Swollen

Lightening slashed the Austin clouds, and I could see it as a giant hand, reaching into my throat to turn on the spigot again. The thundercloud, merciless and ceaseless, poured viscous rain down my throat and spiked my body with sharp and burning droplets that pooled inside me, just as the downpour bounced off the wooden railing on the patio and the dry grass just outside my window.

I was awake again, my eyes forced open by the bright lightening and heavy surges of the tides that welled up in my lowest depths. I looked down at my feet and legs, somehow obscene in their nudity, and, again, saw the impossible made possible. With my back slumping against the smelly couch, I crafted a simile, however clichéd it seemed to my zapped brain: “My legs and feet look like sausages.” Swollen and huge before me, they weighted me down to the extent that they increased my fear ten-fold. I didn’t think that I could move anywhere on these legs and feet, much less get up from my position, where I leaned, gasping, coughing, and futilely trying to construct any possible meaning from what was turning into an endless ordeal.

Just then, the CD player rotated around to the first cut on the Doors’ first album: “Break on Through (To the Other Side).” Memory gushed back into my mind. I had taken a bath, with Morrison’s voice hitting me like a prophetic specter. I’d hallucinated images of Pam and Jim in Oliver Stone’s biopic, and trans-lucid images of Jesus, Mary, Apollo, Dionysus, Nietzsche, Blake, and Rimbaud joining hands and dancing in endless circles around my head in a challenge to find a meaning, a pivot point, in the eternal quest to comprehend what could possibly be wrong with me. The dancers, of course, wouldn’t stop circling, and they jeered, pointed as they moved—at me, at Morrison. Or maybe it was only at Morrison—as if Morrison resided somehow inside me, made up my internality, a shamanistic mask that I had to accept if I did indeed die that morning, a bloated, washed-up academic.

But Morrison was twenty-seven and, as the thundercloud spattered rain within and without him, and as my legs and feet seemed to grow plumper by the second, I’d made it to twenty-eight. I’d made it past the age at which Morrison had died; I felt so much older than Morrison ever could, trapped as the singer was in the red haze of the Paris bathtub, with Pam holding his seemingly resurrected and beatified body.

Unlike Morrison, I had made it out of the bathtub—I couldn’t say how, but I’d made it, probably squeezing into my pajama bottoms, which were now soaked through, and crawling to the living room, to the couch, where I’d passed out.

I couldn’t stand listening to The Doors anymore. “Soul Kitchen” was now driving its way into “The Crystal Ship,” and I knew that no such ship awaited me. I wanted to leave behind Blake, whose poetry had inspired the song, and to act.

My lower extremities felt so weighty that I realized that I didn’t have the power within myself to get up. So I crawled again, this time to the stereo, where I eliminated the Doors and all traces of Morrison. I reached up to get some leverage on the entertainment center, but my hands were so bloated that they couldn’t gain purchase on the smooth surface on which the TV rested. Even when I achieved some semblance of elevation, my head swam with dizziness that my rare undergraduate binges never taught me were possible. On hands and knees, again I willed myself toward the cordless phone, which lay on the hallway carpet, right where I’d dropped it the previous night after talking to my mother.

Curled up on the floor to avoid throwing up, I called my internist, Dr. King. King occupied a part of my brain that, before I became so inexplicably ill, I was unaware existed—that ambiguous part where trust and distrust, love and abhorrence, friend and traitor all intersect. Because I could barely remember my childhood cancer, and because it had been in remission for so long, I’d always trusted doctors. In fact, some of my deepest and most hardened memories came from the days spent at Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee, when I was vaguely aware that Elvis was dead and I looked through Golden Books, clad in a Superman tee-shirt with a Batman patch on the knee of my pant leg, joking with the nurses who complimented me on my bravery as they injected me with my post-surgery chemotherapy drugs. I was three, maybe four, at the time, but never as nauseated as I was now, twenty-five years later, when I called King.

Perhaps my trust came from the fact that my story had had a happy ending. I’d read all the books I wanted to read, wrote and successfully defended a dissertation, published many important articles for a scholar of only twenty-eight, married a brilliant, beautiful, and energetic woman, and was now branching out from Joyce to contemporary American literature (DeLillo) and popular music (Radiohead). Before my sickness cut me down, I felt myself in a never-ending process of reinvention—of evolution, even, toward a better place: an important job in academia or, maybe even better, an important job in publishing in Boston or New York. My wife, after all, had stopped with an MS in Microbiology and become a high school teacher. She would follow me anywhere.

I had written a paper in my Science and Literature class as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. It was really an autobiographical story about how science and the cancer specialists at Children’s had made possible my life and everything I had achieved and was going to achieve. But as I lay in the hallway waiting to be transferred to the scheduling person in King’s office, I cringed with embarrassment as I realized the immature and egocentric nature of the piece. I’d seen The Matrix and now finally comprehended that my Science and Literature story was really about the ways in which I’d written a narrative, with myself in the starring role, as a cyborg Prometheus or Byronic hero, whose heroic literary deeds were founded on the doctors’ magical powers. Descartes or somebody important, after all, had conclusively claimed that in the future doctors would replace priests as the bearers of unquestioned and unparalleled wisdom.

I might have been wrong about Descartes, but I definitely knew that King’s ability to diagnose me, as well as his prescription of the terrifying Ambien, made my internist’s claims seem at best fallacious. Just when I was debating whether I had enough energy to drive myself to the clinic and maybe give up King for being the charlatan that he appeared to be, I got through to the scheduler and made an appointment for later that morning.