Daphne_A Novel Read online

  When we came back a week later, he took blood samples and made me spit and pee in plastic cups, samples for his research. And he did other, more bizarre things: Startle me by clapping loudly right next to my ear. Make me look at upsetting photos—car accidents, fly-covered corpses—or watch scenes from violent, chaotic movies. Sometimes he shone a light in my face with what looked like a tanning reflector—I never understood that one. I wondered what my mother would make of it all, but Dr. Bell kept her in the waiting room. He was solicitous, always bringing her cups of scalding black coffee and asking about her work at Arcadia’s town hall. But, after that first session, he’d banished her from his exam room. “No distractions,” he told me.

  When he gave us the diagnosis, then, I already had a vague idea what was coming. I’d seen a pattern forming. But my mother was incredulous.

  “Her emotions? It’s her emotions doing this?”

  Dr. Bell dug in his khakis, came out with a starlight mint, began sucking. “It’s the, yes, correct . . .” He clattered the mint around his teeth. “Intense emotional activity in the brain intrudes on the . . .” He made a pair of legs with his two fingers, walked them along in the air. “. . . much in the way REM sleep triggers muscle atonia. Sudden loss of muscle tone.” The legs crumpled into a fist. “But during wakefulness. Naturally.”

  “But she usually doesn’t fall over,” my mother said. “She just makes these faces.”

  “More severe episodes will follow. The movie theater was merely the first.”

  “I don’t understand . . . Every teenager has crazy emotions.”

  “Correct. The condition typically onsets with puberty.”

  “So it goes away afterward?”

  Now Dr. Bell was happily crunching on his mint. “Um, no. Implausible.”

  “Well, let’s talk about the treatment. About the cure.”

  “No need to worry about that. Let me show you.” He spun on his heel and disappeared into the adjacent room.

  My mother turned to me, sick with worry. “Whatever it is,” she said, “honey, we’ll fix it. I’ll move heaven and earth, heaven and earth.”

  Dr. Bell came in carrying a plastic model of a brain, bobbling it between his fingers like a basketball. Then he knocked it on the edge of a countertop and split it into its two halves. “Ah,” he said, “look here!” He fingered a bean-shaped piece, color-coded blue. “The hypothalamus. Yours”—he touched a finger to a point on my skull—“has depleted neurons along the lateral area, hence no hypocretin, or orexin if you prefer that dubious terminology. Now, as to whether the abnormality is produced by lesions on the brain or is simply genetic or perhaps—”

  “Daphne’s father,” Mom said. “He used to have little spells, like hers.”

  Dr. Bell cocked his head, considering. “Good. Yes, that’s good.”

  “So the treatment, it’s fairly straightforward? Jesus, if only Don could have—”

  “Treatment?” Dr. Bell said.

  “That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

  He smiled at her, seemed to search, for a change, for the right tone. He failed utterly. “Let’s see, how many excitatory neuropeptide hormones can you synthesize?”

  My mother regarded him with gathering hatred. “That’s what you’re working on here, right?” she said. “You’re working on . . . whatever you just said.”

  Dr. Bell gave his mint a final crunch. “Eli Lilly may own half this state. But I won’t be yoked to big pharma like a mule. This is a research facility. Quite simply.”

  “Then what, for fuck’s sake, are we here for?” Mom said.

  He looked at her helplessly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend. I understand that I can be a little—”

  “Offend me all you like. All I care about is her.”

  “Well, yes, I can help. Keep bringing her, every week.”

  My mother slung her arms around my neck and pulled me close. “If only Don were here,” she whispered. And then to me: “You’re just like him. Jesus, you’ve always been just like him.”

  FOR THE NEXT EIGHT MONTHS, she and I made the weekly drive down through Indianapolis to Bloomington, where Dr. Bell would take me through round after round of tests. He might have been solicitous with my mother, but he was never particularly tender with me. Once I complained that my weird little moments had made me quit volleyball, that girls at Arcadia had gone on to play for Penn and Stanford, and now I never would. Dr. Bell scoffed. “Get a scholarship on academic merits, then. Good Lord, if I have to hear any more about the plight of student athletes . . .”

  Senior year was no joy. Samantha and Tina had blabbed about the movie theater all over school. I couldn’t bear all of the wide-eyed glances in the hall, so I became a ghost, flitting from class to class, never seen. An injury lawyer took up my case—all brisk, dollar-sign optimism at first—then dropped us when he learned about my diagnosis. Other than Brook and Mom, I probably saw more of Dr. Bell than anyone. “You’re lucky you found me,” he’d say. “There isn’t anyone else east of the Mississippi who knows a thing about you.”

  The condition seemed in a holding pattern, growing neither worse nor better. Or at least, spending all my free time on the couch with bad TV, there wasn’t much to stimulate or upend me. I neglected the dusty stack of books on my bedside table and idly flipped through magazines and catalogs instead. Movies, of course, I avoided completely. Even trailers on TV were too harrowing, too ruthlessly tuned to wring some immediate response out of the openhearted viewer. Once, I asked Dr. Bell flat-out, “What am I supposed to do about all of this?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  But something in his voice seemed to suggest possibilities. On another visit I asked again. “So what can I do about this thing?”

  “Get plenty of rest. Eat your vegetables. Salute the flag.”

  “So what can I do about this?”

  He put down his clipboard, noisily unwrapped a mint, and with a sigh said, “What do I do when I’m frustrated?”

  “What do you do?”

  “Good. Her auditory synapses seem unaffected.”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “What, you can’t answer a simple question?”

  “Fine. What do you, oh wise doctor, do when you’re frustrated?”

  “What does anyone do? It’s unproductive, all this fretting. It impedes my work. I can’t control how these bureaucrats fund anything.”

  “But you can’t just ignore it all,” I said. “Emotions have to go somewhere.”

  “Manure. Pop-psychology manure. The Greeks thought feelings blew in on the winds. Do you believe that, too?”

  “You haven’t answered my question. Your question, whatever.”

  For a moment, he seemed uncommonly reflective. “The elevated train in Chicago, I grew up in an apartment tower two blocks away, and at night I could look out and see the train throwing off sparks. Whenever I’m stuck on the campus bus and some Cro-Magnon farm boy who shouldn’t even be in a university environment keeps bumping me with his backpack full of books he won’t even read, to keep from utter despair, I put it all back together in my head: the rumble coming up through my feet, the green light inside the train, the people staring out into the dark, those beautiful blue-white sparks coming down with the snow on a winter night.” He blinked at me, took off his glasses, seemed embarrassed. “I don’t know, something like that.”

  It didn’t take me long to land on the river, the cattails, and the willows. Though I hardly went down there, the riverside park was the prettiest spot in Arcadia. Close enough, I figured, to the things most people saw when they closed their eyes and summoned up some serene, meaningless view.

  “And what about depression?” I asked on another occasion. “What about that?”

  All that time at home on the couch, all of those gawkers in the hallway, the nights when I woke out of nightmares, unable to move, still trapped in that morgue drawer—I wasn’t even sure if dep
ression was the right word. But Mom was already struggling with my medical bills, forget about weekly trips to a therapist.

  “Please don’t say you want me to prescribe you something,” Dr. Bell said. “You’re not beaten that easily, are you? Depression is just a survival mechanism. Ego reinforcement. There’s a little voice in you that says, ‘No one has ever suffered like this. No one. I’m special. I’ve received some special punishment. No one can ever understand what it’s like to be me.’ You see, our overweening sense of individual destiny keeps us from erasing ourselves. It’s a purpose-built, evolutionary mechanism. Because the sole specimen really isn’t of consequence, but species survival, of course, is of the utmost.”

  “Well, thanks. That’s exactly the comfort and reassurance I was looking for.”

  “Here.” He took another mint from his pocket. “Something to make you feel better. Or do you want some candy from our overlords at Eli Lilly?”

  I doubt he cared enough to think about it, but his goading helped. All of those drills and squats and push-ups in volleyball, “Pain Is Just Weakness Leaving the Body”—even after a whole summer drowsing on the couch, I was still that girl stubbornly grinding away. No, I wouldn’t be beaten. That year I graduated sixth in my class. Brook was salutatorian. After Rob Schaple, the valedictorian, finished his corny exhortation to “live out all your secret dreams,” she got up on the podium, a hot pink wig under her cap, and said there was more than corn in Indiana, yup, there were racists and homophobes and teachers who couldn’t find Berkeley on a map and once she got out there she was getting the Golden State tattooed on her right butt cheek and never, ever coming back. I wanted to laugh so hard I nearly slipped out of my chair onstage, the first time my visualization—river, cattails, willows, drifting white smoke—really saved me.

  That summer, Brook left for an internship at an alternative weekly in Oakland, and I found myself alone with my magazines and Nintendo and my mother always hovering. The days slouched by. My thoughts turned grim and circular. At night, I woke with the taste of stainless steel and chilled flesh in my mouth. The spot where my dad had always sat on the couch loomed like a lifetime sentence.

  Then, in the fall, I enrolled at IU. Mom was terrified, but she trusted Dr. Bell to look after me more than she trusted herself. It seemed he and I were making headway; any day now we would beat the condition. Meanwhile, I began my little pillow routine—thump, thump, to my suitemates’ laughter—and tried to bury myself in Late Victorian Fiction and Biological Mechanisms. But I was so scattered from watching my body and my thoughts that the textbooks barely yielded to my scrutiny. Thinking I might try something “marketable,” I’d also signed up for Intro to Com-Sci. By the end of the semester, I was hooked. Deep in a C++ or Java exercise, my chattering brain just shut the hell up. Between that, drinking, and all the new faces who knew nothing about the movie theater, college was all-consuming, the distraction I so desperately needed.

  Late that spring, The Gothic and Female Sexuality, in which I was flailing to keep up, got interrupted by a crowd of students pushing out into the hallway. The professor went to investigate, and a few of us followed. I pushed my way to the window at the end of the hallway, the eighth floor of Ballantine. Three floors above, a girl, a sophomore, had used a chair to break the plate glass. Most of her body was blocked from view by the building, but I could see her legs, clad in dark jeans, splayed out unnaturally, a starburst of shattered glass around her.

  It could be done. That tiny, bewildered voice crying inside me could be silenced. I’d already died once. It would only take a little effort to do it again.

  NINETEEN

  NATO STARTED BOMBING LIBYA. OLLIE AND I WENT to a beatboxing concert in the basement of a shop that sold antique typewriters. Greeks were protesting in the streets, and the entire world economy was again on the verge of collapse. We checked out an art opening in a Hunters Point warehouse, guys in saggy jeans doing live graffiti while a fierce-looking girl twirled on a ribbon of silk hanging from the ceiling. A Norwegian guy killed seventy kids and blew up a chunk of central Oslo. We went to a kombucha festival and a lecture by a guy who claimed to have cured his own blindness. The president of Egypt sat in a cage in court, and London was exploding with riots. Going to dinner, we got swept up in a parade, ramshackle floats bumping house music, everyone in feather boas and zebra-stripe vests, some crazy pre–Burning Man thing pulsing with perversity and possibility. A bloody, chaotic battle in Tripoli overthrew Gaddafi. We met Brook for a drink.

  In the Pit Stop, she sat across the booth from us, sipping her Manhattan. How had I not seen her in almost three and a half months? “Jesus,” she said, “you went to a parade?”

  “Yeah, somehow”—I pulled on Ollie’s arm, smiled—“and I maybe even enjoyed it.”

  He and Brook worked their way through ten minutes of what do you do and where are you from. And why had I hardly mentioned one to the other? Brook’s phone kept vibrating with texts. She kept breaking off to check them. Well, that was why.

  “You two have known each other basically forever, right?” Ollie asked her.

  “Longer than,” Brook said.

  “Despite having zero in common,” I said.

  “Well, you both grew up in a place you kind of hated,” Ollie put in after an awkward silence. “And you both made it out here.”

  “Then again,” I said, “us midwesterners have a hard time adjusting to paradise.”

  “God damn it”—Brook’s phone went off again—“this guy is going to be the death of me. After Halloween, I’m taking the rest of my life off.”

  “Her ‘full-service’ client,” I explained. She gave me a look. Neither of us addressed it.

  “So, tell me, Brook,” Ollie said, stepping gallantly back in, “how did you find your Miller Lite girls? I mean, is there an agency?”

  “When you pay forty bucks an hour, they come to you. The trick is keeping them on schedule and halfway sober.”

  “Forty bucks an hour? I’m in the wrong line of work!” I felt him laboring to keep things going. “How do you think I’d look in a crop top?”

  “Now this fucking cocktail waitress is trying to fucking cancel on me.” Brook started furiously typing a response. Without looking up, she said, “At least promotions was honest. Drunk guys get to flirt with sexy girls, then they buy stuff. Straightforward.”

  “Spend your erotic capital while you have it,” I said.

  “Parades,” Brook murmured. “At least you two have something to do together.”

  Now I gave her a look.

  “Got to love La Mission,” Ollie said uncertainly, “always happening.”

  Brook glowered at her phone, clattered it down on the table, fixed Ollie with a stare. “The first thing you need to know is that Daphne’s brave as fuck. If I were her, I probably wouldn’t even cross the street let alone go to a parade.”

  “Jesus, B, it’s not that bad.”

  “And the second thing, young Ollie, is that if you break her heart, I’m going to hunt you down and kill you.”

  “Brook, go easy.” I was touched, confused, dismayed; she was already gathering her things to go. I’d been downing a whiskey soda. An ice cube slipped out of my mouth.

  “Oh?” Ollie said, still trying. “And how exactly would you kill me? Death by Miller Lite? Jose Cuervo?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Brook was pulling on her coat with one hand and texting with the other. “But I’m about to practice on this fucking waitress.” And then she was gone, and all I could do was stare at the ice cube on the table, melting in its own water.

  ALL THOSE TEXTS Brook was sending, fewer and fewer were coming my way. My chat window, on the other hand, was filling up with Alden.

  Alden taking my mother wine tasting, Alden pruning the sumacs overgrowing the backyard, Alden getting them both season passes to the Indianapolis Opera. My mother had only ever liked Billy Joel and the Miss Saigon soundtrack. Now Alden had her listening to Verdi and Puccini. She used to
drink Bacardi Breezers and Taster’s Choice. Now she went on about Frascati and Illy espresso. There were times when I actually wanted to talk on the phone, just to confirm it was the same woman. Alden, Alden, Alden. She hardly mentioned my dad.

  I remembered my father the way you saw things through water, blurred and wavering, almost taking shape, then fluttering back to the depths. Everyone always talked about his athletic glory; he’d set every swim team record at Arcadia. “Such a strong swimmer,” everyone said. The little I’d known him, he’d been sedentary and beer-bellied. Yet even in repose he was kinetic, picking up a Field and Stream, whipping through the pages, putting it down with a sigh, roaming through channels on the TV, turning it off with a grunt, turning it back on, whittling a fishing lure with shavings cascading down his shirt, reaching for another magazine—until suddenly he launched himself from the couch with a chunk of the reclining lever. Then he’d trundle around the house, which suddenly came alive, floorboards squeaking, pictures rattling on the walls.

  “You’re just like him,” Mom told me after the diagnosis. “I noticed. His little fainting spells, I just thought he was tired from work.” As if days at the town hall, where he and my mother had met, her in Payroll, him in Sewer and Water, were so taxing.

  Once I got into trouble. I’d gotten a new set of markers for my fifth birthday, and I scrawled a house, a car, a tree, a smiling family all over my bedroom wall. Dad had just paid a couple of grand to have the house painted. He was livid. Yet it upset him to spank me. He drew his hand back and . . . His head lolled. His jaw went slack. He could only manage the weakest, glancing blow on my butt, and I watched in confusion and queasy relief as he stumbled backward, slurring under his breath, reeled into the living room, and dropped back down on the couch.

  For a man like him, the swimmer, to die at thirty-seven of a heart attack—maybe if he had gotten off the couch now and then. Mom was always letting him “rest up.” Whenever I was bouncing off the walls, “Daph, let your father rest up now.” The funeral had been a haze of solemn, stunned adults, though I did remember getting a new dress and never being allowed to wear it again. She must have known something was wrong when she married him. She couldn’t have believed his “spells” were just from long days at the office. Or maybe she hadn’t always been so vigilant, so attuned to frailty. In old photos, she’s a different woman, all flared trousers, bead necklaces, and smoldering looks at the camera. A heart attack—some shocks just keep on reverberating. Since that day, she must have told herself: prepare.