Yesterday, Today & Also, Tomorrow (an excerpt)

In 1688, Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer identified a new disease that had become an epidemic throughout Europe. The disease was a mania of longing, an illness pregnant with the need to return home. 

Symptoms included: 
Nausea
Loss of appetite 
Brain inflammation 
Cardiac arrests 
High fever 
Maramus (a severe protein-energy malnutrition characterized by energy deficiency) 
Suicidal tendencies 
Pathological changes in the lungs

“One of the earliest symptoms,” wrote the Swiss doctor Albert von Haller, “ is the sensation of hearing the voice of a person that one loves in the voice of another with whom one is conversing or to see one’s family again in dreams.”


My mother died on a Tuesday in spring, just as the forsythia’s began to bloom and the world ached to be lush again. She had been struggling with lung cancer for exactly one year, April to April; the diagnosis swept in and then swept out her life in the same transitional breeze. I knew the end was coming but refused to look, like when the crispness of fall disappears and winter blows in; I closed the shades and tried to ignore the spin of the planet.

This past May I met with a friend for coffee. We walked along the East River and, as flecks of condensation formed around the waxy lip of my cup, David told me he could no longer remember the sound of his mother’s voice. This is something I could never forget, my mother’s voice when I was young and curled up into the soft space along her belly, hearing her voice transform into a midnight croon. That sound, right before you fall asleep, that’s like hearing things underwater or from inside the womb. Or when I was older, and she would call me by my first and middle name when I was being fresh. Or just simply “My love” whenever she pleased. I can still hear it today, in the voice a friend or a stranger, in an inflection, in a face distorted by the glow of the sun; they make my throat rise and burn. These apparitions, shimmers of nostalgia and longing, do create a pathological change in the lungs.

_ 

Cures: 

Leeches 

Warm hypnotic emulsions 

Opium Purging 

Returning home 

We drive through the Pennsylvania countryside at the beginning of a change. In front of us is a spread of freshly turned trees still clinging, with little hope, to their greens. When I look at the trees I smile and think, “You can’t stop them from dying when the red begins to run.” When I look at the driver, he smiles. I think, “I’ll miss all of this when it’s gone.” A boombox on the dashboard slips around with the rhythm of the highway, falling into my lap once or twice, and someone from inside it sings along with us. There are also cow bones on the dashboard: a row of teeth, a joint, a shoulder blade perhaps. The teeth are unlike ours. They are attached to a curved jawbone that looks like a permanent arc of a smile, or a frown; it depends on where you are in the van.

_

Nostalgia was once considered a disease that needed to be cured, a hypochondria of the heart. During the French Revolution, doctors believed nostalgia could only be cured by terror. They based this on the Russians treatment of nostalgia by the Russian army in 1733 as it ventured into Germany. The General threatened, “the first to fall sick will be buried alive.” All complaints of nostalgia ceased. 


We go to therapy to get inside our own heads. We are paying someone to lead us to answers we already possess; we have the doors, but we need the keys. My therapist tells me that sometimes the things I say are very sad, but I think they sound just fine. When I tell her I’m in love, but can’t stop thinking about the things I will miss when it’s gone, she tells me I’ve one upped myself. I laugh at this, and then I laugh again when I say I hate these things about myself. She asks me why I do this, why I laugh at painful things, and I tell her it’s because I’m nervous. So, when I tell her I can’t stand the thought of losing someone else, I smile. When she points it out, I say it could also be a frown, depending on where you are in the universe.

HER HOME

The exterior is completely the same.

Picture this: Purple crocuses with open mouths spewing yellow stamens, huddled close and side-by-side, grow in front of bushels of evergreen shrubs. They have grown in the finely manicured front yard since I can remember, pushing their way into the soil like thumbtacks to protect the ground from the effects of gravity. The front walk leading up to the purple guardians looks like the aftermath of a quake. Bricks that read "Hanson," "Potomac," and "Lifetime" awkwardly bubble from the ground, trying to fit in, trying to find a comfortable space amidst the chaos of weeds and roots. The walk leads to the door, accompanied by the weathered gold address of 254 hanging diagonally on the rainbow of brown bricks covering the front of the house (the 4 is uneven, always has been, always will be). On one of the bricks, in between the front door and the gold letters, is a thin-lined wavering heart, scratched in with a safety pin years ago.

The interior is nothing like I remember.

My childhood bedroom, up until I was thirteen, was on the first floor of the house and regretfully located between my parent's room and the bathroom. It was painted a pink antacid and adorning the walls were plastic balloons forever suspended in artificial flight. Against the back wall towered a wooden canopied crib, in which I slept for longer than I’d like to admit. I had an issue with falling, with waking up on the hard wood floor; my hands were always tucked under my chin as I lay curled and bruised. In the mornings I found my toes stretched out from in between the bars at the foot of the bed. I would often wake to a Schnauzer licking each toe as if they were ice pops melting in the summer sun, his tongue working furiously as if they would soon disappear. Or my father’s thick fingers, like scarred breakfast sausages, tickling each toe mercilessly. Or, I would wake to a debilitating cramp.

And every morning I would have to climb out of the crib. On my better, more adventurous mornings, I would pretend as if I were an escapee bound for freedom. Sometimes I had to flee the grips of a snarling witch; other times a prison guard, and once even an unwanted lover. I would grip the bars and exclaim, “Somehow, someway, I will leave this place forever!” or “You’ll never get away with this!” or, to prince charming on the other side of the bars, “Please wait for me!” (And he always did). On my more irritable mornings I would shove my chubby legs in through the bars and cry out for help, pretending I was stuck, vying for attention. The Schnauzer, Barney, would scamper in and gently set his wet mouth down on my foot, his yellow teeth softly gnawing on skin and bone. A love bite. Apparently, I wasn't yelling loud enough (something’s are always far away).

Eventually, the canopied crib was replaced with a day bed: white flowered tubing with pink and blue painted flowers hugging a single mattress. It was here I would discover what a self-induced orgasm was at the age of six years old; I thought I was a genius. Here my mother would walk in on me masturbating to a cassette tape of janet. by Janet Jackson ("Throb," track 10) with my pale pink ballet stockings around my knees. Here I would write numerous notes to my parents in the event that I should unexpectedly die in the middle of the night. "I'm Sorry Mom, I'm Sorry Dad," they would read. Here I would pull a pillow down on my face until I came up for air choking. And here I would take out my self hate on a blue stuffed bear by punching him in the stomach repeatedly because he would never be as good as the pink stuffed bear. Never.

(The room has been torn down and joined in lavatory matrimony with the adjacent bathroom to create a larger space to shit, piss, whatever. My father’s new throne.)

When I turned thirteen, the last of my two brothers had moved out and I was given his bedroom on the second floor. Large and baby blue with nooks and spotlights, I decorated it with lyrics written in Sharpie marker on the wall. The black ink read, “Is it wrong to wish on space hardware? I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care,” or “My cunt is built like a wound that won’t heal.” There was an L-shaped desk with filing cabinets and a typewriter on the surface. In the corner lay a box spring and a mattress (I still only sleep on a mattress on the ground) covered in green sheets and a husband pillow while sheer tapestries of bright green and venetian red billowed from the ceiling above like lime cherry clouds floating over me while I dreamed. It was in this room I lost my virginity, a clumsy five minutes of figuring out the simultaneous motions of two bodies. It was here an ex-lover tried to kill himself with a pair of black fabric scissors, spitting and crying as I bear hugged him to the ground from behind. It was here I truly fell in love for the first time, seven years ago, and still haven’t completely fallen out of it. And now it is here that I dread. It's the one room that hasn't been renovated. The walls still have the lyrics, the desk still has the typewritten pages, but the room itself is now used for storage: boxes of faded photographs, a plastic Christmas tree, birthday cards and elementary school paintings, my father’s endless towers of coins. Some things will never, ever change.

* * *

Here is something: I visit with my father recently, absorbing the changes I dread and the changes I pray for. I don’t go upstairs; it’s only filled with terrible specters of the past looking to squat my brain. I piss in a spot where I once used to sleep and I move like a praying mantis through the unrecognizable. As I am about to leave, my father tells me a story (he’s good at that). There’s a young priest, an old friend of my brother, who has a twin brother, although I am unsure who is who. He probably feels the same way about me, although I am just one. The priest calls my brother, after not seeing him for a few years, and asks if my father is having construction done on the house. The priest had a dream, like we all do, except he remembers his: my mother, in all her ghostly lucidity, came to him and told him to tell my father she really likes the changes being done on her home.

THE SYNDROME

The air tastes like cutlery and salt. It lay smooth and cold on a furry white tongue that he runs over rows of cluttered teeth. His mouth is a crowded room, a subway car during rush hour, a deadline. He presses the third floor buzzer and then slips his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt to hold them there and feel the beads of pulled material accumulating; the wear and tear of every day that sneaks by. Everyday that is exactly the same as the last. When he breathes out, he breathes out smoke. When he breathes in, he breathes in savory metal. He runs one hand over the back of his neck as the door opens and the warmth inside hits him like an air bag.

* * *

The window in her bedroom is open, even though there is frost crystallized like cracked glass on the window. She lay belly down on her bed, a mattress in a corner, reading from a book that she’s been trying to finish for months. She places the book on the ground, lays her head across her forearms, and begins to mentally play out a conversation she would like to have. Before she gets to the crux of the internal dialogue, a cool stream of wind whistles down her spine and the apartment buzzer sounds. She flies off the bed to answer the door, but stops cold as she glimpses a shadow escape through the window. A shadow so palpable she could have run the back her hand along its cheek, licked its teeth, pricked the bottom of its foot with a needle and sewed it back to a body before it could fly out into the piercing dusk.