Claire's Head (15 page)

Now the question is, Rachel said, was it a physical reaction to the cheese or some delayed reaction to the stress of all he'd lost or a reaction to the release from stress, which of course is a common moment for illness to appear, or some combination of all of the above.

Dr. Win Toong was younger than Claire had expected. Dr. Toong was also a woman.

When Claire had counted her way along East Broadway and turned in at the most sanitized and medicinal-looking herb shop she'd passed, she spotted a figure at the far end. Behind the woman, white shelves rose to the tall white ceiling, shelves that were partitioned to look like boxes, holding jars and plastic sacks of roots and vegetable matter. The glass cabinetry of the counter was similarly subdivided, filled with ground powders (what was in those powders?) on white porcelain plates, more roots. The woman approached, smelling of salt and anise, a distillation of the shop's pungency. She wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt and a navy skirt that fell to just below her knees. Though Claire had been to acupuncturists before, she had never been to a doctor who worked out of a Chinatown herb shop.

“I have an appointment,” Claire said. She realized she'd forgotten to ask how much her appointment was going to cost.

“This way, please.” The woman led her behind a curtain hung across a doorway, through another doorway, and into a room, white-walled and drably carpeted, where she motioned Claire to the chair in front of the desk and took the seat behind it. The six-foot desktop was wood veneer. On the eight-foot-high wall behind the doctor hung a series of diplomas. To her right, on Claire's left, a map of the body was divided by meridians, the arms of the figure held out in supplication. “How can I help you?” Dr. Win Toong asked.

“I get migraines,” Claire said. This wasn't what she had meant to say, but she'd woken to a low pulsing. On the left side, not the more usual right. By now her left nasal passages were blocked,
neck muscles tensing, the place behind her eye commencing its dull throb.

“How often do you get them?”

“Two to four times a week.” Which was a lie: could be two, three, four, five, six, more than she would ever admit to.

“When did they begin?”

“When I was a child. Six or seven.”

“Stick out your tongue.” The doctor's voice was curt, brusque but not unkind. “Stretch your arm.” If Rachel had come here, perhaps she had done so because it seemed so far from any treatment she'd sought before: the powders, the roots, the herbs. Perhaps this step was a measure of her desperation. Perhaps someone she knew had been returned to health after coming here, and for all her cynicism, she'd been drawn by the possibility of what lay behind these doors and in these drawers, or perhaps she'd been seeking treatments like this far longer than Claire knew.

“Have you had acupuncture before?” the doctor asked.

Claire nodded.

“Has it helped?”

“Not really. I thought you used herbs.”

“Yes, but acupuncture stimulates the body. Have you ever tried moxa?”

Claire shook her head.

The doctor led her into another room in which there was an examining table. Metal cabinets lined the wall above a small metal sink. On the counter, packages of needles were laid out on a silver tray. “Take off your shoes and socks.” The doctor ripped open a packet of needles.

“I came here,” Claire said, “because I believe my sister saw you. Rachel Barber. She's taller than me, with darker hair, a little older. It would have been earlier in the year. In January or last December, maybe.”

The doctor stopped in the midst of extracting a needle from the packet. “How is she now?”

“I don't know. We don't know where she is. She seems to have disappeared. I was wondering if you could help. If you could tell me when you saw her. How she was. Do you remember her?”

“I will see.” The doctor pointed to the table. “Lie down.” Claire unfolded herself along the vinyl-covered surface. Perhaps the doctor wouldn't tell her anything about another patient, even if that patient was Claire's sister.

Dr. Toong began to touch Claire's body – the inside of her arm near the elbow, a point along the rim of her ear, another between her first and big toes. The doctor's fingers were cool and rough. “Does it hurt here? Here?” Some of the points were exquisitely sore, points which Dr. Toong located swiftly and without fuss. In each sore point, she stuck a needle, which did not startle Claire or hurt exactly. The doctor laid a palm across her forehead. “Relax. Whatever happens, you must learn to relax. I will look for your sister.” She dipped her fingertips in a black paste and smeared it against the ends of some of the needles. Then she flicked a lighter to life, an ordinary cigarette lighter, and held it to the paste-smeared needles, until they began to smoke. Without another word, she left and closed the door behind her.

In the dark, the moxa glowed. Tendrils of smoke drifted towards the ceiling. Claire's body resembled a series of small,
perspiring volcanoes. Heat travelled down the spines of the needles. She had never seen her body give off smoke before.

Time passed. One or two of the needles – the ones between Claire's toes – became uncomfortable. Places travelled up from inside her, as if carried upward on the smoke. The mosque at First Avenue and nth Street. The parking lot on the southwest corner of College and Bathurst in Toronto. The corner of First Avenue and 6th Street. The Petit Pont in Paris. The Bloor Street Viaduct. Places appeared but there were no people in them.

She kept having the feeling that she was missing something. Fragments of e-mails that Rachel had sent and that she'd been poring over, back in Rachel's apartment, drifted through her head.
Terribly and suddenly after a glass of milk, a single glass of milk, 2.6 on the BPS
. That was from October. (Why was it that Rachel had made the most use of the Barber Pain Scale, while she, who measured everything else, had been reluctant to do so?)
Off to Shanghai next week to find out about arsenic as a cancer-fighting drug. No milk in the meantime
.

If pain is a call for attention, what exactly is ours calling attention to (and why why why are our headaches so persistent)?

Claire tried to puzzle out what time it was but had stupidly taken off her watch and left it on the examining room's counter, and although by now her eyes had adjusted to the dark, there was no clock. She began, restlessly, to measure the room, using the needle in the crook of her right elbow as her ruler: the walls, twelve needles high. At first there were sounds from outside, the doctor's voice in the shop, two other voices speaking what might be Cantonese or some other dialect, then the doctor's and one of
those voices moved to the office, but now nothing, for a long time nothing.

An hour, Claire's internal clock said, an hour and a half. It couldn't be, though, could it? She'd never been left so long in a doctor's office before. Usually the problem was how quickly you were booted out. Was the doctor trying to find some record of Rachel's visits? Had the doctor forgotten her? She had to go back to 9th Street to pick up her bags. It had seemed a reasonable plan beforehand, in lieu of lugging her computer and overnight case downtown. It was hard to relax. If her head felt better, it might be because she was distracted. Perhaps the doctor was at lunch. Could you set someone on fire and then lose track of them? Could she begin pulling needles out by herself? Could she get up, needles still in place, and wander off in search of the doctor? What
was
she missing? At last, without a sound, on slippered feet, the doctor reappeared, through a second door, to Claire's right. Two hours or none at all. “How are you feeling?”

“I have a plane to catch,” Claire said weakly. If patience was what counted then she, like Rachel, had surely failed.

“Why didn't you say?” Dr. Win Toong plucked out needles as if they were bits of string. “We can call you a car.” When Claire sat up, she said, “Your sister Rachel came three times. Last time February. Three times is not enough.”

“Did she think the treatments were working? Did you think they were?”

“Sometimes the herbs take longer. Two months. Six months.”

“How did she seem to you?”

“Her system is stressed. It take time to work.”

“Do you have any idea why she didn't come back?”

The doctor shrugged.

On the counter in the shop were two large paper bags, each stuffed to the brim with small clear plastic bags filled with vegetable matter. Roots? Twigs? Burdock? A second older woman, with liver-spotted hands, had joined the doctor behind the counter. The visit cost seventy-five dollars. Six weeks' worth of herbs would be three hundred dollars. Dr. Win Toong did not take credit cards. After that Claire was to come back. She began to blush. “I can't do this. I'm sorry. I really can't.” Worse than Rachel. She couldn't possibly carry these bags home across the border. Any customs official would take one look and flag her. Paying for her appointment used up just about all the cash she had. Pink-cheeked, Claire dashed into the street. There were no taxis in sight, only a black sedan car pulled up at the curb, the young Asian driver signalling to her.

This time, there were messages – three! – waiting on the answering machine when Claire burst into the apartment, intent simply on grabbing her luggage and bolting out again. Breathless, she pressed the playback button.

Elise Bray from
American Beauty
asked what had happened to the piece Rachel had been assigned, due April 16, on genital warts.

A hang-up.

Hi, Rachel, Amy Levin here, calling for Ariel. I left you a message last week too. Anyway, reminding you that Ariel wants you to know there are still a few openings for appointments in Amsterdam next week if that suits you and he won't be back in New York until September. You missed him here
last month but since you did see him in Amsterdam in March, maybe you're still in Europe or are heading back. Anyway, can you get back to me either way when you get this message? We don't have another number for you so I really hope you pick this up. Ariel sends greetings and says he really, really hopes to see you and wants to know how you're doing
.

Claire dropped her bags and scribbled down both numbers. She called the second number immediately.

“Hello?” Amy Levin said.

“This is Claire Barber, Rachel Barber's sister.”

“That was quick.”

“I've been staying at her place. I got your message. Rachel isn't here. Do you mind my asking, who's Ariel?”

“He's a healer.”

“And Rachel definitely saw him in March? In Amsterdam? Can you tell me the date?”

“Um.” Pages rustled. Claire's muscles gripped. “March 21.”

“And she definitely saw him.”

“Yeah, well, it's marked here as paid and he mentioned it. Why?”

“That's the last time we know of anyone seeing her.”

“Oh my God. What happened?”

“We don't know.”

“Do you want to talk to Ariel? I do the bookkeeping and the scheduling, especially for the New York clients. Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I can give you his number in Tel Aviv. He's flying tomorrow to Geneva. You may have a hard time getting hold of him. I can give you the number in Geneva too. But he doesn't usually answer the phone. I'll tell him to call you as soon as I speak to him.”

“What kind of healer is he?”

“He does this totally amazing energetic work. He's Israeli. People come to him from all over the world.”

From Montreal Rachel had gone to Amsterdam. She had jettisoned her plans to visit her daughter in order to see this man, this healer.

“What's his number?” Claire asked.

T
he weather turned. Beneath the summer duvet, Claire folded her body against Stefan's. Outside the partly open window, just beyond the head of the bed, rain teemed into the eavestroughs and chortled through the downspouts, the sound so close as to be almost in the room. A fine mist drifted through the screen, the curtains left open, too. Only if the rain grew worse and began to billow in would she rouse herself to shut the window, but she liked the feeling of permeability, of being close to Stefan in the midst of the tumult, for all that she sometimes felt besieged by her body's porousness to the outer world.

Stefan wasn't yet asleep. Sometimes it still surprised Claire to find herself here with him, to find herself loved. When she'd met Stefan, he had seemed worldly to her, having had three girlfriends, Gwen and Uma and Jenny, relationships that had occupied most of his twenties and lasted for years, unlike her two involvements (the second more of a heartbreak than the first), which had each endured only for a matter of months.

At twenty-two, in the office where she was working for the summer, she had met an architecture student seven years older than she was. Tom Speck had a girlfriend, but a month after meeting Claire, he said he was leaving his girlfriend for her. For two and a half months she lived in a state of rapture, half-delirious in his presence, hardly daring to believe her luck, until the night Tom took her out to a restaurant and told her he'd made a mistake and was going back to the girlfriend he'd recently left. After that, Claire dated no one for years, until a mutual friend introduced her to Stefan, saying they'd either drive each other crazy or be perfect for each other.