Permanent Record(62)

A day or so later, I was home around noon, trying my best to keep up with work remotely. I was on the phone with a security officer at Dell when the dizziness hit me hard. I immediately excused myself from the call, slurring my words, and as I struggled to hang up the phone, I was sure: I was going to die.

For those who’ve experienced it, this sense of impending doom needs no description, and for those who haven’t, there is no explanation. It strikes so suddenly and primally that it wipes out all other feeling, all thought besides helpless resignation. My life was over. I slumped in my chair, a big black padded Aeron that tilted underneath me as I fell into a void and lost consciousness.

I came to still seated, with the clock on my desk reading just shy of 1:00 p.m. I’d been out less than an hour, but I was exhausted. It was as if I’d been awake since the beginning of time.

I reached for the phone in a panic, but my hand kept missing it and grabbing the air. Once I managed to grab ahold of it and get a dial tone, I found I couldn’t remember Lindsay’s number, or could only remember the digits but not their order.

Somehow I managed to get myself downstairs, taking each step deliberately, palm against the wall. I got some juice out of the fridge and chugged it, keeping both hands on the carton and dribbling a fair amount on my chin. Then I lay down on the floor, pressed my cheek to the cool linoleum, and fell asleep, which was how Lindsay found me.

I’d just had an epileptic seizure.

My mother had epilepsy, and for a time at least was prone to grand mal seizures: the foaming at the mouth, her limbs thrashing, her body rolling around until it stilled into a horrible unconscious rigidity. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t previously associated my symptoms with hers, though that was the very same denial she herself had been in for decades, attributing her frequent falls to “clumsiness” and “lack of coordination.” She hadn’t been diagnosed until her first grand mal in her late thirties, and, after a brief spell on medication, her seizures stopped. She’d always told me and my sister that epilepsy wasn’t hereditary and to this day I’m still not sure if that’s what her doctor had told her or if she was just trying to reassure us that her fate wouldn’t be ours.

There is no diagnostic test for epilepsy. The clinical diagnosis is just two or more unexplained seizures—that’s it. Very little is known about the condition. Medicine tends to treat epilepsy phenomenologically. Doctors don’t talk about “epilepsy,” they talk about “seizures.” They tend to divide seizures into two types: localized and generalized, the former being an electrical misfire in a certain section of your brain that doesn’t spread, the latter being an electrical misfire that creates a chain reaction. Basically, a wave of misfiring synapses rolls across your brain, causing you to lose motor function and, ultimately, consciousness.

Epilepsy is such a strange syndrome. Its sufferers feel different things, depending on which part of their brain has the initial electrical cascade failure. Those who have this failure in their auditory center famously hear bells. Those who have it in their visual center either have their vision go dark or see sparkles. If the failure happens in the deeper core areas of the brain—which was where mine occurred—it can cause severe vertigo. In time, I came to know the warning signs, so I could prepare for an oncoming seizure. These signs are called “auras,” in the popular language of epilepsy, though in scientific fact these auras are the seizure itself. They are the proprioceptive experience of the misfire.

I consulted with as many epilepsy specialists as I could find—the best part of working for Dell was the insurance: I had CAT scans, MRIs, the works. Meanwhile, Lindsay, who was my stalwart angel throughout all this, driving me back and forth from appointments, went about researching all the information that was available about the syndrome. She Googled both allopathic and homeopathic treatments so intensely that basically all her Gmail ads were for epilepsy pharmaceuticals.

I felt defeated. The two great institutions of my life had been betrayed and were betraying me: my country and the Internet. And now my body was following suit.

My brain had, quite literally, short-circuited.





18



On the Couch





It was late at night on May 1, 2011, when I noticed the news alert on my phone: Osama bin Laden had been tracked down to Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed by a team of Navy SEALs.

So there it was. The man who’d masterminded the attacks that had propelled me into the army, and from there into the Intelligence Community, was now dead, a dialysis patient shot point-blank in the embrace of his multiple wives in their lavish compound just down the road from Pakistan’s major military academy. Site after site showed maps indicating where the hell Abbottabad was, alternating with street scenes from cities throughout America, where people were fist-pumping, chest-bumping, yelling, getting wasted. Even New York was celebrating, which almost never happens.

I turned off the phone. I just didn’t have it in me to join in. Don’t get me wrong: I was glad the motherfucker was dead. I was just having a pensive moment and felt a circle closing.

Ten years. That’s how long it had been since those two planes flew into the Twin Towers, and what did we have to show for it? What had the last decade actually accomplished? I sat on the couch I’d inherited from my mother’s condo and gazed through the window into the street beyond as a neighbor honked the horn of his parked car. I couldn’t shake the idea that I’d wasted the last decade of my life.