Gotham Girl Interrupted Read online

  I’d spent five years trying to crack the code of epilepsy with different treatments, medications, diets, gurus, and whatnot. With each grand mal seizure, where I’d lose consciousness, drop to the ground, and convulse uncontrollably, my world became a near-constant obstacle course filled with sharp corners and hard edges. I’d awaken to crazy bumps, bruises, cuts, and concussions. Looming over me was an ever-changing cast of freaked-out strangers, prickly doctors, and loads of ambulances, bills, and consequences. But I’d solved it. The meds were finally working. I was working.

  I was also in love. More love than I’d been in for what seemed like nine hundred thousand years, and I didn’t want to jinx it. At this point, I’d probably qualified to have my virginity reinstated. His name was Loïc, short for Louis, and he was my exact kind of crazy: a good-quirky-smart-silly Frenchy. We laughed nonstop—at my very broken French, at his even more broken English, with ridiculous conversations where he would implore me, “Mon amour, why not just to use zee sugar cubes if you always get zee wrong amount of sugar in zee café every morning? It’s plus exacte, non?”

  Okay, yes, I was in love with Pepé Le Pew, but he was right; I did always grumble about putting the wrong amount of sugar in my coffee every morning, and these were exactly the kind of silly tête-à-têtes that I wanted to be having after all the years of struggle. Mostly, I could see us getting married one day in some handmade backyard ceremony in France—complete with Polaroids, ukulele music, and crafts that made the guests all feel mildly superior. I could feel a future weaving itself together like some richly patterned fabric.

  I felt such long-legged joy as I walked into the grim little grocery store on the corner, only slightly bigger than a bodega. I was rocking my favorite jacket and my ever-present big bag, a Louis Vuitton Empreinte Citadine tote—a gift from an old squeeze—a terrible boyfriend but one with great taste in purses. To be clear, my big bag doesn’t look terribly fancy at first glance, but it is. For all you nerd ladies out there, it’s like Mary Poppins’s carpetbag when she meets the kiddies for the first time. It holds everything: computers, baby wipes, extra shoes, subway reading, a built-in pharmacy, too much lipstick, and even its own wallet on a leather string so you never lose it. How smart is that? I swear, if this bag had running water and electricity, I’d probably live in it.

  Still, as I made my way down the coffee aisle, I was overcome with a sense of satisfaction that had nothing whatsoever to do with accessories. I felt I’d finally become the person I’d always wanted to be: a solid person who wasn’t totally failing at becoming a better person, who thought of others first, who paid all of her bills and all of her dues, who didn’t let circumstance rule outcome entirely, who donated to public radio, who read real books, who showed up on time (more often than not), and one who’d let go of past gripes, grudges, and regrets.

  Yes, I was finally figuring things out, and feeling pretty badass. Again, I shook off the hiss in my head, or was it the damn fluorescent tube lighting of the store? I couldn’t tell, but just as I bent down for the can of Martinson Breakfast Blend coffee (smooth mild roast), the world fell away.

  (My editor wants me to say here that I melted into the floor, but that’s not actually how seizures work for me. There is no time and no feeling other than a buzzing in my head and sometimes maybe a tightening around my temples. But I don’t melt into anything. Instead, it’s the world that starts to shimmer, and it melts away in a swift vertical wash of slivering, slicing black cuts, like eyelashes blinking closed. Or eyeslashes, as I call them. It’s accompanied by a momentary feeling of exultation that, maybe, only I truly know, but still it’s magnificent because it’s a moment of pure, ecstatic joy.)

  “Ms. Jones, did you take anything?”

  Oh…you again. I tune back into the swarthy stranger above me now. If they were doling out middle school nicknames, his would simply be “The Hair.” He reminds me of a pirate: a tidy, well-groomed pirate with perfect teeth, which now that I think about it, has to be spectacularly rare because everybody knows pirates never brush or floss. They’re too busy looting. It’s practically science.

  I wish he would kiss me. For a second, he leans in closer and I think he might. Wait, no, I love someone. I love someone, don’t I? Where am I? Things shift, and he looks so sorry and sad, as if someone has just spanked a puppy. I feel instantly terrible for him. In my head, I can hear myself: “What’s wrong, Mr. Hair?” Still, there is a heaviness now bearing down on him, and on me, a kind of reverse gravity. He seems physically pained, like his chest is about to cave in. I take in his shirt: there was a medical snake-cross-thingy on the pocket, and he is covered in blood and bits of something pinkish-gray. Oh man, is that my brain?

  Wait…did I just get brain on hot-hair-guy? And wow, that’s a whole lot of blood. That’s pretty much a Walking Dead amount of blood. And then I realize; it’s happened again. I’ve had another one—another seizure. That was the shimmer I felt. The thrum. The hiss.

  As I lay there wishing my brain bits were back inside my head where they belong, I think, holy crapdazzle…isn’t this just the absolute, foundational analogy for life? The moment you think you’re the person you’ve always wanted to be, suddenly you’re not. The world rushes in to compel you to become something more, something different, something else, because nature abhors a vacuum. Where there’s a void, nature always seeks to fill it with some kind of form. And that really is science.

  You may be wondering, is this how this person really thinks all the time? Even after a seizure? Or is it creative reimagining? The short answer is, this is pretty much how I process the world. Even in the middle of a crisis, I live in a state of constant reimagining, creative commentary, and improvisation. Plus, again, I’ve had loads of these. I’ve never been a huge fan of the survivor narrative. Inspiration porn isn’t really my jam as not all suffering is redemptive or transformative. Some of it is just hard and majorly sucky. To generalize wildly for a moment, I think you take certain risks; you make yourself vulnerable to go after the thing you want. In the process, you fall, you thrash and flail around; maybe you get banged up, maybe even a little bloody, but then you get back up and press on. Just like a seizure. Fall, thrash around, get back up, and press on.

  I can’t really blink my answer to The Hair about having taken anything (mostly because I take everything), so I croak a whisper up to him as best I can, “I-nuh-staz…”

  “A what?” he says, leaning down now as though I am whispering a code word for entry into a secret society.

  I try again, “uh sppzzazzz…”

  He cocks his head, looking quizzical. “A spaz?”

  I close my eyes.

  I open my eyes.

  He suppresses a smile and says, “You’ve had a seizure.” To his partner, a guy I can’t quite see, he rattles off, “Status epilepticus…blah-blah-dee-blah-blah…” Everything sounds like molasses now. “…Dislocated jaw, compound facial, cranial, dental fractures and lacerations…”

  Processing his words, all I can do is blink in a Morse code of my own making: Good God, why couldn’t I have fallen on my big bag instead of my face? What’s the point of having a big bag if it doesn’t at least function as a pillow or a helmet?

  Then he is back talking to me, trying to channel his most upbeat but sorry self: “There are things they can do…implants, prosthetics…”

  Prosthetics? Dear me, prosthetic what? His words trail off again, and I can see him realizing that just before this moment, maybe only twenty minutes ago, I was probably a very different girl than I am now. And I just want to tell him, “Don’t be sad, hot-hair-ambulance guy. This isn’t my first brush with the electric.”

  2

  Everything in New York Is a Little Bit Broken

  WHEN WE ARRIVED at the hospital, I was too afraid to look at myself. I avoided any and all reflective surfaces. I had no idea bones and teeth were technically poking through my face. Seriously, wha
tever you are imagining right now, I’m pretty sure it was worse. I just knew that everything about me was a little bit broken.

  It’s the same as when I try to explain New York City apartments to the rest of the developed world. People usually don’t believe me. Don’t get me wrong—I love my apartment. I love living on one not-so-level floor where marbles would roll back and forth by themselves and all my stuff is just right there. I confess to being a little absent-minded—especially on all the new drugs. But even before that, I once lost our hamster in our apartment for a week. She was fine, but only because I also lost a pizza.

  The first thing I typically tell people is, “Look, you need to understand that everything in New York is a little bit broken.” Every building has its quirks. Certain fireplaces only work on the third Thursday of every other month. There are windows that need a hard nudge in a particular direction in order to open depending on the weather. You practically have to be a master locksmith (and recite magic words) to get into the city’s older apartments—it’s all a little broken. In most prewar rentals, everything is retrofitted with clumsy renovations. Don’t even get me started on the railroad apartment and how no one part of the house can be gotten to without going through the whole rest of the apartment, and privacy is for sissies, so get over it. And best of all, there is almost always a refrigerator problem.

  Every single apartment that’s even worth having in New York City—the one that has those built-in bookcases you’ve always wanted or perhaps it’s in the perfect location right next to the dog run, it almost always has a fridge problem. The fridge is either too big or too small, or it juts out oddly into the space so that you stub your toe every time you walk by it. Worse still, some idiot renovator decides the main storage unit for all things edible in your life should go right next to the bathroom—or why stop there? Just put it in the bathroom right across from the toilet, or in the tub, if you are so lucky as to have one of those.

  Now I too was broken—my face, jaw, and teeth to be exact—but no one in the ER seemed to know where to put me. I was still fading in and out of consciousness when The Hair solemnly took his leave.

  Breaking your face is a lot like falling through pond ice. There’s the initial shock of razor-slicing coldness cutting into every part of you and then, within what feels like seconds, there is a gradual slowing of all systems—circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and nervous—that takes hold. It’s a prevailing stillness. I felt my body temperature dropping, as I lay trapped beneath the frozen surface of my mug.

  I knew from my obsessive Googling that there are more than four hundred miles of blood vessels in my brain alone—that didn’t even include the face with all its tiny capillaries laid end to end. The bones in my face and jaw seemed to have cut sharp paths through them. My lower jaw had effectively been ripped off from the upper part and then broken through the bottom of my chin and through the left side of my face.

  There had been no brilliant fireworks with this particular seizure, only obsidian darkness flooding in from all directions. In the cold depths where I was immobile and starved for oxygen and for an inner monolog, I tried for a millimeter of outward movement. I tried to wrap my lips and tongue around any sound I could try to make, but the word help with its “p” sound at the end and lips momentarily touching together was too difficult. The only sound that would come out was “hell…” It seemed appropriate for the moment.

  Overhead and all around me, there was an orchestra of humanity that is the New York City ER department. I could hear the overly intimate moaning of other patients behind neighboring curtains while nonsensical wailing came from behind a closed door in the near distance. Meanwhile a psychiatric patient was yelling into a trash can. Nothing was okay that day. And it had to be okay that it was not okay, I told myself, hoping I’d fade back into my usual, velvety, postseizure blackness, but instead I was relentlessly awake. In my head, I could hear myself whispering, “I see live people.”

  One of the live people I saw was Rakesh. He was not ER staff or an EMT on a break. From the narrative fragments I picked up through the curtain separating our two ER bed bays, he was there for his son who had fallen off some dangerous play structure in the park and broken an arm or some other such bone. They had taken away the kid for X-rays. Now this kind-looking, beautiful, brown-skinned man had spied me through a slit in the curtains. His face was one of horror upon making sense of me. He also made out that my whisper of “hell” was actually a call for “help” and came closer.

  “Do you need me to get someone?” he whispered from a few cautious feet away.

  I tried to nod yes, but wasn’t sure if my movement could be discerned by the outside world. “Yes!” I yelled from inside my head. The pain was dull and distributed but still overpowering like a tidal wave bearing down on every bone in my body. He seemed to understand me and scurried off to find a doctor.

  A few minutes later he returned. “They are coming,” he whispered again, his expression still grave. Approaching closer now, he introduced himself in broken English. “My name is Rakesh. I am driving Uber. Would you like me to pray for you, my child?”

  “Oh God, no!” I screamed inside my head. “Don’t pray for me, Rakesh! Pray for morphine! Pray for any opioid pain relief!”

  He put his hands out toward me now, both palms facing me as though he might lay them on me in some evangelical, holy roller prayer ritual, except I was probably still too bloody and gross to actually touch.

  Oh no, where were the nurses, I wondered. Through the curtains I could see scrubs flitting past us now. There must be a shooting happening or a code blue. Jesus Christ, why wasn’t I a code something?

  Glancing up at what were surely moldy ceiling tiles, Rakesh closed his eyes and began to pray in hushed, melodious, Hindu-sounding tones. “Lord Jesus, we pray to you now for mercy. Please come into this poor, wretched…”

  Wait, wretched? Who’s wretched? Have you seen my purse?

  “…suffering soul,” he continued, voice rising in intensity. “And drive the devil out of her, most merciful God…”

  Oh, for fuck sake.

  “Cast out the demon of pain from your poor, wretched daughter, Lord…”

  Demon of pain? Holy cats! No, just cast out the pain. Maybe cast in some Advil? I’ll keep my demons, thank you very much, if only to do my bidding later.

  Then, raising his hands, Rakesh started speaking in tongues, which I want to say went something like this, “Nnngyoooooo–tammmmmmmm–yaaaaaaaaa–zahhhhhhhh.”

  Don’t get me wrong. I was grateful for the intercession on my behalf since I couldn’t speak, but inside my head and outside my head, I’d already been through enough. I didn’t get any coffee that morning; I’d seen bits of my brain on a hot guy’s shirt and then lost him for good. And somehow, there I was, still pleading, “Someone, just please, anyone…hit me in the throat with the back of a hammer, right now! Let me go back to my usual postseizure coma! I’m too tired for all this fanfare.”

  Just then, a nurse entered and Rakesh-the-exorcist stepped aside to let her get to my IV. “Are you saved, my child?” he asked before disappearing behind the curtain.

  I am now, I thought, not entirely facetiously. Then, the black curtain of morphine came down on the scene, or was it another seizure? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t care. I was back to not being, which was fine considering the alternative.

  I AWOKE SOME TIME LATER to a very tall white ghost at the end of my bed. It was my best friend, Ed. Ed is probably not quite tall enough to qualify for giants-only sleep-away camp, but because he is a commanding salt-and-pepper executive type, I think most people often mistake him for one. There’s a waspy, I-rule-the-world, deep-voiced quality to Ed. And he is a total dead ringer for New York City’s current mayor, which can be really funny when we’re out walking together. He’ll pretend to be the mayor and tell some poor tourist very sternly not to litter, or a speeding cabbie to slow the hec
k down when taking a left through a crosswalk. It’s totally the best and slightly evil because people’s eyes go all wide with false recognition and they immediately freak out and obey him on the spot. Then later, you might see a blurb in the daily Gotham news blotter, “Mayor D. tells littering hipster tourist to tidy up!”

  I think the hospital was under a similar impression about Ed being the mayor because, while I’d been off in the great, glorious outback that is my unconscious brain, it had been a literal game of musical rooms, I later learned. I’d been in the ER, the OR, the X-ray, and what passed for a broom closet as well as a room with another patient named Alissa Jones who was having some random organ removed. And so Ed, my giant service beast—my service unicorn, as I call him—had been required to have a full-on, grown-up man tantrum and use his “mayor” voice to get me decent digs with a reduced chance of life-altering medical mistakes.

  There’d been a stroke of luck, he also reported. The head of the maxillofacial surgery program had been in the hospital right as I had been brought in and had seemed very excited by how smashed up I was. It takes five hundred pounds of force to break the human skull with the thinnest part being near the temples. That’s mass multiplied by acceleration. I am only a hundred and twenty pounds and had fallen but a short distance (two feet), so apparently I had done a real number on myself. They were coming soon to talk to me about next steps.

  In the meantime, Ed was trying to distract me with the PBS series Wolf Hall playing on his laptop, which I thought was hilarious because I realized in my morphine-induced stupor that Ed is also Sir Thomas Cromwell. If you’re not familiar with the history of the sixteenth-century British monarchy, fear not. Cromwell was King Henry VIII’s right-hand man—a cunning idealist from the back streets of London—who masterminded Henry’s divorce so Henry could not only get down with the hot strumpet Anne Boleyn but also undertake a heap of other nefarious things involving executions, torture, and the creation of the Church of England. In the fog of drugs and blinding pain, it was clear to me Ed was a total Cromwell and I was so the ne’er-do-well Henry VIII—but without the turkey leg. The point is, Ed always loves running back and forth amid all the different key players (neurologists, surgeons, nurses, and lunch ladies) trying to get everyone to agree and take action. It is his favorite thing in the world. He’s like a more effective United Nations, only in giant human form.