The Opposite of Loneliness Essays and Stories(42)

It was mid-tide, and the up-shore seaweed still crunched under my bare feet. The water was rising. The moonlight drifted down on the salt-caked battlefield, reflected in the tiny pools of water and half-shell oysters.

It was easy to spot the living whales. Their bodies, still moist, shone in the moonlight. I weaved between carcasses, kneeling down beside an old whale that was breathing deeply and far too rapidly for a healthy pilot.

I put my hands on his nose and placed my face in front of his visible eye. I knew he was going to die, and he knew he was going to die, and we both understood that there was nothing either of us could do about it.

Beached whales die on their sides, one eye pressed into the sand, the other facing up and forced to look at the moon, at the orb that pulled the water out from under its fins.

There’s no echolocation on land. I imagined dying slowly next to my mother or a lover, helplessly unable to relay my parting message. I remember trying to convince myself that everything would be fine. But he wouldn’t be fine. Just like the homeless man and the Ethiopian aren’t fine.

Perhaps I should have been comforting one of them, placing my hands on their shoulders. Spending my time and my money and my life saving those who walked on two legs and spoke without echoes.

The moon pulled the waters forward and backward, then inward and around my ankles. Before I could find an answer, the whale’s jaw unclenched, opening slightly around the edges.





Against the Grain

On my deathbed, I will instruct a nurse to bring me the following: a box of Oreos, a bag of Goldfish, a McDonald’s hamburger, an assortment of Dunkin’ Donuts, a chicken pot pie, a Hot Pocket, a large pepperoni pizza, a French crepe, and an ice-cold beer. In my final moments, I will consume this food slowly and delicately as I fade to oblivion. I’ll start with the donuts, lemon glazed and Boston Kreme, biting at each collapsible calorie as my relatives sigh and sign condolence cards. Next, I’ll sample the pizza and beer, happily slurping both as the doctors sew me up and take sad notes. “Oh,” they’ll say in deep baritones, “I think it’s too late. I think it’s the end.” Everyone will gather around me, crying softly and clutching each other, as I reach gloriously for the four-cheese Hot Pocket and Big Mac Supreme.

I’m allergic to stuff. Bread, pasta, cereal, pancakes, soy sauce, seitan, hydrolyzed amp-isostearoyl, triticum monococcum, hordeum vulgare extract, the list goes on. Eventually, it stops at a single word—a single little protein that lurks inside ingredients at the depths of unpronounceable obscurity. Gluten. The king of all polypeptide chains. The enemy of my existence and the hero of my deathbed feast. It hides in sauces and stews, artificial colors and flavors. It teems inside deliciousness to sneak down into my small intestine and kill all my villi.

It’s called Celiac Disease: an autoimmune disorder manifested in an intolerance to the proteins found in wheat, rye, barley, and other common grains. Upon exposure to gluten, my enzyme tissue transglutaminase modifies the protein, and the immune system cross-reacts with the small-bowel tissue, causing an inflammatory reaction that truncates the intestine lining and prevents nutrient absorption. In other words, my white blood cells freak out and attack the stuff like it’s a virus, destroying the intestinal battlefield I unwillingly provide.

My mother taught me words like transglutaminase a few years after she saved my life. As a baby, I spent weeks puzzling doctors and specialists with my stick-thin limbs and distended stomach. I couldn’t gain weight and threw up almost everything I ate. A test called a barium swallow finally revealed that my entire stomach had pushed into my chest, resulting in an emergency surgery to correct this hiatal hernia. Yet I stayed pale and ailing. Instead of improving, I slipped into malnourishment and was carried home from appointment after appointment to high chairs strewn with Cheerios, Saltines, and other plain poisons. My mother, devoid of expert answers, sought her own in the stacks of Boston’s best libraries. She pored over pages and symptoms and Latinate labels until she found an answer under the alphabet’s third letter. “Test her,” she demanded to the mob of white coats. They did. She was right. And at eighteen months, I ate my first rice cake.

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If Celiac Disease were an obscure Indie band, I could brag that I knew about it before everyone else. These days, GLUTEN FREE! is stamped upon cardboard and cupcakes from Whole Foods to local cafés. Apparently, I’m super trendy. I’m the new vegan. I’m the hip new diet that’s sweeping San Francisco and Williamsburg. Glamour magazine prints gluten-free recipes and the Daily Beast featured an article last summer on its popularity among Hollywood stars. I think they’re crazy. Nevertheless, I welcome the awareness. When I was diagnosed in 1990, hardly anyone had heard of the thing. This year the gluten-free market hit $2.6 billion—a number expected to double by 2015. This rice-based explosion has origins from nutritionists in Sweden to doctors in New York . . . but one such source traces closer to home.

My brothers like to tease my mom that she’s obsessed with Celiac Disease. But she kind of is. She bakes endless batches of wheat-free cookies and breads, pouring them at me from ovens and pans, in the morning and in the mail. She often sends me e-mails about some newly safe product. “Rice Chex are gluten free!!!!!!!” she’ll type in the message—more excited than I could ever be over tiny crisp squares. In anticipation of Passover (the most hilarious holiday), my mom counts down the days like it’s the Advent, eagerly awaiting the sudden proliferation of flourless foods. I roll my eyes while half my school agonizes over the deprived horror of a week without bread, but my mom’s off at distant supermarkets, hunting the best and brightest kosher cakes.