Lying (9 page)

Sometimes, if I had this daydream in bed, I would fall asleep before it was finished. Other times I would get to the end only to start the story all over again, only this time I had broken not only my bones, but many of my organs too, and the doctor who spoke French had to work on me using many experimental cures.

Understand, I would have told no one back then. The experimental cures involved pins and touch. Maybe I was becoming mentally ill. Actually, I was becoming mentally ill. If you’ve read my other books—and I have written other books,
Prozac Diary
and
Welcome to My Country
, which I suggest you rush out and buy—you would know that mental problems have been issues throughout my life.

Is epilepsy mental or is it physical? A long time ago, when van Gogh was alive, people with epilepsy were put in insane asylums, where I’m sure, with their froth, they fit right in. In my own life, even though she pooh-poohed psychoanalysis, Dr. Swan had once told me my seizures were the result of repressed things, and if I could just let my feelings fly free I would get better. I had asked Dr. Neu about that and he said bosh, and he’s brilliant, whereas Dr. Swan was merely bright. But still. When I look back on myself now, from the vantage point of many years, and see myself as I was, all thrash and spasm, I have to wonder what it meant, if my sickness was like longing for things in the past I had never had, and for things in the future I was too afraid to try.

•  •  •

“We might be able to cure you pretty soon,” Dr. Neu said to me one day.

“What?” I said.

“Cure you,” he said. “I think you have the type of seizure that would respond well to a sectioning of your corpus callosum.”

I knew the corpus callosum from the model in his office, a creek that cuts through the middle of the brain, where thick bands of fibers connect the separate sides.

The operation didn’t scare me, but the hospital, that I might lose the hospital. “I’ve been feeling,” I said, “significantly worse, you know.”

My voice had a thick sound, as though coming up through clots in my throat.
Don’t cry
, I thought.
Whatever you do, don’t cry
.

“Oh,” he said, sitting down in a chair, “how is that?”

Lately, in my spare time, I’d been going to the library and reading about my disease, and now I started to pull out phrases I could recall. While I spoke I watched my doctor’s face, the living red beard, the wide, kind hands.
Don’t leave me
, I was thinking.

Don’t cry
, I was thinking, because, you see, I did not want to give myself away.

“The seizures,” I said, stretching my memory, “the, the neural discharge, it’s been far faster. More rapid,” I said, because that was what I had read in a book.

“Rapid,” he said. “More rapid?” A small smile formed on
his face, but I was so desperate it didn’t occur to me he could see right through me; I took the smile as a sign of interest.

“Yes,” I said. “I have terrible headaches. Terrible! Terrible! There may be a tumor too.”

“Where?” he said, leaning forward. “Where, Lauren, do you think this tumor is?”

“I feel it here,” I said, touching the crown of my head, the place where long ago the plates of bone should have grown together, but, on me, a soft spot still.

•  •  •

I went home on the trolley, holding hard to a steel pole while the car clattered over tracks. At every station-stop I stared out the grime-speckled windows and saw the world through a scrim of speckled grime; ugly. At last we left the city behind and climbed up out of the underground, into the air of green neighborhoods, where children swung a rope and sang:

So this was the world out there, no thank you. And yet, my seizures were exhausting, and when I saw certain boys, truth be told, I did get a funny feeling in my mouth and in my innards, like maybe there was something to want out there, in the frightening but occasionally pretty place where girls swirled with color and people held hands.

•  •  •

I got off at my stop—Waban—and started home, the same way every day, past the baseball diamond and then the Newton-Wellesley, a small suburban hospital. On this day, though, I didn’t pass the Newton-Wellesley. Instead I turned right and went into the emergency room.

In my hands, that feeling, like I wanted to steal. The pneumatic doors parted. In front of me a woman slouched in a plastic chair. In the far corner I saw another woman, altogether happier looking, a baby snoozing in a car seat by her side. Oh, that baby was cute. Even from the distance I could tell.

I went closer, close enough so I could see the small sunsets in each of his pale fingernails, and the little dark dots of his nostrils.

The mother smiled at me.

“Mrs. Carney?” a nurse said, and Mrs. Carney got up, looking back once at the baby while she crossed the room to the reception booth.

What I had: a desire to feel the flesh of the baby, so plentiful I could smell its talc. I liked the baby’s mouth, the red spurt of its smile, and its booties, with just the tiniest bells sewn in. The baby kicked, and the bells went off. Such a merry thing. I wanted the baby, or at least its booties, and I saw how simple it would be to steal it.

I could just pick up the baby and go. Apparently, all you had to do to steal a baby was to pick it up and go. If so, then maybe all you had to do to become a baby was, was to pick it up and go? To steal a baby? To steal its booties? Understand,
I am mentally ill. I didn’t want the baby, but to be the baby. I crept closer still, and then, just as I was getting up my very troubled guts to do something with either the baby or the booties, the mother came back, saying, “Okay then, Miranda, we’ll see you next week,” and she swooped up the child and left through the circling glass door.

I got mad. I have a lot wrong with me, psychologically speaking, but I have always been a sweet-tempered person. After the woman left, though, I felt rage inside of me, and I thought,
Fuck fuck fuck
.

I gripped my hands hard.
Let me have a seizure
, I thought. I started it myself. I’d never brought on a seizure before, and I hadn’t known it was possible. I swayed back and forth and squinched up my eyes and I thought of rubbing rocks together until a small spark catches, and crackles, I went. One. Two. Three. I caught. I sank myself down and started it myself, arsonist of the flesh. Wind rocked through me and pollution poured out my ears, and when I awoke, what do you think?

Doctor of my dreams, he was standing over me, with another doctor, and several nurses, and a private curtain making the cubicle my own.

“What happened?” I said, even though I knew.

The nurse drew blood. She nosed a needle under my skin and I watched the tube fill. My blood seemed especially red that day, like it was ashamed and excited, both.

Someone called my mother, who came to pick me up, and in all the hubbub no one thought to ask me why I was in the
ER in the first place. What I was doing was no different than stealing, really. Instead of taking things, I was taking time; taking attention—

Taking touch.

•  •  •

And so it happened. Our heroine began her criminal career lifting small concrete tchotchkes from small suburban houses, and she ended it in the abstract, stealing things beyond weight, beyond measure. I was a very Piagetian thief. After the first ER, I made my visits regular. I lived in Boston, where there are almost as many hospitals as there are people to fill them. The Deaconess, the Children’s, the Peter Bent Brigham and the Lying-In. The Mary Saltonstall, Mount Auburn and Mass General, the Lindemann and the Dana. After school, I would drop in to different ERs, and stage a seizure, and wake up in that wonderful way, wake up in a blizzard of nurses, a cup of cool water held to my lips, oh.

Oh.

“I’m okay,” I would say, struggling like a heroine to sit up.

“No no. Stay still. Lie down. Rest.”

The Saltonstall, the Peter Bent Brigham, the Lying-In, all wonderful, rhythmic names, all old brick buildings with twinkling views of the city.

“I can get up,” I would say again. I had, after all, gotten what I’d needed, and now I knew I could leave.

“Where do you live? We’ll call your parents,” the nurses would say.

I’d figured this one out. Certainly I couldn’t have my mother called each time; she would have caught on. Instead, I gave the nurses the number of a pay phone by my town’s trolley stop. The decrepit-looking pay phone hunched by itself in a corner, a phone no one would answer when it rang. It must have rung and rung in the nurses’ ears. I pictured the phone ringing in the late-day dark of June, and sometimes, despite myself, I would hope a person might answer—hello?—and I would have to say, “Yes. Hello. My name is—”

Lauren. Lauren.

I live at—

But I didn’t live as Lauren. I lived, in those emergency rooms, as April, Bobby, Maria and Juliette.

“I am epileptic,” Juliette said. She showed the nurses her epilepsy bracelet. “I have seizures all the time. I’m fine. Really. I can go now.”

And so they let her go. Sometimes, they gave her money for a cab, other times a trolley token. Whatever she got, she saved in a silver pig.

•  •  •

Munchausen’s is the name. A long time ago there lived a man named Munchausen, a German gentleman who traveled from town to town, faking illness. Mr. Munchausen had a waxed dagger mustache, and his hair, swept off his high forehead, made him look as though he faced a forceful wind.

Even though I have never met Mr. Munchausen, and many differences exist between us, he a man with a mustache,
I a woman with pierced ears, I feel I know him. I know his wandering from place to place, his desire for a doctor always. He was so good at illness, a whole disorder has been named for him, Munchausen’s syndrome, otherwise called factitious illness, the patient faking not for money but for things beyond weight, beyond measure.

Now we get to a little hoary truth in this tricky tale. The summer I was thirteen I developed Munchausen’s, on top of my epilepsy, or—and you must consider this, I ask you please to consider this—perhaps Munchausen’s is all I ever had. Perhaps I was, and still am, a pretender, a person who creates illnesses because she needs time, attention, touch, because she knows no other way of telling her life’s tale. Munchausen’s is a fascinating psychiatric disorder, its sufferers makers of myths that are still somehow true, the illness a conduit to convey real pain. So you will understand Munchausen’s syndrome better, here are some quotes: