was jealous of anything, it was the relationship I had with my father. Let’s not forget I have a damaged brain. Not much to be jealous about there.”

  “But you’ve recovered from it.”

  I shook my head. “You’re wrong.”

  “Trust me on this. I know what I’m talking about. Your mother is jealous. So now you know what the problem is, it’s time to get over it.”

  8

  AMERICA

  In August 1997, approximately two and half years after my accident, Laura and I reluctantly checked out of our suite in the sumptuous Warwick Hotel in New York City, where we had stayed during the weeklong orientation. We weren’t accustomed to such luxury but would very much have liked to be. During the orientation we had met the other fellows, their partners, and their offspring.

  I had hoped there might be another moron among us, someone who had also managed to slip through the fissures of the selection process, but I was disappointed. The other fellows were very clever, and almost all of them were medical doctors. “We are the top one percent,” I overheard one of the British doctors telling a small group of fellows, and I felt something inside my stomach lurch. Later, I smiled when I heard another British doctor refer to the first British doctor as an arrogant prick. I was in the top 1 percent of Harkness fellows who had suffered a mild traumatic brain injury. I decided to keep my mouth shut almost permanently, so people would mistake me for a deep thinker and selective mute. The truth was, the selection panel would have been hard-pressed to find someone less qualified and less capable than me. I was an entirely unsuitable candidate, so I channeled all my energy into hiding my limitations from the others.

  The other fellows were nice, interesting people, but I felt like an alien. During the orientation week, small groups started to form, but I stayed on the fringes, hovering around on my own, wary of everyone and everything. They probably considered me to be prickly or rude, or perhaps just woefully socially inept. I didn’t mean to be rude, but it was difficult to hide my awkwardness, and the massive chip on my shoulder seemed to double in size each day since we had arrived in America. At the various social gatherings during our orientation where our significant others were invited along, I stuck to Laura’s side, allowing her to do the talking for both of us.

  Luckily for me, the Harkness Fellowship program wasn’t just one of the most generous fellowships around, it also happened to be one of the least onerous in terms of output. Fellows were given free rein to spend the year as they wished. The 1997–1998 cohort, of which I was one, was the first focused exclusively around health policy. Each of us had been matched with a mentor who would supervise our research. At the end of our year, we were expected to present a paper outlining our findings to members of the Commonwealth Fund, the other fellows, and their mentors. That was the only requirement of our year in America. One paper. Apart from that, the fellows would convene every quarter in New York to meet with one another, listen to guest speakers, and do fun things like attend baseball games. One of the purposes of the fellowship was to allow us to immerse ourselves in American society and culture.

  The other fellows were about to be sent to various universities across the country: the University of Washington; Harvard; Johns Hopkins; Columbia; and the University of California, San Francisco. I was the only one due to travel to Georgetown.

  Laura and I caught the train to Washington, DC, and began our search for an apartment. We settled on a one-bedroom place in an old converted hotel in Dupont Circle, which was within our budget and a short walk to most of what we wanted in DC. Dupont Circle was close to George Washington University, where Laura planned to take three marketing classes for her master’s degree, and a thirty-minute walk from Georgetown. It was also the epicenter of DC’s gay community.

  Our building looked majestic from the outside and boasted a spectacular
marble foyer and ballroom on the ground floor. Inside, our apartment had slits for windows and synthetic gray carpet and felt like a prison cell. The kitchen wasn’t much bigger than an orange box. Ours was one of hundreds of apartments in the building, and most of our neighbors were gay men. They were friendly with the exception of the middle-aged bald man living opposite us, who wore tight leather pants and bright-pink tank tops and had thick black hair sprouting out from any exposed skin. Slung across his shoulder was a teddy bear backpack. When we smiled and said hi, he stared straight through us.

  Our apartment was on Fifteenth Street. What could be more thrilling than a city so vast it had run out of proper street names! On the day we moved into our apartment, the building manager took us aside and warned us about the neighborhood. He was a weedy man not much older than twenty with acne and a giant Adam’s apple. Judging by the Playboy magazine he buried under his desk when we entered the office, he wasn’t a homosexual.

  “Don’t go past Fourteenth Street,” he said. We looked at him blankly. Australians are not used to being in a city with streets that needed to be avoided. “Just make sure, okay?”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Laura said to me as we rode the elevator to our tiny new apartment. “I know you. I know what you’re thinking!” I smiled and nodded.

  Neither of us slept during our first night in the new apartment. Helicopters circled above us, their searchlights shining into our bedroom. Sirens raged all night, up our street, down the next. Fire trucks, police cars, ambulances. War had broken out. We lay in each other’s arms waiting for our building to be hit by a missile. We will die here, on our first night in our tiny apartment in Dupont Circle, I thought. The next morning we were relieved to find our street in exactly the same state it was the day before. Buildings hadn’t burned to the ground; bombs hadn’t wiped out entire apartment blocks. We visited a pharmacy and bought two sets of earplugs.

  A week later, when Laura was at university, I locked the apartment door behind me, took the elevator downstairs, and walked outside into a bright sunlit day. I walked past apartment blocks just like ours, past stand-alone buildings too big to be private residences, past consular buildings representing countries I had never heard of. I turned a corner and walked past a small park with a single empty bench and neatly trimmed hedges. At the first set of traffic lights, I crossed Fourteenth Street. More apartment blocks, more buildings. Cars whizzed past and trucks stopped in the street, their hazard lights blinking as men traipsed inside lugging large pieces of furniture. I reached another set of traffic lights and waited for the pedestrian light. Thirteenth Street. At the next block, the gardens in front of the apartment blocks became overgrown and crowded with useless bits of electrical equipment and old, rusted chairs missing cushions. In the driveway of one block a car was supported on bricks with its hood open. Three men sat on crates beside the car sharing something from a thermos. I smiled at them and they smiled back. I crossed another set of lights and had started walking up another block when I saw a man walking toward me with a golden retriever.

  I smiled at the man. “Do you mind if I say hello to your dog?”

  “Please, be my guest.”

  I knelt on one knee and patted the dog, who wagged his tail and licked my face.

  “Beautiful dog.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  I laughed. “Is it that obvious?”

  “You’re the only white person here.”

  I told him I was from Sydney and that I had only just arrived in DC.

  “Sydney, Australia? That’s a long way from here.”

  I nodded.

  “Can I give you some advice?” he said.

  “Please.”

  “Turn around and walk back. It’s not safe around here. You know, lots of guns and drugs and stuff.”

  “Even if you’re just passing through? In the middle of the day?” My chest thumped with excitement.

  “Especially if you’re just passing through,” he said. “I’ll walk back with you. I’m headed that way too.”

  DC was an exciting city to explore. Even if Laura and I spent the year just poking around its streets instead of studying and going to class, we wouldn’t have been able to see it all. Since hearing I had won a fellowship, Laura had devoted her time to writing details of every museum, gallery, park, restaurant, bar, and café she deemed worthy of a visit in a tiny green notebook. She devised a color-coded system using sticky notes to distinguish museums, monuments, food, drink, and so on. She was an excellent traveler, keen to maximize every spare moment we had and to make every meal, every coffee, every glass of champagne we swallowed memorable. I, of course, would forget pretty much all of it. But the distractions of a new city and the opportunities to do new things meant I also forgot about my depression. And without my depression, my rage subsided. Laura was right. Leaving home was the best thing we could have done.

  We stood in awe of the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial. We spent our days wandering through seventeen Smithsonian museums without paying a cent. We visited every art museum, and I saw every Edward Hopper painting on display in the capital. I sat in front of his paintings for ages without even twitching. I reclined on a chair in front of People in the Sun, and Laura snapped my photo. It felt like a holiday, and when I could distract myself from the fellowship and detach myself somehow from my damaged brain, I realized I was happy.

  Because I kept nagging about wanting to see the real DC, not the sanitized stretches of polished marble and rainbow flags dangling from café windows, a friend who worked for the State Department took us on a drive around the southeast quarter.

  “This is the dangerous part of the city,” she said. It was lunchtime and the streets were stark. There was no one around apart from a small group of kids huddled outside a corner shop. We passed what my friend told us were crack houses, dilapidated old buildings that jumped to life at night. I wanted to see things come alive, to be part of the action.

  “Can we come back one evening?” I asked my friend.

  “Are you crazy?” she asked, tilting her head to one side. “I would never come here at night. You should never come here at night either.”

  “Just ignore her,” Laura said.

  My friend laughed.

  “Hard to believe she’s thirty-four.”

  That afternoon, my friend took us to the State Department building. We walked for what felt like a mile along a linoleum corridor on the seventh floor. I hoped to catch a glimpse of Madeleine Albright, or at least her office. Outside the secretary’s suite two Corinthian pillars led into the Treaty Room. We were disappointed to learn that Ms. Albright was out of town.

  I spent my days wandering the streets of the nation’s capital, stopping only to eat and to drink. New York is my favorite city in America, but DC comes a close second. I took the bus and got off at random stops to explore new neighborhoods. Laura, a far more conscientious student than I, spent her days in the library at George Washington.

  I immersed myself in the novelty of American television and did everything I could to delay starting work on my research project, but eventually I called my mentor and introduced myself. It was a short conversation. She was curt and told me how busy she was, and I felt, even before I had met her, that I was wasting her time.

  At her office in Georgetown, I knocked on her door, and she asked me to wait outside for a few minutes. When she invited me in she pointed to a chair. I liked her less in person than when we had spoken on the phone.

  “You can get a PhD from the University of Sydney?” she asked.

  “Yes, yes you can.”

  “And why would you want to do that?”

  Her question disarmed me, and I had no answer. She was clever, and I was not. I dropped my head and prepared for the worst.

  She didn’t like my research topic and told me I should choose another. I didn’t much like my topic either. I had cobbled it together quickly
to win the scholarship. I never had even the vaguest notion of following through and conducting the research, because I didn’t believe I had a snowflake’s chance in hell of winning a Harkness Fellowship.

  “I will try to think of one,” I said, looking behind her at a credenza covered in photographs of her and Bill Clinton, her and Bill and Hillary, and a lot of other people I didn’t recognize who were clearly very important or they wouldn’t have been sitting in silver frames on her credenza.

  “You do that,” she said.

  I felt like an impostor. A fraud. This woman had a mind like an MRI machine. She had peered inside at the wasteland of my brain and wanted nothing to do with me. I didn’t blame her. I took the long way home, wondering how best to break the news to Laura.

  Laura pondered my news and decided a drink might be in order, so we caught a cab to a bar in Adams Morgan and drank as much wine as we could. I woke the next day and realized I still needed a research topic. Two weeks later, I showed up at my mentor’s office for an appointment I thought we had made. She scolded me and told me I had made a mistake. She couldn’t see me for another three weeks due to her travel commitments.

  Laura kept in touch with a couple of the other fellows. They loved their mentors and were making excellent progress with their research. I had achieved nothing. Since meeting my mentor, I spent my days at home, slumped on the sofa in front of the TV, convinced that coming to America was a huge mistake. I was way out of my depth, and it was going to become frighteningly obvious to everyone around me. I hadn’t been able to disguise my damaged brain from my mentor. I was certain she’d contact the Commonwealth Fund and let them know they needed to cancel my visa and send me home. I decided to lie low until that happened and watch as much TV as I could. On Jerry Springer, I saw a white man who liked to dress up in a Ku Klux Klan outfit, smear fried chicken all over his body, and screw black prostitutes. The world is full of crazy people, I decided, and a lot of them seemed to be in America.