I didn’t understand how Davis could like her. She was horrible—totally self-centered and perpetually annoying. At one party scene, Rey observed, “Of course, when Ayala’s around, it’s never really a party, because at parties, people have fun.”
Eventually, I clicked away from the site, but I couldn’t bring myself to put away the computer and go to sleep. Instead, I ended up on Wikipedia, reading about fan fiction and Star Wars, and then I found myself reading the same old articles about the human microbiota and studies of how people’s microbial makeup had shaped and, in some cases, killed them.
At one point, I came across this sentence: “Mammal brains receive a constant stream of interoceptive input from the GI tract, which combines with other interoceptive information from within the body and contextual information from the environment before sending an integrated response to target cells within the GI tract through what is commonly called the ‘gut-brain informational axis’ but might be better described as the ‘gut-brain informational cycle.’”
I realize that’s not the sort of sentence that fills most people with horror, but it stopped me cold. It was saying that my bacteria were affecting my thinking—maybe not directly, but through the information they told my gut to send to my brain. Maybe you’re not even thinking this thought. Maybe your thinking’s infected. Shouldn’t’ve been reading these articles. Should’ve gone to sleep. Too late now.
I checked the light under the door to make sure Mom had gone to sleep and then snuck over to the bathroom. I changed the Band-Aid, looking carefully at the old one. There was blood. Not a lot, but blood. Faintly pink. It isn’t infected. It bleeds because it hasn’t scabbed over. But it could be. It isn’t. Are you sure? Did you even clean it this morning? Probably. I always clean it. Are you sure? Oh, for fuck’s sake.
I washed my hands, put on a new Band-Aid, but now I was being pulled all the way down. I opened the medicine cabinet quietly. Took out the aloe-scented hand sanitizer. I took a gulp, then another. Felt dizzy. You can’t do this. This shit’s pure alcohol. It’ll make you sick. Better do it again. Poured some more of it on my tongue. That’s enough. You’ll be clean after this. Just get one last swallow down. I did. Heard my gut rumbling. Stomach hurt.
Sometimes you clear out the healthy bacteria and that’s when C. diff comes in. You gotta watch out for that. Great, you tell me to drink it, then tell me not to.
Back in my room, sweating over the covers, body clammy, corpse-like. Can’t get my head straight. Drinking hand sanitizer is not going to make you healthier, you crazy fuck. But they can talk to your brain. THEY can tell your brain what to think, and you can’t. So, who’s running the show? Stop it, please.
I tried not to think the thought, but like a dog on a leash I could only get so far from it before I felt the strangling pull against my throat. My stomach rumbled.
Nothing worked. Even giving in to the thought had only provided a moment’s release. I returned to a question Dr. Singh had first asked me years ago, the first time it got this bad: Do you feel like you’re a threat to yourself? But which is the threat and which is the self? I wasn’t not a threat, but couldn’t say to whom or what, the pronouns and objects of the sentence muddied by the abstraction of it all, the words sucked into the non-lingual way down. You’re a we. You’re a you. You’re a she, an it, a they. My kingdom for an I.
Felt myself slipping, but even that’s a metaphor. Descending, but that is, too. Can’t describe the feeling itself except to say that I’m not me. Forged in the smithy of someone else’s soul. Please just let me out. Whoever is authoring me, let me up out of this. Anything to be out of this.
But I couldn’t get out.
Three flakes, then four arrive.
Then many more.
EIGHTEEN
MOM WOKE ME UP AT 6:50. “Sleep through your alarm?” she asked.
I squinted. It was still dark in my room. “I’m fine,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” I said, and pulled myself out of bed.
I was at school just thirty-two minutes later. I didn’t look my best, but I’d long ago given up trying to impress the student body of White River High School.
Daisy was sitting alone on the front steps. “You look sleepy,” she said as I walked up. It was cloudy, the kind of day where the sun is a supposition.
“Long night. How are you?”
“Great, except I haven’t seen nearly enough of my best friend lately. You want to hang out later? Applebee’s?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Also, my mom had to borrow my car, so can we just go together?”
—
I made it through lunch, through the standard post-lunch encounter with Mom worrying over my “tired eyes,” through history and statistics. In each room the soul-sucking fluorescent light coated everything in a film of sickness, and the day droned on until the final bell released me at last. I made it to Harold, sat down in the driver’s seat, and waited for Daisy.
I hadn’t been sleeping much. Hadn’t been thinking straight. That sanitizer is basically pure alcohol; you can’t keep drinking that. Should probably call Dr. Singh, but then you’ll have to talk to her answering service and tell a stranger that you’re crazy. Can’t bear the thought of Dr. Singh calling back, voice tinged with sympathy, asking whether I’m taking the medication every day. Doesn’t work anyway. Nothing does. Three different medications and five years of cognitive behavioral therapy later, and here we are.
—
I startled awake at the sound of Daisy opening the passenger door. “You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. I turned the car on. Felt my spine straightening. I reversed out of the parking spot and then waited in line to leave campus. “You barely even changed my name,” I said. My voice felt squeaky, but I was finding it.
“Huh?”
“Ayala, Aza. Beginning of the alphabet to the end and back. Gave her compulsions. Gave her my personality. Anyone reading it would know how you really feel about me. Mychal. Davis. Everyone at school, probably.”
“Aza,” Daisy said. My real name sounded wrong in her voice. “You’re not—”
“Oh, fuck off.”
“I’ve been writing them since I was eleven, and you’ve never read a single one.”
“You never asked.”
“First, I did ask. A bunch of times. And then I got tired of you saying you’d read them and never doing it. And second, I shouldn’t have to ask. You could take three seconds away from your nonstop fucking contemplation of yourself to think about other people’s interests. Look, I came up with Ayala in like seventh grade. And it was a dick move, but she’s her own character now. She’s not you, okay?” We were still inching our way through the student parking lot. “I mean, I love you, and it’s not your fault, but your anxiety does kind of invite disasters.”
At last I pulled off campus and headed north up Meridian toward the highway. She kept talking, of course. She always did. “I’m sorry, okay? I should’ve let Ayala die years ago. But yeah, you’re right, it is kind of a way of coping with—I mean, Holmesy, you’re exhausting.”
“Yeah, all our friendship has gotten you in the last couple months is fifty thousand dollars and a boyfriend. You’re right, I’m a terrible person. What’d you call me in that story? Useless. I’m useless.”
“Aza, she’s not you. But you are . . . extremely self-centered. Like, I know you have the mental problems and whatever, but they do make you . . . you know.”
“I don’t know, actually. They make me what?”
“Mychal said once that you’re like mustard. Great in small quantities, but then a lot of you is . . . a lot.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve said that.”
We were stopped at a red light, and when it turned green I was somewhat ungentle with Harold’s accelerator. I could feel the heat in my cheeks, but couldn’t tell if I was about to start crying or screaming. Daisy kept going. “But you know what I mean. Like, what are my parents’ names?”