You are nervous, you’ve noticed, but you haven’t got any drugs to help with that, and visiting an unethical psychiatrist in order to acquire a prescription for those drugs would have a negative effect on your ability to obtain health insurance, should you ever feel inclined to do so. You sit on the edge of your bed, feet firmly planted on the floor. You are attempting to ground yourself, so as to move through the nervousness and enter a calm reality. The floor is cold, though, and it is physically painful to keep the sensitive soles of your bare feet flat upon the surface of the freezing floor. You begin to bounce your feet up and down rapidly, and because you had been leaning your elbows on your knees, and resting your head in your hands, the rest of your body shakes along with your bouncing feet. You allow a noise to escape from your mouth – a hum of sorts – and the shaking effects the hum as well. With your eyes fixed on an arbitrary spot on the wall, your feet bouncing on the freezing floor, your elbows jerking up and down with the bounce of your knees, your head wobbling along with the rest of your body, and this jittery, moaning, staccato hum escaping your mouth, you appear to any voyeurs looking through your window to be something of a dunce.

A stranger and his friends who were sitting next to me in the Starbucks asked me if I knew the difference between right and wrong. Or maybe he said good or bad. I can’t remember. Is there a difference? Between the words right and wrong and the words good and bad, I mean. I’m not asking if there exists some disparity between the concept of right and the concept of wrong, or the concept of good and the concept of bad. Obviously, these things are opposites of one another. I’m just not certain I know what exactly the other differences might be, aside from the fact that they are opposing concepts.

I spoke to the stranger for a while. There are the big moral ones, I told him. I know those, I remember them. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. After quite a bit of discussion, however, I came to believe that it may not be too unheard of that there are understandable exceptions to these rules. Perhaps thou shalt not kill unless, and thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife unless. For example, thou shalt not kill if thy brother-in-law accidentally crashes your car into a ditch whilst foolishly operating the car during a period of heavy intoxication. Thy brother-in-law meant no harm, he is just an alcoholic, or maybe he is even addicted to sniffing glue. Regardless of his chosen intoxicant, thy brother-in-law is a moron, but a moron who did not intend to cause the damage he did indeed cause. Therefore, thou shalt not kill the moron. However, thou should perhaps consider killing thy brother-in-law if one day you discover him raping your seven-year-old daughter. Thy brother-in-law is a bad person in this hypothetical, and certainly deserving of thy wrath and the punishment of death. Further, thy seven-year-old daughter might also require death at this point, as thou may not want thy daughter living out the rest of her life having experienced incestuous rape. One might argue that killing thy daughter at this point would be morally justifiable, just as one might put a bullet in the head of a deer, to put it out of its misery after the deer has been maimed by a speeding car. While the killing of thy daughter could potentially go either way in a court of ethics, killing thy brother-in-law is irrefutably justifiable. I suppose it’s possible some might claim killing is never well-founded, but these are the same sissies who would argue that thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, even if thy own wife is in the habit of throwing ashtrays made of thick glass at thy head when she is feeling ignored, which she frequently claims to feel, even though thy wife refuses to perform her marital duties, stating that her marital duties “feel like rape.”

So, because there are apparent special case scenarios imbedded in the large moral rules we as a society agree to, I answered that no, I do not know the difference between right and wrong, or good and bad. Immediately following my response, there were many gasps and looks of befuddlement, and I knew at that moment that I’d chosen the incorrect answer. “Yes,” I should have said. “There is quite a clear distinction between those two concepts. What a silly question!” But I did not say that, and now everyone around the table at Starbucks was glancing at one another.

“One cannot simply create his own set of rules because he does not care for the rules the rest of society follows,” one man said to me.

“No, of course not,” I said, attempting to backtrack. “I’m just saying there are grey areas.”

“There are no grey areas,” the man said.

“There are the laws, and there are the people who choose to break them,” another man said.

“Are you under the impression that I’ve broken a law?” I asked.

“I noticed you’ve stolen a number of sugar packets from the sugar and cream stand,” the first man said.

“That sugar is free,” I said. “Starbucks gave it to me.”

“You aren’t using it in your coffee, though. You’re clearly taking it with you for some other purpose. You can’t just take sugar you don’t plan to put in the coffee you purchased,” the second man said.

“You can’t?” I asked.

As it turned out, you absolutely cannot just take the sugar. That’s one of the big rules, the men in the Starbucks told me, following closely those rules dictating our freedom to kill and covet our neighbors’ wives.

I can’t help but think these men, in refusing to take the sugar on moral grounds, are living very limited lives.

The end.

It starts innocently enough.You are experiencing the tedium of the afternoon, restlessly wishing the ticking second hand on the clock would just only tick faster, though you’re not entirely certain why you might wish for this to occur, as not one single thing will be different by dinnertime, and in fact, there is a good chance you will feel worse when dinnertime does come, because dinnertime is in the future and more of your life has been wasted and thrown away in the future.Nevertheless, you wait, and you begin to feel the anesthetizing languor take hold.In order to combat this sensation, you start a game of spider solitaire.Your father loves this game, and you love your father, so you play the game.It is more challenging than regular solitaire (a game for neophytes), and when you win, you know your father, sitting in Miami in his tropical print shirt, is psychically proud to have had a hand in raising such a brilliant child.

There’s a disgusting commercial on the television. They keep flashing photographs of some unfortunate woman’s foot – she appears to have a lot of trouble keeping the skin on her heels healthy. They’re yellow and cracked, and frankly, they look diseased. But then, the product the commercial is pushing came into her life and now she has happy feet and she could maybe even be a foot model, and everyone knows that men want to date models, so she’s pretty set. She doesn’t have to worry about anything anymore, unless, of course, she doesn’t want to be a foot model. Not every girl would want to spend the working hours having her feet photographed, day in and day out. Maybe she wanted to become an accountant. She might just really like numbers, you never know, not all girls are bad at math. If she were educated at a Montessori school in her formative years, the educators would have encouraged her to develop her natural skill set – they would have nurtured her true, instinctual interests by removing any road blocks standing between her and her professional destiny. I guess this would mean the teacher would give the kid a calculator or an abacus or something and tell her to go nuts. If the woman really did always want to be a foot model, I suppose the obstacle standing in the way between her and her dream job would be this nauseating foot disease, so the teacher would probably have given her the product in the commercial and maybe shown her how to apply it. “Do it in little circles. No, smaller. Smaller. Smaller.” I don’t really know what I’m talking about; I’m not a teacher.

 

I went to a Montessori school. The different wooden farm animals outside the door distinguished the classrooms from one another. There was a sheep and a cow and a duck – I’m pretty sure I have a memory of wanting to be in the duck room, and looking forward to the day that would happen. I don’t remember doing any work while I was in the Montessori school. Unless I’ve imagined it, I don’t think I did anything there but peel carrots and oranges. All day long, that’s what I did in school. It makes me wonder what the hell my natural skill set is, if this is what I did while the teachers removed the obstacles that might stand in the way of my professional development. I suppose I was preparing diligently to obtain employment at Jamba Juice – and hey, that job might actually pay me more than what I’m doing now, if I worked my way up to becoming manager. And most people who go to Jamba Juice are in a really good mood because they’re about to get some juice, and everyone likes juice. It’s nice to work in a friendly environment.

 

My parents took me out of Montessori – or maybe I graduated from Montessori, I don’t remember – and then I went to University Primary School, which was called Uni-Pri. It was the school associated with the University of Illinois, and I’m assuming it was also the school responsible for derailing me from my goals of becoming an orange and carrot peeler. Probably, because my interest in carrots and oranges was discouraged upon leaving Montessori, I repressed this urge to be active in food-related activities. This repression spawned an unconscious obsession with food, which would explain why I began sneaking extra fruit snacks (it’s no coincidence I preferred the artificial orange flavor) when my parents weren’t looking, and it would also explain why I’m unable to go more than five minutes without my brain screaming to me about food food food FOOD FOOD FOOD! I mean, what the hell do you people who don’t think about food think about? Please tell me, maybe I can train myself to be like you. I’m so tired of thinking about food, and really, I’m tired of thinking about most of the crap I think about. Why does my hand feel dirty? I was petting the cat. Is the cat dirty? Cats clean themselves, so you’re not supposed to wash them. But they clean themselves with their fucking tongues, and they stick their tongues in their assholes. Is there cat shit on my hand? Should I go buy some food? No one is looking, it’s okay, I can have more food. You can confess to facebook tomorrow if you feel guilty. Am I special? Do people think I’m special?

 

Meanwhile, as I was damaging my psyche with this repression, I was being changed. Uni-Pri, the school I actually remember quite fondly, was offering me up as a participant in psychological studies measuring child development and the like. I didn’t know about this until I took a class in cognitive development, and we watched a video about object permanence. Object permanence is a concept children achieve at some early age – I’d tell you which age, but I can’t remember because it’s not that important to me. If I ever get pregnant, I’m sure I’ll suddenly care, and then I’ll think it’s the most important information in the world and I won’t believe that some people out there don’t care! What it is, is when a kid realizes that just because he can’t see an object, doesn’t mean it ceases to exist. So if you show him a toy, and he’s all happy, then you hide the toy, a child who has achieved object permanence will cry and reach for the hidden toy and etcetera, while a child who has not achieved object permanence will be all “woah, that thing is just fucking gone now, it’s just gone.” It’s easy to fool kids because their brains aren’t fully developed yet. They can’t be, otherwise they’d be so big that they’d destroy a woman’s vagina on their way out. In any event, I was enrolled in a cognitive development class, and we watched a video about object permanence, and, to my surprise, I was in that video. “Lenore, can you find the Snoopie doll?” they were asking me, and there I was, in a really cute little dress, representing, thank god, the kid who had achieved object permanence. How humiliating it would have been to be the slow kid in the educational video. “Did you ever involve me in any psychological studies?” I asked my father, and he said: “I don’t know.” It’s okay with me, really. It’s not like it’s upsetting – all they were doing was having me locate a stupid doll.

 

But I do wonder if maybe this is why I ended up getting my doctorate in psychology. Because at the same time I was being deterred from developing and nurturing my natural skill set of peeling oranges and carrots, I was compelled to take part in psychological studies. I was young, my brain wasn’t fully developed – it couldn’t have been difficult to confuse me and replace “carrot peeling” with “psychology.” I really don’t know what I’m talking about. What the hell am I doing? It’s 2:10 AM between Friday and Saturday and I’m just sitting around. I haven’t even read a book or anything tonight, I’ve just been sitting here, and my neighbor is serenading me with his loud burping. I don’t know why he isn’t asleep. I can see a number of lights on and televisions flickering in the neighborhood. The middle of the night used to be so peaceful and quiet – it used to be my time, this was my fucking time, and now everyone’s wide awake, burping out of their windows at me. I should really get a boyfriend or something, this is getting really fucking boring. I guess I can read a book and stop all this complaining, do something proactive about my lassitude – I mean, I’m a doctor of psychology for crying out loud, but Jesus Christ, I just looked up and that diseased foot commercial is on again. It must be cheap to buy air time in the middle of the night between a Friday and a Saturday, and those foot people are smart, because the only people who would see it are the other slobs who didn’t do anything at all other than sit around in their pajamas from the night before, and those are the people who probably get skin diseases on their feet. I hope I don’t get one, but hey, at least now I know what number to call if I do.

I went to a spa for the first time the other day.

Booked myself a massage and a facial at Burke Williams. It’s very fancy, and when I checked in I was immediately escorted to the ladies’ locker room, where there were Jacuzzi baths and showers and a sauna and a steam room and dozens of beauty products and expensive blow dryers and fuzzy bathrobes and towels, all of which were available to me.

I’d been told when I made the reservations that I should come at noon, as this was when the spa opened, and I was free to spend the entire day there, soaking in various baths with other naked women.

My spa escort brought a number of rooms to my attention during the tour.

“This is the Silent Ladies’ Room,” she said. “You can come here and be quiet.”

Inside, there was a woman being quiet.

“This is the lounge,” she said. “You can sit here quietly.”

Then she brought me to my locker and told me to get naked and please remember to wear my special spa slippers. “They’re in your locker, along with your bathrobe.”

I put on my bathrobe. It was very large, too large. I put on my spa slippers, which fit perfectly. I found this strange, because I am an average sized female, but my feet are smaller than average.

I had an hour before my massage appointment, so I walked to the steam room. On the door was a large sign that said: “Do not use the steam room if you are wearing contacts.”

I was wearing contacts.

So I went to the sauna. Same sign on that door.

I noticed a bowl with bananas and apples. I hadn’t been told anything about the bananas.

Could I have a banana?

I looked around me.

No one.

I quickly took a banana. I hid in one of the showers while I ate it, just in case.

It was still only 12:20. My appointment wasn’t until 1:00. I walked around. Where were the other naked ladies?

I went to the Silent Ladies’ Room.

I sat quietly for a moment.

I went to the lounge.

There were more bananas in the lounge.

I stared at the bananas for a moment, then grabbed one, unpeeled it, and ate it. Right there in the lounge. An employee walked by as I ate the banana. I got nervous and stuffed a giant piece into my mouth, just in case she was planning to take it away from me.

She didn’t take the banana away from me, though, so I became bold and took another one and ate that right there in the lounge, too.

There was nothing to look at in the lounge. There was a fireplace, but I’d hardly call that entertainment.

Another lady in a bathrobe and special spa slippers entered the lounge. I got nervous in her presence, so I got up and went back to my locker to get my cell phone. Maybe I had some good emails.

No service.

I ate another locker room banana.

I went back to the lounge, and sat down. My masseuse walked in and asked if I was “Leonora.”

“Yes,” I said. Because there’s really no point in correcting her.

She put her hand on my back and kept it there as she guided me to the massage room and spoke to me in a thick accent. This made me feel as though I was in trouble.

In the room, my masseuse told me to get naked.

Everyone wanted me to get naked.

She left, I got naked, she came back in.

“No no, darling. You need to be on your stomach,” she said.

I predicted she might want me on my stomach, but it seemed rude to have her enter the room with me not even facing her with a nice smile.

“Oh my goodness! So many tattoos on your body!” she said.

“Heh heh, yes,” I said.

“You have large bruises here,” she said, poking my right butt cheek.

A few nights before I let a stranger in striped pants and a feathered hat spank me with the riding crop at the after party for the TNB reading series, and he wasn’t very gentle.

“Oh, ha, yes, that’s because of this person, I don’t know his name, and this event…it’s really not a big deal,” I said.

Then massive amounts of oil were poured all over me.

As she rubbed me down, the masseuse verbally pointed out all of my bruises and scars.

“What happens here? You have bruise here, also,” she said, holding my arm.

“I think I fell,” I answered.

“You have scar here,” she said, tapping my chin.

“Yes, yes, I drove a scooter into a parked car,” I said.

“You have bruises, many bruises here,” she said, holding my leg in the air.

“Right, I’m fairly certain I was sleepwalking,” I said.

“Also many scars on toes,” she said.

“Scooter accident again,” I said.

This went on and on for the entire massage.

Then it was over. She told me to drink plenty of water and guided me back to the ladies’ locker room with her hand on my back, telling me about how I should really use the steam room.

I had an hour before my facial.

I stood in the ladies’ locker room. Now there were more naked ladies in there with me.

My contacts were still in, so I still didn’t use the steam room.

I ate another banana.

I accidentally looked at a woman’s bush for too long, and she caught me. I pretended I was looking at something behind her. Hmm, that’s interesting, what’s that? A used towel? Interesting.

I got into the Jacuzzi with two other naked women.

No one was speaking, even though we were not in the Silent Ladies’ Room or the lounge, where we were free to sit quietly.

It made me uncomfortable, to not speak to my naked Jacuzzi partners, so I got out, put my robe back on, and ate another banana.

Then I went and sat in the lounge quietly. I pretended to be very relaxed.

The lady doing my facial came to retrieve me.

She also placed her hand on my back as we walked to the room.

We got to the room, and even though I was there for a facial, I was told to get naked again.

The lady smeared many delicious smelling things on my face and then, for some reason, massaged my feet, which are not a part of my face at all.

As she was removing the face mask she’d applied to my skin, she tapped my chin.

“You have a scar here,” she said.

Then I was brought back to the ladies’ locker room with her hand on my back.

I took a long shower, and then dried off while trying not to stare at an old woman’s naked body.

I put two bananas and an apple in my purse, and then left the locker room.

Many people put their hands on my back as I was walking out, all of them asking how my stay had been.

“Oh, very relaxing, just wonderful,” I said. “Your bananas are very nice.”

Parking was twenty-one dollars.

You can check out this link if you’re looking for something to help improve your mood.

I’d say my life started at the approximate moment that my identical twin sister died next to me in my mother’s womb.

After that, it moves all over the place.  But that was the key moment, right then.  And it, being the key moment, has peppered every other moment in my life.

Before grade school – kindergarten, I believe:  I took piano lessons with a woman whose age I cannot remember.  She forbade her students to touch the keys of the piano.  We were “dirty little children,” and we could not be trusted to keep her piano, which was not actually her piano, but the school’s piano, clean.  Instead, we played “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” pounding out each note on the wooden plank that covered the keys when the piano was shut.

From this teacher, I learned almost no piano – not a huge shock – but I did learn that I had murdered my twin sister.  After class one day, she pulled me aside.

“No one will tell you the truth, but I will,” she said.  “You are a murderer.  Your twin sister is dead because you made her dead when you sucked the oxygen out of her inside your mother’s belly.”

This, as it turns out, was not true, as one fetus cannot suck oxygen from another fetus.  Because a human fetus is not a feline character in an old wives’ tale.   But what did I know?

I didn’t know much.

I didn’t know what it meant that my twin sister died before she was born.  She was never born.  How could she have died when she was never born?  Doesn’t one invariably come before the other?

On a holiday – some holiday, I can’t remember which one – my mother, frazzled from being the mother of five living children and one dead child, lost focus and dropped me off for school to a locked and empty building.  And she didn’t come back, at least not immediately, so I took a walk.  There was a path lined with Sycamore trees.  There was an illness going around in Sycamore trees that season.  They were all falling ill, and inexplicably dying.  Their leaves withered, and their branches drooped, and as a result, birds’ nests that once comfortably rested in the crooks of the trees, shifted.  Sometimes, the nests would shift enough that an egg would fall from the tree.

That day, wandering alone, I came across an egg – that had fallen from its nest – which had shifted from its position on the tree – which was curling up and dying.  This egg had cracked in half, revealing the fetus of a bird, drooped over the edge of the shell.  The shell, though open, had pieces held together by a clear film.  A string of this clear film was suspended between two large pieces, and on this string rested the baby bird’s crooked head.

I crouched down, hands on the ground, chin between my knees, and stared.  I thought and thought and thought, and I eventually I laid belly down on the cold cement of the pathway, my face no more than a couple of inches from this tiny, dead, fetal bird.

Its skin was transparent beige.  It had no feathers.  Its eyes were closed.  Its beak was closed.  Its veins were dark.  Its wings were bare.  There was no blood.  It just rested, broken, but not damaged, on the edge of the shell.

I thought then, after watching it do nothing, after watching it be dead, I thought: “Ah ha!  Dead without ever having been born.”

And that’s when I noticed just how human this little bird looked.  My God, did it look human!  It was nothing but a tiny little bird-human, and it had died before it was born.

So I rolled over next to it, onto my back, and I smiled and I smiled and I looked up at the sky through the branches of the Sycamore trees that were bending and dying, releasing baby bird-humans to fall to their deaths, before they were able to be born.  And it felt like they were falling all around me, though really, none were falling, not after the first one, but Goddamnit , it felt like they were raining from the sky.

All of these birds.  Dead without ever having been born.  Killed by the Sycamore trees that refused to hold them carefully.

Trees can’t be evil.  They can’t be; they produce oxygen, they give life.  But these Sycamore trees were tossing these baby birds to their deaths, and they were killing them, just like I’d killed my twin sister.  But trees can’t be evil.  And if the trees weren’t evil for killing these birds, then I wasn’t evil for killing my twin sister.

I used my fingernails.  I clawed through the dirt in the ground beneath the Sycamore trees.  I dug a hole, a nice, deep hole, and I buried the baby bird inside.  I put it to rest, telling the tiny bird it had not been murdered, no, it had just died before it was born, and it was okay.

That’s when my mom came back to get me.

Since then, it’s like these baby birds really are raining from the sky – I see them everywhere.   And I dig a hole in the dirt with my fingers, and I lay these not murdered baby birds to rest, and I tell them it’s okay.

I was in a gas station because I needed a pack of Kool Kings.  In line in front of me was a retarded midget.  And I mean really retarded, as in mentally disabled.  Now, I am lacking in every midget-appropriate social grace known to man.  I have no idea how to behave when a midget, or otherwise tiny person, is nearby.  I often confuse them with children and speak to them as such.   Add retarded to the mix, and I’m outright socially crippled.  Additionally, after all this time, I’m still not sure if this retarded midget was a girl or a boy, or a man or a woman.  I am just going to refer to her as “her” because it’s easier that way.  Just keep in mind that she might have been a he.

She had no hair.  Just peach fuzz on top of her head.  She appeared to have a cold, which was creating a mess of mucus on her face.  She was attempting to purchase a Pepsi, but she was 48 cents short.  I happened to be holding, in my hand, two quarters.  She was fumbling around for a few minutes, trying to locate 48 cents, and I was standing behind her holding the two quarters.

I feel sorry for retarded people.  It broke my heart, this scene.

I walked up next to her and placed my two quarters on the counter.

“Here you go,” I said, smiling at her.

The retarded midget turned her oozing face to mine.  She smiled a really super big smile at me, which allowed me to pat myself on the back for a moment for my extraordinarily altruistic character.

Then:

“Thank you.  Can I have a ride home?”

I stared at her painfully for about five seconds.  I made a decision.

“No,” I said.
“Why not?” She asked.

This is where I started to panic.  I didn’t want her to think that I was grossed out by her, and that I didn’t want her coming in physical contact with my car.  I didn’t want her to think that it made me tremendously uncomfortable to be in such close vicinity with a midget, never mind a retarded one.  I didn’t want her to think that my charitable nature was strictly limited to those actions that cost fifty cents or less.  These were the real reasons I declined to take the retarded midget home.

“I don’t have enough gas,” I lied.

“You are at a gas station.  Get gas,” she quipped.  Outsmarted by a retarded midget.

“I don’t have enough money.” I lied.

“I just live right over that way,” she said, pointing east.

“I’m going that way,” I lied, pointing west.

“Then I live right over that way.” She said, pointing west.

Now, that frightened me.  Before, there was a retarded midget who didn’t want to walk home asking me for a ride.  Now there was a retarded midget attempting to fool me into granting her access to my car, and whose motivation for this behavior was ambiguous.  Petrifying.

“No,” I repeated, sticking to my guns.

I bought my cigarettes with her standing uncouthly close to me.  Then I walked out of the gas station, with her following unnervingly near.  I tried to ignore her, but it couldn’t be done.  I could practically feel her.

And then I broke.  I began to run.  I couldn’t help myself.  I was more than apprehensive at that point; I was terrified.  I turned around while I ran.  I don’t know what I expected to see.  I guess I wanted to see her face, whether I had offended her or not.

The retarded midget was chasing me.  Stubby little legs zigzagging rapidly back and forth, mucus and saliva flying off of her face and into the air.  She was visually livid, just absolutely irate, and determined to get me.

I got to my car, and it was like a horror movie.  I fumbled with my keys.  I dropped them on the ground and wasted time trying to retrieve them from under my car.  The retarded midget was getting closer and closer.

Finally, I got my act together and opened my car door.  I managed to slip in and slam the door shut right before she came, bashing into my window.  Snot and spit smeared all over the window, and I screamed in terror.  She was smashing her fist on the glass, hollering, noise, but no intelligible words.

I turned the keys with my shaking hand and started the car.  She was still punching my window when I peeled out of the gas station to escape her dreadful attack.

This was one menacing retarded midget.

The incident ended there, but maybe the worst part of the whole thing was that no one believed me.  I grew up in a small town, you see, and no one had ever heard of or seen a retarded midget living in the area.  People tend to take notice of someone like that.  There was Purple-Face Guy, Tanner the Wheelchair Kid, and the others, but no one knew of any local midgets, let alone retarded midgets.

Months after the episode, I was driving home from a friend’s house.  I saw her again, the retarded midget.  She recognized my car, and me in it.  She raised her arm and extended her pointer finger out to me.  Kept it up, pointing at me, until I couldn’t see her in my rearview mirror anymore.

Chilled me to the bone.

I have no memory of “the scene.” My entire neighborhood was standing around me in a circle, apparently, and I was bleeding everywhere.

This makes me experience two decidedly conflicting emotions: massive embarrassment and pure badass.

The source of the blood was mostly my face and my feet. Of course, my brain was bleeding as well, but that was internal and likely the cause of my fogginess and confusion.

I am very excited that my brain was bleeding. This is a rite-of-passage injury. I am now bona fide.

So I don’t remember a thing, not a single thing, until one fleeting moment in an ambulance. I was being restrained, and things were being inserted into my arms and my pants were being ripped from my body and I said: “But I don’t remember buying a scooter!”

I bought a scooter. An ex-boyfriend had one, and I intended to buy one from the moment I rode on the back of his for the first time. It was fun as hell. But then, he knew how to drive one.

It’s not as much fun when you drive your scooter into a parked car at 20 miles per hour and stop yourself with your head.

Though, really, since I don’t remember it, I guess it’s safe to say that I might have enjoyed it. I do so many stupid things, it seems, that I must enjoy doing them – at least on some level.

I was in the ambulance, insisting that I did not buy a scooter and being restrained and stripped, and then the next thing I remember is being prepped for a CAT scan.

“Is there any chance you could be pregnant?” The stranger asked me.

“I fucking hope not,” I said.

“Okay, we’re going to put this lead blanket on you to protect your uterus,” he said to me, while I clawed at my neck brace.

“Fuck, go ahead and leave it off, for all I care,” I slurred.

Then the next thing I remember is being placed in another room, when a man with a computer on wheels came to terrify me by telling me I was not covered by insurance.

You see, my health insurance payment was due May 1st. This was May 2nd. I’d forgotten to pay. And at the time, I didn’t know about the grace period (thank god for the grace period) you were granted before your coverage lapsed.

I will never forget to pay my health insurance bill again. Not ever again.

So the mean man came and told me “you’re screwed!” and then a neurosurgeon came into the room and said a bunch of stuff. What I heard was “You have bleeding in your brain. You need brain surgery. You have to pay for it out of pocket because you’re stupid and you didn’t pay your insurance. Brain surgery costs somewhere around $100,000. You are very stupid, and by the way, you are a major disappointment to your mother and father.”

I started crying. I was really confused and I was bleeding everywhere and I was a disappointment.

What the neurosurgeon actually said was that I had petechial hemorrhaging and I needed to be kept overnight for observation. No brain surgery. Sounds worse than it is. But man, the headaches for the days following….

Another doctor: “I’m going to give you pain medication now.”

Me: “What? What are you giving me?”

“What do you want? Morphine?”

I refused pain medication. Three reasons:

(1) I was confused, and I didn’t want to be more confused. I didn’t know what was happening or why it was happening. I wanted to piece things together, not become more foggy.
(2) I didn’t know how much morphine costs, and I assumed it would be too expensive, especially since I thought I was now paying out of pocket for all of these expenses.
(3) If the doctor didn’t know which medication I needed and wanted my input, I didn’t want her to give me anything at all.

According to my many friends who were with me, though I wasn’t exactly aware of their presence, I had spent most of my time in the emergency room up to this point cussing and cracking jokes at the hospital staff.

This is incredible to me, because in my memory, I was very frightened. I was terrified. Imagine, you’re in the hospital and you’re bleeding and there are people doing things to you and you have no idea why you’re there or what happened. At one point, I remember wondering if I’d experienced a dissociative fugue, but head trauma seemed more likely given my surroundings.

Another doctor came in to X-ray my feet. I fought tooth and nail with him, claiming that I did not need this service, that it cost too much, that they needed to let me go home. He proceeded to X-ray my feet regardless.

My chin was stitched up. Six stitches. I squeezed my friend Lisa’s hand while they did it. Moments prior to the stitching, the doctor had confused Lisa for my mother, so she was very angry. Lisa does not look any older than I look. My theory is that she looks twenty years more mature than I look, especially given the way I am told I was behaving.

Apparently I made a few phone calls around this time. My little brother, my friend Jeremy, and possibly a few others. To my little brother, I hysterically cried. To Jeremy, I laughed and made fun of myself.

I remember wanting to call my sister, because she is a doctor and she is smart and she would tell me what to do. But in my disorientation, I came to the conclusion that I could not call her because she would be asleep and her husband and kids would be asleep and they all needed the rest.

They took me to the room I was to spend the night in. I had no pants on. I was wearing underwear and my white v-neck, which was covered in blood and iodine. I was still very bloody.

My friends, Sadie and Dach, accompanied me into my room.

A few nurses came in. They were supposed to wash out the wounds on my feet. I thought they were indentured servants.

This, I found to be very offensive, so I refused to let them wash my feet. “It’s degrading to them!” I argued.

Sadie had to wash my feet.

Then there was about ten minutes of arguing with Sadie because she wanted to help me out of my bloody shirt and into a fresh shirt she’d brought for me from home.

“No! I want to wear this one! It’s cool! I like it! It’s cool!”

The nurse told me my other friends were going to my apartment to get me some things, and asked me if I wanted anything special from home.

“Sexual Murder! Sexual Murder! Sexual Murder!”

This is the book I am reading. Luckily my friends pieced that together and explained what I was talking about to the nurse.

I also insisted my friends bring me my night cream and my It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia DVDs.

A nurse tried to give me Vicodin and some anti-anxiety medication. I refused both, because I didn’t want anything habit-forming and I didn’t want to pay for it. I stumbled through a not-so-eloquent explanation of how I worked in a clinic with many clients who struggled with addictions to painkillers and benzodiazepines and how I’d seen too many people fight that battle to start it myself.

The nurse told me that’s why she didn’t ride motorcycles.

Jason arrived. He was staying the night with me in my hospital room. I was standing, refusing to get into bed, bleeding and babbling.

The nurse asked me if I had any allergies.

“I can’t have lobster. I’m allergic to lobster. Don’t give me lobster,” I said.

I was at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. It’s a Jewish hospital. And it’s a hospital. They aren’t serving shellfish, and they’re definitely not serving lobster.

Jason was the best. He stayed up all night with me, held me and calmed me down when the doctors came in to do things that scared me. He explained what they were doing to me and why, and got me ice packs for my feet and sent the nurses away when they came to do vital checks once I had finally fallen asleep for a moment.

He didn’t seem to mind that I bled on him, or that I was even afraid when the nurses came to take my temperature, or that I looked like a corpse, or that I cried on and off all night long.

Men, pay attention. This is how all men should be.

A neurosurgeon came into my room with about six residents. He did the checks that I had gone through every half hour with a different neurosurgeon, and then said to me: “Great. Everything looks great. You’re looking great.”

“Yeah, this is the best I’ve ever looked. I’m going to the prom tomorrow,” I said.

Outside my room, there were two policemen with guns. They were guarding the room next to mine. There was a criminal in it. They wouldn’t tell me what he’d done.

In the morning, Jason had to go to work, so Dach came and switched places with him. I tried to talk to Dach for a while, but they gave me more anti-seizure medication and that stuff makes you sleepy, so I passed out. Sadie arrived while I was sleeping. Sadie made up a song about my injuries and Dach told me stories about how he’d injured himself in the past.

I was taken to have another CAT scan. An old lady was being wheeled around on her hospital bed by a black dude. She was complaining to him. “Don’t go over bumps! Be careful! Not so fast!”

He looked at me and said: “Driving Miss Daisy.”

Later he read the tattoo on my back and told me he’d heard about me, that I was making all the folks in the hospital laugh. I didn’t remember being that much of a clown, but I’m not at all surprised.

They released me in the afternoon. I went home and fell asleep.

I went to work the next day. I was still very out of it, very spotty.

To be perfectly honest, today is the first day I feel actually lucid. I think I’m back to normal again. Of course, I can’t walk well, and I have a giant stitched up wound on my chin and I have a bruise that still continues to grow on my inner thigh (I’m fascinated by this bruise) and my feet are tore the fuck up and I have a chipped tooth and I have a constant, terrible headache from the head trauma. But I feel pretty awesome.

There is something almost thrilling about having control completely ripped away from you, about being unaware of your surroundings, about not being able to account for nearly ten hours of your life, and then only have fleeting moments of understanding for the following twenty hours. It is horrifying at first. But at some point, when you start to gather yourself, it becomes fascinating, and it’s almost disappointing when you begin to pull it back together. You have to go back to being responsible for yourself. No more excuses. No more tales of what you’ve done while you were temporarily “away.” No more pleasant dissociation. In a way, I love to lose control. In that same way, I love when I learn that I’ve lost moments of time. And also in that same way, I love being injured.

It’s something new. It’s not boring. It’s a story to tell. It’s mixing up the routine.

And I finally told my parents. They were pissed I didn’t tell them sooner. Mom never wanted me to get a scooter in the first place. I promised I’d mention that.

I made it clear to my brothers that they had to wait two weeks before making fun of me. After two weeks, they are free to make fun of me for the rest of my life. But I get two weeks to heal.

I already want to get on the scooter again.

I was in a full panic before my mother said anything at all. I didn’t want to ask what was going on, because her face and her shaking hands were confusing me. Usually, when I was in trouble, my father looked at me a certain way, and then it was clear, I’d been caught. But Dad wasn’t there, and all I had to go by were my mother’s ambiguous signals.

Finally, she spoke. “Your grandmother tried to kill herself today. She put a bag over her head and tried to suffocate herself.”

God, I was so relieved.

Almost excited, even. I got out of school early for this. Poor Mom, though. This was her mother, and I can see getting upset over this sort of thing.

My mother had a tendency to swallow this kind of thing whole. She was literally shaking with grief. Some people get upset like this. My mother was one of these people. I guess it’s safe to say I didn’t inherit this particular behavior.

Because Nana tried to off herself, my brothers and I had to visit her all summer long. We’d stand outside the automatic doors of the mental institution for a while, taking in the flowery, summer air, and then enter. The whoosh of sterile, crazy people scent replaced the outside smell, and into Nana’s room we were ushered.

The halls were white. Not sterile white, but eggshell white. It was so crisp and clean. I had imagined shit on the walls and muffled screams. It was more like an elementary school without the children.

The rooms where they kept the patients didn’t have open doors. I don’t see why they didn’t keep Nana’s door open, though. It would have been hard for her to escape, seeing has how she was in her eighties and she only had one leg.

And there was Nana, crumpled on her bed. She looked like she was sinking into the mattress. There was no fat on her body, none at all. The blankets covered her torso, but you couldn’t tell there was anything under there. If there wasn’t a head sticking out the top and a foot sticking out the bottom, she’d easily go undetected.

Nana didn’t ever turn to see us. She knew we were in there, but she didn’t care. Her face would just stay, all squeezed around her mouth, in a perpetually angry expression. She smelled terrible, like week-old urine, but so did everyone else in a mental hospital.

“Lenore, next time you come, bring your Nana Drain-O to drink,” she’d say.

“I’m not allowed to, Nana. Sorry.”

Then she’d try with my brother.

“Benjamin, you’re the smartest one, right? Find Dr. Kevorkian’s number for Nana.”

Ben was only eleven. He just quietly declined and apologized for not being more helpful.

We’d spend a long, unbearable hour in that awful, sharp room, struggling to make conversation. What do you say to a crazy, old lady whom you never really knew to begin with? She blamed my mother for her attempted suicide. After all, my mother was the one who brought the fresh fruit to her in a plastic bag. She was tempting her, obviously.

We watched Nana deteriorate in the next few months. She shrank smaller and smaller, week by week. Eventually, my grandmother starved herself to death.

It was different than I expected it to be. I was very unaffected by her passing. I didn’t even go to her funeral.

I was surprised when my siblings told me that her death was disturbing to them. I didn’t understand. I’ve realized since then, Death made his footprint on me long before Nana went. I was desensitized when he zapped my identical twin sister, Margot, in the womb.

The umbilical chord attached to my twin was pinched, so she couldn’t get any nutrients from my mother. It also wrapped around her neck and strangled her, which was the eventual cause of death. My chord was pinched also, but not as long as hers was. I was born dead, in that ridiculous way where I wasn’t actually dead, but the doctors say I was for dramatic effect. But there was no hope for my twin, who was dead three days before we were born. Dead bodies decompose very quickly, even in the womb. This means I was floating next to my decomposing sister for the last three days of my womb life. I must have smelled terrible when I came out.

The time I spent with my dead sister in the womb, I believe, forced a bizarre relationship between myself and Death. I go to sleep thinking about my mother getting into some sort of horrific accident, resulting in her decapitation, or the portioning up of my little brother on some grimy hotel room floor by the local pervert. I can’t control it. I’ve tried to think about happy things like babies and puppies, but then those babies and puppies die. My brain forces the thoughts into visualizations, and soon, I’ve knocked off my entire family and all my friends.

The worst part about this problem of mine is the irrational mess I become when these nighttime reveries are especially jarring. I’ll start believing that these things are actually going to happen, that I’m psychic. I’ll call my father and beg him not to go to any public places for a while, because there will surely be an armed madman in Home Depot or that little Argentinean restaurant. And he’ll kill Mom, too, but only after he rapes her. It drives Dad crazy. “Stop calling, Lenore. We’re not even going to Home Depot today.”

When I think about my twin, I wonder why I ended up alive and she ended up dead. I always end up feeling some level of guilt for being alive. When I think about this topic in depth, I often feel so blameworthy that I punish myself in small degrees. I’ll stay home from a party I was looking forward to or make myself watch a movie without my contacts so I get a headache. Sometimes this frame of mind moves in a circular motion. In the beginning I will think about Margot, which results in the culpable feeling; a need to reprimand myself is created, compelling me to think about the death of a loved one.

Although Margot’s death certainly did have an effect on me, it didn’t offer an explanation of Death. I didn’t understand it as a child, even knowing about her, and I don’t understand it today. This is tremendously exasperating because I believe that, given my insider’s info, I should have come up with a theory by now. In reality, I just don’t know what happens- I don’t even know what I think happens. I have examined all of the most popular beliefs, and none of them seem logical to me. If there is a Heaven, by now it must be packed. Under the same presumption, Hell would be overflowing with tortured souls. I could go on for hours about why these ideas have an endless string of flaws attached to them but then I feel pressured to come up with a viable hypothesis of my own. Eventually, the thought of it will drive me crazy if I don’t just assume that reincarnation would be a reasonable explanation. I only go with this premise because I believe that recycling is a relatively efficient way of keeping our environment clean. The parallel may be difficult to draw but it is there if you work at it, which I do.

Today, my grandmother and my twin’s deaths are still the only family deaths I have experienced, and I suppose they have both been important.

Even if it affected me in no other way, Nana’s passing made me realize that I was different from others because of the loss of my twin sister. And in the end, no matter how many hours I spend upsetting myself with images of death, or how many sets of twins I see walking around to remind me of Margot, I’m not always bothered by it. I think I benefit in some way by this thing that haunts me. I sometimes think I know more, or that I’m tougher than the rest of the people my age.

I spent one summer taking courses in biology when I was in high school. In the program, we got to dissect human bodies. Real, bloated, dead bodies, and they didn’t cover the faces with surgical napkins, or make any attempt to dehumanize the specimens. While half of the class ran out of the room covering their mouths, and the ones who stayed spent the rest of the day whining about how “all they could think about was the poor departed and their families,” I was holding organs in my hand and laughing at the squishing noise that they really do make when you squeeze.

I have Margot to thank for that.

When I was young, I went through many phases.

My childhood can be clearly divided into the obsessions I developed and practiced religiously.

The most memorable to me were the months in which I dedicated my every waking hour to the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

In the past, I had been terrorized by insects.

They were constantly popping up in places that seemed unnatural and inappropriate, like in my bed or clinging to the edge of a toilet.

To me, there was nothing worse than curling up in your freshly cleaned bed sheets, laying your head down on the pillow, and closing your eyes, only to feel the tingling sensation of tiny little legs skittering across the back of your neck and into your hair.

There was one period of time in my childhood when I kept discovering strange looking bugs in my comb after I finished fixing my hair.

These were no lice. Compared to a louse, these bugs were Godzilla.

I would pick it out of my comb, shudder, and hope it would be an isolated event.

But these particular bugs became all too common a sight in my hair each morning.

I looked through books to identify the bug so I could read about it. I needed to know if it was an insect that might dwell in one’s hair.

When I matched the species up with the bedbug, it wasn’t easy information to swallow.

Eventually, my anxiety about the situation grew into something of a maniacal frenzy. I scratched my head until it bled and pulled clumps of hair out of my scalp.

“They’re living in my hair!” I screamed at my parents.

“Lenore, they can’t be! They’re too big to live in your hair. Maybe a few made their way up there accidentally, but there’s no colony of bedbugs in your hair,” they’d say.

Days went by, and I didn’t spot another one.

My head was free of the bedbug infestation, but the scratching from all the psychosomatic itching left my scalp scabby and even itchier.  It was weeks before the dried blood stopped falling from my head. My mom even tried to get a new bed such as these hospital beds engineered for safety as well as new pillows.

And after all of it, it seemed all too likely that I had imagined the whole thing.

This incident soured my relationship with bugs.  They became my enemies.  It didn’t take them long to realize that they had messed with the wrong little (possibly delusional) girl.

I decided to direct all of my scientific experiments in the direction of bug research.  Only bugs, though. I would never hurt a real animal.

Most kids like to catch bugs and put them in jelly jars.  They punch a few holes in the top and throw some sticks in there in an effort to recreate their natural habitat and try to keep the insects alive long enough to call them pets.

I did this too, but I didn’t make air holes in the jar.  Instead, I watched to see how long it took for them to suffocate.  Then I’d document specific reaction times in a little spiral notebook.

I referred to them as my “findings.”

This process was not, to me, an exciting one. It was a matter of importance in the scientific community.  If I didn’t run tests to see how long a certain insect could survive without air or water, who would?  How would we as a people ever know?  The way I saw it, my lab experiments were a necessary evil.  Humans simply needed this information.  Or else.  Or else what?  Would you really want to risk whatever the answer to this question may be?

I didn’t.

In another form of experimental science, I spent many summer nights in my childhood smacking lightning bugs with a baseball bat and then spreading their glowing torsos across my driveway with my sneaker.  The faint light would last for up to thirty seconds when you hit the lightning bug at just the right time.

That took practice.

Once the lightning bug butts had stopped shining their brilliant light, I collected samples and placed them on slides for a microscope.  My parents had bought me a science kit that included a microscope and other fun lab equipment.  Hours would go by as I gathered bug guts and wings to magnify.

As a scientist, I was careful, meticulous.  I catalogued every specimen, just like my father had taught me.  “Real scientists catalogue,” he said. “Don’t be sloppy with your work. If you get sloppy, you’re at risk of being sued.”  So I was careful.  Just as soon as a glob of dragonfly brain was smeared across the slide, it was properly labeled and stored.

My mom let me set up my lab on the kitchen table.  I would carefully study each sample and sketch them in my notebook along with all of my other findings.  Because I had labeled them so professionally before, I was able to keep very accurate notes.  The smell of the sample (sharp cheddar), the texture (bumpy), buoyancy (sometimes), and yes, even the taste of the sample (bitter apple), were all included.  Whenever I came across a particularly interesting slide, I’d show my mother.

“What’s this I’m looking at?” She’d ask, trying to encourage my quest for education.

“It’s an ant’s vagina.”

“How do you know it’s the genital region of the ant?”

“Because I labeled it.”

“It looks red.”

“Well, she was in heat. Which would explain the extreme buoyancy.”

“Of course,” my mother agreed.

My father, while proud that I was showing an interest in something scientific rather than artistic, was not as patient.  He only looked at a few slides before becoming bored, complaining that the insides of a bug are just the insides of a bug.  And sometimes that’s true: The insides of a bug are just the insides of a bug.  Maybe it was the truth in my father’s opinion that made me lose interest in my own personal pursuit of scientific discovery.  Maybe it was the fact that I felt my beginner’s microscope was inadequate in it’s magnifying capabilities.  How was I supposed to make significant scientific advances with a microscope that was stamped with a “Playskool” sticker?

I guess in the end, I did alright, anyway.

Now when I want to kill bugs, I use Raid.

I’ve discovered it’s much more efficient.