[sic]: A Memoir (12 page)

Then after that everything hit at once. It was a soft blow. I wasn’t happy to be in the hospital having a bone marrow transplant, vomiting thick green bile, being unable to swallow my own saliva, unable to move my mouth without cracking the calcified, thick-and-white-and-hard-as-porcelain mucus lining that coated my gastrointestinal tract, claustrophobic, perhaps dying, fearing insanity. But on the other hand, I liked my life; I liked my childhood, my parents, my brother, my city, my decade, my era; I liked the fact that I’d lived in France, my friends, the girls I’d dated; I liked growing up in Milwaukee, with its South Side that looked like Warsaw and its North Side that looked like Mulberry Street; I liked my friends in high school, my first girlfriend, that cute Armenian girl and the time we went out for Italian food and saw a double feature of
The 39 Steps
and
The Third Man
; I liked the fact that I was in my thirties, I thought that was a pretty cool time of life; I really liked how my father had taught me about writing, how he had shared these great books with me; I liked the United States, how it was a strange country in so many ways, but really had produced a lot of things we can be proud of; I liked the fact that Louis Armstrong (of whom that junkie deadbeat Billie Holliday, who can boast coauthorship of at most a handful of songs, unconscionably said, “Of course he Toms, but he Toms from the heart”; who gave away more than half his lifetime income in spite of the fact that he was born penniless, out of wedlock, to a son and a daughter of slaves; who as a child hauled coal in Back of Town, a squalid slum which he later called “the heart of good old New Orleans, something to live for”; who was one of MLK’s crucial financial patrons, and anonymously, out of modesty; who turned down State Department funding to protest what he perceived as Eisenhower’s inaction in the face of the desegregation movement; who was the musician that, at age sixty-three, dislodged the Beatles’ unique fourteen-week, three-song reign at numbers one, two, and three on the charts; who bought his first trumpet with a loan from a Russian Jew junkyard owner in whose honor he wore a Star of David pendant every day for the rest of his life) was American; I liked the fact that we had computers now, that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin had already come out; I liked digital recording techniques, and iTunes; I liked single malt Scotch, and rainy weather and fireplaces, and the fact that my father had taught me chess; I liked how I had put all the Mozart operas on my computer at home in iTunes, and had organized them by year—it was cool to see them arranged like that, to see how incredible it was that he wrote all that music in such a short span of time, really. Oh and that’s right—music! I really thought it was actually pretty cool that I had learned how to write music, how I had written these pieces—I did a quick inventory of them in my mind, ran through some of them in fast-forward.

But what about Valentina?

They took me off the morphine that night, switched me to fentanyl.

•

ANOTHER FUNNY THING
: not only my wholesale belief in the delusion, but the fact that I actually thought I’d been writing the whole thing down. In reality, here’s what I wrote, between May 18 and June 3, when I was on the morphine drip:

And my entire memoir, the history of my parents, my marriage, my imprisonment—let’s get a closer look at that:

Just two entries, scribbles. I wonder whether during the delusion I experienced the narrative the way I remember it, like a story; or whether the entire thing, present and past, wife and parents and grandparents, was created in a single, synchronous flash that overwhelmed my mind the instant before I tore the IVs out of my chest, and the nurses sounded the alarm.

Compare these pages to a page from my pre-delusional self’s journal, just a few days before, with a fairly accurate sketch from memory of the Bastille in Paris, where I’d lived, and where (I’d just been notified) there was some chance of having a new work of music produced, a sort of avant-garde opera (it ended up not working out, which is too bad, because apparently they were talking to David Lynch about doing sound design).

And a map I drew of my neighborhood:

Or Exhibit B, a diagram of the electromagnetic spectrum, in a minimalist style. Light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Most radiation treatment in the context of oncology uses X-rays, which fall near the top of the piano keyboard of the electromagnetic spectrum: Uranus between the Saturn of ultraviolet and the Neptune of gamma rays. (Remember that—as I note in extremely disciplined hand, since I’m talking about science here, not art—the electromagnetic spectrum is thus called because its waves have both electric and magnetic components; and the physics controlling these waves is electrodynamics. This represents my sum total knowledge of this subject, so we shall move on.)

Now were we to approach the delusion as a dream, and if we were to some extent Freudians (which we are, of course, we eminent Victorians), many elements are clearly recognizable as “residue,” as Freud called the distorted figurations of objects we fear or desire that our waking selves refuse to acknowledge, leaving that task to the unconscious, including Dorothy Gale’s unconscious in
The Wizard of Oz.
In this film (premiered, incidentally, in Wisconsin, in 1939), a twelve-year-old girl, traumatized by the realization that she is homosexual, experiences an elaborate delusion in which her dreary, homophobic relatives and friends in Depression-era Kansas are transformed into celebratory marchers in a sort of gay pride parade in Technicolor. (Now I’m mixing Jung in with Freud, but who cares. “I’m a writer, not a psychologist,” he growled from downstairs; and she, just like the time before, and surely just like the next, sighed and pretended not to hear him. Wait, hold on, I’m not writing fiction.)

In real life, my mother is a gifted musician, just as she was in the morphine dream; and she suffered an emotional breakdown not unlike that experienced by my Viennese mother. The thing about my European family living in pre–World War I Alexandria was unconsciously cribbed from Eric Hobsbawm’s
The Age of Empire
, a book I’d been reading in the hospital. My father hadn’t been killed, but he had died. Budapest? A city I love, where I’ve eaten deep-fried calves’ brains for dinner, and heard folk musicians playing hammer dulcimers. I’d had a good friend in high school named Andy, who was a gifted musician but went on to study law. The Liszt Academy stands in for Northwestern University’s School of Music—a separate school, rather than a department, thus nearly a conservatory, rare for universities. Valentina was based on a college girlfriend who really is Bulgarian, really is a wonderful pianist, really is exceedingly lovely. The composers are real, I’ve met both of them; their stories are real; I’ve really written music journalism. Et cetera.

In other words, the morphine acted as the classic unreliable narrator, unleashing this elaborate yarn in the great tradition of Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, and David Fincher. But if the elements of the story—the characters and motifs, the place settings and odd little details—are distortions of things I fear and desire in real life, then, as my father would have said, what’s this movie
about
?

It’s about guilt. I’d transferred the notion of hospitalization for treatment of an illness to imprisonment for having written an article about music. My own ambivalence about life choices—that is, the pursuit of a career in the arts and humanities, rather than in finance—thus surfaces in a classic twist ending, in a most unexpected, colorful, and terrifying manner.

The guilt of the ill—especially the guilt of those who have done nothing to help create their state—is a theme on which we’ve touched, and on which we’re sure to touch again, but for now consider the interesting notion that if a person finds himself or herself in a situation for no reason, he or she will go to quite extraordinary lengths to create a reason. If there is no agency, we will create an agency—even (especially!) a malignant one. My illness had nothing to do with lifestyle; it was a roll of the dice, as the poet Mallarmé would have put it; it was a numbers thing, a genetic mutation somewhere that surfaces so rarely that natural selection grudgingly opens the velvet rope. I am not responsible for my illness, nor was I ever responsible; rape victims are not responsible for being raped; civilians who are captured and tortured by despots as a show of power are not responsible for being captured and tortured: we should have learned this by now. This is why God told Saint Beckett to walk the lands of the earth, preaching the Christian doctrine of Absurdity: to absolve His children of our sins, of our guilt. But we wouldn’t listen, so God was forced to do more. God found a Parisian pimp named Prudent and asked him to murder Saint Beckett, for no reason. At first, Prudent refused: he had no prior relationship with the saint, and had absolutely no motive for doing him harm. But it was, after all, God’s order. So Prudent sought down Saint Beckett and stabbed him in the chest. The reason God did not let Saint Beckett die was so that Saint Beckett could confront his attacker and ask him, why? And God had Prudent reply,