Read More: A brief Q&A with Alethea Black
STEP ONE
Wake up drenched in sweat, with a fatigue that reaches to your marrow. Fear you’re dying. Go to the doctor. When he runs a battery of tests and declares you to be in perfect health, blink at him in wonderment. Explain again: everything hurts, you have zero energy, on some mornings, when you first wake up, you can’t see. The doctor will shrug and send you home. When you get home, crawl into bed and sleep for 16 hours.
A week later, go to a different doctor. Show her your brown, furry tongue. She will also run a bunch of tests, will also say you are fine. Dumbfounded, reiterate the part about your liver—how you have a dull, constant ache where your liver should be. With one hand, she will hold up an ultrasound slide and say, “You’ve got a terrific liver! Enjoy it!” Stick out your tongue. “Some people just have brown, furry tongues!” she will say. Ponder all the people you’ve known in your forty years, all the tongues. Not one of them resembled the beer-stained carpet at a fraternity house.
The doctor standing before you in her white coat and stethoscope appears perfectly sincere. You are at one of the finest hospitals in the country. Glance around. Is it April Fools’? Are you being punked? When she tells you again that you are the image of good health, do not scream. Do not say: “Are you out of your mind?” Not because you’re intimidated by her framed diplomas, her mahogany desk, her shockingly white teeth. You just have an absurd compulsion about ‘being nice.’
At home, alone in the bathroom, scrutinize your face. Your hair is falling out. There are dark circles under your eyes. Your fingernails are soft as wax. Your skin, once dewy, has turned brittle overnight. Tell yourself that now you have just enough wrinkles for people to take you seriously. But underneath the lie, your stomach twists. What’s going on? Even the dog sniffs at you as if your scent has turned suddenly foreign.
By the time you go to the third doctor, you’ve started forgetting things. You carry a list of symptoms in your purse. Sunlight—nearly all light—hurts your eyes. All sounds hurt your ears. Your mouth tastes like metal. Several times a day, you feel on the verge of passing out. On your way from your car to this doctor’s office, you have to sit briefly on the curb. Whenever you walk these days, it feels as if your legs belong to someone else—someone who has just run twelve marathons.
Again, the tests say you are fine. Again, the doctor agrees. On your way back to the car, you slump beside a manicured bush and cry.
Repeat this six more times, with six more doctors.
STEP TWO
Begin to research your symptoms on the Internet. You do not want to get medical advice from the World Wide Web; you are acutely aware of the perils of such a path. But what choice do you have, when all the professionals insist you’re tip-top?
At night, scroll through pages in the half-light until four, five, six in the morning. Beside you, your boyfriend will snore quietly, sleeping the sleep of the un-sick. Type as softly as you can, your pulse quickening as you connect the dots from one medical article to the next, and the next. You regret not having studied biochemistry in college. What good is Madame Bovary to you now? When your boyfriend stirs, close your laptop and pretend to be asleep. Your boyfriend, whose intelligence you respect, thinks becoming your own doctor is a very, very bad idea. “I used to think the same thing,” you tell him. “That’s what everyone thinks, until this happens to you.”
Your friends in their smart-looking spectacles will all side with your boyfriend. They are healthy. They do not understand. You’re already weary of not having a precise answer when they ask you what’s wrong. You see it when their eyes say, Well, you’re standing up and talking, so you must not be that sick. This illness, whatever it is, is making you angry—at it, at everyone else, and at yourself.
During Step Two, you will feel totally alone—what’s more isolating than illness?—until you discover within your computer an entire sub-continent of the chronically ill. There are discussion boards, home remedies, support groups, YouTube videos. There are protocols to follow, links to online pharmacies where you can buy prescription drugs without a prescription.
You are intrigued, repulsed, attracted, overwhelmed. Try to keep your wits as information flies at you from all directions. It’s unfortunate that some of the articles employ bad grammar, cutesy fonts, squirrelly logic. The man in the YouTube videos appears to be missing some teeth. Try to overlook these things. Instead, focus on the many aspects that ring true. Finally you are recognizing symptoms, identifying causes, reading about cures. Your pulse throbs with new purpose. It’s possible you’ll be able to solve this thing on your own.
Buy a lot of supplements. You’re surprised by how many things will cure everything. Vitamin C cures everything. Iodine cures everything. Ozonated oil cures everything. Beta Glucan cures everything. Put everything that will cure everything in a blender, hit puree, and drink. Dub it a Panacea Smoothie, and, laughing, ask your boyfriend if he would like some. He would not.
Soon your kitchen cabinet will be so full of supplements that it overflows. Rows of bottles cascade across the countertop, creep up to the toaster oven. You have acquired so many supplements, you can no longer connect them all with their original purpose. Pick up the bottle of molybdenum, unscrew the cap, and sniff. You remember molybdenum was good for something. Sniff. You just can’t remember what. Put it back, concluding that molybdenum was never a great name for a supplement, anyway; it’d be much better for a body part.
What’s wrong with you?
My molybdenum’s broken.
You’ve been told that the psyche can influence the body, so you force yourself to remain positive, keep an open mind. But, one morning, you find yourself peering through your new reading glasses at a supplement that claims to provide multi-dimensional immune system support. If it hadn’t used the word multi-dimensional, you might have believed it had the power to support your immune system. But its use of the word multi-dimensional troubles you. You think this supplement is probably bunk, yet you bought it, you’re holding it, you’ve been taking it for weeks. Because that’s who you are: a snake-pit of contradictions. Perhaps your contradictions are what’s making you sick.
STEP THREE
Your digestive system stops working. It groans with absurdly audible explosions, gurgling and sloshing as if space aliens were building amusement parks, aqueducts, entire civilizations within your walls. All day, all night, they blast tunnels and run their water hoses. You want to press your boyfriend’s ear to your belly, the way you might if you were pregnant. “Do you hear that? Can you even believe that?” you would ask. But you do not.
You love your boyfriend, you think he is perhaps the Last of the Last Great Men. But his lack of enthusiasm for the world of amateur medicine is becoming a wedge. Whenever you share your discoveries, your theories, the fruits of your research, you can feel him doubting you. He supports you in so many ways—cooking bone broth, juicing carrots, picking things up at the pharmacy—but inside, he doubts. You want an official diagnosis as much as he does, you tell him. But no one will give you one. What are you supposed to do, just crawl in a hole and wait for the end?
Awake one morning with excruciating abdominal pain, followed by a warm, flowing sensation. Wonder if there’s a way for a person to tell if she’s bleeding to death. Consider Googling “symptoms of internal bleeding,” but do not, on account of your hairdresser. Your hairdresser, while she was last cutting your hair, told you the story of her cousin, who was found slumped over his keyboard, dead of a heart attack. The terms of his final Internet search still glowed on the screen. Heart attack symptoms. Now, even though you know it’s irrational, you fear that Googling “symptoms of internal bleeding” will somehow precipitate a dire effect.
Besides, while the stabbing pain was unpleasant, the warm flowing sensation is actually quite enjoyable. If there were a cure that enabled you to keep the warm flowing feeling, but eliminate the stabbing, you would take it. But there is never such a cure in life. You buy both sides of the coin.
When your boyfriend comes home that afternoon, you’re still lying on the kitchen floor in the fetal position.
What’s wrong? he asks.
It feels like my organs are shutting down.
Should I call the doctor?
You start to cry. You’ve already been to nine doctors. They all tell you you’re fine.
Your boyfriend squats beside you and takes your hand. He is a man of logic, of reason. You like this about him. It reminds you of your father.
How can I help you? he says.
I don’t know, you say. I don’t know what to do.
STEP FOUR
The illness moves to your brain. There are flashes of white light in your peripheral vision. You can’t concentrate. Your ears ring. You’ve always taken pride in your command of language, but you are no longer in command. First you call a wall a door. Then you call a toaster oven an oven toaster. You know what you mean, but your mouth says the other thing. You do not even realize your mistake until your boyfriend gives you a look.
Your emotions take on a bizarre intensity. When the dog barks, it’s as if someone’s beating you to death via your eardrums. One afternoon, when she barks for an hour straight, you tell her to please stop, that her barking is hurting your ears, but she only barks louder, so you yell at her to STOP, to STOP BARKING NOW, but she barks even more crazily, more constantly, until finally you grab her, you squeeze her little body and scream with the full force of your being: Stop barking Stop fucking barking right now if you don’t stop barking this instant I’m going to stop barking for you.
In the sickening silence that follows, you feel stunned. You feel poisoned. It’s not exactly that you have shaken your own infant to death. But you have felt, in your body, how someone could.
You are losing your very self. When you weep in the shower, helpless beneath the uncomfortably sharp needles of water, it is half pain and half fear.
Go to a garden, sit in the sun, try to get your head right. Attempt to meditate, even though you don’t really know how it’s done. Attempt to be still. You no longer attempt to pray. You don’t know when you lost the feeling that someone was listening to you, that an omnipotent loving presence attended to your every word. This could be your faith’s finest hour. Instead, in your center, in the warm nest where your faith used to sit, there is only pulsing, undulating fear.
A plane passes high overhead, riding the lavender clouds. Imagine it blowing up, chunks of flames and debris tumbling through the sky. You have these sorts of thoughts all the time now, out of nowhere. From your sunny garden bench, as you envision ash and scalding metal hurtling toward you, you wonder if you would even bother to move out of the way. In the past few months, you’ve several times imagined stabbing a knitting needle through your own eardrum. You are as confounded by this imagery—knitting needles have no place in your world, you do not even read books with knitting needles in them—as you are by the dark impulses it portends.
On your walk home, the normal citizens of the world will pass you by, oblivious. The un-sick wear their good health so cavalierly. It’s as if they possessed the most exquisite gift—an ermine cloak studded with magic gems—and they just drag it about, wipe their sweat with it. You used to do the same thing.
When your boyfriend asks how you’re doing, you hesitate to tell him the truth. You cry several times a day now—hot, helpless tears, like a child’s. The ringing in your ears has grown constant. It’s as if, inside your head, there’s malicious chatter, static, a live wire flailing about.
There’s a constant feeling of crawling beneath your skin. That part, you tell him about. One night, after he showers and climbs into bed with his book, you whisper, “It’s like having bed bugs, on the inside.” There was a time when the things you whispered in your boyfriend’s ear at this hour of the night were of a decidedly different nature. As he reads his book, you can’t tell if he’s slowly and imperceptibly inching his body away.
After he turns out the light, you lie in the silence and ponder if you have somehow done something to bring this suffering upon yourself. Your record is not without blemish. There was the time you stuffed a used maxi pad in the pocket of your little sister’s parka. The time you were supposed to be driving home for Thanksgiving but you went to the movies with your boyfriend instead. There was the Hostess muffin incident. The cigarette fire in the woods. All the times you knew what was right, but followed your whims anyway. Perhaps your lymph is clogged with the detritus of your mistakes. Perhaps your own blood cries out against you.
STEP FIVE
Find mold in your attic, mold in your basement, mold behind your walls. You’ve always thought that people who suffered from environmental illness were quacks, so this is karmic payback: now you’re one of them. Your beloved house, with its wood-burning stove and wraparound deck and panoramic views of the lake—your house is as sick as you are. This house was your first major purchase in life, and when you bought it, back in 1999, you felt so safe, so free, so much like an adult that after the movers drove away, you lay on the floor between the tall stacks of boxes and cried.
Now the inspectors come in their protective clothing and show you all the different types of mold you have. They do not use the phrase “toxic black mold,” because all the colors of mold are toxic, they explain, and while you do not harbor every variety of mold in your house, you are definitely an equal opportunity employer.
Read everything that has ever been written about mold sickness. Study the inspectors’ report. Talk to other people who’ve gone through the same thing—not Suzanne Somers, but the less famous people. There’s a creeping conclusion you don’t want to face, but ultimately, you do: You have to sell your house. Remediation often doesn’t do the trick, once you’ve become sensitized to mold. Spores are microscopic—they reproduce, they hide. Like demons.
Your friends in their smart-looking spectacles will suggest, in a sideways sort of way, that you not disclose that your house has a hidden mold problem. But you do not like to do things that way. You disclose. You don’t get a great deal of money for the house, especially with the home-equity loan you have to pay off, but you get a small sum to tide you over. You, your boyfriend, and your dog move into a hotel—one of those hotels designed for a residential stay, that has a living room and a kitchen.
In addition to losing your home, you must also lose all your possessions. Yes. Because if you bring your possessions with you, you will contaminate your new environment. Your possessions carry mycotoxins, which are the poisons mold uses to kill you, and they can’t be washed out. You know all about mycotoxins now; you’ve become fluent in the horrors of mold sickness. You have a theory, actually, that mycotoxicosis is what killed Beethoven, but you don’t know whom to tell it to. When you share it with the mold inspectors, they nod fervently beneath their face masks and give you the thumbs-up.
Your boyfriend doesn’t want to give away all his stuff. Naturally. But even he can see the mold, and he understands the concept of contagion. So his bed, his desk, his sleep sofa, his books, his clothing—he gives them all away.
Moved by his sacrifice, you take his hands. You tell him that being homeless, possessionless nomads will be an adventure. A chance for spiritual rebirth.
But while your boyfriend supports the idea of spiritual rebirth on principle, he will also point out that the two of you will be asked to leave the hotel as soon as the money runs out. You haven’t been doing much freelance copy editing; he hasn’t been doing much freelance web design.
Tell him there are options. You’ve read about moldies who camp in their backyards, squat in trailer parks, live in their cars. So many live in their cars, in fact, that you wonder why some savvy company hasn’t designed a sedan equipped with blackout curtains, fully reclinable seats, and a refrigerated glove box. They could call it La Casa. What a hit that’d be!
Your boyfriend isn’t so sure that’d be a hit. He isn’t so sure about any of this. Look into his eyes and tell him that you’re ready for whatever the crazy adventure brings. You’ll live in a teepee, you’ll eat cold beans from a can. You just want to feel normal again.
Go to a doctor who specializes in mold sickness. She’s very expensive, and insurance doesn’t cover it, but what price health? You expect to feel elated—after so many months, to finally know what’s wrong! to be under a professional’s care!—but a disturbing uncertainty threads through you while she speaks. You do not like that her bra strap is showing. You do not like that she spends half your appointment trying to get her air conditioning to work. You do not like that her hair flies in all directions, and there’s nary a white coat in sight.
From your chair, upbraid yourself. You know better than to judge things superficially, don’t you? Has this illness taught you nothing if not that? Or have you forgotten all those white coats who insisted you were 100%? Do not focus on the bra strap. Instead, remind yourself that throughout the ages, there has never been any indication that wisdom favors the well-groomed. On the contrary, wasn’t it the wild-haired locust-eaters who spoke truth?
When she finally gets her A/C to work, the mold doctor will have you fill out one of those forms with little boxes to check for your symptoms. There are so many symptoms for which there is no box. Utterly famished but no appetite. Utterly fatigued but can’t sleep. Fear and trepidation where soul should be. Celestial loneliness.
The mold doctor takes your list and settles in behind her desk. She tells stories about herself as much as she asks questions about your health. She seems wacky. Your new friend from the chat boards has informed you that mold doctors can be wacky because they often started out as moldies themselves.
When she launches into yet another anecdote about her days at Johns Hopkins, interrupt. Tell her that it feels as if you’re dying, as if your organs are melting, as if you’re slipping away in plain sight, and no one believes you.
The mold doctor believes you. She promises to help you rid yourself of mold. She’s going to prescribe two powerful anti-fungal drugs, and for the next six months, you will spend three hours on your back every day, dripping them up your nostrils. But first, you must stop eating carbohydrates.
In your mind, even as she speaks, sever all carbohydrates from your life. You will never touch a noodle again. She seems to expect resistance, but there’s none. That’s fine, you tell her, leaning forward. You’re at the end of your rope, you’ll do anything. The mold doctor nods, understanding. Then, in a musty exam room, without having you change into a gown, she will touch a few pressure points, probe your liver, order some tests. You leave her office and go home to your hotel room feeling more hopeful than you have in months.
STEP SIX
Attempt to win back your health by obediently doing everything the mold doctor says. Become intimately acquainted with fungicidal drugs such as Sporanox and Amphotericin B; fungicidal herbs such as artemisinin and oregano; toxin binders such as modified citrus pectin and Cholestyramine. Boxes of medicines arrive weekly, packed on dry ice. Your refrigerator is full of syringes.
As promised, you eschew all carbohydrates. But you can’t help it if you dream of them. At night, the scrim of your unconscious dances with chocolate cake and cherries, whipped cream and wine. Buttered French toast with warm maple syrup—is there anything better? Now that you’ve been officially prohibited from any interaction with carbohydrates, carbohydrates are all you see. You’ve noticed that people eat them right out in the open, walking down the street. Is this legal? Has this always happened? Overnight, you’ve developed a superhuman ability to spot a muffin at a thousand yards. Men, women, and babies consume carbohydrates ceaselessly, mindlessly, while driving cars, while bobbing in their buggies. Life is a carbohydrate orgy.
Meanwhile, you spend much of that spring on your back, with an absurdly large syringe positioned at your upturned nostril.
One day, your college roommate calls to say she’s coming through town and would like to stay with you. If you have a residential hotel suite, why not share? When she gets there, she’ll seem angry that you’re not eating carbohydrates. You’re already so thin!
Tell her this isn’t a diet, you’re doing it on doctor’s orders. Look into her face as you explain that for the past eighteen months, you have been desperately, mysteriously ill. Point to the dark circles under your eyes, your thinning hair.
Your college roommate is a lifelong dieter; she’s very competitive; she doesn’t understand. The fact that you’re thin now upsets her. She begins to monitor what you eat, and comment on it. Then she starts monitoring what the dog eats. In her opinion, you are eating too little, and your dog is eating too much.
She is focusing on all the wrong things. But you can’t think of a way to tell her this without hurting her feelings. When you go out to dinner at an Indian restaurant, you try to explain what it’s like to feel judged at the exact moment you most need to feel supported.
Without asking, she slops a spoonful of saag paneer onto your plate. Staring at the soggy lumps of green cheese, you realize something. Your college roommate is a bit of a bully. She has always bullied you, and you have always let yourself be bullied. It’s an interesting realization to have, even if you don’t have the strength to do anything about it.
The next morning, on your way to the shower, find your college roommate unspooling her yoga mat in the hallway. Before commencing, she has fixed herself a Bellini with the leftover Champagne—a ritual she refers to as “pre-tox.”
You like this side of your roommate. From her yoga mat, she looks like an origami bird. With her mouth near her knees, she asks what it’s like to have lost everything, to be freed from the shackles of the material world. Tell her it feels liberating and terrifying, the way sky-diving must feel.
Your roommate takes a sip of her drink and strikes a different pose, one that looks stork-like. Illness, she’ll remind you, is a teacher, and you will wonder, again, what your illness could be trying to teach.
From your place by the door, be still. Invite the answers to come. If you were on speaking terms with God, you might be tempted to say: Look. I know I must’ve seemed a little distracted before, what with all that fun I used to have and all those carbs I used to eat. But whatever it is you want me to understand, I’m listening.
Cock your head, your ear to the shell of the universe. But the universe doesn’t answer.
That night, you wake from a dream that you’re back together with your college boyfriend. You haven’t dreamed of him in a decade; it must be the influence of your college roommate. Send him a message on Facebook: “I dreamed we were shagging again. It was nice.” You realize this is offensive on many levels, beginning with your use of the word shag. Your ex has no desire to hear this from you; your current boyfriend would burst a vessel. Why are you behaving this way—like someone helpless, reckless, out of control? What’s wrong with you?
Instead of going back to sleep, you stare at the patches of skin on your calves where the muscles twitch and pulse, unprompted. You know these twitchings are called fasciculations, that they’re linked with Lou Gehrig’s disease. When you hear your roommate shuffle toward the bathroom, ask in a soft voice:
Am I dying?
You’re not dying.
I know, but are my organs shutting down?
They’re not shutting down.
How do you know?
You’re going to get better. Trust me.
But you don’t get better.
For six months, you religiously follow everything the mold doctor tells you to do, but nothing changes. You don’t improve from being out of the moldy house; you don’t respond to the Amphotericin B or Sporanox or artemisinin. Beethoven likely died of mold sickness, but it’s not what’s killing you. You’re back at square one—an illness without a diagnosis, an executioner without a face.
STEP SEVEN
The Internet thinks you have parasites. Your swollen belly, your bulging eyes, your dramatic weight loss—they all point to the presence of worms or amoebas in your gut. These crafty critters are eating your food, they’re crapping in your bloodstream, they are what’s destroying you.
Ha! you think. Your original instincts about space aliens were not that far off. We all have parasites, the Internet says, trying to make you feel better. But in some people, they overgrow. Some people, you think, are too nice.
Sit at your copy-editing desk in a work-like pose, but do not do any actual work. As a freelancer, if you do not do any actual work, you do not get any actual pay. But you have lost all interest in punctuation. Instead, you study parasites day and night, their hoary photographs and slimy habits. You try to determine which one you have. It’s not unlike choosing a pet. You read about their origins, their tendencies; you try to envision this creature in relationship to yourself.
Bring your face right up to the screen so you can stare into a nematode’s vacant eyes.
Could you be living inside me?
When your boyfriend walks in, slam the laptop shut.
What are you doing?
Nothing.
Are you pretending to be a doctor?
No.
Why do you look all excited and sweaty like you do when you read about medical stuff?
Ha, ha.
I’m making organic vegetable stew for dinner, he says. Before he leaves, he stops. For God’s sake, would you go see a professional?
Once he’s gone, you realize he’s right. How can you effectively treat a parasitic infection when you don’t know which parasite it is? They all respond to different drugs. You don’t own a lab; you don’t know CPT codes. You need the professionals.
On your way to yet another doctor’s office, you tell yourself that this is optimism, it’s the sensible thing to do. But, in the pit of your stomach, you feel as you did when you sped over the Tobin Bridge at three in the morning to temporarily reconcile with a doomed boyfriend. Mainstream medicine is like a bad lover you keep revisiting even though you know he can’t give you what you need.
At the Infectious Disease specialist, the team of doctors refuses to test you for parasites. They will not test you unless you have recently traveled to Africa or have lived in Asia for ten years or more. Please, you beg. You’ll do anything—you’ll be part of an experimental trial, you’ll pay for the tests yourself. No, they say. They will not test you, you will not pay. You’ve read that nearly all American doctors are in inexplicable, collective denial on the subject of parasites, but until this moment, you hadn’t believed it.
Keep your lower lip from quivering. Crying will only make things worse. But what about your dog? you ask. Your dog, who likes to nap with her butt against your pillow? Your dog, who had two different types of parasites when she arrived, one helminthic and the other protozoan—tapeworms and giardia? How’d she get them? Has your dog been traveling to Africa without you?
They do not answer. They do not care about your dog. You may leave now, they say, and show you the door.
When you get home, your boyfriend will hand you a glass of fresh-pressed carrot juice with a sprig of mint. He’ll touch your shoulder and inform you that your favorite musician, the one who makes the cells in your marrow rejoice, is playing a free outdoor concert two blocks away.
Under the open sky. The stars. That voice.
You long to go, but instead, you crawl into bed. You spent what little energy you had chasing after doctors who refuse to help.
After he cooks you a free-range grass-fed steak that you don’t have the stomach to eat, your boyfriend will go hear your favorite musician without you. You’re glad. You feel bad for all the ways your illness has hemmed him in.
As soon as he closes the door, you open your computer.
The Internet offers omnibus solutions for parasites. There is diatomaceous earth, there is horse de-wormer, there is Turpentine. You try all of them. That’s right. You, who previously were loath to take baby aspirin—was it wise to plug your ears when a body part was crying?—you eat horse de-wormer with a spoon, you drink Turpentine from a plastic cup. In the course of two years, you’ve become not only someone you no longer recognize, but someone you previously wouldn’t have trusted to mow your lawn. At the outset, you were desperate. Now, you don’t know what to call it.
In addition to the horse de-wormer and the Turpentine, the Internet offers other remedies, ones that sound less life-threatening. Jumping on a miniature trampoline will get your lymph flowing again: you buy a rebounder. Swishing coconut oil in your mouth for twenty minutes a day will pull toxins from your body: you order a jar. Coffee enemas will cleanse your liver: you purchase bucket, bag, hose. Soon there are so many treatments in the queue, you wonder how you’ll have time to employ them all.
The concept of the coffee enema at first will mystify you. You are all for drinking coffee out of a cup. But it never would have occurred to you to stick it anywhere else. Does this mean that at some inspired crossroads of human history, someone took a sip of java and thought: Man, does this taste good. But you know what would be even more delicious?
The dog, too, does not comprehend the coffee enema. She sees you with nose to the floor, down on all fours—naturally, she thinks it’s party time. When you explain, in a pinched voice, No party now. Party later, her tilted head makes you laugh. Then, as your intestines seize, you stop laughing. The dog will jam her nose into your cheekbone and roll onto her back, inviting you to rub her belly.
One afternoon, you decide to bounce on the rebounder while retaining a coffee enema and simultaneously oil-swishing. Do this while your boyfriend is not around. Think of it not as the final peg in your mental collapse, but as clever time management. When the coffee enema proves capable of eliciting ever more sudden urges, slide the rebounder into the bathroom. This way, you’ll be closer to the commode. Also, it might help if you were naked. When your boyfriend gets home, you’ll have to explain why there’s now a trampoline in the bathroom and you’re down on all fours, scrubbing the toilet, naked. But maybe he won’t notice. Lately, when you look at him, he seems only halfway there. When you talk, he seems to only halfway listen.
When he finds the Turpentine, and you admit you’re drinking it, your boyfriend will be appalled. Somehow, explaining that “other people are doing it, on the Internet,” does not help your case. Part of the argument that follows centers on a fact you’ve recently learned: if one person in a household has parasites, all the people in the household have parasites; and if one person’s being treated, all the people have to be treated. Otherwise, the sick person will never get well. Parasites are catchy. People pass them back and forth.
Your boyfriend doesn’t want to hear this. He doesn’t want to hear any of it. Well, you don’t want to hear it, either. Only, guess what? You have to hear it, you’re living it, you’re trapped inside this nightmare while he’s off listening to music and eating carbohydrates!
He eats a lot of sushi. Maybe he’s the one with parasites. Maybe he gave them to you.
There’s a word for the look on your boyfriend’s face, but you’re not sure if it’s contempt or disgust.
Before he climbs into bed that night, your boyfriend will pause beside a photograph of the two of you kayaking. The sun sparkles off the water, your hair, your eyes. Your arms are not emaciated; your smile brims. “Things were so … different then,” he’ll say, and you will try, and mostly succeed, not to hear this as I liked you better before you got sick.
STEP EIGHT […]
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Alethea Black’s recent memoir (You’ve Been So Lucky Already, Little A, 2018) was reviewed by The New York Times. Her short story collection (I Knew You’d Be Lovely, Broadway, 2011) was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover program. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Narrative Magazine, and many others, and has been shortlisted for The Best American Short Stories and won the Arts & Letters prize. Born in Boston, she graduated from Harvard in 1991 and lives in Los Angeles. The illness described in this story ultimately led her to examine human health as it relates to the speed of light. https://medium.com/@alethea/special-relativity-the-key-to-disease-c7e862db0dc7.
“How to Lose Everything in 12 Easy Steps” originally appeared inNarrative Magazine
Read More: A brief Q&A with Alethea Black