Claire's Head (25 page)

It was 2:35 by Claire's watch. “We have to run a little errand.” Brad nodded in Claire's direction. “I won't be late, but if I'm like five minutes, don't panic, I'll be back, okay?”

As soon as they were through Pure's doors, Claire turned to him.

“What did you find?” she asked.

“Wait.” When he pressed the elevator button, the doors sprang open and they stepped inside.

“You were in Rachel's apartment.” The elevator sucked them towards the ground.

“In her postcard she asked me to check up on things and so I went over last night to take a look around.” Disgorged into the lobby, they came face to face with a herd of bicycle couriers, all wearing helmets and ready to surge.

Out in the street, the air was hotter than ever. Brad waved his arm and dragged Claire towards a cab pulled up half a block away.

“Where are we going?” she asked breathlessly.

“Back to my place.”

In the cab, an automated voice asked her to fasten her seat belt, so she did. (South on Broadway to Spring, east on Spring, north on Lafayette.) Brad swigged from his carton of soy milk. Finished, he squashed the carton flat and wiped his mouth with his fist, then his hand across his forehead, beginning to flush from the heat (the cab wasn't air-conditioned). So what was the story, she was just back from Europe? Had Rachel ever told him about Ariel, Claire asked. She hadn't. So Claire did.

The gunmetal grey door to Brad's building on East 12th Street was more modest than Rachel's, only a single step leading
up to it from the sidewalk, the vestibule dark and cramped, wire mesh over the small, square window. Despite their rush, Brad stopped, as if it were a reflex, to check for mail, pulling a key from the clump on a chain attached to his belt loop. In contrast, the door to his apartment, three floors up and at the back, was painted glossy scarlet, its interior once again nothing Claire would have predicted, so white, so spartan in its furnishings (despite the used cartons of soy milk on the counter and the clothes strewn on the floor) as to appear almost monkish. In the middle of the kitchen, through which they entered, a metal office desk was in use as a table, two small wooden chairs to either side of it. On the table, in a large bag of thick, clear plastic with the words United States Postal Service embossed repeatedly in blue, was the postcard. Brad handed it to Claire. Inside the bag, the card was ripped almost in half. It looked like a piece of forensic evidence. On the front: the photograph of a hotel at night, a flourish, now bisected, of floral neon. The Fla mingo. On the back, Rachel's writing, or an eerily good facsimile of it.

Dear Brad, It was very bad of me to leave like that. In a bad way. No excuse. Strange place, isn't it? Everything you said and more. Desert's a balm. Would you mind keeping an eye on the apartment for a while? love, R
.

The diction was a bit odd but credibly like Rachel.
A while
. She had not, but this was typical of Rachel, dated the card.

“When did it arrive?” Even the plastic felt hot, steamy in Claire's hands. Rachel's words – so much left out of them.

“What's today? Tuesday, yesterday. I called you guys as soon as I got it. I can't tell when it was sent, though. Look.” He pointed. The postmark was smudged and the rip went through the middle of it. “What do you think?”

Claire peered “April? May?” Definitely not JUN or JUL. “The fifteenth or the sixteenth.”

“I think it took so long because it got ripped. It probably sat in some vault of lost postcards for a couple of months. Anyway, I went back to the apartment last night.” He was walking away from her as he spoke, to the left, stepping over a pair of jeans and into the small room that she surmised was his bedroom, since, in addition to bare walls, a corner of mattress was visible through the doorway. (On the far side of the other room, to the right of the kitchen, the white drapes were drawn, and the wooden frame of a massage table projected into the doorway, a bundle of sheets at its feet.) “Just to check on things. And I found this.” He reappeared, holding out a notebook. “You didn't know this was there, did you?” Claire shook her head. She took the notebook, a blue Hilroy two-hundred-page 5 × 8 inch spiral-bound pad, and flipped through its pages. A diary of some sort. The notebook had been mostly but not entirely filled. The entries broke off in February, it appeared, although not all the entries, especially the final ones, were dated. All those that Claire glanced at seemed to be about pain.

“Where did you find this?” she asked dizzily.

“Underneath the mattress. Between the mattress and the box spring. Slipped right into the middle.” She hadn't looked there. She'd slept on the bed and hadn't felt a thing.

“You were going through stuff in her apartment?”

“Only a little.”

Had Rachel abandoned the notebook or hidden it? Between mattress and box spring seemed an odd place to abandon anything. If she had hidden it, had she done so trusting that no one
would find it or in the hope that someone would? Perhaps Brad, in the past, had seen her tuck it there. Whether or not Rachel had wanted someone to find the diary, she must have realized there was a chance that someone would stumble upon it – that, after a while, they were going to make an effort to look for her.

“Did you read it?”

He nodded. “I thought – I thought maybe there was something in there that would, you know, help.”

“And?”

“Well, I worry about her. I worry about her more now than before. I know she lives close to the edge but, Claire –” He glanced at her – “have you ever worried if the pain got bad enough she would do real damage to herself? She's tough, on the whole, there's that, but there's the headaches, and her kid.” His gaze shifted to the clock above the stove. “I've got to go. I'm sorry. I can't –” He shrugged helplessly. “As soon as I'm through, I'll meet you at Rachel's. Take the notebook. Read it and tell me what you think.”

Aug 15

Keep a record of them, Dr. D. says. A diary. Look for patterns. Any pattern. Keep track of everything you eat, any unusual environments, stresses. I feel like the frog in the pot of water beginning to boil who doesn't know what awaits it but unlike the frog, I'm aware that things didn't use to be like this. I can look back ten or eleven years and although I suffered terrible migraines then, I also know I went out to clubs. I hung out, danced. People smoked. I smoked. I spent hours in bars and didn't think about it. I couldn't have been in constant pain. I couldn't do this now. I remember one night sitting on a bench near the edge of Tompkins Square with Lorrie G., both of us in our little black leather jackets, sharing a flask of brandy (M. must have been away or didn't want to come out) and getting happily drunk. If there was a headache, it came later, and if anything came that night, it must have been something I could toss some codeine at and go on.

Aug 16

2.2 BPS. Right side. Z + Tyl 3 (3 a.m.)

I took a lot pills, it's true. More than now? Possibly. I used pills to help me forget the pain, shut it off, so I could go on functioning normally, as if everything were fine. The illusion was that they dissolved the pain but probably they just covered it up. Drugs repress a pain that doesn't want to be repressed.

2.1 Right side. Z + Tyl 3. (10 a.m.)

Aug 18

How were things when I was with M.? Before we lived together, I hid things pretty well. Often in the morning, when I got up there would be something so I would down a couple of codeine (222s smuggled from Canada) and eat some breakfast and have a cup of coffee and sometimes the coffee and codeine would act together and I would be fine and sometimes I wouldn't. M. had lost his father when he was fourteen. A heart attack. I wonder if I needed to feel he had access to some sort of pain to feel attraction (I wonder this now, don't think I wondered then). I remember wanting to seem fearless. I did not want to be the kind of woman who uses pain as an excuse for not doing things. M. used to make fun of what he called an organ recital: old ladies (anyone) sitting around rehearsing their health problems. So, on the whole, I shut up and kept things to myself. And yet he was not unsympathetic. I think he felt his own presence ought to be curative and it was a peculiar kind of insult (he would never have said or even thought this explicitly) when it wasn't.

The first time we met, I felt nothing much. The second time, my heart dropped to my knees. We were at that gallery opening arguing about minimal consciousness, can a rock be said to experience any form of consciousness, if not a rock then a plant, if not a plant then what. His brother was a philosophy professor who studied this. What are the conditions of minimal consciousness? I argued for plants, that minimal consciousness must include some awareness of pain, and the awareness of pain requires consciousness and plants (unlike a rock) are, in some rudimentary way, aware of pain. He started defending rocks. Something about his laugh reminded me of Dad (Of course D was still alive then)
– this shook me. If I had a headache that night, I was able to act as if I didn't. He sang. He was taking singing lessons. What son of an Irishman needs singing lessons, he said. He sang Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah.” Because I was Canadian. I have never felt so overtaken by longing as when he walked from one room of my apartment into the other singing in the dark.

If I think back to the headaches then, I was aware there had to be triggers but I didn't know what they were. Sometimes it seemed to be one thing, sometimes another. So I ended up careening about. Anything that seemed to help once – a glass of orange juice, a bottle of Coke – had an almost mystical power. There's a lot of frustration, the sense that you never know how much time you'll have before it begins again. I read with a kind of fury because I never knew how long I had – that probably induced a tension that made everything worse.

Migraines, says Dr. S., are more overdetermined than dreams.

Sept 21

Today, nothing. Finally. How long will it last? Last week, four days at 2.75 (Barber Pain Scale). (M, T, W, Th) Drugs? (Z + Tyl 3 × 5)

I was trying to finish a piece, past deadline. On how we appear to do, believe we're doing two things at once but on a neurological level, we can't, we switch between them. Only my own crazy brain kept interfering. I'd medicate every four or five hours, but I couldn't get the migraine to cut out, and I had to
keep working because they were holding space for me. So sleepy and nauseated, every relevant thought just out of reach, but I had to keep going. I got to the end. Then their e-mail system shuts down or something goes wrong and no matter how many times I send the piece, F. H. doesn't receive it. I don't have a fax machine. I did but it broke. They could have sent a courier but there was worry that the courier wouldn't complete the delivery before the end of the afternoon, and the fact is, I was late and F. was getting pissed off. So I told her I'd bring it in. It's just a subway, a taxi ride uptown and back. I took some Dramamine. If the cab driver or receptionist stared at me strangely I didn't notice. F. doesn't just stare, she asks me if I'm okay in such a way that it's clear something is not okay. At first I think I've slipped professionally. Also, I figure I am nearly green. I touch my hair and scan my clothes but everything seems buttoned right. I tell her I'm fine, just a little tired. This response does not seem to satisfy her. Before leaving the office, I ask for the key to the women's room and check myself out in the mirror. All afternoon, I'd been rubbing the place where the pain was concentrated. I'd rubbed the skin right off. There was a raw, bloody spot in the middle of my forehead.

Nov 2

Woke in night, 3 a.m. After dinner party. 2.25. Z + Tyl 3. Hate explaining to people I barely know why I won't eat something or don't drink. Most people assume you're on a diet or intuit a note of moral superiority. “Don't you have any vices?” a man asked last night.

And then begins a strange, collective, nearly tribal effort to break you down.

Enemas. No vices I will admit to. Okay, it was a wickedly fine Amarone so I broke down, half an inch, that was all it took, half an inch.

Nov 7

Okay today. After that bad day in September, I bought myself a pair of tinted glasses, rose-coloured, since this particular tint is supposed to reduce visually provoked activity in the brain (from fluorescent lights, etc.). Have been wearing them. B. makes no stupid jokes. I did. Yet there's something soothing about the tint, taxis turn to pumpkin, and in no time you forget there ever existed any other colour field. Some days I leave them on until bedtime. Taking them off is a neurological jolt in its own right. Forgot them in a cab today. Trying to decide whether to replace them. Not sure if they work, if they really help, or if I just like them.

Fact o' the Day

Dr. Albert Hofmann was working in his lab in 1943 on the ergot fungus, searching for a more effective treatment for migraine, when he first synthesized
LSD
. No migraine, no
LSD
. Dr. Hofmann called
LSD
his problem child, but migraine's mine.

Nov 8

Tension/tension-type headache; chronic daily (mixed, combination headache, transformed migraine, transformational migraine,
rebound headache); analgesic-induced; cluster; chronic paroxysmal; hemicrania; hemicrania continua; post-traumatic; sinus headache; allergic; eyestrain h'ache; benign exertional; wind in your face h'ache; sex h'ache; ice-cream h'ache; idiopathic stabbing (formerly ice-pick pains); hangover; substance-abuse h'ache;
Lupus h'ache
: benign cough, external compression h'ache; life-threatening h'ache; fever h'ache; headache caused by malformation of blood vessels; headache caused by lesions; migraine [migraine without aura; migraine with aura (migraine with typical aura; migraine with prolonged aura; familial hemiplegic migraine; basilar migraine; migraine aura without headache; migraine with acute onset of aura); ophthalmoplegic migraine; retinal migraine; childhood periodic syndromes that may be precursors or associated with migraine (benign paroxysmal vertigo of childhood; alternating hemiplegia of childhood); complications of migraine (status migrainosus; migrainous infarction); migraine disorder (migraines not fulfilling the above criteria)]. Okay, that's enough. This was supposed to be for comfort, i.e., thank God, I don't have all of these.