To Feel Stuff (17 page)

After a short while, E heard C return to the nurses' station, where he told Sarah, a late-night nurse practitioner, “I'm going downstairs.” E then heard the elevator.

Realizing that she would be waiting “longer than I thought” and buckling under the duress of increasing pain, E decided to stretch out. As she was reaching her arms forward, she saw a pair of slippers on the carpet. They were approximately eight feet away from her.

Initially, E believed that she had been caught by C. She assumed that he had pulled a trick on her—pretending to enter the elevator, and then reversing his course. “I did think to myself, though,” E noted, “that I probably should have heard him coming.”

Then two details registered with E. The first was that the person in the slippers was standing free of a wheelchair. The second was that the “slippers were translucent. I could see the carpet right through them.”

At this point, E confessed that, while stunned at the appearance of the slippers, she immediately comprehended the circumstances of them. She “had this automatic feeling that it was the ghost I'd talked to that day in the shower and that I'd seen around the second floor. I knew.”

E partially crawled out from underneath the chair. She described seeing “some pale ankles and then pajama bottoms. Blue ones.” Crawling out farther, she saw that “he was wearing a robe. And then I saw his hair. It's black and it goes down to his chin, like mine does.” She demonstrated by holding her fingers at chin level. “And I understood it was the same guy I'd seen before.”

“Did you say anything when you recognized him?” I asked.

“I said, ‘You!' Like I was accusing him of being him.”

“Did this apparition respond?”

“He laughed.” E described the laugh as being somewhat pained, as if the sound had been difficult for the apparition to produce. He then said to her, “Don't make me laugh.”

“I didn't,” E argued.

E didn't remember the apparition's words verbatim due to her state of shock, but she recalled that his response had something to do with him being on “meds” and being “giddy” because of them. She also remembered a comment that struck her as particularly eerie. While telling E that she wasn't “off the hook” for making him laugh, the apparition said, “I can't be sure that you're not doing that psychic voodoo that you do.”

“It was like he knew all about me,” E said.

Listening to E speak, I found myself willing to suspend my usual skepticism. Rather, I should say that skepticism seemed an inappropriate tactic in her presence. It was remarkable to watch this patient—this patient who normally presented an extraordinarily composed façade—reposition herself with very few signs of self-consciousness about this supernatural worldview. She inspired a profound trust. She possessed a sober rationality that rivaled that of the colleagues I regularly encounter in my profession.

There was a lull in the conversation between E and the apparition, during which he did nothing but “stare” at her. He did not move closer. There was movement, however, in his chest Despite its transparency, E reported that she could see small inflations and deflations of the cavity. Additionally, the apparition blinked every few seconds.

Wishing to provoke action or explanation, E asked, “What are you doing here?” There was no immediate response. It was then that E decided “to test out his consistency.” She surveyed the pharmacy's waiting room, searching for a tool. Because she “didn't want to make any drastic movements,” she chose from among the objects closest to her, which were health pamphlets.

She laughed for the first time all day as she told me she chose “the gonorrhea pamphlet.” It appealed to her because “the girl on it didn't seem that disappointed to have it. She was still hiking.” Jokes aside, I believe that this portrait of manageable illness appealed to a specific fantasy within E. Namely, that one day she might be able to incorporate her health problems into a somewhat normal, mobile life.

E folded the pamphlet into a paper airplane. She aimed the plane for the apparition's cranium and released. The plane “flew in a direct line toward the ghost's forehead, and it kept going along that direct line right through his forehead.” Apparently, the apparition did not display any awareness of the attack. His blinking did not increase, and he made no movement to escape it. The plane hit the wall on the opposite side of the hallway.

After a period of renewed staring, the apparition's “face clouded.” E believed that this expression was too delayed to be in response to the plane.

The apparition suddenly said, “I'm starting to freak out about your teeth.”

“What about my teeth?” E asked.

In response, the apparition delivered a bizarre speech. “I'm thinking about how awful they really are. We have bones jutting out of our gums and everyone's aiming to make them even whiter. I say make them grayer and hope that they fade into the background. I'm freaking out that you have bones shooting out of your mouth.” E illustrated for me how the apparition brought his fingers up to his translucent teeth to examine them.

E admitted, “Sometimes I also feel that way about teeth. When I start looking at them in a particular light.”

“Do you really have thoughts like that?” I asked E.

“Yes.”

It made sense that E should have a dysmorphic view of the body and its composition. There was an illusive autonomy about her cells; they seemed to act without regard to the well-being of the greater whole.

“Did the apparition respond?” I asked.

“Now you tell me what you're freaking out about” was the request that the apparition made to E.

Surprised that he was responsive, E asked him whether he could really hear her. The apparition, however, did not respond to this question, but continued along a course of his own inquiry.

“Do you have it yet?” he asked.

“Have what?” E asked, deeply puzzled and astounded. Then, determined to obtain an answer, she took a small step closer to the apparition. She told me that she “half-expected him to squirt me with ectoplasm like in
Ghostbusters.
I'd never met a ghost before. I'm not sure what makes them nervous.” Despite her trepidation, E adopted a more rapid interview technique with the apparition. “What are you? Where have you come from? Why are you talking to me? Are you dead? Are you a ghost?” she asked.

Seconds after E finished, the apparition relaxed his stance and pointed straight at her. “That's a good one.”

“What is? That you're a ghost?”

“Eyes
are
disturbing. Everyone always says they're the most beautiful features we have, but think of how they're attached to our heads. It's creepy! Creep-ayyyyy!” the apparition exclaimed.

“I couldn't be imagining you. Could I?” E asked him. Then, taking her right hand, she slapped herself across the face.

When E's vision cleared, she saw that the apparition was still present. She told me that her face tingled for a long while afterward, making her feel “like I was transparent, too.” At the very least, the pain of the slap confirmed for E that she had not fallen asleep while waiting for C to locate her.

“That went well,” the apparition said.

“Are you a ghost?” E repeated.

Again, the apparition failed to respond to E's question, but this was because he began losing “fragments of himself to the dark.” E described his disappearance thusly: “Parts of his body would pulse and dim like they were shutting off.” In the midst of his disintegration, the apparition shrugged, turned around, and exited the room. He made a left at the hallway, and then he was gone.

This comprised the entirety of their communication in the pharmacy waiting room.

“What did you do then?” I asked.

“I thought,” E replied.

Her first thought, E said, was that that her mother's supernatural assertions had been grounded in reality. E had been told unbelievable stories all her life—A had liked to repeat one, in particular, about a ghostly woman who used to show up over E's cradle and attempt to rock her to sleep—and now she instinctively felt they had basis in fact.

E shared that she had always mentally filed items as correct or incorrect when receiving information from her mother. The example she supplied me that afternoon was, “Correct: We are out of milk.' Incorrect: T am getting the message that this six-pack of 7-Up cans contains the winning entry for the Caribbean sweepstakes. Oh, yes, I feel that it's the third one here. When we get home we'd better start packing our bags.'”

Following these thoughts about her mother, she began to consider other theories for her experience with the apparition. She was attempting, she said, to explore all possible angles.

One she considered was that “there are natural laws that account for weird occurrences.” She had once read an article in which the author theorized that pockets of extreme energy could preserve and repeat themselves. These pockets clung to a space even when they no longer made sense there, making an apparition like the one E had witnessed merely an echo in time.

E said that this theory did not wholly satisfy her, however, as she felt that the apparition seemed to have a specific relationship with her. She was under the impression that he had “sought me out,” that intentionally he had located her, not simply “a break in the space/time continuum.”

Then E expressed concern that it might be her mind and not physics that had been responsible for the apparition. It occurred to her that perhaps she'd summoned herself “a make-believe friend,” which she felt was “a pathetic thought.” “I get lonely sometimes, but I don't think it's gotten to that bad of a stage yet,” E told me. Nonetheless, after the encounter she had worried that the apparition was the result of a fractured psyche, possibly even a schizophrenic manifestation of another, masculine personality within her. She feared that her hidden desire for a kindred soul in the infirmary had inspired her brain to invent one.

Yet the timing contradicted this theory. Since C's arrival in the infirmary and what E described as a rapidly growing bond, she had been less lonely than during previous months. Why would her mind summon a prolonged meeting with the apparition on the night when she was feeling “the least alone that I had in a while”?

E weighed the merits of yet another hypothesis—that it was not her psyche calling the apparition forth, but her entire body. For a moment, she became certain that she must be sick again, “really sick.” She imagined a pea-sized tumor growing inside her head, pressing on the part of her brain responsible for distinguishing real-life occurrences from those in her imagination. E had heard stories of patients whose brain tumors caused them to hallucinate, some of those patients coming to believe in the existence of beings that they normally wouldn't.

“We ran scans the other day, though,” I reminded her. “We would have seen a tumor.”

“I know,” E said. “I was trying to think of everything. Everything.” She had also considered that her ailment did not have to be as extreme as a brain tumor. She knew that there were a number of diseases that resulted in the swelling of the brain, temporary confusion of the senses, or permanent dementia.

E told me that on a previous afternoon, when extremely bored, she had perused the pamphlets in the pharmacy (including the gonorrhea pamphlet that she had eventually thrown at the apparition). A syphilis pamphlet featured “a guy sitting on a window seat, gazing out on a healthy field. I realized that maybe he was gazing because he was watching a dead kid in a robe running among the wheat. I know that syphilis also causes hallucinations. I thought that maybe I had it.”

“Again,” I advised her, “syphilis would have shown up on the tests we did. I promise you that we left no stone unturned.” I suddenly recognized that I was working with E to disprove alternative theories. I was surprised to find myself helping her narrow her choices to those within the supernatural realm.

“As of last night at that time, I hadn't had sex for a while either, so that's what I figured, too.”

“What do you mean ‘as of last night at that time'?” I questioned.

“I had sex with C after he found me last night.”

“You should have told me that right away.” This was crucial information. We needed to take into account any change in E's life if we were to isolate the source of her multiple illnesses. I told her that it was very important that she keep me updated on all of her activities, especially those that involved bodily contact with others.

“I promise that I would have gotten around to it,” she said. “This ghost thing is more urgent.”

“Did you use protection?” I asked.

“We'll come back to that.” She was reluctant to leave the subject of the apparition and quickly returned to her thoughts from the previous night.

Ruling out syphilis, E conjectured that she might be relapsing. The most obvious candidate was the encephalitis from the beginning of freshman year, which had produced brief hallucinatory effects. Although she had not seen apparitions or imaginary persons during that period, she had lost her sense of time and place. Hours and days went by without her awareness of their passing.

“I didn't have the same muddy feeling, though,” she explained to me. “When I had the encephalitis, it was like I was in a dream state. I had the sense that something was off. But last night I was clear-headed. I felt sharp.”

As with her previous sighting of the apparition, E's ultimate post-reaction was to consult me and obtain my medical opinion. While she believed that she was “starting to see ghosts,” she still wanted me to eliminate all medical possibilities.

“Have you told anyone besides myself about what you've seen?” I asked.

E had not. She felt that if she told C or nurse practitioner Sarah what had happened, they would immediately take her to the hospital. She feared that she would be detained for at least twenty-four hours, and that her “window of opportunity would have closed” by the time she returned to the infirmary.