Claire's Head (27 page)

Sometimes I think if I can describe it, that will help. It is like a fit of depressive mania, or at least a fit of depressive mania is like an inversion of a migraine, a migraine without the pain. First the torpor. Then the loss of appetite (rather than hunger). The disgorging of the body. The catatonia and internal wildness of complete despair. The knowledge that it will pass even as it
seems impossible, inexplicable that it will ever pass. Like lost love. You cannot see the way out. You have no idea how you will get out. But the next morning dawns, bright and ordinary again.

Dec 11

2.95 on the BPS. Day three on R side. Muscles hurt. Why so much worse now? They were bad after Star's birth, very bad. There were days when I'd look at her and barely be able to see her. I'd walk towards her and feel like I was walking through a flood, limbs barely part of me. How hard it was to respond to her as a human being when in this state, to do even the ordinary things, lift her, feed her, bathe her.

This offers some comfort. It is chaotic but not random. It begins in instability. It is a complicated, dynamic system of neural behaviour and response. You tip from an unsettled state into illness, and at certain critical times, it takes only the smallest stress to push you from unsettledness into illness. Each thought, each action, everything you eat functions as a neurochemical threshold, you move through thresholds towards the final threshold, the singularity, something so small, possibly infinitesimal, that pushes you over the edge.

But the problem, neurologically speaking, is complex, for how much of the migraine is other and how much is indissolubly, chemically part of the self. For instance, a mathematician who suffered from severe migraines went to a neurologist after many
years of agony and somehow he managed to locate her single trigger – cheese, say cheese – and all at once when she stopped eating cheese, her headaches vanished but just as suddenly she lost her ability to do higher mathematics. Something about her mathematical genius was so chemically or structurally connected to whatever created the migraines in her brain that she had to choose, pain plus mathematics or no pain and no math. She took the pain and chose the math.

If you can't feel pain, you die. This offers some consolation, if not exactly comfort.

Sonya calls. We make plans to meet for dinner. We haven't seen each other for months, which is largely my fault because I haven't been returning calls. So it's a little awkward. When we meet it's clear how happy she is, she can't hide it and once we're sitting down in the most smoke-free place we can find, she tells me she's pregnant. She's embarrassed, I think, because she's not sure how I'm going to respond. She knows what I did, giving up S. I don't know if she can forgive me for it. I don't know if I can forgive myself. We don't speak of it but it's there between us. I tell her I'm glad for her, after so long (she's convinced it's partly due to her work with A.), and I am, of course I'm glad.

Perhaps it helps to think of the worst. To place the worst in the past. The day M. and I arrived in Ethiopia (the trip we'd planned
for ages – I wanted to take him to the place I'd come to consciousness, so much more meaningful than the place where you're born). We landed at the same time as the Chinese prime minister's Official Delegation, and so were kept on board for hours more after a ten-hour flight while the airport was emptied for their arrival and they were heralded across the tarmac by a military marching band, glimpses of which we could see through our airplane windows, so that I was not in good shape by the time we finally made it into the terminal building and into an interminably long and slow line, and grew worse while we waited and I was so ill and addled by the time we got to the customs official (already vomiting, occasionally racing to a sour but functional toilet and unable to keep any medications down) that he kept asking us more and more questions, which lit the long fuse of M.'s annoyance, (I wasn't sure the customs guy was going to let me in the country), and by the time we made it out to where Mum's friend Eileen was frantically waiting, as she had been for hours, behind a barrier, outside the terminal, because of the reception of the Official Chinese Delegation, and into her white Pajero, I was repeatedly throwing up into the only plastic bag I'd managed to rustle out of my luggage, completely dehydrated, (soldiers everywhere), M. furious, Eileen looking nervous about the state of me (collapsed on the back seat) and M. and her truck, (none of this like what she'd anticipated) as we drove along behind the marching band – in other words a real doozie that lasted about five days out of our ten-day trip, and I remember thinking then, for the first time, it will end, Michael and me, not now, but it will end.

One year, at the opening party for the Whitney Biennial, I
spent most of the evening lying on a small black-cushioned bench in the dark womb of a video exhibit.

Once I had to drive alone into the city in heavy, rush-hour traffic across the George Washington Bridge, drugged, barely able to keep my eyes open, stuck in the outside lane, the river beneath, and I thought, I can't go on like this, it would be so easy to – there was nothing to do but keep driving.

I've survived all this. Such solitude, such humiliation to this kind of pain and, even as you're aware of the humiliation, such detachment.

I remember the hospital visits and I remember so many rooms, so many hotel rooms, by their ceilings. Green hotel ceiling in Shanghai. Light fixtures, ceiling fans. Why travel if it's so hard? Because every time you go somewhere else there's a chance of throwing yourself in the path of something unforeseen. These days I check out the state of bathrooms, of toilets, first thing, given the odds that I may be kneeling in front of them. Sometimes even clean them – me – if they're particularly disgusting and it looks likely I'll be sticking my head in.

Sometimes when I lie in bed, it's as if there's a figure at the other end of the bed whispering, what will you give up to be free of it? And I'm convinced, if only I can find the right thing – I have given up so much. How much more can I give up?

Or I think my only hope is a kind of continual neurochemical track-switching, a shape-shifting, go suddenly off medications, change diet, change anything that will allow me to restart, to outsmart, if only temporarily, the pain grooves.

Someone once said, It is like you have a ghost living inside you.

M. once said, You should get a new head.

Is there some essential part of me that isn't touched by pain, or, no matter how many layers you peel away, is it still there, a thought which depresses me, but also comforts,
because
it makes the pain essential.

B. has a way of asking, Do you have a headache, that is less judgmental than anyone I have known. He manages to make an observation without any trace of blame or recrimination, not the subtlest nudge of what have you done now?

(And yet I'm frightened of his pity. If this gets worse, it will come.)

I told him about R. H., the man from the pain group. He freaked. Perhaps that's what I wanted. Why are you so cruel, he yelled.
I suppose I wanted to hurt him – perhaps it's all I can bear. I want to feel helpless. I want not to.

The thing is, I sleep better when I'm with B. than almost any other time.

Jan 2, 2000

I feel saturated with her ever since I got back. She's learning to draw Chinese characters, Len's teaching them, he's bought them special exercise books. She showed me hers at Xmas. I made a mistake, though, near the end. I asked her if she wanted to come live with me. I asked out of curiosity just to see how she would respond and her face took on the most peculiar expression. She doesn't want to, she was frightened I was going to take her away, but she also wanted to placate me because she knows I have the power to take her away and she doesn't want to hurt me because she loves me and so felt she should say yes (she wants to want to) but she couldn't honestly. Maybe, she said. I said, Don't worry, I'm not going to. I said I thought she was happier with her cousins. I wanted to walk through a door and vanish. Ravaged. The wind knocked out of me. Whatever I do I have failed her. If I took her back now I could not change my mind ever again. And how could I look after her now, like this? I made an agreement. She doesn't remember living with me. (Sometimes she seems as far away as a dream, sometimes I miss her so much I cannot see what's in front of me.) She says she remembers the bed. I remember her sleeping beside me, how restless she was,
how restless we both were. I remember the smell of her scalp and her ears. I remember lying on the floor of the front room with a headache, for hours, not wanting the weight of her presence beside me. Working at night in the front room, I'd walk past the bed on my way to the toilet and be shocked at the sight of her. For the first year there was such joy in her presence, my little love, and wonder, and I'd think of calling her father to say, look what we've made (the pure gift – the extraordinary openness of those moments on the train), but I didn't (and now I can't call him, because how can I admit what I've done?). What did I dream would happen? I dreamed things could be different. I dreamed the pain would break because it had to. But it didn't. I began to weep at the thought of hauling her down and up the stairs. I'd imagine the two of us leaping out the window just to see if there was an easier way of getting from here to there. That winter, the pain was making me crazy, it makes you crazy, all I could think was what could I give up, I had to give something up, I would have given up anything if it made the pain go away.

Jan 3

S. calls. Mother, she says, listen to our spell. I am so miserable, make me invisible. But she's laughing, they're all laughing, I can hear them.

Jan 15

Have been boiling up herbs like a witch.

Jan 30

There are two places in the world that may offer the migraineur sensitive to meteorological and barometric fluctuations some sustained relief: the middle of the Dead Sea and the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Feb 6

Dr. D. suggests Botox. Says he has nothing else left to offer. Ladies who use injections of the botulism bacterium to relieve their wrinkles by freezing their muscles have discovered it helps their migraines. They think it works by numbing the area around the trigeminal nerve. Injections last about three months. It costs c. $500 a pop. I ask about side effects. None, he says. Well, your eyebrows may collapse.

Feb 10

Claire said she thought I might go for it.

I cannot eat any dairy products at all now. I am needless to say assigned to write an article on the wrinkle-free wonders of Botox. I try to avoid walking along streets that are bus routes or which have a lot of truck traffic. I suppose I could try wearing a face mask as the Japanese do when sick. Even in Manhattan the prospect daunts me. I can last about five minutes in a dry cleaner's. I wave from outside the door of the place across the street on 9th and hang what clothes I do dry clean in the bathroom with
the window open for a day. I stay clear of people wearing strong perfume, especially in movie theatres. Avoid movie theatres. Newspaper ink's a problem, but depends on the newspaper.
Times
still okay. Sugar. Dairy. Smoke. Alcohol. The smell of onions. Carpets, esp. new ones made of petroleum-based substances. Oil paint. Varathane. Bleach. Air on airplanes. Muscles hurt. Worse on days when head's less. Maybe it's New York. Maybe it's the life I lead. Maybe it's the world and I'm a canary in it. Everything feels toxic. Yet I am a lucky woman. I can still afford my health insurance, and the bloody Zomig, which isn't working as well as it used to but soon there'll be a new generation of drugs. I have money, work, nothing to complain about. It's all in my head. In all likelihood I'm not dying any faster than anybody else.

Woke thinking of M & D. Wake at the first signs of pain, fearing it will grow. It will grow. Take drugs. More drugs. Think of them on the escalator, riding up. Let them have been happy together at the end. (How many times have I flown through Frankfurt and yet never been on that escalator.) I hope she didn't have a migraine. I think of the photos he took of her in High Park, the day he asked her to marry him, the ones he loved and she hated because she had a migraine. Did he know this about her then?

I could pray. Try to believe suffering is worth it for its own sake.

What is the opposite of pain? Some other kind of pain?

Think of it as fluid. Think of it as your medium, said A. Works for a while. In the doorway, he kissed me on the lips, which surprised me, but I don't think it was a sexual kiss.

Arms hurt too, not so bad on days when my head aches. What lurks always are the things that cannot be said.

There's no use keeping a headache diary expecting it to reveal patterns of cause and effect.

Is the key, still, to give something up, then what, what is the thing to give up?

Three, okay, three, three, three. Fuck the Barber Pain Scale.