[sic]: A Memoir (18 page)

I got to the restaurant first. She was late. She walked into the restaurant with an uncanny smile. Not her smile. Her gaze was steady, direct, preternatural. I already felt blood draining from my face. She wouldn’t speak. I asked her how she was. Silence. Just a smile. I tried engaging her in conversation. Silence.

Finally she spoke, an odd relish in her voice. She told me she had to be honest. She hated to tell me this now, because she knew I was worried about the results of the scan tomorrow, and how Sara’s results had been, in the oncologist’s words, “disappointing,” and how he’d given her six months to live and she died in three, and her lover had gone mad and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. But, Nothereal said, she just couldn’t keep the façade alive any longer. She felt I had to know the truth: that she didn’t love me, that she didn’t even like me; that frankly she could hardly bear the sight of me, it was so depressing. I started literally shaking. It crossed my mind that tomorrow I might be dead in three months.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

She went on. She had been lying to me about her love for the past few months out of pity, she said; but she couldn’t continue the lies. It was unfair to me, and, most of all, it was unfair to her; she deserved better than this.

“Why are you saying this?” I asked. “Because if you continue, you realize, I’m going to walk out of here and never see you again, and I’m just not sure if that’s what you want.”

But it has to be this way, she said. Her face was immune, angelic, her eyelashes sympathetic and mocking, her chin defiant. “The disease came for a reason,” she said, “haven’t you realized that?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

Staring into my eyes from a thousand miles away, she said,

—But surely you know, deep down, why you’re diseased.

She was one of my doctors. I stared back for a few moments, and then I got up and left.

She followed me outside, for reasons unclear to me. The street was busy; the sun was setting. She was laughing delightedly. She ran after me, touched me. “Don’t touch me,” I said. She laughed again, playfully, and tagged me, like a child on the playground.

I whipped around and screamed so loudly my throat went raw.

Get the fuck away from me!

Everybody on the street, all the extras, turned around on cue, and now her face was the slick wall of a tsunami before its glassy crash.

I walked away briskly. Six blocks later, I received a text from Nothereal. It read, simply:

Loser!

What happened then? Ah, let’s see. I ran into a bar and ordered a whiskey. I called a friend who lived nearby, told him what had happened. He came over right away. He didn’t understand it either. “Not only that but she’s your doctor!” After another drink, I felt a little calmer. We went to the restaurant next door. We happened to be seated next to Chelsea Clinton’s table; she’s the daughter of a woman who, once, was one of my adopted state’s senators who, like me, had adopted it, and who, like me, has since moved on to bigger and better things; and Chelsea’s also the daughter of one of my country’s former presidents. She was with three others; she seemed like an extremely nice girl, and in person was very attractive. My friend and I enjoyed a good meal. I had trout.

My friend got up to go to the bathroom. Suddenly, alone, I was seized with terror. I rose and ran out of the restaurant. And I mean ran. Chelsea Clinton was like what the fuck. I ran blocks, I don’t know how many blocks. I ran into another bar. My heart was pounding, of course. I ordered another whiskey, called another friend who lived nearby. (The nice thing about living in a small town like New York is that no matter where you are, you’re always about two blocks from somebody’s place.) I tried to explain what had happened; he came over, found the whole situation as strange as I did.

Finally, I’d calmed down. I walked back to my apartment, relaxed. I got inside and closed the door. Then I was alone again. There was no sound. I switched on a beautiful old glass lamp—Oriental, deep bourbon—I’d inherited from my father. There was still no sound.

It was about two in the morning. Scan results in eight hours. I sat down to write in my journal. That’s what my father’s advice always was: write it out, write it out. I started to describe a film I was thinking of making. Some notes about lighting: diffused light for the wide shots, conversations (over the shoulder) use direct keys with high contrast. And then a note about the form: a series of vignettes, which turn to melodrama.

But why would Nothereal have done that, if it wasn’t that she knew the transplant had failed, and, in love, made the break in a somewhat psychotic but, given the circumstances, somewhat understandable way? They already had the results. They’d had them for days. And Nothereal obviously had access. She’d looked already—How could she not look? How could she resist looking? Like Orpheus and Eurydice. Of course he’d look back—are you coming back up with me, or not?

This thought unsettled me—so I put on some music. The Stones. But now the dreadful rising crest had begun.

It hadn’t worked for Sara so why would it work for me. Sara—same diagnosis, same chemo, same not working, same salvage treatment, didn’t work. Sara—same thing, she was a month ahead of me, that’s all, I’d been following her from behind, like the second voice of a two-voice fugue: same thing, just a delay in time.

But there’s no reason to think that. Am I losing my mind? Write it out, write it out. Just keep pen to paper: I am trying very hard:

Ezra Pound spent most of his life working on a long poem called
The Cantos.
He told Yeats that when it was finished (he never finished it) the form would be “like that of a Bach fugue”—“no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse.”
¹⁶
(Sorry to cut in for a second – but to a musician this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But that’s okay; he knew nothing about music; he was responsible for the revival of Vivaldi, for heaven’s sake, which might well have aided his insanity plea.) The poem was fragmentary. In the hospital, he wrote a note that wasn’t used in the poem but was in its style.

Problem now is

not to go stark

screaming hysteric . . .

And later

young doctors absolutely

useless.

And a little later

grey mist barrier impassible [sic]
¹⁷

It wasn’t a poem, but a letter to a friend who consoled him. I was alone. “I could
kill
myself now,” I write, “like Jason,” my roommate, “in these horrible rages and I am being so good”:

But it’s just a goddamned nightmare of anxiety and adrenaline. That’s all.

But in a fugue, one voice follows another at some preordained delay. They gave Sara six months. She had her transplant before I had mine. But no—they gave Carmilla six months three or four or five or howevermany times and she’s fine—she’s drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes and sharing wonderful moments with people including me. So why am I not in a fugue with Carmilla? But why
wouldn’t
I be in a fugue with Sara? Because Nothereal knows I’m in the fugue with Sara, not with Carmilla, because she checked the records, and that’s why she left. And the
Cantos
was a fugue, and a guy who knows, Noel Stock, the critic, a very smart guy, said that “the
Cantos
is a tragedy.”
¹⁸
But they gave Sara six months and there, the organs of her body stopped functioning, one by one. Three months in, she was having a tough morning. She was at home, in bed with her lover—she was a lesbian—and she started vomiting blood. Her lover called the hospital, called 911, called the ambulance, but Sara, who was supine, didn’t seem to care about any of that: she was shouting “I’m not dying, I’m not dying—I can get up, watch, I can get up by myself.” And of course she couldn’t. And her lover knew the ambulance wouldn’t get there in time. Sara looked at her and between pukes of blood repeated—I can get up by myself. But Carmilla is okay; but Carmilla cast her breasts, her torso, in plaster, and hung it on the wall. Sara’s lover bent down and kissed Sara and placed her hands around her lower back, and gently lifted her upright, lifted the torso upright like the torso of a Greek statue might not be the original, it might have been from another one originally and later, in Rome, upon this one, that faces you, affixed—and gently lifted her upright and Sara laughed and smiled and said—see I told you I’m not dying, I told you I could sit up by myself, and her lover nodded, yes, you did sit up by yourself, you’re not dying, and Sara’s eyes rolled up: the top of the iris was eclipsed, then half the pupil, like the apparition of the sun setting upon a rim of water, but inverted, the water meeting the edge of the sky from above, which would make no sense, then the whole pupil, now the sun is down/up but there’s still light, but then the rest of the iris, black and gold and shimmering like an insect’s wing, copper and wine and the rest of the iris was eclipsed and she died. And now, later, her lover is a patient in a psychiatric ward just like Ezra Pound was, writing his fugues, and Yeats described the writing as