The Faraway Nearby (11 page)

The tiles were a companionable series of stories for patients, a reminder that they were not alone in that space where people rarely dared to inquire about anyone else's odyssey. I had known for many years about those tiles in the lobby near the garden she also revamped, because you passed them en route to various other departments, and when I became an oncology patient I discovered another wall of them in shades of green at the far end of the waiting room in which I was going to spend so much time that season. Some of them endeavored to be uplifting. Others were unhappy, grisly, or frightened. There were stark words of witness and haikus and expressions of gratitude and fury in among the images of leaves and stalks and flowers that were actually indentations, depressions, absences, the traces the plants had left behind.

Others' woes can be used as reproaches and sometimes are: how dare you think about your own private suffering when wars are raging and children are being bombed? There is always someone whose suffering is greater than yours. The reproaches are often framed as though there is an economy of suffering, and of compassion, and you should measure yourself, price yourself, with the same sense of scarcity and finite resources that govern monetary economies, but there is no measure of either. In high doses suffering is boundless and incomparable and overwhelming. Though sometimes paying attention to others gives you perspective, and in suffering similar to your own you might find encouragement in knowing that you're not alone.

It was that loneliness that Ann's wall of tiles sought to mitigate, and mitigates still. More than two hundred thousand women a year are diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States alone; about half a million children are born prematurely in this country every year; more than five million Americans now have Alzheimer's disease; about forty-four thousand are diagnosed with some form of leukemia annually. There are armies, legions, empires of the ill, the frail, the failing; it is the dark side of the moon we call being human.

Illness mitigates solitude in another way in that it attacks any notion that you are separate, autonomous, and independent. You require bone marrow or blood from another; the care of experts and of the people who love you. You are made ill by a mosquito or a virus or an unknown environmental toxin or by an aberrant gene you inherited or some exciting combination of these things. You cannot ignore that you are biological, mortal, and interdependent.

When you are well, your own body is a sealed country into which you need not explore far, but when you are unwell, there is no denying that you are made up of organs and fluids and chemistry and that the mechanisms by which your body operates are not invincible. You may have pains in places where the healthy person feels nothing, you may when injured see your own bones, or see X-rays and be reminded of death's skeleton under the flesh of life, you may be invaded, have parts of yourself removed, or tubes, shunts, devices, plates, and more added, your chemistry and hormones may be tinkered with, drugs administered. The system has been opened up and so has your awareness of it.

Ann continued making art as she went deeper and deeper into the country of illness for the last time. She made a series of drawings of lines across sheets of grid paper, and because her hand shook, the drawings became registers of tremors, like the lines traced by seismographs recording earthquakes, like the lines shown by medical monitoring equipment. An unsteady hand is usually considered to mean that you can't draw, but she made the shaking into a means of recording the little earthquakes of her being and an assertion that life and art would go on for a while anyway. And they did, trembling.

With the help of her assistant and her sister, she then made a final masterpiece, a vast wall map of white plaster topographical reliefs of islands. Each island was connected by fine red string reaching out to the other islands, like flight routes for planes or birds or neural pathways or blood vessels. Or conversations, affections, alignments. I think of that piece as an elegant assertion that everything is connected. Each of us is an island of sensations confined to the realm beneath our skin, but a great deal of migration and importing and exporting connects most of the islands to each other. It does if you can locate yourself in an archipelago or trace the lines to where they reach others and the lines whereby others touch you.

•   •   •

The night before surgery Sam and Kat took me out to dinner and then Kat went to rehearsal and Sam and I went to Ocean Beach late at night. On the firm wet sand at low tide your footprints register clearly before the waves come and devour all trace of passage. I like to see the long line we each leave behind, and I sometimes imagine my whole life that way, as though each step was a stitch, as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, crisscrossing others' paths, quilting it all together in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced. A meandering line sutures together the world in some new way, as though walking was sewing and sewing was telling a story and that story was your life.

A thread now most often means a line of conversation via e-mail or other electronic means, but thread must have been an even more compelling metaphor when most people witnessed or did the women's work that is spinning. It is a mesmerizing art, the spindle revolving below the strong thread that the fingers twist out of the mass of fiber held on an arm or a distaff. The gesture turns the cloudy mass of fiber into lines with which the world can be tied together. Likewise the spinning wheel turns, cyclical time revolving to draw out the linear time of a thread. The verb
to spin
first meant just this act of making, then evolved to mean anything turning rapidly, and then it came to mean telling a tale.

Strands a few inches long twine together into a thread or yarn that can go forever, like words becoming stories. The fairy-tale heroines spin cobwebs, straw, nettles into whatever is necessary to survive. Scheherazade forestalls her death by telling a story that is like a thread that cannot be cut; she keeps spinning and spinning, incorporating new fragments, characters, incidents, into her unbroken, unbreakable narrative thread. Penelope at the other end of the treasury of stories prevents her wedding to any one of her suitors by unweaving at night what she weaves by day on her father-in-law's funeral garment. By spinning, weaving, and unraveling, these women master time itself, and though
master
is a masculine word, this mastery is feminine.

Women were spinsters before the word became pejorative, when distaff meant the female side of the family. In Greek mythology, each human life is a thread that the three Moirae, or Fates, spin, measure, and cut. With Rumpelstilskin's help, the unnamed fairy-tale heroine spins straw into gold, but the wonder is that every spinner takes the amorphous mass before her and makes a thread appear, from which comes the stuff that contains the world, from a fishing net to a nightgown. She makes form out of formlessness, continuity out of fragments, narrative and meaning out of scattered incidents, for the storyteller is also a spinner or weaver and a story is a thread that meanders through our lives to connect us each to each and to the purpose and meaning that appear like roads we must travel. As we did on that midnight walk on the beach, trailing footprints behind like stitches.

“The ‘I' is a needle some find useful, though/the thread, of course, is shadow,” writes Brenda Hillman in her poem “String Theory Sutra.” The English and Latin word
suture
has the same root as Sanskrit
sutra
or Pali
sutta
. They both have to do with sewing. The sutras, the most sacred texts of Buddhism, were named for the fact that they were originally sewn. The flat blades of palm leaves were strung together by two lines of thread that tied together the stiff, narrow pages like accordion blinds. The books were copied by hand over and over again in that climate of decay. Thus leaf became book, and knowledge was held together and transmitted in a thread, a line, a lineage.

The term
sutra,
as in the Platform Sutra, the Heart Sutra, or the Lotus Sutra, generally means a teaching by the Buddha himself or one close to him, as distinguished from the scholarly and philosophical texts that piled up afterward. The word is said to have arisen from the actual sewing or binding of these old palm-leaf books, but it must have had some more metaphorical sense, as though the sutras' words and meanings run throughout all things and bind them together, as though the threads are paths you can follow and veins through which life flows.

When you take the precepts or are ordained in the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, you are given a piece of paper on which is written the lineage to which your name has just been added. Written and drawn, since the names are inscribed on a long red line that loops back and forth so that so much lineage can fit on a single large sheet. It's a kind of family tree that traces the teachings from student to teacher and to the teacher's teacher and beyond, following the Japanese Soto Zen masters back to Dogen, who brought Soto Zen from China in the thirteenth century, and tracing the Chinese ancestry back to the first Chinese ancestor, Bodhidharma in the fifth century, and then through the Indian teachers back to the Buddha himself (though some older parts of it must be mythological).

It's called the blood lineage, as though you had been sutured to a new family whose ties are as strong and red as blood, been sewn into a new set of associations, or given a transfusion. Or become the newest page of a book that continues to be written, or sewn. It's a way of saying that Buddhism is nothing more and nothing less than a conversation that has gone on from generation to generation, not by palm leaves but face-to-face, a thread of ideas and efforts unbroken over 2,500 years. It makes the recipient of the blood lineage only the latest stitch as the flashing needle keeps working its way through the fabric of this existence.

And I, if sutures are sutras, what was I going to be stitched to? I got up before dawn that morning to wash myself in the harsh disinfectant they'd given me, and another friend took me to the early morning appointment. I changed into the ugliest hospital gown I'd seen yet, a billowing sack with snaps all along the top and two clashing patterns in green and brown, put on the blue cap that covered my hair, and the white support hose meant to prevent blood clots during the long stillness of surgery. Then the anesthesiologists came in to see me.

I had been well prepared for surgery but little had been said about the other procedure I was to undergo, the instigation of numbness, stillness, amnesia, and oblivion by drugs injected and then inhaled through a tube put down my throat and a mask over my face after the intravenous ones had taken effect. The doctor or medical student slipped a curved needle into a vein in the crook of my left elbow, and the drugs began to do their work. The drugs they give you induce a retrograde amnesia, so I must have been conscious for a little while after that, but those minutes were erased from the record and the next few hours too.

Happily erased, since what must have transpired would be horrifying to witness and excruciating to feel. Before anesthesia, major surgery was unbearable. The effects of agony made it a last resort, not a routine procedure, and speed was a surgeon's chief virtue. Ether and other early anesthesias appeared as miraculous solutions to the problem of pain in surgery, though they exacted their own toll. Administered incorrectly they were fatal. The drugs and techniques have since been refined, but there are still consequences and aftereffects that can linger for months, and occasional permanent damage.

The anesthesiologist sits at the head of the patient during surgery like the host at a table. While the surgeons' job is to change, the anesthesiologist's is to maintain, to monitor and manage heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, all of which he or she can control with the mix and rate of drugs, bringing consciousness down like a banked fire and then withdrawing the restraints as surgery finishes and allowing consciousness and the body's own regulatory processes to return. I felt that interruption for a long time afterward, as though I had lost the beats of the music, the steps of the dance, and was stumblingly trying to recapture them, these rhythms that were my own metabolism.

There was a continuity that was my breath since birth, and the anesthesiologist cut that, tied a knot in it, put me on monitors and respirators, then started a new thread, and while I was stopped, the continuity that was my skin was cut, and I was altered, and then sewn shut with thread and knots. There are a thousand stories in which someone falls asleep or wanders off to fairyland and comes back unchanged to find that years, decades, centuries have passed, but surgical anesthesia is the opposite adventure: you go to sleep for what seems a moment, and when you wake up everything is the same except yourself. You have been severed from who you were when you went in and stitched to another destiny and body, saved or maimed or both.

Five hours or so after I'd gone under, I regained consciousness in the recovery room, or that's where my memory returned. I must have wanted to believe that I was not affected, because I had a brief phase of overcompensatory brightness, when I tried to entertain my Czech nurse and somehow aired the only phrase in that language I know,
Nic netra vecne,
a phrase I learned when it was scrawled on a bust of Stalin paraded through the streets as that country liberated itself from the Soviet bloc in 1989.
Nic netra vecne:
nothing lasts forever. The nurse corrected my pronunciation and ignored my vital signs. The phase in which I reached for some interview transcripts and notes as though I would resume working right away faded and I settled in to being exhausted. I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.

People who loved me were there to greet me, and so were huge bouquets of flowers. When they had left to let me rest, I realized I couldn't get out of bed. My left arm had the long curving needle in it, so I couldn't bend or flex it to lift myself up; my right side and arm were injured and tender; and a muscle that ran down my torso had somehow been tweaked, so that it hurt and I could not use my abdominal muscles to sit up as I usually did. Dusk came as I was immobilized in the room with the masses of flowers, without a call button or lights. I tried shouting for help to see what happened. Nothing did. Darkness fell.