1. Occult
There was a period of weeks this season when panic would overwhelm me. I couldn’t find the source. My friend Abigail met me at a diner and palmed me some pills in a strip, which she’d ordered from Reddit via Canada. I took half of one, and the edges of the world went soft.
*
In fact, this was the month doctors eventually told me they thought I was bleeding internally. “Occult bleeding,” it’s called. They thought it might be in my gut – or an ulcer. Because my iron levels were so low. Fatigue, nausea, weight loss. Jags of crying, depression. When the tests came back, one said, “These are levels we would expect to see after massive blood loss. Car crash victim levels.” Unexpectedly, this reassured me. A person in authority confirmed! Something was not right.
To take a look, to find the source, they would “scope me,” they said. An endoscopy-colonoscopy. For 24 hours beforehand, you eat and drink only clear foods and liquids. An exercise that reminded me of fasting on Yom Kippur, though less extreme. The awareness of the body. Made me think of prayer. A calming exercise in control.
Broth, lemon and lime popsicles. Gatorade, apple juice. The perfect diet for someone running on fumes, who’d lost 10 percent of her body weight in weeks, according to the doctors’ scales. Just the thing. I was feeling very normal.
Before the procedure, the nurse said, “My name is Destiny, I’ll be assisting. Breathe deeply through your nose,” and I was asleep. The sedation did feel positive – to have been professionally anesthetized.
The tests showed nothing. One thousand dollars, after insurance, for a black plastic camera to travel the length of my body, taking photos of my pink, slippery insides. No gory rips or tears or holes. Mild gastritis. Those doctors sent me to other doctors.
*
Some weekend, not long after this, I go to a jumbo spa in New Jersey with Abigail, who tells me it will relax me. Different rooms with different themes. Steam, dry heat, mud, rocks. A view of the city, water with cucumber or citrus.
We go together in our robes into the Himalayan salt room, which glows pink. The walls are crystalized, lit from behind. The air is warm. When everyone’s eyes are closed, I lick the wall. Salt! I see Abigail see me and laugh. She waits for her moment and does the same.
*
At last, I go to a doctor who says he can give me an infusion of iron to mitigate the symptoms. “Pernicious anemia,” he theorizes.
We make two appointments at two week intervals. At the first, I go to a midtown office, am led to a La-Z-Boy chair, which the nurse reclines for me, and receive an IV of a rust-colored liquid for 45 minutes. A small stand of candy, chips, and cookies is wheeled over.
In the other chairs, around me, I realize, are waifish women like me – all of us pale, all of us vaguely Victorian, looking at our phones. Like a Gothic, vampire convention, but sleepy and with snacks. I eat some crumbly Famous Amos and the nurse brings me a ginger ale.
When the IV bag is empty, I feel woozy. For 15 minutes, after the infusion, the nurses watch you to make sure you don’t have a negative reaction. Then you’re free to go.
Within 48 hours, I feel like a completely different person. Surely how the vampires feel after feeding.
That weekend, Labor Day, I go up to New Hampshire to a lake with friends. There, in the mornings and afternoons, I swim. September – the air and water chilled by any measure. For the first time in my adult life, swimming in natural water, I do not feel cold. My body maintains its warmth and energy, its heat. I’ve been cured of something I didn’t know was anything but a fact of my life. Swimming, comfortably, in a bracing lake at dawn. A best feeling in the world?
For weeks after, I send texts to everyone I know. Little vampire emojis, the steak ones, green leaves like spinach. Magnets and metal links signifying iron, the needle with red drops for my fortified blood. I celebrate the second infusion –“IRON WOMAN!”-- and schedule them at recommended intervals months down the line.
“Careful,” Louisa says finally, the third time she hears me retell the tale to someone new at lunch. “You’re at risk of making pernicious anemia your whole personality.”
2. The Rebound
A picnic in a park near the river. Cake, that heavy paper bag of charcoal, silver-lined. Someone’s going-away. Clouds break up afternoon light.
A man stands by the grill, which is welded to the ground. His friend turns franks, scrapes char from the grate.
In conversation, a movie comes up, a coming attraction. Its name passed through talk, turned over. The man tells me he has passes to a preview, and would I like to go? I would. At last, I’m feeling myself again.
S’mores appear. Melted sugar coats fingers, stays in the corners of lips.
I meet the man outside the theater. Saturday, early evening, not yet dark. The A/C-ed interior a balm. He buys popcorn and waters, asks for a box of Junior Mints kept cold in the fridge behind the counter. We take our seats.
The movie is slow and indulgent, like watching a painting. Some shots have no motion at all. When the lights go up, the lead actor speaks with the director, takes questions.
“Painterly,” the actor calls the picture.
“Thank you,” says the director.
“Not sure that was a compliment,” my date whispers.
“Smart reframing,” I say. “Control the story.”
“Never been my strength,” he says, taking my hand.
Some months, some films. The man asks me to come to California with him for a work trip. I take off five of my ten allotted days.
“To get any closer, you’d have to be on a surfboard,” reads the copy for the trainline, as we zip along the coast.
“Got the whole Pacific,” I say, windows full of waves.
“It’s no East River,” he says, patting my head.
As we travel, I read aloud a script under consideration by the production company where he works. He keeps his hand with mine. That this is a job remains unreal – Tinsel Town, names in lights. When characters blur, I nap, and he reads to himself.
Groggy, I wake to dark frond outlines and the city against water. A flamingo-pink sky.
“Palm trees are ludicrous,” I say. “Like jokes on trees.”
“They’re supposed to put you in mind of paradise.”
We stay a night at a ranch before the workweek. Grapes line a cliff edge, exposed to the elements. “Refrigerated sunlight,” the owners call the wine.
In patchy morning shade the next day, three huge dogs nap on the walnut porch. Rhodesian ridgebacks.
“They were raised to keep wild boars from eating the vines,” the ranchers explain as we eat breakfast: runny, colorful eggs and bitter coffee. “But they were originally bred to kill lions.”
I pet one’s snoozing head at my feet, correct an inside-out ear. We fill up on chard with garlic, sweet butter on pumpernickel. Grapefruit juice.
In one direction, groves are thick with globes of citrus. In the other, mountains.
Peacocks wander the grounds, pecking bugs, like we’re inside a dream or a fresco. The man tells me to come look, standing by some dusty brambles. I walk up beside him, and he points through waxen leaves. We’re quiet. Then a ghost rustles -- a peek of bone-pale feathers. An albino makes its way through the tangle: red eyes, a red beak, a white-plumed crown.
“It makes the others look ordinary,” he says.
“It needs them,” I say.
“Don’t you wish they could fly?”
“They can,” says the rancher’s wife, who’s standing behind us. She’s in boots and a dress bleached of color by the sun. A skeletal white. “Not far, but if they’re in danger, they can achieve liftoff.”
“I’d like to see that,” I say, but the birds waddle off, unperturbed, and we gather our things to depart.
*
The Santa Barbara pier. Beach hippies and burnouts place signs in sand for tourists, us. One painted board tells visitors to throw change at concentric circles. “Aim at the bullseye to find out how good you are in bed.”
“Disastrous,” "None of your business,” “Perfect,” “Best in the west.”
The wharf, souvenir shops. One postcard is dissonant among copies of the shoreline. It shows a cloud of fire and smoke at night – lurid yellows, reds and black. The spot where we stand glows, billowing up and out to heat and nothing. I read the caption:
“November, 1998. Fire erupted on Stearns Wharf. Fueled by creosote preserved timbers, the conflagration consumed three businesses before it was tamed: Moby Dick’s Restaurant, Mike’s Bait and Tackle, and the Santa Barbara Shellfish Co.”
“Goth as hell,” the man says.
“If you ever need to send bad luck through the mail.”
In its strangeness, the note appeals, but I return it to the rack, tucked among the airbrushed beaches.
*
Years later, I see another postcard on a rack – a bearded face, partially hidden, so that he’s an any-man or every-man.
“I think I see you here in crowds sometimes,” I think of writing to this man I’ve kept in mind. “It hasn’t been you yet, but I’ll let you know.”
3. The Fast Track
Here’s how Michael and I met. Michael was the one after the rebound.
It was one of the coldest days of a mild fall, and there was a flurry of snow in the morning. Call it the first day of winter.
I’d been texting guys on Hinge, asking if they would help me bring in my A/C unit. It was only halfway a joke or a bit. Sometimes it would almost work. One of Michael’s answered prompt on his profile was, "My love language is: helping you bring in your A/C unit."
"Help," I wrote him, as it grew dark.
I was supposed to have dinner with a friend, but she had a daylong hangover and canceled. Another friend had said she'd help, but got busy. She told me to text my downstairs neighbor, and I did, but he wouldn't be home for hours. A lot of cold air can get into an apartment in a few hours when you have a poorly insulated A/C unit and the temperature has dropped.
Michael responded, saying he was free. He was making a stew at his place and told me he'd bring me some. He biked down, and brought in the heavy A/C unit right away, with my holding the window open. Then he hoisted it onto a shelf in the closet with his strong, strong arms. We heated up the stew he'd brought and ate it. Then we had a few beers, ice cream. At some point I touched his arm, and we were kissing, and he stayed over.
I saw him for a drink a few nights later, and dinner a night or two after that. One evening he brought me insulating foam for my other windows, which were drafty. The second time, oil for my wood floors.
The other defining incident with Michael came a few weeks later.
It was late December, and we were supposed to go to this Malaysian chicken place in Sunset Park for dinner. It had been snowing. We were walking through the park to the restaurant, and some kids had sleds. Michael asked if we could borrow them, and they let us.
We went down once, medium fast, laughing. The second time, I tried to race him, and at the bottom, I crashed. I was dazed, laughing. It was romantic – the snow, the night, the kids. He didn't see it happen – himself avoiding a lamppost, but he could tell I was jarred. We gave the kids back their sleds, kept walking.
It was dark and cold. I felt full of adrenaline, exhilarated. But I touched the back of my head, and it was wet. I walked a little further, trying to figure out how bad it was, then told Michael I thought I was bleeding. It became clear, under a street lamp, my scarf was covered in blood. My ear, my neck. When we got to the restaurant, he tried to see where the bash was, in the restroom – my hair was very matted with blood.
It was bad, and deep, and worrying – the wound.
Michael took me to the Emergency Room, Maimonides Medical Center, in Borough Park, a short walk away, navigating on his phone, my head wrapped in both our scarves. I was a little mortified, but also bleeding from the head. At the bottom of the hill, there had been an iron fence.
At the hospital, there were doctors in yarmulkes, men in long black coats, women in long skirts – a Hasidic neighborhood. I wasn't in pain, somehow, but I was bleeding plenty, and so dazed. Michael went through my wallet to try to find my health insurance card, signed me in, filled out the papers, and sat with me in the hallway in the fluorescent lights, under the cracked ceiling tiles, telling me about who Maimonides was – the first Jewish doctor – and making sure I applied pressure to the back of my head.
Ahead of us, on the wall in the narrow hall, a flatscreen HD TV played reality shows at us: contemporary gold miners competing to find ore, little-people wrestlers in Vegas. It sounds hallucinatory, because it was.
Michael had nuts and dried fruit on him in his bag (I was learning he was always very prepared), and ibuprofen he gave me. I held a small sheet of paper with my temperature written on it, and my blood pressure, and my vitals, which I would hand to the doctor. In the triage line, because of the head wound, I was pretty high up. "The fast track."
Michael took my photo, my face grinning painlessly, and waited while the doctor gave me a topical anesthetic, and then eleven staples in my scalp – so much more metal and hardcore than stitches. It sounds just like someone is stapling your head. The stapler was made of flimsy plastic, but the staples were medical-grade and thick.
Then the doc washed the blood off my face and the sink. Michael got me home in a car, ordered us spicy noodle soups. I washed the blood out of my hair in a hot shower, being careful of the staples. The water ran red like in Carrie, or like Lady Macbeth.
Cleaned off, in a robe, Michael held a mirror behind my head so I could look in another mirror on my wall to see the back of my head, the way they do at a salon after a haircut. He showed me the row of six silver metal lines in my skull at the crown, and the five above my ear, beneath my hair. The painkiller they'd given me had started to wear off, and the skin around the staples felt tender. I sat on the couch while he made me tea, and looked after me. We went to bed, him kissing me gently, him taking good care. Breakfast together in the morning... a blur.
After that, we were rarely apart.