Disease
As a child whenever I had a cold they tied a fuming wreath of fried garlic around my throat, wrapped in ancient rags, a flaking flyblown corpse of a python strangling me with its putrid weight. When Gogol was dying, his doctors insisted on applying leeches to that most intimately observed and disconcertingly alien of his organs, his nose, as if to proffer for him a sidelong image of the writhing hell he feared he was heading for. It can be difficult not to despise the healthy, who seem inclined, in their robustness, to crack you open like an oyster and scrape the pearl of illness from out your aching glands. Which unfortunately is what you want them to do, if only they could. This is the humiliation of an illness. I always feel that it’s wrestling with me, pinning me in painful holds, to see if it can make me cry out to the healthy for the one thing they can’t offer. They can give me a rag full of garlic, they can even, if I insist, invite a doctor to do the honors, but they can’t make me them.
On Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday my mother texted me to ask if I was feeling better. Unsatisfied with the information conveyed by my answers, on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday she texted me to ask if I was feeling worse. Virginia Woolf proposed that illness was impossible to write about because it lacked a plot, yet what is a cold or a flu if not a drastic conflict followed by a tedious though ultimately satisfying resolution? Few other narrative arcs are so cliché, and it’s a cliché we cherish, much preferring it to the alternatives: simmering post-viral tensions, borderline test results, the dark cloud of “remission,” which sounds more like a promise to one day return with more troops. Are you feeling better? I did not want to say yes, because it would have hemmed me in, narratively speaking. Suppose on Monday my voice became weak or I got a strange pain in my side, and I had to admit that my once smooth arc was now kinked? It’s important to remember your audience.
Or maybe the difficulty in writing about sickness lies in the fact that the body, unlike the mind, cannot look at itself from a distance. Suppose I want to tell you about the sickest I’ve ever felt, a day or two after braggadociously forcing down some grilled kidneys by the docks in Montevideo. I can tell you about the sixteen-hour bus ride, about the color of my regurgitations and the violence of my ordure, about constantly stumbling to the shitter unsure which end I’d need to service first only to find it occupied by the genteel old man who used this flimsy aluminum prayer room for offering cigarette smoke to his private gods. I could tell you about the country doctor who kneaded my stomach on his couch, empanada crumbs still stuck in his fingernails, before shrugging his shoulders and pronouncing me “okeh.” I could say “exhaustion” or “agony,” or I could invent elaborate metaphors where my intestines become the instruments upon which some very clumsy imp is trying to master a magic trick. But what does that really say about the sense that sickness, in its extreme manifestations, feels so fundamentally different from health that the two cannot be brought into any sensible relation? It might be better to say only that sickness is a craving for health, just as thirst is a craving for water. And who can even remember thirst, let alone describe it? I was sitting here, waiting until I grew thirsty, hoping it would offer some insight, but when I was thirsty enough I wanted water not insight, and with an impatience that now, having drunk my fill, seems incomprehensible. Parchedness cannot speak, only swallow.
My grandmother didn’t get vaccinated because right after she’d talked herself into making an appointment, her other grandson’s wife called her to say that in her dream the previous night she’d seen her lying upside down in a coffin—my grandmother was afraid of leaving her in-law with the anxious burden of prophecy. Then when she fell violently ill with the disease, she fevered and cried alone in her room, not answering calls, just so no one could force her to bear the shame of a nurse asking her if she’d gotten her shots. Maybe it’s a family trait: I remember stuffing tiny morsels of hummused pita, as delectable as used band-aids, into my roiling guts, trying to keep my face arranged into a look of generic fatigue and hoping I might pass for merely boring, because I felt an unspoken duty to have dinner with my couch-surfing host. My body hangs upon my mind by way of a luggage scale, and when it becomes too heavy, my instinct is to hide it from the gate attendants.
The first thought that came to her mind when she wanted to express the surety of their love was that she knew if she were ever ill he would take care of her. I wondered then if this were too undemanding a standard. Later, a different person told me a story that made me reconsider. When she’d gone to visit her mother and stepfather, she’d had a scratchiness in the back of her throat, which, by the time she woke up the next morning in her old bedroom (now guest room), had raked itself across her whole body, a full-blown flu. Seeing how shakily she came down the stairs, her face sagging as if with the weight of bad omens, her stepfather (whose constitution may be hinted at with the formula of bread plus sausage minus physical labor) began to fume: “Even idiots know you don’t go house to house carrying disease.” Too proud to plead that she could not have known, she whispered that she was not a stranger here, that it was the house of her own mother, who meanwhile in the middle of this kept demurring. “You have to make your own decisions,” she trilled, in the doomed, knowing voice of a being from beyond this world. In the end, she called a taxi and went to a hotel. A pointless gesture, as it turned out: call it karma, call it chance, call it how contagion works, but both the mother and the stepfather fell ill, and six weeks later the latter still has not recovered—I hear he sits on the couch all day, eerily silent, somehow out of place, like a wet piece of raw meat upon the velveteen. Kindness is not a child’s toy. The sick can’t help it if they plead for our mercy with claws. A body may fall on us just once, but it becomes a hammering. The doorway where suffering awaits our beckon is a mirror. To love in these moments is to reach a hand out to our own death.