The Violet Hour (8 page)

As it begins to seem like the transplant has failed despite its spectacular hardship, some of the people around her are having conversations that open with “what if.” For instance, Sharon and David discuss what if someone had talked Susan out of going to Seattle in the first place. Sharon writes in an email: “Even if that had been possible, which I don't think it would have, it would have ended up in guilt about not having given her the big chance. She would never have written off the hope that Seattle seemed to offer.”

Slowly, the knowledge seems to come into focus: The transplant is not working. Those around her have on some level absorbed this fact before the official announcement, though she herself has not. The night before the doctors are going to give her the news, Peter and David talk about it over a drink in the suite at the Marriott.

The next morning, the whole six-person medical team comes into Sontag's room to tell her that the transplant failed. Out the window you can see the lake under a veil of heavy mist.
David is in the room with her, along with Peter. She screams, “But this means I am dying!”

The doctor's assistant, Juan, a handsome man in his thirties, of mixed Argentinian and Italian descent and of whom Susan is particularly fond, said, “You might want to take this time to concentrate on your spiritual values.”

Sontag snapped, “I have no spiritual values!”

“You might want to take this time to be with your friends.”

“I have no friends!”

The next day Annie flies out to see her. She comes into the room and, without following protocol, which involves putting on gloves, a mask, a robe, she crawls directly into Sontag's hospital bed and puts her arms around her like a child.

When Susan was sixteen, she wrote in the notebooks,
“It is a bullying fear of death, the stretching, the straining to comprehend the incomprehensible…‘I will die too'…But how is it possible for me to stop living…How could anything
be
without me?”

The day of the transport the sky is dark, roiled. The wind rumples the hair of one of the medical personnel as she moves toward the nose of the ambulance plane; the tarmac is slick
with rain. Sontag lies on the gurney under great waving white sheets, eyes closed, hair snowy, face swollen beyond recognition. There is a majesty to her reclining figure, like she is a queen. This is Annie's photograph of the transport out of Seattle.

Annie has another picture in her head when she brings Susan home. She wants Susan to die in her own bed, in the arms of those who loved her. Peter has that same picture in his head. He imagines her dying surrounded by friends, books, by the paintings that she loved. Sontag herself imagined a slightly sharper iteration of this deathbed scene in “Debriefing”: “You were at least supposed to die in a warm bed—mute; surrounded by the guilty, clumsy people who adored you, leaving them frustrated and resentful of you to the end.”

But they are not going home. They are going to Sloan Kettering, where Dr. Nimer has another treatment, or several other treatments, lined up.

Once they arrive, Sharon writes an email to David: “Hey, it's not so bad. The trip from Seattle in the ambulance plane was a big success. The attendants were two of the coolest people I've ever met. They kept her doped up on morphine, among their many other sterling qualities….In the meantime, Susan looks like a corpse that's been dead for several days. But she's got most of her marbles when the occasion arises….xxxx Sharon.”

The next morning, in her spacious double room at Sloan Kettering, Susan seems to have risen phoenix-like from the grave.
She is sitting up in her bed, reading
The New Republic
, complaining about one of the articles. It's impossible to imagine her doing this forty-eight hours earlier. She is a different person.

Susan calls Sookhee. “Bring me some of your spicy steak and spinach.” Sookhee says, “They're not going to let you eat that stuff, Susan.” Susan says, “You hide it and sneak it in!”

There are drugs to put her to sleep and drugs to wake her up; drugs for the pain and drugs for anxiety. It is hard to know how she is underneath the narcotics, or without them, or if that is even a question one can ask. Late into the night, Sharon reads to her from Leonard Woolf's memoir. Her mind is clearly selecting: She has trouble remembering what Dr. Nimer said twenty minutes before, but she knows all sorts of arcane trivia about the Webbs and Chesterton.

Peter brings in Buddhist prayer flags for decoration. Annie brings in a Buddha head, also for decoration. They are both trying to make the hospital into something other than a hospital.

In the meantime, there is the question of what to tell people. There is an official line, and the official line is not exactly the truth but something closer to the heroic medical battle Sontag had mapped out in her head when she was well. They tell callers
like Barbara Epstein, one of the founding editors of
The New York Review of Books
, and Stephen Koch that Susan prefers to be treated in New York, that at this point they can do the same treatments at Sloan Kettering that they can do in Seattle; they do not say that the transplant failed. They are, in fact, giving the impression that the transplant didn't fail. “Maybe it doesn't matter,” Sharon writes to David, “but you know what the jungle drums are like.” Some of this editing of reality is a concern for Sontag's privacy; some perhaps reflects the magnetic force field of Sontag's own view, or what those around her perceived to be her view: the wild and implausible upholding of optimism, the stubborn defiance of death. The narrative is that she is
recovering
, and that narrative cannot change. Sooner or later, this causes anxiety for most of the people around her, because her place in that narrative cannot change. She is stuck there, fixed there, like a bug in amber, and there will be some speculation, some unsettling imaginings and suspicions that she is no longer the person who wrote that version, the brilliant, resourceful theoretician of perpetual recovery.

And indeed the treatment continues. There is no question of simply keeping her comfortable. David and her doctors are considering experimental drugs. Sharon Googles two of the drugs that have been discussed, Zarnestra and clofarabine. She writes an email to David: “They both seem kind of fabulous…what if this stuff works?” On some level they are all still waiting for the magic bullet, for the moment where Susan rises from the hospital bed and is fine. On some level they are in awe
of her will, in thrall to it. It is impossible to imagine that she will die; she has been for so long the person who doesn't die.

There is tension now among David, Annie, Sharon, Peter, and others. Some of the private nurses notice bickering; they walk into the room and sense a poisonous atmosphere. There are quarrels that flare up, and there are quarrels that don't flare up but are glowing beneath the surface. There are those who think that Susan shouldn't be in a hospital, that the treatment has gone too far, and those who think that it is important to honor her wishes, and that her wishes are to fight to the end. Ultimately, the legal and medical responsibility lies with David. He does his best and berates himself for it. He tells himself, “She has a right to her own death.”

Very few people talk about David and Susan without commenting on how difficult it would be to be the only son of such a powerful and demanding mother, especially one who seemed, over the years, to vacillate between possessing him entirely and abandoning him. Sontag wrote about her own mother's “narcissism, absences, inability to nurture.” Her father died when she was five, so her mother was intensely reliant on her intelligent daughter. Sontag wrote, “I played the shy adoring boy with her. I was delicate; the boyfriends were gross. I also played at being in love with her (as when I copied things from
Little Lord Fauntleroy
…like calling her ‘Darling').” She also wrote, “From Mother, I learned: ‘I love you' means ‘I don't love anyone else,' ” and she may have passed along the same rigorous, punishing standard to David. She brought him everywhere
as a date, a confidant, a friend, to parties, dinner parties, screenings.

When he was five she wrote, “I dreamt last night of a beautiful, mature David of about eight years, to whom I talked, eloquently and indiscreetly, about my own emotional stalemates as Mother used to talk me—when I was nine, ten, eleven…” She was analytical enough to know that what she was doing would harm him but not generous enough to stop. Even her most loyal friends saw the tangle of their relationship and worried about how some of the more brutal things she wrote about him in the journals—like how as a child he wasn't as intelligent as she had been—would affect him.

David, however, is not interested in their sympathy. He has moved on—at least he had moved on, until this latest illness. He has left the circles where people would be enchanted or enthralled by his mother; he has moved into a world of foreign policy, human rights, a world she was interested in but not entirely absorbed by. He is literally in flight in the sense that he travels constantly. He is like his mother, changing countries as easily as he changes rooms.