Turtles All the Way Down(48)

“There’s an expression in classical music. It goes, ‘We went out to the meadow.’ It’s for those evenings that can only be described in that way: There were no walls, there were no music stands, there weren’t even any instruments. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, we all went out to the meadow. It describes a feeling.”

—TOM WAITS

I know she’s reading this right now. (Hi.) I felt like we went out to the meadow tonight, only we weren’t playing music. In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It was like we weren’t even there, lying together by the pool. It felt like we were in some place your body can’t visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments.

And that really should have ended my evening. But instead of going to sleep, I decided to torture myself by reading more Ayala stories.

I didn’t understand how Davis could like her. She was horrible—totally self-centered and perpetually annoying. At one party scene, Rey observed, “Of course, when Ayala’s around, it’s never really a party, because at parties, people have fun.”

Eventually, I clicked away from the site, but I couldn’t bring myself to put away the computer and go to sleep. Instead, I ended up on Wikipedia, reading about fan fiction and Star Wars, and then I found myself reading the same old articles about the human microbiota and studies of how people’s microbial makeup had shaped and, in some cases, killed them.

At one point, I came across this sentence: “Mammal brains receive a constant stream of interoceptive input from the GI tract, which combines with other interoceptive information from within the body and contextual information from the environment before sending an integrated response to target cells within the GI tract through what is commonly called the ‘gut-brain informational axis’ but might be better described as the ‘gut-brain informational cycle.’”

I realize that’s not the sort of sentence that fills most people with horror, but it stopped me cold. It was saying that my bacteria were affecting my thinking—maybe not directly, but through the information they told my gut to send to my brain. Maybe you’re not even thinking this thought. Maybe your thinking’s infected. Shouldn’t’ve been reading these articles. Should’ve gone to sleep. Too late now.

I checked the light under the door to make sure Mom had gone to sleep and then snuck over to the bathroom. I changed the Band-Aid, looking carefully at the old one. There was blood. Not a lot, but blood. Faintly pink. It isn’t infected. It bleeds because it hasn’t scabbed over. But it could be. It isn’t. Are you sure? Did you even clean it this morning? Probably. I always clean it. Are you sure? Oh, for fuck’s sake.

I washed my hands, put on a new Band-Aid, but now I was being pulled all the way down. I opened the medicine cabinet quietly. Took out the aloe-scented hand sanitizer. I took a gulp, then another. Felt dizzy. You can’t do this. This shit’s pure alcohol. It’ll make you sick. Better do it again. Poured some more of it on my tongue. That’s enough. You’ll be clean after this. Just get one last swallow down. I did. Heard my gut rumbling. Stomach hurt.

Sometimes you clear out the healthy bacteria and that’s when C. diff comes in. You gotta watch out for that. Great, you tell me to drink it, then tell me not to.

Back in my room, sweating over the covers, body clammy, corpse-like. Can’t get my head straight. Drinking hand sanitizer is not going to make you healthier, you crazy fuck. But they can talk to your brain. THEY can tell your brain what to think, and you can’t. So, who’s running the show? Stop it, please.

I tried not to think the thought, but like a dog on a leash I could only get so far from it before I felt the strangling pull against my throat. My stomach rumbled.

Nothing worked. Even giving in to the thought had only provided a moment’s release. I returned to a question Dr. Singh had first asked me years ago, the first time it got this bad: Do you feel like you’re a threat to yourself? But which is the threat and which is the self? I wasn’t not a threat, but couldn’t say to whom or what, the pronouns and objects of the sentence muddied by the abstraction of it all, the words sucked into the non-lingual way down. You’re a we. You’re a you. You’re a she, an it, a they. My kingdom for an I.

Felt myself slipping, but even that’s a metaphor. Descending, but that is, too. Can’t describe the feeling itself except to say that I’m not me. Forged in the smithy of someone else’s soul. Please just let me out. Whoever is authoring me, let me up out of this. Anything to be out of this.

But I couldn’t get out.

Three flakes, then four arrive.

Then many more.





EIGHTEEN



MOM WOKE ME UP AT 6:50. “Sleep through your alarm?” she asked.

I squinted. It was still dark in my room. “I’m fine,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” I said, and pulled myself out of bed.

I was at school just thirty-two minutes later. I didn’t look my best, but I’d long ago given up trying to impress the student body of White River High School.

Daisy was sitting alone on the front steps. “You look sleepy,” she said as I walked up. It was cloudy, the kind of day where the sun is a supposition.

“Long night. How are you?”