Brain on Fire (10 page)

“She’ll take the chicken sandwich,” Stephen said, after it was clear I was incapable of making such a momentous decision. “And I’ll have the reuben.”

When the food came, I could focus only on the greasy french dressing congealing on Stephen’s corned beef sandwich. I looked down at my own sandwich despairingly; nothing could convince me to put it to my lips.

“It’s too . . . grizzly,” I told Stephen.

“But you didn’t try it. If you don’t eat this, there’s nothing but gefilte fish and chicken livers at home,” he joked, trying to lighten the mood by pointing out Allen’s strange eating habits. Stephen finished his reuben, but I left the chicken sandwich untouched.

As we walked to the car, two conflicting urges struck me: I needed either to break up with Stephen here and now or profess my love to him for the first time. It could go either way; both impulses were equally intense.

“Stephen, I really need to talk to you.” He looked at me oddly. I stammered, growing red before conjuring up the courage to speak, although I still didn’t know what was going to come out of my mouth. He too was half-expecting me to break up with him at that moment. “I just. I just. I really love you. I don’t know. I love you.”

Tenderly he grasped my hands in his own. “I love you, too. You just have to relax.” It was not how either of us had hoped this exchange would happen; it was not the kind of memory you recalled to your grandchildren, but there it was. We were in love.

Later that night, Stephen noticed that I had begun to steadily smack my lips together as if I was sucking on a candy. I licked my lips so often that my mom started to apply globs of Vaseline to keep them from cracking open and bleeding. Sometimes I would trail off midsentence, staring off into space for several minutes before continuing my conversation. During these moments, the paranoid aggression receded into a childlike state. These times
were the most unnerving for everyone, since I’d been pigheadedly self-sufficient, even as a toddler. We didn’t know it then, but these too were complex partials, the more subtle types of seizures that create those repetitive mouth movements and that foggy consciousness. I was getting worse by the day, by the hour even, but no one knew what to do.

At 3:38 a.m., on March 21, as Stephen snored away upstairs, I wrote again in my computer diary:

Okay there’s no place to start but you have to, ok? And don’t be all “wow I didn’t spell check this.”

I had the urge to baby stephen instead of allow him to baby me. I’ve been letting my parents baby me for too long.

you have a mothering instinct (you held him in your arms). you felt you have untangled your mind when you are around him. you found your phone and remembered.

talking to my father makes me feel more with it. my mom babies me way too much because she blames herself for the way I am. But she shouldn’t. She’s been a great mother. And she should know that.

who gives a shit what anyone things about me. I’m going to

Stephen: he keeps you sane. He’s also very smart. Don’t let how humble he is fool you, okay? You got this crossroads because of him and you should be forever grateful for that. So be kind to him.

Reading these entries now is like peering into a stranger’s stream of consciousness. I don’t recognize the person on the other end of the screen as me. Though she urgently attempts to communicate some deep, dark part of herself in her writing, she remains incomprehensible even to myself.

O
n Saturday morning, my mom tried to get me to return to Dr. Bailey’s for the EEG. I had had two identifiable seizures and had developed an increasing number of worrying symptoms in the past week alone, and my family needed answers.

“Absolutely not,” I grumbled, stamping my feet like a two-year-old. “I’m fine. I don’t need this.”

Allen walked outside to start the car as Stephen and my mother pleaded with me.

“Nope. Not going. Nope,” I replied.

“We have to go. Please, just come,” my mom said.

“Let me talk to her for a second,” Stephen said to my mom, leading me outside. “Your mom is only trying to help you, and you’re making her very upset. Will you please just come?”

I thought this over for a moment. I loved my mom. Fine. Yes. I would go. Then a moment later—No! I couldn’t possibly leave. After a half hour more of persuading, I finally got into the backseat of the car beside Stephen. As we drove out of our driveway and onto the street, Allen began to speak. I could hear him distinctly, though he wasn’t moving his lips.

You’re a slut. I think Stephen should know.

My whole body shook with anger, and I leaned threateningly toward the driver’s seat. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” Allen said, sounding both surprised and exhausted.

That was the last straw. Swiftly, I unbuckled my seat beat, yanked open the car door, and prepared to jump out of the car headfirst. Stephen grabbed the back of my shirt in mid-leap, saving me from launching myself out of the vehicle. Allen slammed on the brakes.

“Susannah, what the hell are you doing?” my mom screamed.

“Susannah,” Stephen said in a level tone, a timbre I had never before heard from him. “That is not okay.”

Obedient again, I closed the door and crossed my arms. But hearing the
click
of the child’s lock sent me into panic mode again. I flung myself against the locked door and screamed, “Let me out! Let me out!” over and over, until I was too exhausted to yell anymore, then rested my head against Stephen’s shoulder and momentarily nodded off.

When I opened my eyes again, we had exited the Holland Tunnel and were entering Chinatown, with its sidewalk fish, swarms of tourists, and fake designer bag salesmen. The whole sordid scene disgusted me.

“I want coffee. Get me coffee. Now. I’m hungry. Feed me,” I demanded, insufferably.

“Can’t you wait until we get uptown?” my mom asked.

“No. Now.” It suddenly seemed like the most important thing in the world.

Allen took a sharp turn, almost hitting a parked car, and took West Broadway to the Square Diner, one of the last authentic train car diners in New York City. Allen couldn’t figure out how to unlock the child’s lock, so I climbed over Stephen to get out of his door, hoping to disappear before any of them could catch up. Stephen suspected as much and followed me. Since I couldn’t get away, I sauntered into the diner in search of coffee and an egg sandwich. It was Sunday morning, so the line to eat was long, but I wouldn’t wait. I barbarously nudged an elderly lady out of my way and, spotting an open booth, sat down. I shouted obnoxiously to no one in particular, “I want coffee!”

Stephen took the seat opposite mine. “We can’t stay. Can’t you just get it to go?”

Ignoring him, I snapped my fingers, and the waitress arrived. “A coffee and egg sandwich.”

“To go,” Stephen added. He was mortified, rightly, by my behavior. I could be willful, but he had never seen me be rude.

Luckily the man behind the counter, who had been listening in
on the exchange, called out, “I’ve got it.” He turned his back to us and cooked the eggs. A minute later, he delivered a steaming cup of coffee and a cheese-covered egg sandwich in a brown paper bag. I swaggered out of the diner. The paper coffee cup was so hot that it burned my skin, but I didn’t care.
I made things happen. I was powerful. When I snapped my fingers, people jumped.
If I couldn’t understand what was making me feel this way, at least I could control the people around me. I threw the egg sandwich, uneaten, on the car floor.

“I thought you were hungry,” Stephen said.

“I’m not anymore.”

Mom and Allen exchanged glances in the front seat.

The traffic was light heading uptown, so we got to Dr. Bailey’s quickly. When I walked into the office, something felt different about the place, odd, alien. I felt like Gonzo walking into the casino after he had dropped mescaline in
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Nothing was as it seemed, and everything dripped with apocalyptic meaning. The other waiting patients were caricatures, subhuman; the glass window that separated the receptionist from us seemed utterly barbaric; the Miró was smiling down at me again with that twisted, unnatural grin. We waited. It could have been minutes or several hours, I have no idea. Time didn’t exist here. Eventually a middle-aged female technician called me into an examination room, wheeling in a cart behind her. She dug out a box full of electrodes and pasted all twenty-one of them, one by one, onto my scalp; first rubbing the dry skin, and then fixing them to my head with some kind of glue. She turned off the lights.

“Relax,” she said. “And keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them. Breathe deeply in and out. One complete breath for every two seconds.”

She counted for me, one, two, exhale; one, two, exhale; one, two, exhale. And then faster, one, exhale; one, exhale; one, exhale. It went on forever. My face flushed, and I started to get dizzy and lightheaded. I heard her fiddling around with something across the room so I opened my eyes enough to see her handling a small flashlight.

“Open your eyes and look directly into the light,” she said. It pulsated like a strobe, but with no apparent rhythm to its pattern. When she turned on the light to remove the electrodes, she began to speak to me.

“So are you a student?”

“No.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a reporter. I write for a newspaper.”

“Stressful, huh?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” she said, gathering the electrodes back into the box. “I’ve seen this dozens of times, mostly with bankers and Wall Street guys who come in here all stressed out. There’s nothing wrong with them; it’s all in their heads.”
It’s all in my head.
When she closed the door behind her, I smiled. That smile turned into a laugh, a belly laugh dripping with bitterness and resentment. It all made sense.
This was all a ruse, set up to punish me for my bad behavior and tell me that I’m suddenly cured. Why would they try to trick me? Why would they arrange something this elaborate? She wasn’t a nurse. She was a hired actor.

My mother was the only person left in the waiting room; Allen had left to get the car, and Stephen, overwhelmed by my harrowing behavior on the ride in, had called his mom for consolation and advice. I gave my mom a wide, toothy smile.

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh! You thought I wouldn’t figure it out. Where’s the mastermind?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You and Allen set this all up. You hired that woman. You hired everyone here. You told her what to say. You wanted to punish me. Well, it didn’t work. I’m too smart for your tricks.”

My mom’s mouth fell open in horror, but my paranoia read it as nothing more than mock-surprise.

T
he whole time I’d been in Summit, I had been begging to return to my Manhattan apartment. I felt constantly under surveillance by my family. So on Sunday, the day after my EEG, my mom, exhausted by the week of sleepless nights and constant monitoring, agreed, against her better judgment, to let me revisit my apartment under one condition: I spend the night at my father’s house. Though my behavior was worsening day by day, it was still difficult for her to reconcile the old image that she had of her daughter as trustworthy, hard working, and independent with the new, unpredictable, and dangerous one.

I quickly consented to spend the night with my father—I would have said anything to get back to my own studio. I felt calmer as soon as we arrived in Hell’s Kitchen, being so close to freedom again. As soon as we saw my father and Giselle waiting outside on the front stoop of my building, I bounded out of the car. My mom and Allen didn’t follow, but they did wait until the three of us were safely inside before driving away.

I was delighted to be back in my safe haven. Here was my cat, Dusty, a blue-haired stray who’d been tended by my friend Zach during my weeklong absence. I was even glad to see the unwashed clothes and black plastic bags filled with books and debris and the garbage overflowing with stale food. Home sweet home.

“What’s that smell?” my father asked. I hadn’t cleaned my apartment since the last time he came, and it had only gotten worse. Some of the leftover shrimp from the meal Stephen had cooked had spoiled in the garbage. Without hesitating, my father and Giselle began cleaning. They scrubbed the floors and disinfected
every inch of that small apartment, but I didn’t even offer to help. I just walked around them, watching them clean and pretending to gather my things.

“I’m so messy!” I said, stroking my cat triumphantly. “Messy, messy, messy!”

After they finished, my father motioned for me to follow him out of the apartment.