Stone Arabia (12 page)

Historically known as the “The Disease of Kings”
^[2]
or “Rich man’s disease.”
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I also found the Wikipedia boilerplate medical disclaimer:

Wikipedia
contains articles on many
medical topics
; however
no warranty whatsoever
is made that any of the articles are accurate. There is absolutely no assurance that any statement contained in an article touching on medical matters is true, correct or precise.

I was, out of necessity, less rigorous than Wikipedia. I concluded that the prescription-strength nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory, coupled with Preparation H liberally applied to the swollen toe, would offer Nik some relief.

I stopped by Nik’s house, his “hermitage,” aka Western Lights in the Chronicles, which in actual life is an eight-hundred-square-foot apartment over a dilapidated garage
studio. I liked the last part of the long drive from my house to Nik’s apartment: up and over the winding Calabasas pass to get to the secluded and forgotten corner of Topanga Canyon where he had lived the last twenty-odd years. The best thing about the place was it was set back from the road, hidden behind several gnarled canyon oaks and clumps of shrubby manzanitas. Nik had divided the upper space into two large rooms by building a wood screen. One was the bedroom. The other was the living room/kitchen. One wall offered mottled light through a row of prefab aluminum-framed sliding windows that were characteristic of the flimsy warm-weather structures built in the fifties and sixties, back when Topanga was still a rustic, bohemian paradise full of artists and disaffected underground movie actors. The edge of the yellow-and-brown vinyl linoleum kitchen floor had up curled at the threshold join to the main room, so it caught your shoe and tripped you when you walked through; the Formica counter was cracked and peeling; and the kitchen ceiling had radiating cycles of ancient water-damage stains. But it was not dirty—Nik always kept things clean and in working order. The double garage underneath was given over to Nik’s use, so he had room for his recording studio and for storage. Nik spent most of his time down in his garage/studio or at his worktable. The upstairs rooms underlined how the rest of his life (eating, sleeping, fucking) had become increasingly rudimentary. He had never been single for more than a month until these last few years. His last (known to me) girlfriend was Alize. Alize was okay, I guess. She was a washy blonde, very thin, very aloof. After their first inseparable year of lap-sitting and private jokes and
finishing each other’s sentences and cigarettes, they didn’t get along at all. They continued on and off for several more years; she kept turning up so much I thought she might last forever. But two years ago she finally got married to someone else, and I wasn’t sure, but I was pretty sure, that they no longer saw each other. (Alize was still on the short list of people who got CDs. She was number three, I believe.) I never got very close to Alize. She was forever trying to enlist me in emotional manipulations of my brother, trying to get him to “get real.” Which was really funny coming from anyone who knew Nik at all. She once suggested we do an intervention, a cruel and crude ganging up on someone by every known and trusted intimate in his life. I refused.

“This is a person, if there ever was a person, who will not change. I promise you, what you have is all you will ever get,” I told her. But she knew that. We all knew that. It was just very hard to take, his obsessive work habits that yielded (what felt like) willful esoterica combined with his truly unsustainable consumption habits. Accepting a person like that in the long term is hard even for a sister, but beyond hard for a lover. Especially as Nik got older, the real issue, I think, although no one will admit it, became Nik’s lack of resources. He lived with no financial future, a middle-aged dive-bar worker with no ambition about money. Few women could accept that. I used to dream he would meet a very rich artsy widow who would fall in love with him and his work. She would sponsor and keep him. I remember even counting on it as a real possibility—for many years his wide-set gray eyes and his angular hollows made him a prodigious male beauty (albeit
the oddball/bizarro type)—but the rich benefactress never appeared. Not even close.

The door was open when I arrived. I found him lying on the couch in sweaty, red-faced pain. I could smell that Nik had been drinking (to alleviate the pain, of course). He couldn’t put a sock on and certainly not a shoe.

“You gotta go to the doctor.”

He laughed.

“What?”

“I’m really broke right now. I’ve already missed a week of work.” I nodded. I tried to put the Preparation H on the swollen sausage toe. He yelped. I gave up.

“Maybe you should go to the emergency room,” I said. “They won’t make you pay. I can take you over there.” He shook off this suggestion. He took a sip from a glass filled to the brim with a caramel-colored liquid and a few melting ice cubes. As he swallowed, he closed his eyes and took a sharp breath in.

“You know, drinking really makes it worse.”

He nodded, as if to say,
No doubt.

“But especially beer. You can give up beer, can’t you? Don’t make me tell you about tophi and what unleashed urates eventually will do.” And I also knew, but did not mention, that this gouty arthritis could often develop in tandem with much more serious illnesses, this feature being sweetly termed
comorbidity
. Not wanting to alarm him, I did not mention the list of possibilities delivered to me via the flowing and all-leveling directionless coursing of my online research. But the huge amounts of repetitive medical data, the folk guesses stacked next to scholarly papers, the self-help encyclopedias
by the pay-per-access medical advising sites, the automatic diagnostic tools that led to the badly designed sales sites of holistic treatments—all of it—were not directionless, actually. They all led back to you and your lonely, sad little search. Each decision you made, each click or go-back button, each time you put one more thing in the search box or bookmarked a page, this was your desperate, pathetic self applying some insular logic and order to the information, however inadequate it might be. It exhausted you because you got lost in the flow of endless data, and it exhausted you because you never stopped trying to find your way in it, to apply some little spit of personal agency to it. It was a fucking war, that’s what it was.

He placed two of the shiny white liver-toxic NSAID pills I brought him in his mouth and washed them down with a swallow of bourbon.

“That will make you feel better.”

He paused, put a hand to his mouth as if he were holding down something vile, then swallowed and nodded.

Denise put down her pen and clasped her hands as she stretched her arms up toward the ceiling. She shook her head and yawned. Two p.m. She should call someone. She ought to make some phone calls. She went to Nik’s bathroom and washed her face. She considered using Nik’s toothbrush, which he had left, and instead just gargled with green Scope.

She called her mother and told her she wasn’t coming today, but not to worry, the home aide would be there soon. Denise
also called her boss. She heard herself say “sick.” And that was it. No police, no Ada, not yet. She just wanted more time. She walked back to the desk covered with the papers she had been filling. She wasn’t ready to stop.

She picked up an open pack of cigarettes that sat waiting on the edge of the desk, right within reach. She picked up Nik’s Zippo and lit one up.

The tobacco smoke curled into the room. She reached for the bottle of Evan Williams and poured some bourbon into the glass on the desk. It was all rather pleasant, rather comforting to her. She hadn’t eaten or slept at all, and now she felt it instantly as she swallowed a long warming pull, puckery and sweet. The bourbon and the cigarette smoke together. She could almost smell her brother.

She plucked a new pencil from the jar of neatly sharpened pencils. The chair was padded and she could adjust it up. He had it all figured out, didn’t he? The little world inside the big world. The world within the world.

But here is what she did not do: She did not put on his clothes. She did not play his guitar. She did not brush her hair out of her eyes in his manner. She did not imagine she had become her brother. She did not indulge in some rigged transmogrification like in that weird Roman Polanski movie. She forgot the name of it.
The Tenant
. She did put out her cigarette after only a few drags. That was enough. Ridiculous. Denise laughed out into the room. She took another sharp sip of the bourbon.

She took
The Ontology of Worth: Volume 1,
out of her purse and put it in the CD player, easily reached from her present perch. She hit play. She heard his voice, and then she clicked it off.

She was going about this all wrong—sequential, linear, chronological. From day to day. There were other ways, other connections that were maybe deeper, other ways of ordering and contemplating and telling and showing.

Confession.

If I am honest. If I can be truly honest. Memory doesn’t reside in dates.

Memory resides in what you notice, what you feel, what catches in your mind. And the things I remember best about the last year are not conversations with Ada or dates with Jay or helping Nik. All of those things fuzz into one another. The things I do remember best are not my experiences at all. They are what I call the permeable moments: the events that breached the borders of my person. Let’s call them breaking events. I don’t mean breaking news. I mean breaking of boundaries. These are incidents that penetrated my mind, leaked the outside inside.

Okay. Ever since my mother got ill, or ever since I began to suspect things were not right with my brother, or ever since Ada moved away to New York, or just ever since, I can’t quite negotiate the border between myself and the world around me. I am not referring to mere empathy or generosity or expansiveness. For example: when, on New Year’s Day, I read on the website I visit on a daily basis about the woman arrested in the bar, I didn’t have the normal person’s indifference. I got caught up. I got
obsessed. I ruminated, I investigated. I developed an unhealthy correlative feeling of suffering. I developed a nearly debilitating sympathy, sometimes for the least sympathetic among us.

Okay. I watch a tremendous amount of television, mostly cable news. Further, I spend hours on the internet. And I read the newspapers. There are many hyped and excessively covered news events. Most just mildly engaged me, but some really got to me and overwhelmed me. I didn’t have the proper defenses any longer.

SARS was maybe the inaugural incident. My outsize preoccupation and concern about SARS was fairly ordinary contemporary hysteria, nothing that standard narcissistic hypochondria and paranoia wouldn’t yield when mixed with the right amount of overblown media yelping. But things soon moved to a different level, a deeper, more personal level. And it wasn’t just the big things—little, barely covered things got to me. Like when I noticed this newspaper photo of a middle-aged, heavily built man. He was in an orange jumpsuit and those awful manacles they put on the wrists and ankles of prison inmates. His face showed no emotion, but if you looked closely, you could see the wet streaks on his cheeks where tears had streamed down. I became instantly tearful myself; as I read about him, my tears grew to sobs. After twenty-seven years of prison, he was being released because DNA evidence had finally exonerated him. His stoic expression belied by tears, his suffering, I felt it, but also the misery of a life lived every day of those twenty-seven years, the things he thought or did to console himself, the injustice he had to live with every day—how could I not be moved? But I couldn’t stop. I wept and
wept. I cut out the picture. I read everything I could about the details of his case and his life. I was inconsolable. I never cried like that for anything that happened in my actual life. That is my problem. This is what I am getting at. My vivid memories of these seemingly random news events. And my fuzzy, fading memories of my actual life.

How can these invasive, overwhelming external events be called my memories? I do partly remember by news cycle. I’m quite serious.
It happened after the anthrax scare but before Daniel Pearl was assassinated.
(Not just important cultural touchstones either. As in
It happened right around the time Laci Peterson disappeared.
) This is the thing, the shame: my memory is dominated by events external to my actual life. These events, for whatever reason, stick in my mind and become secondhand memories. Although I did not experience the events, watching them and reading about them and my reaction to them was a kind of an experience nevertheless. It sounds so meager when I describe it, because the feeling it finally recalls really is, no matter how intense, meager.

It reminded me of watching a certain kind of film. Not some deep and powerful film that moves you, like
The Bicycle Thief
or
Brief Encounter.
Not even a sentimental classic, like
Carousel
or
It’s a Wonderful Life
. I mean some Lifetime channel made-for-TV menopause drama that you stumble upon in the middle of the night. Some embarrassingly manipulative estradiol-targeted story with predictable yet random tragedies, with kids and infidelity and self-pity. Some horribly tawdry thing, but it gets you. It just gets you, it makes it all just pour out of you. And after it is over, you feel as though you have really been through
it. But what, really, have you been through? It is an exhausting and lonely moment, the moment the crappy movie is over and you are left with the crappy hollow feeling. That’s what this feeling reminded me of. A small, meager experience that costs you way more than it ought to.