Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (90 page)

I considered refusing to comply. Though the implied threat (
you must provide your best effort
…) contained in their letter crossed my mind, and I wondered how Beverly and I would manage with out my disability payments, it wasn’t practicality that made me proceed. At least I don’t think so. It was, instead, acceptance. I had spent the morning in a public confrontation with the fullness of my loss, as though on stage with Reggie, representing the insurance company, as my audience. Now I would confront the sheer heartlessness of the System, the powers that demanded that I crawl before they agreed temporarily to accept my disability. I would, perhaps the first time, join the company of those far more damaged than I am, who have endured far more indignity in their quest for acceptance. Whatever it is that Reggie and the insurance company believed they were measuring as I got down on my hands and knees and began a slow circuit of the mats in the center of that huge room, I believed I was measuring how far we still had to go for acceptance.

Reggie stood in the center of the mats, rotating in place as I crawled along one side, turned at the corner, crossed to the opposite side, and began to return toward the point where I had started. Before I reached it, Reggie told me to stop. He had seen enough. I was slow and unsteady at the turns, but I could crawl fine. I never received a follow-up letter from the insurance company. I was never formally informed of their findings, though my disability payments have continued.

At the end of the second day of testing, Reggie told me how I’d done. In many of the tests, my results were in the lower 5–10 percent for men my age. My performance diminished alarmingly on the second day, and he hadn’t ever tested anyone who did as poorly on the dexterity components. He believed that I had given my best efforts and would report accordingly. But he would not give me any formal results. I was to contact my physician, who would receive Reggie’s report in due time.

When the battery of tests had first been scheduled, I’d made an appointment to see my doctor a few days after their completion. I knew the physical challenges would worsen my symptoms and wanted him to see what had resulted. I knew I would need his help. By the time I got there, he too had spoken to Reggie and knew about my performance. But my doctor never got an official report either.

This was familiar ground. Did I wish to request a report? I was continuing to receive my legitimate payments; did I really want to contact my insurance company and demand to see the findings of my Functional Capacity Evaluation? Risk waking the sleeping dragon? What would be the point? I anticipated no satisfaction in reading that I was in fact disabled, or in seeing how my experience translated into numbers or bureaucratic prose. It seems that I was of interest only when there was an occasion to rule me ineligible for benefits. Found again to be disabled, I wasn’t even due the courtesy of a reply. The checks came; what more did I need to show that my claims are accepted? There was no need for a report. Through the experience, I had discovered something more vital than the measures of my physical capacity. The measure of public acceptance that I hoped to find, that I imagined would balance my private acceptance, was not going to come from a public agency or public corporation. It didn’t work that way, after all. The public was largely indifferent, as most people, healthy or not, understand. The only measure of acceptance would come from how I conducted myself in public, moment by moment. With laws in place to permit handicapped access to public spaces, prevent discrimination, and encourage involvement in public life, there is general acceptance that the handicapped live among us and must be accommodated.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not resented, feared, or mistrusted by the healthy. The disability racket! I had encountered the true, hard heart of the matter. My life in the social dimension of illness is governed by forces that are severe and implacable. Though activism has helped protect the handicapped over the last four decades, there is little room for reciprocity between the handicapped person and his or her world. It is naïve to expect otherwise.

I would like to think that the insurance company didn’t send an official letter of findings because they were abashed at what they’d put me through. I would like to think that Dr. Avilov, who no longer practices in Salem, hasn’t moved away because he found too many claimants disabled and lost his contract with the Social Security Administration. That my experience educated Reggie and his firm, and that his report educated the insurance company, so everyone now understands the experience of disability, or of living with brain damage.

But I know better. My desire for reciprocity between self and world must find its form in writing about my experience. Slowly. This essay has taken me eleven months to complete, in sittings of fifteen minutes or so. Built of fragments shaped after the pieces were examined, its errors of spelling and of word choice and logic ferreted out with the help of my wife or daughter or computer’s spell-checker. It may look to a reader like the product of someone a lot less damaged than I claim to be. But it’s not. It’s the product of someone who has learned how to live with his limitations, and work with them. And when it’s published, if someone employed by my insurance company reads it, I will probably get a letter in the mail demanding that I report for another battery of tests. After all, this is not how a brain-damaged man is supposed to behave.

Lauren Slater

 

LAUREN SLATER
is a three-time American Society of Magazine Editors Award nominee — twice in the essay category, once in the profile category — who has published several highly acclaimed books of nonfiction. Her essays and articles have appeared in
Harper’s
,
The New York Times Magazine
, and
Elle
, among others; her work has also been picked numerous times for
The Best American Essays
series. She is a 2004 winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in creative nonfiction. A psychologist, she works in Boston, Massachusetts.

 

There is something satisfying and scary about making an angel, lowering your bulky body into the drowning fluff, stray flakes landing on your face. I am seven or eight and the sky looms above me, gray and dead. I move my arms and legs — expanding, contracting — sculpting snow before it can swallow me up. I feel the cold filter into my head, seep through the wool of my mittens. I swish wider, faster, then roll out of my mold to inspect its form. There is the imprint of my head, my arms which have swelled into white wings. I step back, step forward, pause and peer. Am I dead or alive down there? Is this a picture of heaven or hell? I am worried about where I will go when I die, that each time I swallow, an invisible stone will get caught in my throat. I worry that when I eat a plum, a tree will grow in my belly, its branches twining around my bones, choking. When I walk through a door I must tap the frame three times. Between each nighttime prayer to Yahweh I close my eyes and count to ten and a half.

And now I look down at myself sketched in the snow. A familiar anxiety chews at the edges of my heart, even while I notice the beauty of the white fur on all the trees, the reverent silence of this season. I register a mistake on my angel, what looks like a thumbprint on its left wing. I reach down to erase it, but unable to smooth the snow perfectly, I start again on another angel, lowering myself, swishing and sweeping, rolling over — no. Yet another mistake, this time the symmetry in the wingspan wrong. A compulsion comes over me. I do it again, and again. In my memory hours go by. My fingers inside my mittens get wrinkled and raw. My breath comes heavily and the snow begins to blue. A moon rises, a perfect crescent pearl whose precise shape I will never be able to re-create. I ache for something I cannot name. Someone calls me, a mother or a father.
Come in now, come in now
. Very early the next morning I awaken, look out my bedroom window, and see the yard covered with my frantic forms — hundreds of angels, none of them quite right. The forms twist and strain, the wings seeming to struggle up in the winter sun, as if each angel were longing for escape, for a free flight that might crack the crystal and ice of her still, stiff world.

Looking back on it now, I think maybe those moments in the snow were when my OCD began, although it didn’t come to me full-fledged until my mid-twenties. OCD stands for obsessive-compulsive disorder, and some studies say more than three million Americans suffer from it. The “it” is not the commonplace rituals that weave throughout so many of our lives — the woman who checks the stove a few times before she leaves for work, or the man who combs his bangs back, and then again, seeking symmetry. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is pervasive and extreme, inundating the person’s life to the point where normal functioning becomes difficult, maybe even impossible.

For a long time my life was difficult but not impossible. Both in my childhood and my adulthood I’d suffered from various psychiatric ailments — depressions especially — but none of these were as surreal and absurd as the obsessive-compulsive disorder that one day presented itself. Until I was twenty-five or so, I don’t think I could have been really diagnosed with OCD, although my memory of the angels indicates I had tendencies in that direction. I was a child at once nervous and bold, a child who loved trees that trickled sap, the Vermont fields where grass grew the color of deep-throated rust. I was a child who gathered earthworms, the surprising pulse of pink on my fingers, and yet these same fingers, later in the evening, came to prayer points, searching for safety in the folds of my sheets, in the quick counting rituals.

Some mental health professionals claim that the onset of obsession is a response to an underlying fear, a recent trauma, say, or a loss. I don’t believe that is always true because, no matter how hard I think about it, I remember nothing unusual or disorienting before my first attack, three years out of college. I don’t know exactly why at two o’clock one Saturday afternoon what felt like a seizure shook me. I recall lying in my apartment in Cambridge. The floors were painted blue, the curtains a sleepy white. They bellied in and out with the breezes. I was immersed in a book,
The Seven Storey Mountain
, walking my way through the tale’s church, dabbing holy water on my forehead. A priest was crooning. A monk moaned. And suddenly this: a thought careening across my cortex.
I
CAN’T CONCENTRATE
. Of course the thought disturbed my concentration, and the monk’s moan turned into a whisper, disappeared.

I blinked, looked up. I was back in Cambridge on a blue floor. The blue floor suddenly frightened me; between the planks I could see lines of dark dirt and the sway of a spider crawling. Let me get back, I thought, into the world of the book. I lowered my eyes to the page, but instead of being able to see the print, there was the thought blocking out all else:
I CAN’T CONCENTRATE
.

Now I started to panic. Each time I tried to get back to the book the words crumbled, lost their sensible shapes. I said to myself,
I must not allow that thought about concentration to come into my mind anymore
, but, of course, the more I tried to suppress it, the louder it jangled. I looked at my hand. I ached for its familiar skin, the paleness of its palm and the three threaded lines that had been with me since birth, but as I held it out before my eyes, the phrase
I CAN’T CONCENTRATE ON MY HAND
blocked out my hand, so all I saw was a blur of flesh giving way to the bones beneath, and inside the bones the grimy marrow, and in the grimy marrow the individual cells, all disconnected. Shattered skin.

My throat closed up with terror. For surely if I’d lost the book, lost language, lost flesh, I was well on my way to losing the rest of the world. And all because of a tiny phrase that forced me into a searing self-consciousness, that plucked me from the moment into the meta-moment, so I was doomed to think about thinking instead of thinking other thoughts. My mind devouring my mind.

I tried to force my brain onto other topics, but with each mental dodge I became aware that I was dodging, and each time I itched I became aware that I was itching, and with each inhalation I became aware that I was inhaling, and I thought,
If I think too much about breathing, will I forget how to breathe?

I ran into the bathroom. There was a strange pounding in my head, and then a sensation I can only describe as a hiccup of the brain. My brain seemed to be seizing as the phrase about concentration jerked across it. I delved into the medicine cabinet, found a bottle of aspirin, took three, stood by the sink for five minutes. No go. Delved again, pulled out another bottle — Ativan, a Valium-like medication belonging to my housemate, Adam. Another five minutes, my brain still squirting. One more Ativan, a tiny white triangle that would put me to sleep. I would sleep this strange spell off, wake up me again, sane again. I went back to my bed. The day darkened. The Ativan spread through my system. Lights in a neighboring window seemed lonely and sweet. I saw the shadow of a bird in a tree, and it had angel wings, and it soared me someplace else, its call a pure cry.

“What’s wrong with you?” he said, shaking my shoulder. Adam stood over me, his face a blur. Through cracked eyelids I saw a wavering world, none of its outlines resolved: the latticed shadow of a tree on a white wall, my friend’s face a streak of pink. I am O.K., I thought, for this was what waking up was always like, the gentle resurfacing. I sat up, looked around.

“You’ve been sleeping for hours and hours,” he said. “You slept from yesterday afternoon until now.”

I reached up, gently touched a temple. I felt the faraway nip of my pulse. My pulse was there. I was here.