The Opposite of Fate (40 page)

“Okay,” I said, having no idea who this Erin woman was. Was she a paramedic? People were going about doing their jobs, enacting approximations of what they usually did, but making no sense in this altered context. I needed to go home and turn on the news to find out what was going on. But wait—these were the very people viewers turned to for that. To everyone’s credit, no one in the newsroom was racing out the door or hiding under a desk in fetal position. Yet to judge from the stunned faces, the tearful curses, the sky was falling, and we were all going to die.

Of course, I was not close to death, not like those who worked in the towers and had escaped by accident, or God’s grace, or whatever timely circumstance intervened and delivered them out of harm’s way. It could have been a missed train, a daughter’s earache, a decision to go downstairs to buy a new pair of reading glasses. As for me, I would be the answer to a trivia question that would never be asked: Which guest on CNN was preempted by the attack on the World Trade Center?

An hour or so later, I found myself walking along Seventh Avenue, trying to reach home to be with Lou. I was heading downtown against a stream of people moving uptown, their dusty bodies like figures from Pompeii come back to life. We all stopped when the second tower collapsed, descending like a runaway elevator into the earth. In my mind, I rode it the whole way down and felt in my chest the crush of lives.

For the next six days, while barricaded in our home a mile north of the site, I paced about with tightened sphincter muscles and gritted teeth, waiting for the next explosion, the next wail of fire trucks, the roar of F-16s zooming past our windows and then across the television screen. I felt lucky to be alive, but like those around me, I did not know how long that luck would last. I didn’t know what would come next. The only thing any of us could do was pass the time as fate took its course.

W
hen I returned to San Francisco, I sensed I had been given a reprieve from terror. The danger was far removed now. Or was it closer than ever? While I was no longer as
focused on the uncertain future of the world, I had to turn to the uncertain state of my own body. Another blood test showed dangerously low blood sugar. And thus began a regime of tests to rule out the usual, and the unusual, suspects. There was a terrorist in my body, and I wanted it caught and removed.

Several times a week, I went to the hospital for tests—giving what felt like liters of blood and urine, as well as undergoing two CAT scans, an MRI, and a forty-eight-hour hospitalized fast. For most of my life, I had rarely gone to a doctor’s office, let alone a hospital, save for an annual Pap smear and mammogram. I had not suffered from any prolonged illness. Flu symptoms lasted no more than twenty-four hours. I always managed to avoid colds, while my husband might catch two or three a year. I had been so confident of my health that I had only the barest of insurance policies, one that cost a few hundred dollars a year, and that accordingly covered only the most basic of emergencies, such as decapitation.

Now I was paying the price for arrogance about my good health. I had been thrown into the maze of hospital corridors and insurance forms, with every procedure automatically denied by a grand vizier who lived unseen behind an 800 number. To this magistrate of maladies, my symptoms did not exist unless I died from them. So for now, since I was still very much alive, the tests were unnecessary and not covered.

Some good news came early on. I did not have a brain tumor. There were fifteen “unidentified bright objects” in my frontal and parietal lobes, but that might be nothing more than the residue of age, I was told. So the curse was off, the images of my blank-eyed father and comatose brother receded.

I found myself wishing for a diagnosis, which in essence meant I was wishing for a disease. As the weeks passed, I grew impatient having to keep my life on hold until the next batch of test results arrived. I had to cancel lectures in Maryland and New York, an appearance for
The Washington Post
’s book club, a trip to Aixen-Provence to honor Toni Morrison, a fête in New Delhi with Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul—though who wanted to fly in this time of heightened security? Better to stay home, where I could stand on my toes, watching for the demise of the Golden Gate Bridge, waiting for the latest tests results. I was struck by how my sense of danger matched the new national climate. We were all anxious over the unknown terrorist who was awaiting us, in tall buildings, at monuments, in amusement parks. We all delayed going on vacation, taking airplanes, and crossing bridges. If anything, my disease served me well as a distraction from a larger uncertainty. Nonetheless, I wanted to secure a diagnosis, good or bad, and then move on with my life in some place other than a hospital waiting room with unread
Golf
magazines and elderly patients who looked genuinely unwell.

What if I had to spend the rest of my life being this lethargic and foggy-headed and not know why? What if I would never again have the energy to hike along the trails of Mount Tamalpais, or ski in races that didn’t matter, or dance like a fool with The Rock Bottom Remainders? What if I had to struggle with each sentence I wrote, feeling as if I were writing with a terrible head cold and lack of sleep? What the hell was wrong with me? The cause had to be medical, for I wasn’t unhappy with my life. I wasn’t the sort who needed a psychosomatic ailment to compensate for a psychic wound. Yet no cause for my illness would turn
up. Time after time, the tests came back as disgustingly “normal.” To me, “normal” meant that I had
failed
the tests. I wanted numbers that were tangibly abnormal, anything that would explain the problems, lead to the correct treatment, and enable me to return to a truer normal, to be oblivious of my state of health. Soon the doctors would exhaust the possibilities, and if nothing was found, they would give me a benevolent look, tell me that I was quite healthy, and that I should discuss this further with my psychiatrist.

Somewhere in the parallel universe, where everything is absolutely known, was the elusive namable reason. Could the reason be changed? Could I do as Christians did when they went to China in the 1800s and conquer Chinese fate with religious faith? If I prayed for a less serious ailment, could I really change an already given cause? Was it possible to have symptoms to suit a dozen diseases and have God decide later which one, if any, it was? Hadn’t He already decided what I had when He allowed the symptoms to arise? Or was He in charge only of reducing the medical sentence? How did prayer work, anyway? What were you praying to alter or affect?

And then one day, finally, after so many tests, a promising candidate surfaced as the source of my problems: a tumor on one of my adrenal glands, that set of organs above the kidneys that does not exist in most people’s minds until something goes wrong.
A tumor!
So my mother was right once again.

The tumor, on my left adrenal, was a tiny little thing, a tad more than a couple of centimeters wide, called an “incidentaloma” because it was the kind of anomaly doctors find incidentally when searching for other problems. As the specialist explained, if you examine anyone’s body long enough, you will
find all kinds of bugaboos: cysts and scotomas, lesions and adhesions, calcification and clogs, thinning and thickening of cells, tissue, and arteries, and skin eruptions as varied as snowflakes, most of which are the usual detritus of commuting, fast food, and the vicissitudes of time. It sounded as harmless as finding loose change and popcorn stuck between the seat cushions in an old movie theater. A small portion of incidentalomas might require cleanup and removal, but for the most part, some degree of body weirdness and decrepitude was expected. And indeed, my doctor told me my tumor was probably benign, given its size, meaning it was probably not malignant.

In my posttraumatized state, “probably not” was not a reassuring prognosis. After all, did most people nearly die a dozen times? Did most people have three brain tumors among their immediate family members? The answer to both was “probably not,” but look what had happened to me. The specialist went on to suggest a reasonable plan: I could wait and see, then have a CAT scan done every six months to check whether the tumor was growing. Or I could choose to have the left adrenal gland taken out now. Let’s see, I said to myself, which would I rather do—gnaw my fingers down to the bone over the next six months, or convict and sentence the tumor right now, guilty on all counts? Off with its head, I said.

After the laparoscopy, I was given steroids to help me along until my right adrenal gland kicked back into service. As I recovered from surgery, I noticed that the Dolby Digital buzz and fast heart rate were gone. My doctor and I congratulated ourselves on having found the apparent culprit. But then the hallucinations began.

The night they first came, I had retired to bed early. Three hours later, I suddenly woke up, as I often did. I glanced at the clock. It was only twelve-thirty a.m. The light in the dressing area was still on, and I was about to get up to turn it off when I saw my husband standing in the doorway. “Lou?” I called out. He walked silently toward me until he reached my side of the bed. Oh no, bad news. I waited for him to turn on the lamp and tell me who had died. But he said nothing. Was he dumbstruck with grief? “Lou?” I said again, and as I reached for him, my fingers raked thin air, and the figure before me warped and then evaporated.

I jumped out of bed, certain now that Lou was dead and the vision I had just seen had been his ghost. I ran down the stairs and through the house, my dogs at my heels, calling his name until I found him, very much alive, watching television. So what had I seen? Was the hallucination the residual effect of being on morphine and anesthetized during surgery? Since my release from the hospital, besides steroids, I had been taking nothing more powerful than ibuprofen.

My doctors did not think the vision was a drug reaction. Yet they could not say what it was. With their kind but concerned looks, did they think I had the dreaded medical malady known as “loose screw”?

The hallucinations came once a week, then every few days, and eventually, daily. This was especially problematic when I was away from home and staying in a hotel. Since I had had stalkers and death threats, I could not automatically assume that the stranger I thought I saw lying next to me in the middle of the night was a phantom of my mind and not a flesh-and-blood
lunatic (on one occasion years before, a
real
man, drunk and completely naked, had come into my hotel room from an adjoining door). To deal with the hallucinations, I trained my Yorkshire terriers to search hotel rooms before I entered. “Find bin Laden” became my cue, and their game was to dash behind doors and into dark closets, to zoom under beds and behind curtains in search of vermin in their mind and a villain in mine. When the odd people appeared to me at night, I would whisper, “Who’s there?” and the dogs would instantly leap to attention, scan the room, sniff the air. When they settled back to sleep, so would I. That is, I would try to sleep after having seen a corpse lying next to me, or a pudgy poodle dangling from the ceiling, or two girls skipping rope by the side of my bed, or a woman in a white dressing gown standing in a garden, or a carnival barker playing a circus organ.

I began to track when the hallucinations occurred: always when I had just awakened from sleep. The hour did not seem to matter, whether it was midnight or seven in the morning. It did not seem to correspond to the degree of light in the room, or to my blood sugar levels, whether I was home or away, whether I had had wine at dinner or none for weeks. Some switch in my brain that controlled dreams now seemed to fail to turn off once I opened my eyes, and before me would spring forth the embodiment of my nightmares, the incarnation of my imagination. Had I been a science fiction writer, I would have been blessed with abundant material.

My bedtimes became even wilder, and not in the ways most people would find sexy and desirable. Along with having hallucinations, I began to act out my dreams. I ran in bed, I sat up, I
talked. Since I often had dreams of being attacked, I would kick and thrash, push and pummel, and Lou would bear the brunt of those kung fu moves. Other victims of my assaults were a lamp, the sharp corner of my nightstand, and my pillow. I awoke with bruised fists. One night, while dreaming that a woman was about to stab me, I tackled her in my dream and in doing so dived out of my real bed and landed with full bodily force on my crown.

Then there were the bizarre acts I committed of which I have no memory. I purportedly threw laundry around our loft in New York, draping clothes over chairs, sofas, and tables in odd configurations, so that when I saw my rearranged rooms the next morning I thought a deranged interior decorator had broken in. The notion of ghosts also came to mind. Another time I apparently crammed several boxes’ worth of tea bags into a small bowl. I thought Lou had assembled this odd presentation of herbal choices for future guests. And one night, while in a hotel in Pasadena, I reportedly called a friend at midnight and left a message in a woeful little-girl’s breathy voice, asking whether my friend had seen Lou and my dog Bubba. The next day, after I refused to believe I had called her at such an ungodly hour, she played back the message for me. Listening to my recorded voice, I had the eerie feeling I had developed multiple personalities. Had I been a drinker, I would have sworn off alcohol.

I was worried that I was developing dementia, that I might be following in my mother’s footsteps and have Alzheimer’s disease; I gave Lou permission to place me in an assisted-care facility, should the time come. We revised our wills and set up a trust. I consulted a few more doctors. I saw a sleep-disorder specialist who found only that I did not have apnea. I saw a neurologist, who said I did not have signs of seizures. I was starting to
wonder whether perhaps nothing was wrong with me but the general malaise of growing older and stranger. Did other people simply accept that their bodies broke down like automobiles the moment their warranties expired?