I didn’t reply, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Daisy, about Ayala, and most of all about the bugs inside and outside of me, and I knew I was being selfish by even making a big deal out of it, making other people’s real C. diff infections about my hypothetical one. Reprehensible. Pinched my finger with my thumbnail to attest to this moment’s reality, but can’t escape myself. Can’t kiss anyone, can’t drive a car, can’t function in the actual sensate populated world. How could I even fantasize about going to some school far away where you pay a fortune to live in dorms full of strangers, with communal bathrooms and cafeterias and no private spaces to be crazy in? I’d be stuck here for college, if I could ever get my thinking straightened enough to attend. I’d live in my house with Mom, and then afterward, too. I could never become a functioning grown-up like this; it was inconceivable that I’d ever have a career. In job interviews they’d ask me, What’s your greatest weakness? and I’d explain that I’ll probably spend a good portion of the workday terrorized by thoughts I’m forced to think, possessed by a nameless and formless demon, so if that’s going to be an issue, you might not want to hire me.
Thoughts are just a different kind of bacteria, colonizing you. I thought about the gut-brain information axis. Maybe you’re already gone. The prisoners run the jail now. Not a person so much as a swarm. Not a bee, but the hive.
I couldn’t stand my mother’s breath on my face. My palms were sweating. I felt my self slipping away. You know how to deal with this. “Can you turn over?” I whispered, but she responded only with breath. You just need to stand up.
I picked up my phone to text Daisy, but now the letters blurred out on the screen, and the full panic gripped me. See the hand sanitizer mounted on the wall near the door. It’s the only way that’s stupid if it worked alcoholics would be the healthiest people in the world you’re just going to sanitize your hands and your mouth please fucking think about something else stand up I HATE BEING STUCK INSIDE YOU you are me I am not you are we I am not you want to feel better you know how to feel better it’ll just make me barf you’ll be clean you can be sure I can never be sure stand up not even a person just a deeply flawed line of reasoning you want to stand up the doctor said stay in bed and the last thing needed is a surgery you will get up and wheel your IV cart let me up out of this wheel your IV cart to the front of the room please and you will pump the hand sanitizer foam into your hands, clean them carefully, and then you will pump more foam into your hands and you will put that foam in your mouth, swish it around your filthy teeth and gums. But that stuff has alcohol in it that my damaged liver will have to process DO YOU WANT TO DIE OF C. DIFF no but this is not rational THEN GET UP AND WHEEL YOUR IV CART TO THE CONTAINER OF HAND SANITIZER MOUNTED ON THE GODDAMNED WALL YOU IDIOT. Please let me go. I’ll do anything. I’ll stand down. You can have this body. I don’t want it anymore. You will stand up. I will not. I am my way not my will. You will stand up. Please. You will go to the hand sanitizer. Cogito, ergo non sum. Sweating you already have it nothing hurts like this you’ve already got it stop please God stop you’ll never be free of this you’ll never be free of this you’ll never get your self back you’ll never get your self back do you want to die of this do you want to die of this because you will you will you will you will you will you will.
I pulled myself to standing. For a moment, I thought I might faint as the pain blazed through me. I grabbed hold of the IV pole and took a few shuffling steps. I heard my mom stirring. I didn’t care. Pressed the dispenser, rubbed the foam all through my hands. Pressed it again, and shoved a scoop of it into my mouth.
“Aza, what are you doing?” my mom asked. I was so fucking embarrassed, but I did it again, because I had to. “Aza, stop it!”
I heard my mom getting up, and knew my window was closing, so I took a third shot of the foam and stuffed it into my mouth, gagging. A spasm of nausea lurched through me, and I vomited, the pain in my ribs blinding, as Mom grabbed me by the arm. There was yellow bile all over my pale blue hospital gown.
A voice came from inside a speaker somewhere behind me. “This is Nurse Wallace.”
“My daughter is vomiting. I think she drank hand sanitizer.”
I knew how disgusting I was. I knew. I knew now for sure. I wasn’t possessed by a demon. I was the demon.
TWENTY
THE NEXT MORNING, you wake up in a hospital bed, staring up at ceiling tiles. Gingerly, carefully, you assess your own consciousness for a moment. You wonder, Is it over?
“The hospital food didn’t look so good, so I made you some breakfast,” your mother says. “Cheerios.” You look down at your body, rendered mostly formless by a bleached white blanket.
You say, “Cheerios aren’t something you make,” and your mom laughs. At the end of your bed you see a huge bouquet of flowers resting on a table, ostentatiously huge, complete with a crystal vase. “From Davis,” your mother says. Nearer to you, hovering above your formless body, a tray of food. You swallow. You look at the Cheerios, bobbing in milk. Your body hurts. A thought crosses your mind: God only knows what you inhaled while you were asleep.
It’s not over.
You lie there, not even thinking really, except to try to consider how to describe the hurt, as if finding the language for it might bring it up out of you. If you can make something real, if you can see it and smell it and touch it, then you can kill it.
You think, it’s like a brain fire. Like a rodent gnawing at you from the inside. A knife in your gut. A spiral. Whirlpool. Black hole.
The words used to describe it—despair, fear, anxiety, obsession—do so little to communicate it. Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain. Maybe we needed to give shape to the opaque, deep-down pain that evades both sense and senses.
For a moment, you think you’re better. You’ve just had a successful train of thought, with an engine and a caboose and everything. Your thoughts. Authored by you. And then you feel a wave of nausea, a fist clenching from within your rib cage, cold sweat hot forehead you’ve got it it’s already inside of you crowding out everything else taking you over and it’s going to kill you and eat its way out of you and then in a small voice, half strangled by the ineffable horror, you barely squeeze out the words you need to say. “I’m in trouble, Mom. Big trouble.”
TWENTY-ONE
THE ARC OF THE STORY GOES LIKE THIS: Having descended into proper madness, I begin to make the connections that crack open the long-dormant case of Russell Pickett’s disappearance. My dogged obsessiveness leads me to ignore all manner of threats, and the risk to the fortune Daisy and I have stumbled into. I focus only on the mystery, and embrace the belief that solving it is the ultimate Good, that declarative sentences are inherently better than interrogative ones, and in finding the answer despite my madness, I simultaneously find a way to live with the madness. I become a great detective, not in spite of my brain circuitry, but because of it.
I’m not sure who I walk into the sunset with in the proper story, Davis or Daisy, but I walk into it. You see me backlit, an eclipse silhouetted by the eight-minute-old light of our home star, holding hands with somebody.
And along the way, I realize that I have agency over myself, that my thoughts are—as Dr. Singh liked to say—only thoughts. I realize that my life is a story that I’m telling, and I’m free and empowered and the captain of my consciousness and yeah, no. That’s not how it went down.
I did not become dogged or declarative, nor did I walk off into the sunset—in fact, for a while there, I saw hardly any natural light at all.
What happened was relentlessly and excruciatingly dull: I lay in a hospital bed and hurt. My ribs hurt, my brain hurt, my thoughts hurt, and they did not let me go home for eight days.
At first, they figured me for an alcoholic—that I’d gone for the hand sanitizer because I was so desperate for a drink. The truth was so much weirder and less rational that nobody really seemed to buy it until they contacted Dr. Singh. When she arrived at the hospital, she pulled a chair up to the edge of my bed. “Two things happened,” she said. “First, you’re not taking your medication as prescribed.”
I told her I’d taken it almost every day, which felt true, but wasn’t. “I felt like it was making me worse,” I eventually confessed.