Lying (20 page)

In Greek, the word
aura
means breeze, and this is what it feels like, like winds washing over you, gentle or menacing, always full of meaning. The medical term for aura is prodrome, which means running before. Auras run before seizures.

After the dean I went back to my apartment, fell into a sitting, slumping sleep, and years passed. The universe turned over twice. The sun died and then was born again, in a flare of lemons. A breeze blew, a
running before
, and then I was flying over the earth. Jesus held my hand, both of us were naked, and, I hate to admit it, aroused; we just held hands. We flew like Peter Pan and Wendy. From above I saw a wheel of fire, and then I realized the wheel was really someone’s head on fire—
seizure, seizure
—and when the fire passed, and the smoke cleared, Jesus pointed to the place. The head had become the earth, which I saw from outer space, blue lakes for eyes, red clay skin, so gorgeous I cried.

I opened my eyes. Or maybe I had never closed them. Or maybe I had actually had a seizure, because I did have a headache and my mouth was dry. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the prodrome and a very small seizure. In any case, it didn’t matter. It was physical but spiritual. God had visited me. He was here.

•  •  •

I had an appointment with Dr. Neu. “No seizures, but auras,” I said.

“Or very small seizures,” he said, “that’s what I think,
but the point is, you’re not having grand mal, and it’s not getting in the way of your functioning.” He paused. “Or is it?” he said. “How is your functioning?”

“I am changing,” I said. “For the first time in my life I feel like I’m actually starting to function well.”

“How’s that?” he said.

“Well,” I said, and then I got embarrassed. It’s hard to talk about religious things in our society. “I guess,” I said. “In my auras,” I said, “I’m sometimes seeing God. Don’t take that the wrong way, it’s not like I think I’m God or anything, but I have the feeling God is close to me.”

We were sitting in his office. He suddenly looked very interested. He leaned forward in his seat.

“Like how?” he said.

I didn’t tell him about AA, but I did tell him about Bible study, the prayer circle, my feeling of being drawn to churches, my memories of the convent at Saint Christopher’s coming back, and this desire I had to read the words of Jesus.

“That’s the TLE personality,” he said. “There it is again.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Epileptics,” he said, “are often drawn to creative and religious pursuits. There seems to be something about the neural discharge that lends itself to these states. There was,” he said, “Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Paul, Moses, you know, Mohammed, the prophet Ezekiel.” He paused. He looked genuinely excited. “Epilepsy,” he said, “is truly fascinating.
Over and over again I am awed to see how consistently my TLE patients display the same symptoms.”

First, I felt flattered. I mean, it’s hard not to feel good being put in the same class as Moses and Mohammed. I looked out the office window and waited to see if the bushes would start to burn. However, they didn’t. They stayed stubbornly, resolutely, bushes.

“Amazing,” Dr. Neu murmured.

Then I got mad. “Do you mean to tell me,” I said, “that my spiritual feelings are just symptoms of a disease? I don’t think so,” I said.

“Look,” he said. “It’s not an either/or thing. Who knows, maybe the disease is God’s way of reaching certain people; God causes the disease, the disease gives way to God. Who knows?”

“Who knows?” I said, but I still felt angry. “You know,” I said, “you know, Dr. Neu, all those seizures I had right before the operation? I brought a lot of them on myself, because I liked the attention. I think I fooled you. I went to the library and read books about seizures and said I had a lot of symptoms that I never really had.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “Exaggeration, trickery, we know that’s part of your personality profile. I suspected all along you were hamming things up a bit.”

His demeanor disturbed me. He seemed utterly unfazed. “I lied,” I said, my voice rising, a bit righteously I might add. “I lied and a lie is a sin and a sin is never small, because it’s a form of separation from God.”

“Okay,” he said, “you lied. But really, Lauren, I don’t want you to feel guilty. In one sense you lied, but in another sense you didn’t, because trickery is so hinged to your personality style, and, therefore, you were only being true to yourself.”

•  •  •

Well, he was right, but I was still mad. I felt like that visit diminished me. I lost a little bit of faith. Here, I’d dropped out of school and was going to live cleanly and honestly and close to the spiritual pulse of things, and maybe that was all just chemical. Maybe none of it mattered.

I went to an AA meeting that afternoon, but I couldn’t connect. Depression came back. I filled my mouth with butter cookies.

I was so easily derailed in those days, just like an alcoholic, newly sobered, can sink straight into a drink.

I had tastes in my mouth, tastes like vodka and gin. My stomach felt sick. At the meeting they lit incense and the incense smelled of piss.

I pulled a prayer book out from the wooden pocket of the pew. I opened it and closed my right eye. With my left eye, I watched the meaningless march of words, surgically shattered.

“Newcomers speak,” someone said.

I looked up. I opened both eyes and looked up.

“It’s newcomers’ night,” Helen said. “We dedicate this microphone to the stories of those new to sobriety or new to the program itself.”

I was sitting next to Brad. “Go on,” he said. He elbowed me. “Why don’t you speak? You’re new to the program and so far you haven’t done a drunk-a-logue.”

Drunk-a-logue
was the word AAers used to describe what they did up there, in the microphone. They told the woeful tales of their drinking days; they repented in front of everyone.

“No,” I said. “Not now.”

“Go on,” Brad said. He was speaking loudly. He even gave me a little shove, the jerk.

Amy turned from the front pew. “Lauren,” she said, “I think it’s your time. I think it’s time.”

And before I knew it everyone was saying, “Go on, Lauren, tell us your tale, Lauren, the story saves, Lauren,” and the incense smelled like piss, my mouth pinging with phantom spirits, I felt bad, because of Dr. Neu, or maybe just a seizure, a physical thing, and Jesus flying far above me, as small as a mosquito in the sky, I could not connect.

And I was wafted up there, a breeze blew me up there, the voices a kind of aura carrying me,
running before, standing before
, them. Them. And the microphone, it looked like, like a microphone, a device to deepen my voice.

This, I thought, was my chance to tell the truth. They wanted my story, I would tell them my story. I was not an alcoholic, I suffered from a different disease. I had told them I was an alcoholic because in some deep sense it seemed true. Alcoholism can stand in for epilepsy, the same way epilepsy can stand in for depression, for disintegration, for self-hatred, for the unspeakable dirt between a mother and a
daughter; sometimes you just don’t know how to say the pain directly—I do not know how to say the pain directly, I never have—and I often tell myself it really doesn’t matter, because either way, any way, the brain shivers and craves, cracked open.

And yet there is always the desire to find the words that refer directly to reality, fact and truth together. I wanted to try. Try. My heart pounded. I can come up with no better phrase. My heart was a huge hammer pounding, pounding on nothing but my blood. My blood splashed around. I thought I would faint. “Tell your tale, Lauren,” and I saw my tale, and God, I wanted to tell it
as it really was
and have them love me, have them listen to me still. That is all we ever want, the one risk we’re too afraid to take.

A fly landed on the rim of the microphone, black with sheer wings. I watched it crawl over the pores and the sound of its tiny tread filled the room,
crackle
.

I couldn’t. I felt lost. I felt frightened. It’s hard to break old habits. I relapsed, just like an alcoholic. I said:

“My name is Lauren.”

“Hello, Lauren,” everyone answered.

“And I am an alcoholic,” I said. I started to cry.

“You’re brave,” someone said. “Admitting the truth is the bravest, most healing thing.”

“I have never been able to admit or even know the truth,” I continued. I took a deep breath. “It’s part of my disease. I had my first drink, what I mean by that is my disease began, when I was ten years old. We were in Barbados, and my mother, she was an alcoholic, and she was drinking a lot. It
was night, New Year’s Eve, and I remember all the lights and the sound of the ocean crashing. And my mother got very drunk, insulting people and showing off at the piano. And a great sadness but also a great pride filled me, and somehow, I link my disease to these two emotions: sadness and pride. And my mother.”

I paused. My tears dried. My voice got smooth and confident. I felt the story take shape, and it really was true; it flew from me.

“After that first episode,” I said, “my disease got worse. I started, you know, doing it at home, in school, all the time, just stumbling around and making a real fool of myself. When I think back on my behavior now, I am humiliated. Just humiliated. But I couldn’t control myself then, and I can’t even really control myself now; all I remember is stumbling, and tripping, and the stink. I remember the stink.”

I lowered my gaze. I looked back up.

“The stink,” I said, “of my sickness.

“My parents were beside themselves, even though, well, my mother was just as sick, you know? But they focused on me. That’s what happens in dysfunctional families, one person gets focused on and absorbs all the craziness. I was that person. They sent me away. I went to a hospital-like place in Kansas, where nurses and nuns tried to help me out. Nuns taught me how to cope with life, how to be strong and practical, by scrubbing floors, by washing windows and baking bread; it was therapy. And it helped. I loved those nuns. I first felt God in their presence.”

“Amen,” someone said.

My voice rose, a choir of confidence.

“And you know what? When I got home from this school I was better for a while, but then, the disease … It’s a disease of—”

I stopped. Everyone was looking at me. I had them in my hands. I felt this was the best drunk-a-logue anyone had ever done. It wasn’t what I was saying, but how I was saying it, my voice so genuine, so painful, so utterly, absolutely authentic, and it was! It was!

It wasn’t!

“It’s a disease of what?” I shouted. I felt the fire in me.

“It’s cunning and baffling,” someone said.

“What else?” I shouted, my mouth right up against the microphone.

“Of physical and spiritual anguish,” someone else shouted out.

“People,” I said. I lowered my voice and the audience lowered with me. We all went down, tight together, woven in the strands of my story.

“People, it’s a disease of relapse. Relapse!” I said, “And that’s what happened to me after I came back from the convent. I relapsed, I became an adolescent, and my disease progressed. I started stealing. I walked right into my neighbors’ houses and stole, and let me tell you this. It is worse, spiritually speaking, to steal from a neighbor than to steal from a store, even if you take your neighbor’s toilet paper. Because the Bible says to love your neighbor, but it doesn’t say to love your stores.”

I paused and looked around me again. Someone tittered.
The stained glass windows seemed to be glowing with a preternatural brightness; red, rose, lime. I lifted.

“I stole from my neighbors and then, later on, I stole from books, lifted words and phrases. And I was such a lonely, needy kid that instead of hiding my disease like a lot of alcoholics do, I showed it off. You people,” I said. “You people talk about hiding your whiskey bottles, your martini glasses, your slurring words; well, I didn’t. I made sure everyone saw, and even when I wasn’t having an episode I pretended I was. I know that sounds weird, to exaggerate your disease, to entirely
create
your disease, but that’s what happened. Even when I was sober, I stumbled and slurred and went into emergency rooms, and in this way I learned how to talk to the world and to hide from it, both at the same time. Showing off,” I said, “is itself a kind of hiding.”

I paused to let my words sink in.

“The clown is the loneliest person,” I said.

“The brighter the clothes,” I said, “the more somber the soul.

“I hid,” I said, “through lies, but at the same time, every tale I told expressed a truth. It has been very confusing for me.”

I stopped.

The room was dead quiet. “What is sobriety?” I said. “It’s not limited to alcohol, it’s a whole life concept that can apply to everyone. Therefore, I can be in AA whether I drink or don’t because AA is about the sober soul. This,” I said, “this is what you people have helped me with. You have given me a way to tell my tale, but at the same time you
have shown me how to sit with emptiness, and it’s been very very difficult for me.

“You don’t need the details,” I said. “You don’t need all the little niggling facts. You don’t need to know that I drank this on one night, that on another, because those facts are irrelevant. The only thing that’s relevant is that I have a disease—no, that I have
the
disease, and I am here to be healed.

“Help me.”

Everyone clapped like crazy and cried, even the men. “Oh my God,” they said, “that was so honest.”

Inside of me, my heart crashed off a cliff again and again; girl gone, Gomorrah.

•  •  •

I went home and poured myself some wine. I told myself I’d spoken 99.9 percent correctly, except that I was describing another disease, so I shouldn’t feel bad, but I felt very bad. I told myself that the figurative truth means more than the literal truth, but I still felt bad. I felt like a liar. I loved Elaine. I loved Amy. I loved Brad and Sue and Anne and Mike. My friends. And yet I was surrounded by smoke.