Lying (17 page)

16. My name is Lauren. I go by no other. In the story you have before you, I am not a novelist’s character; I am my best approximation of me. I am not a fiction, but nor am I a fact, because a fact implies literalness, a fact implies permanence, and someday I shall die. And when I do, I hope to have
my life
laid out, the soul of the story articulated at last, it is true, yes. This is true, yes.

17. My
memoir
, please. Sell it as nonfiction, please.

18. Look here.

19. This is where I am.

I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. The biological explanation of birth is that sperm meets egg, a single cell divides: oocyte, zygote, bone. The spiritual explanation is that God sends a spark down, and the spark takes full flare as a human. The biological explanation of my epilepsy is that a small scar formed on the left temporal lobe of my brain; the spiritual explanation is that God, in sculpting me from paste, nicked his nail against my gray matter, a small mistake, an error born of love and touch.

I have always loved churches. My father, Paul
David, was a Hebrew School teacher and a man in the bakery business. My mother, Anita Ann, was a Zionist and a believer in Aliyah. But I, Jewish by blood, have always preferred churches, because a seizure in a synagogue means disruption and embarrassment, whereas a seizure in church is part of the holy atmosphere. Churches are places for the two-tongued and the fainters, for broken bodies. Christ himself had his body broken, his back snapped on the board of the cross, little nails driven right through his lifelines. He died up there, stinking and bloody, and tell me this: Where in a synagogue can you find such a sight, a synagogue all clean and quiet, smelling of bleach and law?

The first church I ever went to was before my epilepsy, when I was only seven years old. I went with a Catholic friend of mine, and when the music began, many doors in me opened, and my blood pressure rose, and I rose too, hitched a little higher toward grace.

The second church I ever went to was at the falling school, and this church was intricate and magical, drops of gold on scepter tops, saints walking in all the windows.

The third church I ever went to was after Christopher Marin, when I was in the darkness. There are two kinds of darkness, the first so full of breath you know you are close to God. The second is the darkness of distance, of plugged-up tunnels and exhaust. In this you are far from God, and it was into this that I fell, when I left Christopher on that snowy Vermont morning.

In real time, darkness might last eight hours, but in psychological time, it can go for vast stretches. After Christopher,
I felt lost. Even with my magazine acceptance, I still had a hole in my heart. I experienced an allover heaviness, and so I slept more.

Halfway through my freshman year I left my Israeli roommate, whom I could not come to love or even deeply like. I moved off campus, but I still ate at the cafeteria. Comfort came through foods, hot plates of spaghetti, the satisfying snap of a potato chip in my mouth.

At first, I would have said the breakup with Christopher caused my depression, but, after a while, I stopped missing him, and still the heaviness wouldn’t leave. It got worse. Then I thought perhaps I’d lost my epilepsy, because, since the seizure in the hotel room in Vermont, I hadn’t had an episode. A successful surgical intervention!

What had I lost? I had lost the cherry tree, the toads in the woods, my house, the ants that crawled in a line in front of my house, the grainy golden sandbox of my childhood, the honesty of my childhood—had it ever been?—before I’d learned to fake and clutch and seize at an unstitched world.

I was halfway through my freshman year, then, and I lived off campus, in a studio apartment in Waltham, right at the tip where Waltham blends into Weston, a much wealthier town. My apartment was tiny, with a gas burner for heat, and a leaded glass window. In bad weather, rain streamed down the leaded glass, leaked in under the sill, and sometimes I tasted the puddles, because I was hungry, and thirsty too.

•  •  •

Eventually, after Christopher, I stopped going to classes. I couldn’t think why in the world I should go to classes. They were all in lecture halls, and I was not noticed. I wrote papers that TAs handed back with the briefest of comments, and even if the grades were good, no one thought me special. I was used to being probed and pondered, hated or loved, and the vast neutrality of college life—well, it just wasn’t for me. When “The Cherry Tree” got accepted, there wasn’t even a particular person to tell. I was reading
The Paris Review Interviews
then, and I decided I should submit an interview like that to the campus newspaper. I said my name was Juliette Epstein, and that I had interviewed this student by the name of Lauren Slater, the promising young talent on campus. The interview went like this:

Six weeks later, “The Cherry Tree” came out in print. The interview did not come out in print. Of course, no one called.

•  •  •

I went for walks then. I saw a dwarf. Another day, I saw a man with no nose. I saw a child with pink eyes and white floss for hair. In the CVS, I stared at my own face in the magnified mirror. My face looked horrendous to me, all tilted and pocked.

I signed up for some treatment at the Brandeis Counseling Center. I didn’t know how to adjust to college life. On the day of my first session, I brought Dr. Neu’s paper with me, so the psychologist would get an idea of my complexities.

I should have known from his office. It was all orange leather, a bad sign. He asked me a million questions, like I was applying for a passport, and he scribbled all my answers down on a form. “Born where?” he said. “Mother’s maiden
name?” he said. “Ethnicity?” he said, and as the time ticked by I got mad. I was there for help. “Age?” he said.

“Seventy-three,” I said, and then he looked up.

He blinked behind his glasses, smiled. “I’m sure you feel that old,” he said. “You look tired.”

“I am tired,” I said. “And I have depression too.”

“A lot of freshmen experience depression,” he said. “It’s quite common. The adjustment can be overwhelming.”

“It is overwhelming,” I said, “and more so for me because I have epilepsy and my past has been difficult, which I think you should know.” I handed him Dr. Neu’s paper.

He read it, and then he looked at me. In my opinion, he read it very, very quickly, like maybe thirty seconds, a minute tops, so keep that in mind.

“This,” he said, “this paper,” he said, “is not real.”

“It looks real to me,” I said. I had absolutely no idea what he meant.

“I think you should understand,” he said softly, “that I am confrontational in style. And so it is entirely within my style to say that there is no way this paper was written by a doctor, or anyone even remotely connected to the medical profession.” He paused. “There is no such part of the brain,” he said, “as the ‘temporal amygdalan area.’ There is no such thing as,” and he pointed to the second page, “ ‘eliopathic epilepsy.’ ” He smiled. “I think you meant to write idiopathic. Is that what you meant?”

“How am I supposed to know,” I said, “what Dr. Neu meant?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but there is no Dr. Neu. What I
mean by that,” he said, “is that there is no Dr. Neu anywhere in the world who would perform a corpus callostomy on a patient with TLE. It’s just not done.”

“What do you mean it’s not done?” I said. I felt my voice get very loud and high while the whole room turned to glass. “It was done to me.”

“We should probably talk,” he said, “about why you need to tell this story, what it really means.”

I looked at him, the little skunk. The whole room stank.

“I think,” I said, “I am going to have a seizure right now.”

“What happens to you,” he said, “when you have seizures?” He looked concerned.

“I feel my hands get big,” I said. “My hands are feeling very big and floaty right now.”

He nodded. “I see,” he said. “And is that floaty feeling often accompanied by an excess of saliva in the mouth, what we call ptyalism?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been diagnosed with ptyalism many times.”

“Ptyalism,” he said, “is never a symptom that accompanies seizures. It is a symptom of pregnancy. Could you possibly be pregnant?”

I started to cry. “You,” I said, and then I was whispering. “You are a bad man.”

The room got very quiet.

“I have epilepsy,” I said.

“Perhaps you do,” he said, “I have no way of knowing. However, this operation,” he said, “this operation is definitely
beyond what I can call credible, unless,” he said, and then he was leaning toward me, reaching his hands out toward me, “unless you can show me your scar.”

And that’s when I understood. His hands reaching out toward me. The suggestion of pregnancy. He was a pervert. He wanted to touch me. I jerked away.

“Leave—me—alone,” I said. I stood. “I’m going to report you,” I said. “I don’t lie,” I said. “Ask anyone.” And then I ran.

•  •  •

He was a pervert, and I did report him. I wrote a long letter to the head of Brandeis Counseling about how he had tried to touch me and how he had displayed some deep-seated sadistic need to question my disease and to deny its treatment, possibly because he was threatened by the very things his profession called upon him to confront. It is well known, after all, that a great many mental health practitioners are emotionally unstable, even to the point of playing cruel games with their patients.

Suffice it to say, I was not helped by the Brandeis Counseling Center. I thought about calling Dr. Neu and asking him for a referral. I didn’t do it, though.

Instead, I tried to put the whole visit behind me. I tried to put it right out of my mind. I went for walks. I visited churches, because they were soothing to me and could possibly take the place of professional counseling. I liked churches where there was holy water in pools, churches
where tiny toy fires burned beneath copper samovars, or where the priest walked in a hush of black cassock.

Usually, when I visited churches, they were more or less empty. One day, though, I walked into a church right by my studio apartment, a church called Saint Perpetua’s of the Precious Blood, a small, unassuming-looking building on the outside, but on the inside garlands of fresh flowers, pews worn and almost soft to the touch.

I touched the pews. I slid in and sat. I thought I had stumbled in on a service of some sort. The pews were filled with people who one by one stood and said things. They walked to the front of the room and spoke into a microphone. To the side, I saw a cloth-covered table, pamphlets and books. I saw a coffeepot, and platters of delicious-looking treats.

I saw the food first, and then a man next to me leaned over and whispered, “Welcome.”

“Thank you,” I said.

It was such a simple word,
welcome
, but it had within it the delightful sounds of door chimes announcing your arrival at a hospitable house.

I watched. A woman with frizzy hair and lipstick so bright it made her mouth stand separate from her face got up to talk. I figured this was a Christian thing; what did I know? The woman took the microphone and lowered her lips to it. She said nothing. Her mouth began to tremble and tears came out, silvering her sad, sad face. No one said a word, and the woman just stood there weeping, and then I got scared. A small cry escaped her bunched, bright mouth, and for a second I thought of my mother; I thought it was her up
there. I knew it wasn’t, but the shadows angling the woman’s face, the palpable air of sadness and something far too tight, her hair, high and sprayed; my mother. And then I, too, wanted to cry, because the idea of her unhappiness—whose unhappiness?—brings me always to a dark and difficult place.