Getting called into the office of a cancer specialist back in 2007 was about as bad as it could get—under any circumstances. Why couldn’t he explain things to me in the checkup room while listening to my heart or holding on to my little fellas, telling me to cough? Why his office?
During those agonizing days and nights leading up to this appointment, like any true anxiety sufferer, I Googled spots on the lung and other words related to lung cancer. Immediately I began to picture myself bald and sans eyebrows, sitting in the hallway of some antiseptic-smelling hospital, in one of those sticky leather chairs on wheels, hooked up to an IV, a tea-colored liquid poison flowing from a bag hanging on a shiny, chrome, coat hanger–like apparatus into my veins, while gawkers and hospital staff walked by feeling sorry for me. Google is to the anxiety sufferer as Keebler cookies are to the sugar addict: feels great as you open the bag, but soon you’re sick to your stomach. How great a tool is the Internet that you can Google a tiny pimple, say, on your arm (probably an ingrown hair), and by the end of the morning fully convince yourself it’s skin cancer.
The doctor asked me how I was feeling.
Like jumping over this fucking desk and strangling you assholes who don’t have the C.
“Not bad,” I said, “all considering.”
“Let me get to that.” He spun his desktop computer monitor around and had my CT-scan image blown up. I’d gone back in since the ER visit and had both lungs scanned. This time, though, instead of making me drink two quarts of a Pepto-Bismol-like emulsified chalk, they pumped a bag of urine-colored liquid into my right tricep, which I could literally feel hit my heart and same as an ice crack on a lake, spread spiderweb-like out into my entire body, while the person behind the glass inside the little kiosk said over the scratchy speaker, “You might feel a burning sensation down there.”
“That nodule right there, the area of concern,” the doctor explained, pointing to it with a pen, “nothing to be worried about.”
Nodule, they’re calling it now. The N word. How PC.
“You’re going to be fine,” he added, leaning back in his chair.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a scar, the nodule. Probably from a bout of bronchitis or from smoking and coughing all those years. We measured it and, though we might keep an eye on it and measure it every five or ten years, it’s really nothing to be concerned about.”
I felt relieved, to say the least.
“But you do, however, have emphysema,” he said.
The E word. The dreaded old-man smoker’s disease.
But I had just turned forty. How could that be?
He pointed out a black portion of one lung that encompassed about 75 percent of what looked to be a field in California that had been consumed by wildfire.
I tell this story because for those weeks of not knowing what was wrong with me I had never experienced such intense anxiety—true breathing-into-a-paper-bag type—in my life.
Until, that is, the years of interviewing a serial killer began to add up.
*
BY THE TIME I spoke to Jesperson next, that doubled-over bout of diverticulitis I’d suffered after driving into the old neighborhood had passed. I’d seen the doctor, got a dose of antibiotics, and was feeling better: “Slow down. Take a break from whatever you’re doing,” he suggested. By this point, Jesperson and I were close enough where it would not have been out of the ordinary for me to have shared my ailments. I’d told him by now that Dark Minds wasn’t going to a fourth season. He accepted the news without badmouthing the network or my production company too much. He (of course) sent me his ideas for a new series, and he encouraged me to start thinking about outing him publicly as Raven.
“You do that yourself and we’re through,” I said. Part of my anxiety was centered on the fact that Jesperson, the most prolific letter writer I’d ever known, could, at any time, write to a reporter or anyone else on the outside and easily prove he was Raven. He understood the consequences if he did that, but with the series over, my fear was he’d want the notoriety of everyone knowing he was my Hannibal Lecter.
“I understand,” he said.
I half-trusted his answer.
Throughout the time of our correspondence, I’d shared a few personal issues with him I would have never shared with an interviewee before stepping into the role of what John Kelly called Jesperson’s surrogate father. But allowing him to know about my anxiety and physical vulnerabilities and ailments was not a space I wanted to go. Plus, Jesperson was suffocating. I’d started talking to him about the difficulty I’d been having figuring out a way to write a book based on our friendship (which would include the promise I’d made about his Bennett obsession), especially the narrative flow and how I wanted to approach all the research I’d collected. Once again, after merely mentioning my dilemma, I received an outline in thirty pages, explaining how each chapter of the book should unravel, along with a detailed structure of all the content, which people I should interview, along with a concluding note: “Guaranteed bestseller.”
Of course, I told Jesperson there was no way he was going to tell me how I should set up my book. I followed none of his advice.
I’d get my anxiety under control. Enjoy a spell of pleasant living. But after a few weeks of this sort of back-and-forth with him, hundreds of pages of his ramblings spread across my desk, now embedded in my mind, maps and drawings of crime scenes from him on the floor of my office, I’d feel that pain well up in my lower-left abdomen, another episode no doubt on the horizon.
24
NIGHTMARES
“Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and
others too that are like nightmares.”
—Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
WHILE IMMERSED IN WRITING INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM, IT HAS never been difficult for me to work all day (and sometimes well into the night) inside my office, leave that space, sit down at the dinner table, and then talk to my family about their day, leaving the work behind. I could transition from my office to the living room, turn on CNN, my favorite food/travel series (New Scandinavian Cooking), or, embarrassingly, a DVR’d episode of The Bold and the Beautiful, a soap my daughter got me hooked on, and forget about the violence and psychopaths I’d spent the day trying to figure out. Sure, I’d be uptight after a tough day. But, for the most part, I was fine.