Gotham Girl Interrupted Page 4

  I’d known that well before I’d schlepped the kids out from the East Coast after my poor husband told me he could no longer take being responsible for my happiness. I’d spent most of my time since arriving in LA feeling exhausted and like I was failing. I never fit in with all the orange spray-tanned people. Yet, I’d managed to carve out a little life for us, with scraps of work, a handful of nonjudgmental friends, and family not too far away but also not too close. I went to yoga. I meditated. I waxed all the things I was supposed to—eyebrows, upper lip, chin, arms, legs, and hoozie. I ate and drank all the leafy greens the healthy people told me to. I told myself, no matter what, I meant well, even if Hollywood was making me seem mean, which is sometimes how you have to seem when you are outnumbered, undergroomed, and overwhelmed in LA.

  My last script-doctoring job had ended more than a month ago, and with nothing significant on the horizon, I knew I was on borrowed time. I’d even begun to look at various corporate gigs back in advertising and marketing. I was in such a frenzy to nail down a gig, I’d been running everywhere, attending every coffee meet-up, every dinner party, and every lame networking boondoggle. I made the Kardashians look like shut-ins.

  I tucked a wayward lock behind my ear, pulled out of Starbucks, and turned south on Lincoln toward Venice. The fog was just burning off. It would be warm out today, probably near eighty, I thought, as I made my way toward our modest bungalow in Venice. Driving along, I noticed the vision in my left eye begin to shift. All at once, the left side of the road ahead began to reel backward. The palm trees, shops, and parked cars shot away from me, as if I were driving in reverse. At the same time, in my right eye, the film of life began to speed forward at a pace faster than I thought I was driving. Everything in my right field of vision seemed to rush toward me and past me, accelerating. I felt a panicked hammering in my heart. What was happening? Did my bitter barista just roofie me? Everyone knows they’re frustrated screenwriters. Which way was home again? Which way was I going? Was it north toward Santa Monica, or south toward Venice? I was just around the corner from home and had traveled this route thousands of times on the way to school, sports, and friends. Had I gotten turned around? I tried to catch my breath and pumped the brakes on our 1985 Mercedes surf wagon. Our tank of a family car had been restored and converted to run on veggie oil so you could fill it up with Wesson at Costco. I know what you’re thinking: yes, I was my parents’ child, but we loved this car. The only drawback was that anytime you went anywhere in it, you ended up smelling like a taco. I slowed the Wesson wagon to a crawl.

  My eyes strained to reconcile the two films side by side, but it felt like a sudden shard—the exact opposite of a thought. Where, a second ago, there was nothing but road and trees and houses, now there was a small, certain darkness—a pinprick of a black hole growing in my consciousness. One I didn’t want to see, know, or even think about right then. I tried to blink it away. I just needed the films to match up, but for a moment it was like a splinter of pure absence between them.

  The angry blare of a car horn startled me back to life, the films merged before me in the driver’s seat, and I was mostly back to normal. Yes, I was headed in the right direction. I just needed to get home, I told myself. I heaved a deep breath. Breathing, breathing would get me back home. “Namaste, motherfuckers!” was my mantra. I just needed to drink more water and take an aspirin. “Stop being such a freakin’ sissy,” I scolded myself, using my inner mom voice and focusing on the road. I’d promised to take my youngest daughter and her friend Kasey to the premiere of Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang at the Television Academy. We’d planned to meet my friend Jacqueline and all go together. And I wasn’t going to let work or money stress get in the way of a treat. Between the divorce and move, both of my daughters had been through enough in the last few years. This was one small thing I could still make happen.

  At home, we were traipsing about. In. Out. Around. As usual, glitter was everywhere. For a ten-year-old going on thirty, Sophie was chirping away like a little cricket. Beyond excited, she was getting ready for approximately 109 minutes of Emma Thompson transforming from a warty old crone to a warm, magical, motherly being. I headed toward the car. As I called back to her from the kitchen, I felt a vague buzzing, like tiny electric needles in my temples, and an invisible metal band tightening around my head. My gaze stretched out across the kitchen to the driveway. And then as I stepped forward, the kitchen counter tilted sharply to the right. A black wash of paint flooded my vision from the top down, a dark watery curtain, a tidal wave of blackness falling on the stage of my life.

  There was no time to react, to even put my hands out, or reach for anything to catch myself. Darkness is different from nothing. It’s not that I see darkness in my head; I just don’t see at all. The messages no longer flowed between body and brain. Not even a split second to notice or care that something was happening or had happened because there was no time anymore. No being; just a voluptuous, impenetrable blackness. There was no distance, no distinction between it and me. I was as much part of the blackness as it was part of me. And that was okay. There was no pain. In fact, there was less than no pain. There wasn’t even a concept of it because there was no “body” that I occupied at that point. No gravity. No corporeal heaviness—only nothingness but less than even that. Only light.

  I’ll have to check with the people who do science (like astrophysicists and such), but I feel like there is probably a very pragmatic reason for the speed of light. Complicated theories aside, we need light to take its time to get places, and fortunately, the universe is happy to oblige. Why? Because if you could see all the light in the universe, all at once, it would blind you in an instant.

  What I saw was all the light in the universe, even the little bits you cannot see, a hundred thousand sparklers from a galaxy far, far away. Not entirely blinding but close. In it, I could feel the universe eddying like a fast-flowing river of stars. La-La Land and everything was illuminated—thank you, Jonathan Safran Foer. Like being trapped in the Van Gogh painting Starry Night in swift oceanic motion, but it was more than light. It was a feeling of transcendence, of unstoppable ecstasy, accompanied by divine chromatic effects: a rapturous, paradisiacal stillness and glow. Amid the rushing of countless points of white light, I felt myself wrestling blindly to separate myself from this luminous new inner geography, to get back from it and put words around it, to observe it. All I could get out or hear myself say was, “It’s a lightning storm in my head.” No deep, Jack Handy thoughts. Nothing profound. Just star stuff. It was unbearably bright and impossibly close, but still, I didn’t want it to stop because it was beautiful. Ecstatic even. It was the electric.

  Layers of voices slipped through the blackest blackness like sylphs enshrouding, swirling all around me, touching but not touching. I couldn’t tell where they began and I ended. Was that my skin or hers, or whose? I had only the most fluid and flimsy of borders. I had the vague sense of dark blue authority, a uniform and possibly a badge. I have always had a problem with authority, and had I access to language just then, I might have said something impolitic like, “Don’t tase me, bro’…I’m not one for self-diagnosis, but I think my brain might already be its own stun gun right now.”

  Later, shadows and hushed voices faded in and out, sounding like they were coming from a conversation down the hall in a vague middle distance of nowhere. Still only blackness, but one voice flitted past me. “She hasn’t had a stroke,” it said, and I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Then, another shadow leaned in close, one that I could see only in a silhouette of black on white. I felt her velvety voice brush over me.

  I knew this woman. She had been a mothering presence for my children and me for years now, a bonus mom. A costume designer for the movies and TV, Jacqueline had arrived in our lives by happenstance when I was working on a new pilot for a TV thriller. She always came complete with bags full of fabric, sparkles, glamor, and infinite patience for my chil
dren’s cantankerous ways. She was the prize you found in the bottom of the cereal box—the kind of cereal your hippie mother wouldn’t actually let you ever have because it had artificial everything in it. Jacqueline was her own Lucky Charm. And mine.

  “Darling,” she whispered now.

  “Nanny McPhee?” I may have said back to her.

  “Darling, you’ve had a seizure.”

  Now, I felt the gravity of my body being pulled down and out of the CT machine thing. I could sense the perfunctory comings and goings of medical people in blue and green scrubs. I recognized this feeling in me now. It was electric, like the fence.

  “Good God, my brain is charcoal.” I whispered.

  Still, no nice doctor came to explain what had happened, or what a seizure was for that matter. It was a jam-packed Los Angeles ER. I was not diagnosed with anything. This wasn’t an episode of House where a cranky middle-aged neurologist and his team of plucky residents work tirelessly to solve the medical mystery of why I’d had a seizure. I was released in Jacqueline’s care with discharge instructions to follow up with a neurologist and take a bunch of pills that looked like horse tranquilizers.

  It had all been unbearably bright and extremely close, but I was convinced it was a one-off.

  4

  Where the Hell Is My White Light?

  THE DAY AFTER that first seizure in 2010, I surveyed my prizefighter face. I sported an angry purple shiner, a cut lip, and a massive bump near my right temple where I’d cracked my head on the edge of the kitchen counter. I held a bag of frozen organic peas to my eye to ward off the swelling. I figured I could cover the shiner with sunglasses like the plastic surgery moms at school always did after their various procedures. Thankfully, I hadn’t needed stitches in my lip. The scab was already healing and would fall off in a day or two. In the meantime, I would just look a tad diseased. “Just a touch of scurvy!” I could tell people. Nothing a little vitamin C and some water couldn’t cure. Every muscle on or associated with my person ached to the point that simply taking a shower was excruciating. I wanted to take a bath but was told not to do so until I’d followed up with a neurologist.

  More than anything, life felt strange and seismically unsettled. Out of nowhere, I recalled a conversation about God that I’d had with my father when I was a child. It went something like this:

  “So, you’re saying he’s everywhere?” I asked.

  “Pretty much,” said my father from behind his newspaper at breakfast.

  “And no one can see him?”

  “Yep.”

  I didn’t like it. Not one bit. What happened to mother earth? I must have been about five when I had this first conversation about religion with my dad. Other than their back-to-the-land nature fantasies and a love of Dean Martin Christmas carols, my parents weren’t terribly religious people. Nonetheless, I was a spiritually inquisitive child. Heaven, I had already worked out on my own, was a cloudy white space in the sky where angels and good dead people hung out, while hell was a low-lying hot place for the baddies, but the idea of “God” was still a fairly abstract concept in my little kid brain. The world just seemed too big for only one guy to be in charge. This is why Santa had also seemed unrealistic to deliver all the presents. You’d need tens of thousands of minions—not just one guy and a couple elves, which is how he always showed up in cartoons.

  “And God can see everything and everyone?” I persisted.

  “Hmm-mmm,” my dad confirmed, sipping his coffee all fatherly.

  “Even when they’re getting dressed?”

  “Hmm-mmm.”

  “Well, I think he’s a real perv.” There was something annoyingly conniving about an all-seeing, omniscient being.

  My father lowered his paper. “Where did you learn that word?”

  “What word?”

  “Perv,” he persisted.

  “Columbo?” I couldn’t really remember, but I loved Columbo at the time because Peter Falk has always reminded me of a Muppet.

  It was an early spiritual crisis, but I still think it’s true; there is something perverse about God and the exercise we call consciousness. As I regained mine in the days following the seizure, I noticed I slept like the dead.

  Now, home alone with the kids at school or at their dad’s, what had happened with the seizure began to sink in and the stakes of it all felt unnervingly high. By the time I really woke up and my postseizure stupor had lifted, I felt a strange expansiveness in my head. An odd kind of floating. I started to wonder how close I’d really come to death. I had so many questions.

  Thanks to pop-culture shows like fantastic 1970s paranormal classics such as In Search of…, narrated by none other than Leonard Nimoy, I was already all too familiar with the common trope of the near-death experience. “Don’t go into the light!” you’ve no doubt jokingly shouted at a beloved television character or at your mate when he or she is on a raging emotional bender.

  These NDEs (as the pros referred to them) always seemed to feature a single bright white light, perhaps at the end of a tunnel with gauzy angelic loved ones, all gently beckoning for you to cross over. And in most narratives, somehow if you don’t cross over, it’s because you have yet to fulfill your destiny or learn some lesson that aligns with your belief system. Maybe you even saw yourself from above during your NDE, on the operating table, or lying flat on your back in your kitchen.

  In the quiet of the house, I naïvely Googled “grand mal seizure” and tearfully watched the videos of people writhing, their bodies juddering away in a hospital bed or on a soft couch only then to fall into a deep slumber afterward. The afflicted were usually attended to by a loved one or a couple of methodically calm but comforting nurses who had clearly seen this kind of thing all before.

  I was unusually silent for me. Ordinarily, I am a gregarious Chatty Cathy and given to much cackling laughter and semi-melodramatic tirades, but not after this. This seizure had stopped my mouth in its tracks. I was mired in a deep swamp of ambient melancholy. I must have scared the hell out of my poor daughter. It had to be an isolated incident, I assured myself.

  I kept having vivid flashbacks of the lightning storm that had struck in my head. The words don’t really do justice to the electrifying dynamism I experienced during my seizure. It felt like my brain was actively reaching around inside my head, searching to fill in the blanks to reconstruct the memory of that day.

  I realized there had been no single white light, no tunnel, and no overhead POV shots of me “seizing” on the kitchen floor. There had been no sign of my nanna or our old dog welcoming me to the afterlife. Where were all the beckoning loved ones?

  I knew I had experienced a kind of “lights out,” but what bothered me the most was that I didn’t even know I was gone. What is so uncanny is that when something like this happens, you really don’t miss yourself at all. And you think how can that be? But there is no you to do the thinking. You’re just gone. I couldn’t even miss my kids. There was simply no capacity for missing anyone while off in Seizure City, which meant I’d better get busy with missing them right away if that’s how death was.

  First there had been a gorgeous Van Gogh-esque lightning storm in my head that had felt so sublime, and then suddenly, there was absolutely nothing. Probably less than nothing because it was like blacking out, except with no brain activity whatsoever. Was this what it was like to be brain dead? Could it really be as ordinary and bland as all that? Was the end of life really just lights out? If so, I was going to be magnificently pissed off.

  I noticed an odd openness. It felt as if I were standing in the middle of a great field with my brain having taken a deep, deep breath. Now there was all this new space. Buddhists sometimes refer to this sensation as having a beginner’s mind—where everything seems new—as though you are seeing it for the first time. I’m not sure why it works that way. I’m sure there’s some complicated neurochemical
explanation, but I found myself often studying very small things such as the grains of coffee swirling in the French press coffeepot or the microfine pattern of dust on a window. My linguistic skills were also lagging, but the thoughts in my head were crackling like bacon in a hot pan.

  If I had experienced a glimpse of the afterlife—apart from the pre-spaz glitter bomb—it seemed a bit mundane. No God? No heaven? Where were all the people? Where were my nanna and Jim Croce? Shouldn’t he be there? And what of Princess Di? What about reincarnation? Where was the multiverse as semi-promised by the string theory nerds? And what about ghosts? I’d been so totally looking forward to at least haunting a few of the jerkier people in my life—moving a picture, stacking some chairs, and saying “boo!” Forget the angelic beings you might have heard about. This afterlife was more like when you actively try to remember back to the time before you were born and you can’t because you’re just not. It was very unsatisfying. I don’t know about you, but I’d expected just a little more creativity from the universe.

  As I brooded over the narratives about God—at least in the western hemisphere—it seemed the story went that God is always all powerful, all knowing, and all good. But if you took a look around at all the evidence—things like global famine, childhood cancer, evil dictators, tsunamis, and seizures—it seemed clear that God was either not all powerful or not all good. What was the use of that? But what had I expected, really? Santa? Fairies? Even a higher plane of consciousness would have been nice. I was taken aback by my own naïvety. Had I been such a closeted faithaholic this whole time, silently indulging in Anne Lamott’s three essential prayers of Help, Thanks, and Wow? Those words we all whisper during life’s inexplicable events?