Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

^{CHAPTER 1} BEDBUG BLUES

Maybe it all began with a bug bite, from a bedbug that didn’t exist.

One morning, I’d woken up to find two red dots on the main purplish-blue vein running down my left arm. It was early 2009, and New York City was awash in bedbug scares: they infested offices, clothing stores, movie theaters, and park benches. Though I wasn’t naturally a worrier, my dreams had been occupied for two nights straight by finger-long bedbugs. It was a reasonable concern, though after carefully scouring the apartment, I couldn’t find a single bug or any evidence of their presence. Except those two bites. I even called in an exterminator to check out my apartment, an overworked Hispanic man who combed the whole place, lifting up my sofa bed and shining a flashlight into places I had never before thought to clean. He proclaimed my studio bug free. That seemed unlikely, so I asked for a follow-up appointment for him to spray. To his credit, he urged me to wait before shelling out an astronomical sum to do battle against what he seemed to think was an imaginary infestation. But I pressed him to do it, convinced that my apartment, my bed, my body had been overrun by bugs. He agreed to return and exterminate.

Concerned as I was, I tried to conceal my growing unease from my coworkers. Understandably, no one wanted to be associated with a person with a bedbug problem. So at work the following day, I walked as nonchalantly as possible through the newsroom of the New York Post to my cubicle. I was careful to conceal my bites and tried to appear casual, normal. Not that “normal” means a lot at the Post.

Though it’s notoriously obsessed with what’s new, the Post is nearly as old as the nation itself. Established by Alexander Hamilton in 1801, it is the longest continually run newspaper in the country. In its first century alone, the paper crusaded for the abolition movement and helped promote the creation of Central Park. Today the newsroom itself is cavernous yet airless, filled with rows of open cubicles and a glut of filing cabinets packed with decades of unused, forgotten documents. The walls are freckled with clocks that don’t run, dead flowers hung upside down to dry, a picture of a monkey riding a border collie, and a big foam Six Flags finger, all memorabilia from reporters’ assignments. The PCs are ancient, the copy machines the size of small ponies. A small utility closet that once served as a smoking room now holds supplies, and is marked by a weathered sign warning that the smoking room no longer exists, as if someone might accidentally wander in for a cigarette among the monitors and video equipment. This has been my eccentric little world for the past seven years, since I started here as a seventeen-year-old intern.

Especially around deadline, the room buzzes with activity—keyboards clacking, editors yelling, reporters cackling—the perfect stereotype of a tabloid newsroom.

“Where’s the fucking picture to go with this caption?”

“How is it that he didn’t know she was a prostitute?”

“What color were the socks of the guy who jumped off the bridge?”

It’s like a bar without alcohol, filled with adrenaline-soaked news junkies. The cast of characters here is unique to the Post: the brightest headline writers in the business, the hardened newshounds hunting after exclusives, and type-A workaholics who possess the chameleon ability to either befriend or antagonize almost anyone. Still, on most days, the newsroom is subdued, as everyone silently combs through court documents, interviews sources, or reads newspapers. Often, like today, the newsroom is as quiet as a morgue.

Heading toward my desk to start the day, I wove through the rows of cubicles marked by green Manhattan street signs: Liberty Street, Nassau Street, Pine Street, and William Street, throwbacks to a time when the Post was actually flanked by those downtown streets in its previous home at the South Street Seaport. My desk is at Pine Street. Amid the silence, I slid into my seat beside Angela, my closest friend at the paper, and gave her a tense smile. Trying not to let my question echo too loudly across the noiseless room, I asked, “You know anything about bedbug bites?”

I often joked that if I ever had a daughter, I’d want her to be like Angela. In many ways, she is my newsroom hero. When I first met her, three years before, she was a soft-spoken, shy young woman from Queens, only a few years older than me. She had arrived at the Post from a small weekly paper and since then had matured under the pressure of a big-city tabloid into one of the Post’s most talented reporters, churning out reams of our best stories. Most late Friday nights, you’d find Angela writing four stories on split screens simultaneously. I couldn’t help but look up to her. Now I really needed her advice.

Hearing that dreaded word, bedbugs, Angela scooted her chair away from mine. “Don’t tell me you have them,” she said with an impish smile. I started to show her my arm, but before I could get into my tale of woe, my phone rang.

“You ready?” It was the new Sunday editor, Steve. He was just barely in his midthirties, yet he had already been named head editor of the Sunday paper, the section I worked for, and despite his friendliness, he intimidated me. Every Tuesday, each reporter had a pitch meeting to showcase some of his or her ideas for that Sunday’s paper. At the sound of his voice, I realized with panic that I was completely unprepared for this week’s meeting. Usually I had at least three coherent ideas to pitch; they weren’t always great, but I always had something. Now I had nothing, not even enough to bluff my way through the next five minutes. How had I let that happen? This meeting was impossible to forget, a weekly ritual that we all fastidiously prepared for, even during days off.

Bedbugs forgotten, I widened my eyes at Angela as I stood back up, gamely hoping it all would work out once I got to Steve’s office.

Nervously, I walked back down “Pine Street” and into Steve’s office. I sat down next to Paul, the Sunday news editor and close friend who had mentored me since I was a sophomore in college, giving him a nod but avoiding direct eye contact. I readjusted my scratched-up wide-framed Annie Hall glasses, which a publicist friend once described as my own form of birth control because “no one will sleep with you with those on.”

We sat there in silence for a moment, as I tried to let myself be comforted by Paul’s familiar, larger-than-life presence. With his shock of prematurely white hair and his propensity to toss the word fuck around like a preposition, he is the essence of a throwback newsman and a brilliant editor.

He had given me a shot as a reporter during the summer of my sophomore year of college after a family friend introduced us. After a few years in which I worked as a runner, covering breaking news and feeding information to another reporter to write the piece, Paul offered me my first big assignment: an article on the debauchery at a New York University fraternity house. When I returned with a story and pictures of me playing beer pong, he was impressed with my chutzpah; even though the exposé never ran, he assigned me more stories until I had been hired on full time in 2008. Now, as I sat in Steve’s office wholly unprepared, I couldn’t help but feel like a work in progress, not worthy of Paul’s faith and respect.

The silence deepened until I looked up. Steve and Paul were staring at me expectantly, so I just started talking, hoping something would come. “I saw this story on a blog… ,” I said, desperately plucking up wisps of half-formed ideas.

“That’s really just not good enough,” Steve interrupted. “You need to be bringing in better stuff than this. Okay? Please don’t come in with nothing again.” Paul nodded, his face blazing red. For the first time since I’d started working on my high school newspaper, journalism disagreed with me. I left the meeting furious at myself and bewildered by my own ineptitude.

“You okay?” Angela asked as I returned to my desk.

“Yeah, you know, I’m just bad at my job. No big deal,” I joked grimly.

She laughed, revealing a few charmingly crooked incisor teeth. “Oh, come on, Susannah. What happened? Don’t take it seriously. You’re a pro.”

“Thanks, Ang,” I said, sipping my lukewarm coffee. “Things just aren’t going my way.”

I brooded over the day’s disasters that evening as I walked west from the News Corp. building on Sixth Avenue, through the tourist clusterfuck that is Times Square, toward my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. As if purposely living the cliché of a New York writer, I rented a cramped one-room studio, where I slept on a pullout sofa. The apartment, eerily quiet, overlooked the courtyard of several tenements, and I often awoke not to police sirens and grumbling garbage trucks but to the sound of a neighbor playing the accordion on his balcony.

Still obsessed with my bites, despite the exterminator’s assurance that I had nothing to worry about, I prepared for him to spray the place and spent that night discarding things that could be harboring bedbugs. Into the garbage went my beloved Post clips, hundreds of articles reminding me of how bizarre my job is: the victims and suspects, dangerous slums, prisons and hospitals, twelve-hour shifts spent shivering inside photographers’ cars waiting to photograph—or “pop”—celebrities. I had always loved every minute of it. So why was I suddenly so terrible at it?

As I shoved these treasures into the trash bags, I paused on a few headlines, among them the biggest story of my career to date: the time I managed to land an exclusive jailhouse interview with child kidnapper Michael Devlin. The national media were hot on the story, and I was only a senior at Washington University in St. Louis, yet Devlin spoke to me twice. But the story didn’t end there. His lawyers went nuts after the article ran, launching a smear campaign against the Post and calling for a judicial gag order, while the local and national media began debating my methods on live TV and questioning the ethics of jailhouse interviews and tabloids in general. Paul fielded several tearful phone calls from me during that time, which bound us together, and in the end, both the paper and my editors stood by me. Though the experience had rattled me, it also whetted my appetite, and from then on, I became the resident “jailhouser.” Devlin was eventually sentenced to three consecutive lifetimes in prison.

Then there was the butt implant story, “Rear and Present Danger,” a headline that still makes me laugh. I had to go undercover as a stripper looking for cheap butt enhancements from a woman who was illegally dispensing them out of a midtown hotel room. As I stood there with my pants around my ankles, I tried not to be insulted when she announced that she would need “a thousand dollars per cheek,” twice the amount she charged the woman who had come forward to the Post.

Journalism was thrilling; I had always loved living a reality that was more fabulist than fiction, though little did I know that my life was about to become so bizarre as to be worthy of coverage in my own beloved tabloid.

Even though the memory made me smile, I added this clip to the growing trash pile—“where it belongs,” I scoffed, despite the fact that those crazy stories had meant the world to me. Though it felt necessary at the moment, this callous throwing away of years’ worth of work was completely out of character for me. I was a nostalgic pack rat, who held on to poems that I had written in fourth grade and twenty-some-odd diaries that dated back to junior high. Though there didn’t seem to be much of a connection among my bedbug scare, my forgetfulness at work, and my sudden instinct to purge my files, what I didn’t know then is that bug obsession can be a sign of psychosis. It’s a little-known problem, since those suffering from parasitosis, or Ekbom syndrome, as it’s called, are most likely to consult exterminators or dermatologists for their imaginary infestations instead of mental health professionals, and as a result they frequently go undiagnosed.¹ My problem, it turns out, was far vaster than an itchy forearm and a forgotten meeting.

After hours of packing everything away to ensure a bedbug-free zone, I still didn’t feel any better. As I knelt by the black garbage bags, I was hit with a terrible ache in the pit of my stomach—that kind of free-floating dread that accompanies heartbreak or death. When I got to my feet, a sharp pain lanced my mind, like a white-hot flash of a migraine, though I had never suffered from one before. As I stumbled to the bathroom, my legs and body just wouldn’t react, and I felt as if I were slogging through quicksand. I must be getting the flu, I thought.

This might not have been the flu, though, the same way there may have been no bedbugs. But there likely was a pathogen of some sort that had invaded my body, a little germ that set everything in motion. Maybe it came from that businessman who had sneezed on me in the subway a few days before, releasing millions of virus particles onto the rest of us in that subway car? Or maybe it was in something I ate or something that slipped inside me through a tiny wound on my skin, maybe through one of those mysterious bug bites?

There my mind goes again.²

The doctors don’t actually know how it began for me. What’s clear is that if that man had sneezed on you, you’d most likely just get a cold. For me, it flipped my universe upside down and very nearly sent me to an asylum for life.

^{CHAPTER 2} THE GIRL IN THE BLACK LACE BRA

A few days later, the migraine, the pitch meeting, and the bedbugs all seemed like a distant memory as I awoke, relaxed and content, in my boyfriend’s bed. The night before, I had taken Stephen to meet my father and stepmother, Giselle, for the first time, in their magnificent Brooklyn Heights brownstone. It was a big step in our four-month-old relationship. Stephen had met my mom already—my parents had divorced when I was sixteen, and I had always been closer to her, so we saw her more often—but my dad can be intimidating, I know, and he and I had never had a very open relationship. (Though they’d been married for more than a year, Dad and Giselle had only recently told my brother and me about their marriage.) But it had been a warm and pleasant dinner with wine and good food. Stephen and I had left believing that the evening was a success.

Although my dad would later confess that during that first meeting, he had thought of Stephen as more of a placeholder than a long-term boyfriend, I didn’t agree at all. We’d only recently begun dating, but Stephen and I had first met six years earlier, when I was eighteen and we worked together at the same record store in Summit, New Jersey. Back then, we passed the workdays with polite banter, but the relationship never went any deeper, mainly because he is seven years my senior (an unthinkable gap for a teenager). Then one night the previous fall, we had run into each other at a mutual friend’s party at a bar in the East Village. Clinking our bottles of Sierra Nevada, we bonded over our shared dislike for shorts and our passion for Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. Stephen was alluring in that languid, stay-out-all-night kind of way: a musician with long, unkempt hair, a skinny smoker’s frame, and an encyclopedic knowledge of music. But his eyes, trusting and honest, have always been his most attractive trait. Those eyes, with nothing to hide, made me feel as if I had dated him forever.

That morning, stretched out in his bed in his enormous (by comparison) studio apartment in Jersey City, I realized I had the place to myself. Stephen had already left for band practice and would be gone for the rest of the day, leaving me free to either spend the day there or let myself out. We had exchanged keys about a month earlier. It was the first time I had taken such a step with a boyfriend, but I had no doubt it was right. We felt deeply comfortable together, generally happy, safe, and trusting. As I lay there, however, I was suddenly, unexpectedly, hit with one overpowering thought: Read his e-mails.

This irrational jealousy was wholly unlike me; I had never even been tempted to intellectually trespass like this. But without really considering what I was doing, I opened up his MacBook and began to scroll down his inbox. I sorted through months of mundane e-mails until I triumphantly unearthed a recent one from his ex-girlfriend. The subject line was “Do You Like It?” I clicked, my heart pounding furiously in my chest. She had sent him a picture of herself, posing seductively with her lips pursed, showing off a new auburn hairstyle. It didn’t look as if Stephen had ever responded. Still, I fought the urge to punch the computer or throw it across the room. Instead of stopping there, though, I indulged my fury and continued digging until I’d dredged up the correspondence that chronicled their yearlong relationship. Most of these e-mails ended with three words: “I love you.” Stephen and I hadn’t yet said that to each other. I slammed down the laptop screen, enraged, though I couldn’t say exactly why. I knew he hadn’t talked to her since we started dating, and he had done nothing inappropriate. But now I felt compelled to go look elsewhere for signs of betrayal.

I tiptoed over to his yellow IKEA dresser—and froze. What if he has cameras going? Nah. Who secretly videotapes their home while they’re away besides overzealous parents spying on new nannies? But the thought persisted: What if he’s watching me? What if this is a test? Although I was frightened by this foreign paranoia, it didn’t stop me from pulling open the drawers and rifling through his clothes, flinging them on the floor, until I found the jackpot: a cardboard box decorated with band stickers and filled with hundreds of letters and pictures, most of them from exes. There was one long framed photo-booth series with his most recent ex-girlfriend: they pouted, looked longingly at each other, laughed, and then kissed. I could see it happening right in front of me, unfolding like a child’s flipbook: I was witnessing them falling in love. Next there was a picture of the same girl in a see-through lace bra with her hands on her bony hips. Her hair was bleached blond, but it looked attractive, not whorish. Below that were the letters, a fistful of handwritten notes that went as far back as Stephen’s teens. At the top, the same girlfriend gushed about how much she missed him while she was staying in France. She misused the word their and spelled definitely as defiantely, which thrilled me so much that I laughed out loud, a kind of cackle.

Then, as I reached for the next letter, I caught sight of myself in the mirror of the armoire, wearing only a bra and underwear, clutching Stephen’s private love letters between my thighs. A stranger stared back from my reflection; my hair was wild and my face distorted and unfamiliar. I never act like this, I thought, disgusted. What is wrong with me? I have never in my life snooped through a boyfriend’s things.

I ran to the bed and opened my cell phone: I had lost two hours. It felt like five minutes. Moments later, the migraine returned, as did the nausea. It was then that I first noticed my left hand felt funny, like an extreme case of pins and needles. I clenched and unclenched my hand, trying to stop the tingling, but it got worse. I raced to the dresser to put away his things so that he wouldn’t notice my pilfering, trying to ignore the uncomfortable tingling sensation. Soon though, my left hand went completely numb.

^{CHAPTER 3} CAROTA

The pins and needles, which persisted unabated over many days, didn’t concern me nearly as much as the guilt and bewilderment I felt over my behavior in Stephen’s room that Sunday morning. At work the next day, I commissioned the help of the features editor, Mackenzie, a friend who is as prim and put together as a character out of Mad Men.

“I did a really bad thing,” I confessed to her outside the News Corp. building, huddling under an overhang in an ill-fitting winter coat. “I snooped at Stephen’s house. I found all these pictures of his ex-girlfriend. I went through all of his stuff. It was like I was possessed.”

She shot me a knowing half-smile, flipping her hair off her shoulders. “That’s all? That’s really not so bad.”

“Mackenzie, it’s psycho. Do you think my birth control is causing hormonal changes?” I had recently started using the patch.

“Oh, come on,” she countered. “All women, especially New Yorkers, do that, Susannah. We’re competitive. Seriously, don’t be so hard on yourself. Just try not to do it again.” Mackenzie would later admit she was concerned not by the act of snooping itself but by my overreaction to having done it.

I spotted Paul smoking nearby and posed the same question. I could depend on him to tell it to me straight. “No, you’re not crazy,” he assured me. “And you shouldn’t be worried. Every guy keeps pictures or something from their exes. It’s the spoils of war,” he explained helpfully. Paul could always be counted on for a man’s perspective, because he is so singularly male: eats hard (a double cheeseburger with bacon and a side of gravy), gambles hard (he once lost $12,000 on a single hand at the blackjack table at the Borgata in Atlantic City), and parties hard (Johnnie Walker Blue when he’s winning, Macallan 12 when he isn’t).

When I got to my desk, I noticed that the numbness in my left hand had returned—or maybe it had never left?—and had moved down the left side of my body to my toes. This was perplexing; I couldn’t decide if I should be worried, so I called Stephen.

“I can’t explain; it just feels numb,” I said on the phone, holding my head parallel to my desk because my landline cord was so tangled.

“Is it like pins and needles?” he asked. I heard him strum a few chords on his guitar in the background.

“Maybe? I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s like nothing I’ve felt before,” I said.

“Are you cold?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well, if it doesn’t go away, you should probably go to a doctor.” I rolled my eyes. This coming from the guy who hadn’t been to a doctor in years. I needed another opinion. When Stephen and I hung up, I swiveled my chair around to face Angela.

“Did you sneeze or bend over funny?” she asked. Her aunt had recently sneezed and dislocated a disc in her spine, which had caused numbness in her hands.

“I think you should get it checked out,” another reporter piped up from her desk nearby. “Maybe I’ve been watching too many episodes of Mystery Diagnosis, but there’s a lot of scary shit out there.”

I laughed this off at the time, but flickers of doubt danced in my head. Even though my colleagues were professional slingers of hyperbole, hearing the worry in their voices made me start to rethink my laissez-faire attitude. That day during a lunch break, I finally decided to call my gynecologist, Eli Rothstein, who had over time become more of a friend than a medical practitioner; he had even treated my mom when she was pregnant with me.

Most of the time Rothstein was laid back; I was young and generally healthy, so I was accustomed to his telling me everything was normal. But when I described my symptoms, the usual warmth dropped from his voice: “I’d like you to see a neurologist as soon as possible. And I’d like you to stop taking your birth control immediately.” He arranged for me to visit a prominent neurologist that afternoon.

Concerned by his reaction, I hailed a cab and headed uptown, the taxi zipping in and out of the early afternoon traffic before dropping me in front of an impressive Upper East Side building where doormen staffed a grand marble lobby. One doorman pointed me to an unmarked wooden door on the right. The contrast between the crystal-chandeliered entrance and the drab office was discomfiting, as if I had jumped back in time to the 1970s. Three unmatched tweed chairs and a light brown flannel couch provided seating. I chose the couch and tried to avoid sinking in at its center. A few paintings hung around the walls of the waiting room: an ink sketch of a godlike man with a long white beard holding an instrument that looked suspiciously like a surgical needle; a pastoral scene; and a court jester. The haphazard decor made me wonder if everything, including the furniture, had been dug up at a garage sale or pilfered from sidewalk castoffs.

Several emphatic signs hung at the receptionist’s desk: PLEASE DO NOT USE LOBBY FOR PHONE CALLS OR WAITING FOR PATIENTS!!!!!! ALL COPAYS MUST BE PAID BEFORE SEEING DOCTOR!!!!!!!

“I’m here to see Dr. Bailey,” I said. Without a smile and without looking at me, the receptionist shoved a clipboard in my direction. “Fill it out. Wait.”

I breezed through the form. Never again would a health history be so simple. Any medications? No. Allergies? No. History of surgery or previous illness? I paused here. About five years ago, I had been diagnosed with melanoma on my lower back. It had been caught early and required only minor surgery to remove. No chemo, nothing else. I jotted this down. Despite this premature cancer scare, I had remained nonchalant, some would say immature, about my health; I was about as far from a hypochondriac as you can get. Usually it took several pleading phone calls from my mom for me to even follow through on my regular doctor’s appointments, so it was a big deal that I was here alone and without any prodding. The shock of the gynecologist’s uncharacteristic worry had been unnerving. I needed answers.

To keep calm, I fixated on the strangest and most colorful of the paintings—a distorted, abstract human face outlined in black with bright patches of primary colors, red pupils, yellow eyes, blue chin, and a black nose like an arrow. It had a lipless smile and a deranged look in its eyes. This painting would stick in my mind, materializing again several more times in the coming months. Its unsettling, inhuman distortion sometimes soothed me, sometimes antagonized me, sometimes goaded me during my darkest hours. It turned out to be a 1978 Miró titled Carota, or carrot in Italian.

“CALLAAHAANN,” the nurse brayed, mispronouncing my name. It was a common, excusable mistake. I stepped forward, and she showed me to an empty examination room, then handed me a green cotton gown. After a few moments, a man’s baritone voice echoed behind the door: “Knock, knock.” Dr. Saul Bailey was a grandfatherly-looking man. He introduced himself, extending his left hand, which was soft but strong. In my own, smaller one it felt meaty, significant. He spoke quickly. “So you’re Eli’s patient,” he began. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“I don’t really know. I have this weird numbness.” I waved my left hand at him to illustrate. “And in my foot.”

“Hmmm,” he said, reading over my chart. “Any history of Lyme disease?”

“Nope.” There was something about his demeanor that made me want to reassure him, to say, “Forget it, I’m fine.” He somehow made me want not to be a burden.

He nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s have a look.”

He conducted a typical neurological exam. It would be the first of many hundreds to come. He tested my reflexes with a hammer, constricted my eyes with a light, assessed my muscle strength by pushing his hands against my outstretched arms, and checked my coordination by having me close my eyes and maneuver my fingers to my nose. Eventually he jotted down “normal exam.”

“I’d like to draw some blood, do a routine workup, and I’d like you to get an MRI. I’m not seeing anything out of the norm, but just to be safe, I’d like you to get one,” he added.

Normally I would have put the MRI off, but today I decided to follow through. A young, lanky lab technician in his early thirties greeted me in the lab’s waiting room and walked me toward a changing area. He led me to a private dressing room, offered a cotton gown, and instructed me to take off all my clothes and jewelry, lest they interfere with the machinery. After he left, I disrobed, folded my clothes, removed my lucky gold ring, and dropped it into a lockbox. The ring had been a graduation gift from my stepfather—it was 14K gold with a black hematite cat’s eye, which some cultures believe can ward off evil spirits. The tech waited for me outside the changing area, smiling as he guided me to the MRI room, where he helped prop me up on the platform, placed a helmet on my head, tucked a blanket over my bare legs, and then walked out to oversee the procedure from a separate room.

After half an hour of enduring repeated close-range booming inside the machine, I heard the tech’s faraway voice: “Good job. We’re all set.”

The platform moved out of the machine as I pulled off the helmet, removed the blanket, and got to my feet, feeling uncomfortably exposed in just the hospital gown.

The technician grinned at me and leaned his body against the wall. “So what do you do?”

“I’m a reporter for a newspaper,” I said.

“Oh yeah, which one?”

“The New York Post.”

“No way! I’ve never met a real-life reporter before,” he said as we walked back to the changing room. I didn’t reply. I put on my clothes as quickly as I could and rushed toward the elevators to avoid another conversation with the tech, who I felt was being awkwardly flirtatious. Unpleasant as they can be, MRIs are largely unremarkable. But something about this visit, especially that innocent exchange with the tech, stayed with me long after the appointment, much like the Carota picture. Over time, the tech’s mild flirtations teemed with a strange malevolence created entirely by my churning brain.

It wasn’t until hours later, when I idly tried to twirl my ring on my still-numb left hand, that I realized the real casualty of that disturbing day. I had left my lucky ring in that lockbox.

“Is it bad that my hand still feels tingly all the time?” I asked Angela again the next day at work. “I just feel numb and not like myself.”

“Do you think you have the flu?”

“I feel terrible. I think I have a fever,” I said, glancing at my ringless left finger. My nausea matched my anxiety about the ring. I was obsessed by its absence, but I couldn’t get up the nerve to call the office and hear that it was gone. Irrationally, I was instead clinging to that empty hope: Better not to know, I convinced myself. I also knew I was going to be too sick to make the trek later that night to see Stephen’s band, the Morgues, perform at a bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which made me feel worse. Watching me, Angela said, “You don’t look too hot. Why don’t I walk you home?”

Normally I would have refused her offer, especially because it was Friday evening on deadline, which typically kept us at the office until 10:00 p.m. or later, but I felt so nauseous and sick and mad at myself that I let her escort me. The trip, which should have taken five minutes, today took a half-hour because after practically every other step I had to stop and dry heave. Once we got to my apartment, Angela insisted I phone my doctor to get some answers. “This just isn’t normal. You’ve been sick for too long,” she said.

I dialed the after-hours hotline and soon received a phone call back from the gynecologist, Dr. Rothstein.

“I do want to let you know that we’ve gotten some good news. Yesterday’s MRI came back normal. And we’ve eliminated the possibility that you had a stroke or a blood clot, two things that, frankly, I was worried about because of the birth control.”

“That’s great.”

“Yes, but I want you to stay off the birth control, just to be safe,” he said. “The only thing that the MRI showed was a small amount of enlargement of a few lymph nodes in your neck, which leads me to believe that it’s some kind of virus. Possibly mononucleosis, though we don’t have the blood tests back to prove it yet.”

I almost laughed out loud. Mono in my twenties. As I hung up, Angela was looking at me expectantly. “Mono, Angela. Mono.”

The tension left her face and she laughed. “Are you kidding me? You have the kissing disease. What are you, like, thirteen?”

^{CHAPTER 4} THE WRESTLER

Mono. It was a relief to have a word for what plagued me. Though I spent Saturday in bed feeling sorry for myself, I gathered enough strength the next night to join Stephen, his oldest sister, Sheila, and her husband, Roy, at a Ryan Adams show in nearby Montclair. Before the show, we met at a local Irish pub, sitting in the dining area underneath a low-hanging antique chandelier that let off little tufts of light. I ordered fish and chips, though I couldn’t even stomach the image of the dish. Stephen, Sheila, and Roy made small talk as I sat there, mute. I had met Sheila and Roy only a few times and hated to imagine what kind of impression I was making, but I couldn’t rouse myself to join the conversation. They must think I have no personality. When my fish and chips came, I immediately regretted my order. The cod, caked in thick fried batter, seemed to glow. The fat on it glinted in the light from the chandelier. The fries too looked sickeningly greasy. I pushed the food around on my plate, hoping no one would notice I wasn’t actually eating anything.

We arrived early for the show, but the music hall was already crowded. Stephen wanted to be as close to the stage as possible, so he pushed forward through the crowd. I tried following him, but as I moved deeper into the horde of thirtysomething men, I grew dizzy and queasy.

I called out to him, “I can’t do this!”

Stephen gave up his mission and joined me at the back of the floor by a pillar, which I needed to support my weight. My purse felt as if it weighed forty pounds, and I struggled to balance it on my shoulder because there wasn’t enough space around me to lay it on the floor.

The background music swelled. I love Ryan Adams and tried to cheer but could only clap my hands weakly. Two five-foot-tall neon blue roses hung in the background behind the band, burning into my vision. I felt the pulse of the crowd. A man to my left lit up a joint, and the sweet smell of smoke made me gag. The breath of the man and woman behind me flared hotly on my neck. I couldn’t focus on the music. The show was torture.

Afterward we piled into Sheila’s car so she could drive us back to Stephen’s apartment in Jersey City. The three of them talked about how incredible the band had been, but I stayed silent. My shyness struck Stephen as strange; I was never one to keep my opinions to myself.

“Did you like the show?” Stephen nudged, reaching out for my hand.

“I can’t really remember it.”

After that weekend, I took three more consecutive days off work. That was a lot for anyone, but especially for a newbie reporter. Even when the Post kept me out past 4:00 a.m. working on Meatpacking District club stories, I always made it to the office right on time a few hours later. I never took sick days.

I decided to finally share my diagnosis with my mother, who was distressed when I told her about the numbness, particularly because it was only on one side of the body. I assured her it was only because of the mono. My father seemed less concerned on the phone, but on my third day off he insisted on coming into Manhattan to see me. We met at an empty AMC Theater in Times Square for an early showing of The Wrestler.

“I used to try to forget about you,” Randy “the Ram,” a washed-up pro wrestler played by a haggard Mickey Rourke, says to his daughter.³ “I used to try to pretend that you didn’t exist, but I can’t. You’re my little girl. And now I’m an old broken-down piece of meat and I’m alone. And I deserve to be all alone. I just don’t want you to hate me.” Hot, wet tears ran down my cheeks. Embarrassed, I tried to control the heaving in my chest, but the exertion made me feel worse. Without saying a word to my father, I ran from my seat to the theater’s bathroom, where I hid in a locked stall and allowed myself to weep until the feeling passed. After a moment, I collected myself and headed out to wash my hands and face, ignoring the concerned rubbernecking of the middle-aged blond at a nearby sink. When she left, I stared at my image in the mirror. Was Mickey Rourke really getting to me? Or was it the whole father-daughter thing? My dad was far from affectionate, habitually avoiding using words like “I love you,” even with his children. It was a learned deficiency. The one time he had kissed his own father was when my grandfather was on his deathbed. And now he was taking time out of his busy schedule to sit beside me in an empty theater. So, yeah, it was unsettling.

Get yourself together, I mouthed. You’re acting ridiculous.

I rejoined my father, who didn’t seem to have noticed my emotional outburst, and sat through the remaining portion of the movie without another breakdown. After the closing credits, my father insisted on walking me to my apartment, offering to check it out because of the bedbug scare, though it was clear he was mainly concerned about my health and wanted to spend more time with me.

“So they say you have mono, huh?” he asked. Unlike my mother, who reviewed New York magazine’s list of best doctors religiously, my father had always distrusted medical authority. I nodded and shrugged my shoulders.

When we got near my apartment, however, my stomach filled with that inexplicable but now-familiar dread. I suddenly realized that I didn’t want him to come inside. Like most fathers, he had chastised me when I was a teenager about allowing my room to get filthy, so I was used to that. But today I felt ashamed, as if the room was a metaphor for my screwed-up life. I dreaded the idea of his seeing how I was living.

“What the hell is that smell?” he said as I unlocked the door.

Shit. I grabbed a plastic Duane Reade bag by the door. “I forgot to throw out the kitty litter.”

“Susannah. You’ve got to get yourself together. You can’t live like this. You’re an adult.”

We both stood in the doorway, looking at my studio. He was right: it was squalid. Dirty clothes littered the floor. The trash can was overflowing. And the black garbage bags, which I’d packed during the bedbug scare and before the exterminator had come to spray three weeks earlier, still covered the room. No bedbugs were found, and no more bites had surfaced. By now I was convinced it was over—and a small part of me had begun to wonder if they had ever been there at all.

^{CHAPTER 5} COLD ROSES

I returned to work the next day, a Thursday, which gave me just enough time to finish up a story and pitch two more. Neither passed muster.

“Please do LexisNexis searches first,” Steve wrote, responding to my new pitches.

Insecurity is part of the job, I told myself. Reporters exist in a state of constant self-doubt: sometimes we have disastrous weeks when stories don’t pan out or sources clam up; other times we have killer ones, when even the seemingly impossible works out in our favor. There are times when you feel like the best in the business, and other times when you’re certain that you’re a complete and total hack and should start looking for an office job. But in the end, the ups and downs even out. So why was everything in such upheaval for me? It had been weeks since I felt comfortable in my own journalist skin, and that frightened me.

Frustrated by my sloppy performance, I asked to go home early, again, hoping it was just the mono. Maybe a good night’s sleep would finally get me back to my usual self.

That night I tossed and turned, filled with misgivings about my life. When my alarm clock rang the next morning, I hit the snooze button and decided to call in sick again. After a few more hours of sleep, I woke up rested and calm, as if the whole mono thing had been a distant nightmare. The weekend now loomed brightly on the horizon. I phoned Stephen.

“Let’s go to Vermont.” It was a statement, not a question. Weeks earlier we had had plans to go to Vermont and stay at my stepbrother’s house, but since I had gotten sick, the trip had been postponed indefinitely. Sensing that I still wasn’t my old self, Stephen was offering reasons that we shouldn’t rush into the trip when a blocked call beeped in on the other line. It was Dr. Rothstein.

“The blood test results came back. You are not positive for mononucleosis,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“So much better.”

“Okay, then, it must have been some garden-variety virus that’s now out of your system.”

Invigorated, I called Stephen back, insisting that we pack our bags and go away for the weekend. He caved. That afternoon we borrowed my mom’s black Subaru and drove four hours north to Arlington, Vermont. It was a perfect weekend: Saturday and Sunday mornings we went to a quaint local restaurant called Up For Breakfast, shopped at outlet malls, and hit the slopes—or, rather, Stephen snowboarded as I read Great Expectations in the lodge. On Sunday a snowstorm hit, so we were happily forced to stay another day, which meant more time off from work. Finally I agreed to ski, and Stephen led me to the top of a small mountain.

I had skied a few times before and never found the intermediate slopes difficult to manage, though I was hardly an expert. But this time, as the wind whipped my face and the snowflakes burned my cheeks, the mountain suddenly seemed far steeper than ever before. It loomed out below me, long, narrow, and threatening. I felt instantly helpless, and I panicked, a kind of deep-seated fight-or-flight fear that I had read about but never experienced.

“Ready?” Stephen’s voice sounded distant in the howling winds. My heart pounded in my ears, as I raced through ever-more-terrible scenarios: What if I never make it down? What if Stephen leaves me here? What if they never find my body?

“I can’t do this,” I shouted. “I don’t want to. Please don’t make me do this.”

“Come on!” he said, but stopped his cajoling when he sensed my anxiety. “It’s okay. I promise you’ll be okay. We’ll take it slow.”

I headed nervously down the mountain with Stephen following. Midway down, I picked up speed, feeling silly about my terror from moments before. Safe at the bottom a few minutes later, though, I recognized that this panic had been far more critical than just a fear of heights. Still, I said nothing further about it to Stephen.

Monday night, back at my mother’s house in New Jersey, I was still having trouble sleeping, but now instead of nervous, I felt nostalgic. I riffled through old clothes and discovered I finally fit into pants that I’d only been able to pull up to my midthigh since sophomore year in high school. I must be doing something right, I thought gleefully.

I would soon learn firsthand that this kind of illness often ebbs and flows, leaving the sufferer convinced that the worst is over, even when it’s only retreating for a moment before pouncing again.

^{CHAPTER 6} AMERICA’S MOST WANTED

The next Tuesday morning at work, my office phone rang. It was Steve. He seemed to have forgiven me for my recent absence and displays of ineptitude, or at least had decided to give me another shot: “I want you to interview John Walsh tomorrow morning when he comes in for a Fox News interview. He’s working on a new episode about drug-smuggling submarines that I think could be a fun page lead.”

“Sure,” I said, trying to muster up the enthusiasm that had once come so naturally. It did sound exciting to interview the host of America’s Most Wanted, but I couldn’t seem to focus. The first thing I needed to do was a clip search, so I called the Post’s librarian, Liz. She is a researcher by day, Wiccan priestess by night. Inexplicably, instead of asking for a search, I requested a tarot reading.

“Come on by,” she said languidly.

Liz practiced modern witchcraft using candles, spells, and potions. She had recently been appointed Third Degree High Priestess, meaning she was able to teach the craft. She wore rows of pentacles and flowing Stevie Nicks–style clothes, and even donned a black cape in winter. She smelled of incense and patchouli and had drooping, trustworthy, puppy eyes. There was something attractive about her energy, and despite my innate skepticism of witchcraft and religion overall, I found myself wanting to believe.

“I need your help,” I said. “Things are not going well. Will you do a reading?”

“Hmmm,” she said, laying out a deck of tarot cards. “Hmmm.” She drew out each syllable. “So I see good things. Positive stuff. You’re going to have some sort of a job change. Something freelance outside the Post. Financially, I see good things for you.”

Waves of calm coursed through my system as I concentrated on her words. I had needed someone to tell me that I was going to be okay, that these odd setbacks were just blips on the radar of my life. In retrospect, Liz may not have been the right person to go to for this kind of reassurance.

“Oh, man. I feel all floaty,” Liz added.

“Yeah, me too.” I did.

When I returned to my desk, Angela looked depressed. A fellow Post reporter, our resident renaissance man who covered all sorts of beats for the paper, had passed away from melanoma. An e-mail was circulating throughout the newsroom, outlining the funeral arrangements for that Friday. He had been only fifty-three years old. It made me think of my own melanoma diagnosis, and for the rest of the day, even as I should have been researching John Walsh, I couldn’t force the sad news out of my mind.

The next morning, after another sleepless night, I used the few remaining moments I had to prepare for the interview to Google melanoma relapse rates instead. I was completely unprepared when 9:50 a.m. hit, but I headed out to meet Walsh in an empty office down the hall anyway, hoping I could just wing it. As I walked through the hallway, framed Post front pages began to close in on me, their headlines contracting and expanding.

The pages were breathing visibly, inhaling and exhaling all around me. My perspective had narrowed, as if I were looking down the hallway through a viewfinder. The fluorescent lights flickered, and the walls tightened claustrophobically around me. As the walls caved in, the ceiling stretched sky-high until I felt as if I were in a cathedral. I put my hand to my chest to quell my racing heart and told myself to breathe. I wasn’t frightened; it felt more like the sterile rush of looking down from the window of a hundred-story skyscraper, knowing you won’t fall.

Finally I reached the office where Walsh was waiting for me. He still had the makeup on from his Fox News interview, and it had melted a bit under the bright lights of the studio.

“Hi, John, my name is Susannah Cahalan. I’m the Post reporter.”

As soon as I saw him, I started wondering, oddly, if Walsh was thinking right then about his murdered son, Adam, who had been abducted from a department store in 1981 and found decapitated later that year. My mind wandered through this macabre subject as I stood smiling blandly at him and his manicured publicist.

“Hello,” the publicist said, breaking my train of thought.

“Oh, hi! Yes. My name is Susannah Cahalan. I’m the reporter. The reporter on the story. You know, on the drug smuggling, drug smuggling—”

Walsh interrupted here. “Submarines, yes.”

“He only has five minutes, so we should probably get going,” the publicist said, a hint of annoyance evident in her tone.

“Many South American drug smugglers are making homemade submarines,” Walsh began. “Well, actually, they aren’t in fact submarines but submersible crafts that look like submarines.” I jotted notes: “Columbian” [sic], “homemade,” “track about ten a…” “Drug boats, we must stop boats…” I couldn’t follow what he was saying, so I mainly jotted down disassociated words to make it seem as if I was paying attention.

“It is very cunning.”

I laughed uproariously at this line, though I didn’t know then and still can’t figure out what about that word seemed so funny. The publicist shot me a puzzled look before announcing, “I’m sorry, I have to interrupt the interview. John needs to go.”

“I’ll walk you out,” I said with pressured enthusiasm and led them to the elevators. But as I walked, I could barely maintain my balance, bumping into the walls of the hallway, reaching for the door to open it for them but missing the handle by a solid foot.

“Thank you, thank you. I’m a huge fan, huge fan. HUGE fan,” I gushed, as we waited at the elevators.

Walsh smiled with kindness, possibly accustomed to this type of eccentric effusiveness that was in fact divorced from my typical interview style.

“It was a pleasure,” he said.

I still don’t know—and probably never will—what he really thought of the strange Post reporter, especially because the story never ran. This would be the last interview I conducted for seven months.

^{CHAPTER 7} ON THE ROAD AGAIN

I don’t remember how I got home after the interview or how I filled the hours in the wake of yet another professional debacle, but after still another sleepless night—it had now been over a week since I’d slept fully—I headed to the office. It was a gorgeous early March morning, the sun was out, and the temperature was a crisp thirty degrees. I had walked through Times Square twice a day for six months, but today, once I hit the rows of billboards at its center I was accosted by its garish colors. I tried to look away, to shield myself from shock waves of pigment, but I couldn’t. The bright blue wedge of an Eclipse gum sign emitted electric swirls of aqua and made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I could feel the colors vibrating in my toes. There seemed to be something exquisite about that rush; it was simultaneously enervating and thrilling. But the thrill lasted only a moment when, to my left, the moving scroll of “Welcomes you to Times Square” caught my attention and made me want to retch in the middle of the street. M&M’s on an animated billboard to my left pirouetted before me, forging a massive migraine in my temples. Helpless in the face of this onslaught, I covered my eyes with mittenless hands, stumbling up Forty-Eighth Street as if I had just gotten off a death-defying roller coaster, until I hit the newsroom, where the lights still felt bright but less aggressive.

“Angela, I have to tell you something strange,” I whispered, concerned that people might be listening in, thinking I was crazy. “I see bright colors. The colors hurt my eyes.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, worry evident in her smile. Every day my behavior had been growing increasingly erratic. But it wasn’t until this morning that my ramblings had begun to frighten her.

“Times Square. The colors, the billboards: they’re so bright. Brighter than I’ve ever seen them before.”

“You must be really hung over.” She laughed nervously.

“I didn’t drink. I think I’m losing my mind.”

“If you’re really concerned, I think you should go back and see a doctor.”

There’s something wrong with me. This is how a crazy person acts.

Frustrated with my inability to communicate what was happening to me, I slammed my hands down on the keyboard. The computer glowed back at me, bright and angry. I looked at Angela to see if she saw it too, but she was busy with her e-mail.

“I can’t do this!” I shouted.

“Susannah, Susannah. Hey, what’s going on?” Angela asked, surprised by the outburst. I had never been histrionic, and now that everyone was staring at me, I felt humiliated and on display, and hot tears streamed down my face and onto my blouse. “Why are you crying?”

I shrugged off the question, too embarrassed to go into details I didn’t understand.

“Do you want to go out for a walk or something? Grab a coffee?”

“No, no. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m all fucked up. I’m crying for no reason,” I sobbed. As the crying spell took over my whole body, I became prisoner to it. The more I told myself to stop, the more powerful the sensation became. What was causing these hysterics? I fixated on anything my mind could grasp, picking apart the minutiae of my life, anything that felt uncertain. I’m bad at my job. Stephen doesn’t love me. I’m broke. I’m crazy. I’m stupid. Many of my colleagues were now returning to the office, dressed in black from the reporter’s funeral, which I had not attended because I was too consumed by my own problems. Was this the reason I was crying? I hardly knew the man. Was I crying for myself? Over the possibility that I might be next?

Another reporter, who sat directly across from Angela, turned around. “Susannah, are you okay?”

I hated the attention. I shot her a derisive look, heavy with loathing. “Stop. It.”

The tears continued down my face, but I was surprised to realize that instantly I was no longer sad. I was fine. Not fine. Happy. No, not happy, sublime, better than I had ever felt in my entire life. The tears kept coming, but now I was laughing. A pulse of warmth shot up my spine. I wanted to dance or sing, something, anything except sit here and wallow in imaginary misery. I ran to the bathroom to splash some water on my face. As the cold water flowed, the bathroom stalls suddenly looked alien to me. How was it that civilization had gotten so far but we still defecated in such close proximity to one another? I looked at the stalls and, hearing the flushing of toilets, I could not believe that I had ever used one before.

When I got back to my desk, my emotions now relatively stable, I called Mackenzie, who had been so helpful with my snooping problem weeks ago, and asked her to meet me downstairs. I wanted her opinion on what had just happened to me. When I found her behind the News Corp. building, I noticed that she too was wearing black and had just arrived from the reporter’s funeral. I suddenly felt ashamed for being so self-obsessed.

“I’m so sorry to bother you when you’re suffering,” I said. “I know it’s really selfish of me to behave like this right now.”

“Don’t worry about it. What’s going on?” she asked.

“I just. I just. Do you ever not feel like yourself?”

She laughed. “I hardly ever feel like myself.”

“But this is different. Something is really wrong. I’m seeing bright colors, crying uncontrollably. I can’t control myself,” I repeated, wiping away the remaining moisture from my swollen eyes. “Do you think I’m having a nervous breakdown? Do you think I’m going nuts?”

“Look, Susannah, this isn’t something you can do yourself. You really need to just go see a doctor. I think you should write down all your symptoms, as if you were going to write up a story about it. Don’t leave anything out. As you know, even the smallest details can turn out to be the most important.”

It was genius. I nearly ran away from her to go upstairs and start writing. But when I got to my desk, I wrote only the following:

Then I began doodling, though I don’t remember scrawling out the drawing or what prompted it:

“People are desperate, they’ll do anything,” I’d written. Abruptly I stopped writing and began to clear everything off my desk—all the water bottles, the half-empty coffee cups, and the old articles that I would never read again. I lugged armfuls of books that I’d been saving for reasons I could no longer remember to the floor’s Dumpster and discarded them all, as if they were evidence that I was a hoarder who had been unraveling for months. I suddenly felt in control of every part of my life. That buoyant happiness had returned. But even then I recognized it was a perilous happiness. I feared that if I didn’t express it and appreciate it, the emotion would blaze and burn away as quickly as it came.

When I got back to my desk, I slammed my hands down on top of it.

“Everything is going to be great!” I announced, ignoring Angela’s astonishment. I sauntered over to Paul’s desk, high on my brand-new, wonderfully simple theory on life.

“Let’s go downstairs for a smoke!”

As we took the elevator, Paul said, “You look much better.”

“Thanks, Paul. I feel so much better. I feel like myself again, and I have so much to talk to you about.” We lit cigarettes. “You know, it’s finally dawned on me what is wrong. I want to do more stories. Better stories. Bigger stories. Not the feature bullshit. The real stuff. The real hard-hitting investigations.”

“Well, that’s great,” Paul said, but he also looked concerned. “Are you okay? You’re talking a mile a minute.”

“Sorry. I’m just so excited!”

“I’m glad to hear you’re excited, you know, because some people had told me that you’ve been upset at your desk and you’ve been so sick the past month.”

“That’s over. I’ve seriously figured it out.”

“Hey, have you talked to your mom recently?” Paul asked.

“Yeah, a few days ago. Why?”

“Just curious.”

Paul was busy building a mental picture, ready to relate to Angela what he felt were the beginning signs of a breakdown. He had once seen another reporter whom he cared about fall apart. She began wearing bright, inappropriate makeup and acting strange, and she was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.

After ten minutes of my ramblings, Paul headed back inside and called Angela. “Someone needs to call her mom or someone. This just isn’t right.”

While Paul was upstairs talking to Angela, I stayed outside. If anyone looked at me then, they would have assumed that I was deep in thought or working out a story in my head—nothing out of the ordinary. But in fact I was far away. The pendulum had swung again, and now I felt wobbly and height-sick, that same feeling I’d had at the top of the mountain in Vermont, except without the terror. I floated above the crowd of News Corp. employees. I saw the top of my own head, so close that I could almost reach out and touch myself. I saw Liz, the Wiccan librarian, and felt my “self” reenter my grounded body.

“Liz, Liz!” I shouted. “I need to talk to you!”

She stopped. “Oh, hey, Susannah. How’s it going?”

There was no time for pleasantries. “Liz, did you ever feel like you’re here but you’re not here?”

“Sure, all the time,” she said.

“No, no, you don’t understand. I can see myself from above, like I’m floating above myself looking down,” I said, wringing my hands.

“That’s normal,” she said.

“No, no. Like you’re outside of yourself looking in.”

“Sure, sure.”

“Like you’re in your own world. Like you’re not in this world.”

“I know what you’re saying. It’s probably just residue from the astral travel you experienced during the reading we did yesterday. I think I may have taken you to another realm. I apologize for that. Just try to relax and embrace it.”

Meanwhile, Angela, worried about my erratic behavior, got permission from Paul to take me to the bar at a nearby Marriott hotel for a drink—and to tease some more information out of me about why I was acting so out of character. When I returned to the newsroom, Angela convinced me to gather my things and join her on a walk a few blocks north up Times Square to the hotel bar. We walked into the hotel’s main entranceway through revolving doors and stood beside a group of tourists waiting to take the transparent elevators to the eighth-floor bar, but the crowd bothered me. There were too many people around. I couldn’t breathe.

“Can we please take the escalator?” I begged Angela.

“Of course.”

The escalators, decorated on each side with dozens of glowing bulbs, only intensified my jitters. I tried to ignore the heart palpitations and the sweat forming on my brow. Angela stood a few steps above, looking concerned. I could feel the pressure of fear rise in my chest, and suddenly I was crying again.

At the third floor, I had to get off the escalator to compose myself because I was sobbing so hard. Angela put her arm on my shoulder. In total, I had to get off the escalator three times to steady myself from sobbing during that eight-floor trip.

Finally we reached the bar floor. The rugs, which looked as if they belonged in an avant-garde production of Lawrence of Arabia, swirled before me. The harder I stared, the more the abstract patterns merged. I tried to ignore it. The hundred-plus-seat bar, which looked down over Times Square, was almost completely empty, with only a few groups of businessmen dotting the chairs around the entranceway. When we walked in, I was still bawling, and one group looked up from their cocktails and gawked at me, which made me feel worse and more pathetic. The tears kept coming, though I had no clue why. We positioned ourselves in the center of the room at seats with high chairs, far away from the other patrons. I didn’t know what I wanted, so Angela ordered a sauvignon blanc for me and an Anchor Steam for herself.

“So what’s really going on?” she asked, taking a small sip of her amber-colored beer.

“So many things. The job. I’m terrible at it. Stephen, he doesn’t love me. Everything is falling apart. Nothing makes sense,” I said, holding the wineglass like a comforting habit but not drinking.

“I understand. You’re young. You have this stressful job and a new boyfriend. It’s all up in the air. That’s scary. But is it really enough to make you feel this upset?”

She was right. I had been thinking about all of that, but it was a struggle to make one detail fit well enough to solve the entire problem, like jamming together pieces from incongruent sets of puzzles. “There’s something else,” I agreed. “But I don’t know what it is.”

When I got home at seven that night, Stephen was already waiting for me. Instead of telling him I’d been out with Angela, I lied and told him I had been at work, convinced that I needed to hide my perplexing behavior from him, even though Angela had urged me to just tell him the truth. But I did warn him that I wasn’t acting like myself and hadn’t been sleeping well.

“Don’t worry,” he responded. “I’ll open a bottle of wine. That will put you to sleep.”

I felt guilty as I watched Stephen methodically stir the sauce for shrimp fra diavolo with a kitchen towel tucked in his pant loops. Stephen was a naturally skilled and inventive cook, but I couldn’t enjoy the pampering tonight; instead, I stood up and paced. My thoughts were running wild from guilt to love to repulsion and then back again. I couldn’t keep them straight, so I moved my body to quiet my mind. Most of all, I didn’t want him to see me in this state.

“You know, I haven’t really slept in a while,” I announced. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I had slept. I had gone without real sleep for at least three days, and the insomnia had been plaguing me for weeks, on and off. “I might make it hard for you to sleep.”

He looked up from the pasta and smiled. “Don’t worry. You’ll sleep better with me around.”

He handed me a plate with pasta and a healthy helping of parmesan. My stomach turned at the sight, and when I tasted the shrimp, I almost gagged. I pushed the pasta around on my plate as he devoured his. I watched him, trying to hide my disgust.

“What? You don’t like it?” he asked, hurt.

“No, it’s not that. I’m just not hungry. Great leftovers,” I said cheerfully, while having to physically restrain myself from pacing around the apartment. I couldn’t stay with one thought; my mind was flooded with different desires, but especially the urge to escape. Eventually I relaxed enough to lie down on my couch bed with Stephen. He poured me a glass of wine, but I left it on the windowsill. Maybe I knew on some primal level that it would have been bad for my state of mind. Instead, I chain-smoked cigarettes, one after another, down to their nubs.

“You’re a smoking fiend tonight,” he said, putting his own cigarette out. “Maybe that’s why you’re not hungry.”

“Yeah, I should stop,” I said. “I feel like my heart is beating out of my chest.”

I handed Stephen the remote, and he flipped the channel to PBS. As his heavy breathing turned into all-out snores, Spain… on the Road Again came on, the reality show that followed actress Gwyneth Paltrow, chef Mario Batali, and New York Times food critic Mark Bittman through Spain. God, not Gwyneth Paltrow, I thought, but was too lazy to change the channel. As Batali ate luscious eggs and meat, she toyed with a thin goat’s-milk yogurt, and when he offered her a bite of his dish, she demurred.

“That’s nice to have at seven in the morning,” she said sarcastically.⁴ You could just tell how disgusted she was by his belly.

As I watched her nibble on her yogurt, my stomach turned. I thought about how little I had eaten in the past week.

“Hold on,” he retorted. “I can’t see you on that high horse of yours.”

I laughed right before everything went hazy.

Gwyneth Paltrow.

Eggs and meat.

Darkness.

^{CHAPTER 8} OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE

As Stephen later described that nightmarish scene, I had woken him up with a strange series of low moans, resonating among the sounds from the TV. At first he thought I was grinding my teeth, but when the grinding noises became a high-pitched squeak, like sandpaper rubbed against metal, and then turned into deep, Sling Blade–like grunts, he knew something was wrong. He thought maybe I was having trouble sleeping, but when he turned over to face me, I was sitting upright, my eyes wide open, dilated but unseeing.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

No response.

When he suggested I try to relax, I turned to face him, staring past him like I was possessed. My arms suddenly whipped straight out in front of me, like a mummy, as my eyes rolled back and my body stiffened. I was gasping for air. My body continued to stiffen as I inhaled repeatedly, with no exhale. Blood and foam began to spurt out of my mouth through clenched teeth. Terrified, Stephen stifled a panicked cry and for a second he stared, frozen, at my shaking body.

Finally, he jumped into action—though he’d never seen a seizure before, he knew what to do. He laid me down, moving my head to the side so that I wouldn’t choke, and raced for his phone to dial 911.

I would never regain any memories of this seizure, or the ones to come. This moment, my first serious blackout, marked the line between sanity and insanity. Though I would have moments of lucidity over the coming weeks, I would never again be the same person. This was the start of the dark period of my illness, as I began an existence in purgatory between the real world and a cloudy, fictitious realm made up of hallucinations and paranoia. From this point on, I would increasingly be forced to rely on outside sources to piece together this “lost time.”

As I later learned, this seizure was merely the most dramatic and recognizable of a series of seizures I’d been experiencing for days already. Everything that had been happening to me in recent weeks was part of a larger, fiercer battle taking place at the most basic level inside my brain.

The healthy brain is a symphony of 100 billion neurons, the actions of each individual brain cell harmonizing into a whole that enables thoughts, movements, memories, or even just a sneeze. But it takes only one dissonant instrument to mar the cohesion of a symphony. When neurons begin to play nonstop, out of tune, and all at once because of disease, trauma, tumor, lack of sleep, or even alcohol withdrawal, the cacophonous result can be a seizure.

For some people, the result is a “tonic-clonic” seizure like the one Stephen witnessed, characterized by loss of consciousness or muscle rigidity and a strange, often synchronized dance of involuntary movements—my terrifying zombie moves. Others may have more subtle seizures, which are characterized by staring episodes, foggy consciousness, and repetitive mouth or body movements. The long-term ramifications of untreated seizures can include cognitive defects and even death.

The type and severity of a seizure depend on where the neural dysfunction is focused in the brain: if it is in the visual cortex, the person experiences optical distortions, such as visual hallucinations; if it is in the motor areas of the frontal cortex, the person exhibits strange, zombie-like movements; and so forth.

Along with the violent tonic-clonic seizure, it turned out I had also been experiencing complex partial seizures because of overstimulation in my temporal lobes, generally considered to be the most “ticklish” part of the brain.⁵ The temporal lobe houses the ancient structures of the hippocampus and the amygdala, the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory. The symptoms from this type of seizure can range from a “Christmas morning” feeling of euphoria to sexual arousal to religious experiences.^6,7 Often people report feeling déjà vu and its opposite, something called jamais vu, when everything seems unfamiliar, such as my feeling of alienation in the office bathroom; seeing halos of light or viewing the world as if it is bizarrely out of proportion (known as the Alice in Wonderland effect), which is what was happening while I was on my way to interview John Walsh; and experiencing photophobia, an extreme sensitivity to light, like my visions in Times Square. These are all common symptoms or precedents of temporal lobe seizures.

A small subset of those with temporal lobe epilepsy—about 5 to 6 percent—report an out-of-body experience, a feeling described as being removed from your body and able to look at yourself, usually from above.⁸

There I am on a gurney.

There I am being loaded into the ambulance as Stephen holds my hands.

There I am entering a hospital.

Here I am. Floating above the scene, looking down. I am calm. There is no fear.

^{CHAPTER 9} A TOUCH OF MADNESS

When I gained consciousness the first thing I saw was a homeless man vomiting just a few feet away in a brightly lit hospital room. In one corner, another man, bloodied, beaten, and handcuffed to the bed, was flanked by two police officers.

Am I dead? Anger at my surroundings welled up inside me. How dare they put me here. I was too incensed to be terrified, and so I lashed out. I hadn’t felt like myself for weeks, but the real damage to my personality was only now bubbling to the surface. Looking back at this time, I see that I’d begun to surrender to the disease, allowing all the aspects of my personality that I value—patience, kindness, and courteousness—to evaporate. I was a slave to the machinations of my aberrant brain. We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it.

I am not dead yet. I am dying because of him, because of that lab technician. I convinced myself that the tech who may have flirted with me when I had my MRI was clearly behind all this.

“Get me out of this room NOW,” I commanded. Stephen held my hand, looking frightened by the imperiousness in my voice. “I will NOT stay in this room.”

I will not die here. I will not die with these freaks.

A doctor approached my bedside. “Yes, we will move you right away.” I was triumphant, delighted by my newfound power. People listen when I speak. Instead of worrying that my life was out of control, I began to focus on anything that made me feel strong. A nurse and a male assistant wheeled my bed out of the room and into a nearby private one. As the bed moved, I clutched Stephen’s hand. I felt so sorry for him. He didn’t know that I was dying.

“I don’t want you to get upset,” I said softly. “But I’m dying of melanoma.”

Stephen looked spent. “Stop it, Susannah. Don’t say that. You don’t know what’s wrong.” I noticed tears welling up in his eyes. He can’t handle it. Suddenly the outrage returned.

“I do know what’s wrong!” I yelled. “I’m going to sue him! I’m going to take him for all he’s worth. He thinks he can hit on me and just let me die? He can’t just do that. No, I’m going to destroy him in court!”

Stephen withdrew his hand swiftly, as if he’d been burned. “Susannah, please stay calm. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The MRI guy! He hit on me! He didn’t catch the melanoma. I’m suing!”

The young resident interrupted me mid-rant. “This is something you might want to look into when you get home. If you need a good dermatologist, I would be happy to recommend one. Unfortunately, there’s nothing more we can do here.” The hospital had already conducted a CT scan, a basic neurological exam, and a blood test. “We have to discharge you and advise that you see a neurologist first thing tomorrow.”

“Discharged?” Stephen interjected. “You’re letting her go? But you don’t know what’s wrong, and it could happen again. How can you just let her go?”

“I’m sorry, but seizures are fairly common. Sometimes they just happen and never happen again. But this is an emergency room, and we can’t just keep her to see. I’m sorry. My advice is to see a neurologist first thing tomorrow morning.”

“I’m still suing that guy!”

The doctor nodded patiently and departed to address the gunshot wounds and drug overdoses that awaited him.

“I have to call your mom,” Stephen said.

“You don’t have to do that,” I insisted, my voice mellowing as I returned, almost instantly, to my old self. Manic episodes can fade away as quickly as they arise. “I don’t want her to worry.” Mom was a worrier by nature, and I had tried to spare her the full story of what was happening to me so far.

“I have to,” he insisted and coaxed her home number out of me. He stepped into the hallway and waited two interminably long rings before Allen, my stepfather, picked up the phone.

“Hello,” he said groggily in his thick Bronx accent.

“Allen, it’s Stephen. I’m at the hospital. Susannah had a seizure, but she’s doing fine.”

In the background, my mom shouted, “Allen, what is it?”

“She’s going to be okay. They’re discharging her,” Stephen continued.

Despite my mom’s rising panic, Allen maintained his composure, telling Stephen to go back home and sleep. They would come in the morning. When he hung up the phone, my mom and Allen looked at each other. It was Friday the Thirteenth.

My mom felt the foreboding, and she began to cry uncontrollably, certain that something was seriously wrong. It was the first and last time she would allow herself to completely succumb to her emotions in the frightening months that followed.

First thing the next morning, while Allen scouted the street for parking, my mom arrived at my apartment door looking sharp, as always. Her frenetic energy, however, was palpable. She was terrified of even hearing about cancer on the radio, and now she had to cope with her own daughter’s mysterious seizure. I watched from the bed as she wrung her beautifully shaped hands, the feature I most adored about her, lobbing question after question at Stephen about the night in the hospital.

“Did they give any explanation? What kind of doctor saw her? Did they do an MRI?”

Allen came around behind her and massaged her earlobe, a habit of his to calm people he loves. She unwound the instant he touched her. Allen is her third husband, after my dad: her first husband was an architect, and the marriage didn’t work for a number of reasons, in part because my mom, very much a feminist of the 1970s, didn’t want children. She wanted to focus instead on her career at Manhattan’s district attorney’s office, where she still worked. When she met my father, she left her first husband and together they had my brother, James, and me. Despite having had kids together, their relationship was ill fated from the start. Both were as hot-tempered as they were stubborn, yet they managed to make their marriage last nearly two decades before they divorced.

My mom and Allen had met thirty years ago at the district attorney’s office, long before she married my dad. Allen had won her over as a friend with his loyalty and devotion. He eventually became her key confidant in and out of the DA’s office and through her divorce with my father. Allen’s brother was schizophrenic, and as a result Allen had turned inward, maintaining only a few important friendships and living primarily in his own world. He was animated with his closest loved ones, gesticulating wildly with his hands and laughing a contagious guffaw; with outsiders, he could be quiet and aloof, to the point of seeming rude. But his warmth and calm, not to mention his experience with mental illness, would prove invaluable over the coming weeks.

Before my seizure, he and my mom had developed a theory culled from the few things that they knew about my month of strange behavior. They suspected I was having a nervous breakdown, prompted by stress at work and the responsibilities of living on my own. The seizure didn’t fit into that scenario, though, and now they were even more concerned. After some debate, they decided it would be safest for me to come home with them to Summit, New Jersey, where they could look after me.

Stephen, my mom, and Allen used various tactics to try to get me out of bed, but I refused to budge. To me, the most important thing was to stay in my own apartment, no matter what: going back to my parents’ house would make me feel like a child. As badly as I needed it, help was the last thing I wanted. Somehow, though, their combined forces managed to get me out of my house and into the Subaru.

Summit, named one of the best places to live in America by Money magazine, is an affluent suburb twenty miles from Manhattan, a haven for WASPs and Wall Street bankers who congregate at the many country clubs within its six square miles.⁹ We’d moved there in 1996 from Brooklyn, but even though it had been an ideal place to grow up, our family had never exactly fit in. In a neighborhood of white houses, my mom had chosen to paint our house a lavender-gray-purple, which prompted one of my sixth-grade classmates to comment: “My mom says that you’re going to get polka dots too!” Eventually my mom changed the color to a less outrageous blue-gray.

Instead of relaxing into the nostalgia of being back in my childhood home, though, as I settled into the Summit house over the next few days I began to cling even more vehemently to the Manhattan life I’d left behind. On Sunday afternoon I became obsessed with filing an overdue article on a fairly simple story about a troupe of dancers that was opening off-Broadway who called themselves “Gimp,” made up of disabled performers.

“They’re not your typical dancers,” I began. Unhappy with the line, I erased it. For the next half hour, I wrote, erased, and rewrote that same sentence until I gave up and began to pace, trying to wrestle myself out of writer’s block. I wandered into the family room, where Mom and Allen were watching TV, desperate to tell them about my new trouble with words. But when I got there, I could no longer remember why I’d come.

The TV blasted the theme song to their favorite show, the medical drama House. Seconds later, the normally muted green of the couch grew noxiously garish.

Then the room seemed to pulsate and breathe, like the office hallway.

I heard my mom’s voice, shrill and far away: “Susannah, Susannah. Can you hear me?”

Next thing I knew, my mom was sitting beside me on the couch, rubbing my feet, which had stiffened up in a painful charley horse. I looked up at her helplessly. She said, “I don’t know what happened. It was like you were in a trance.”

My mom and Allen exchanged worried glances and phoned Dr. Bailey to see if they could schedule an emergency appointment. The earliest he could do it, he said, was Monday.

I spent the weekend in Summit, ignoring calls from concerned coworkers and friends. I was too embarrassed by my own unexplainable behavior to talk to them and so consumed by the strange stirring in my mind that I turned away from those closest to me, which normally I would never have done. For some reason, I did pick up the phone once, when I saw it was my friend Julie, a Post photographer and the most carefree, lighthearted person I know. As soon as we started talking, I began to tell her everything: the seizures, the strange thoughts, the visions. Maybe it was because I knew her mother was a shrink. When I finished, it turned out that she had already spoken to her mother about me.

“She thinks it’s possible that you’re having a manic episode and that maybe you have bipolar disorder. Whatever it is, you should see a psychiatrist,” she suggested.

Bipolar disorder. Even though it would have sounded grim at any other moment, now the idea was a relief. This made sense. A quick Google search revealed that the National Institute of Mental Health had a whole booklet dedicated to it: “a brain disorder that causes unusual shifts in moods” (yes); “often develops in a person’s late teens or early adult years” (yes); “an overly joyful state is called a manic episode, an extremely sad or hopeless state is called a depressive episode” (yes and yes, which equals a mixed state).¹⁰ Another site listed at length the famous people who were suspected to suffer from bipolar disorder: Jim Carrey, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Vivien Leigh, Ludwig van Beethoven, Tim Burton.¹¹ The list kept going and going. I was in good company. “No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness,” Aristotle said.

I spent the night in a state of ecstasy: I had a name for what plagued me, and those two words, which fell off the tongue so sweetly, meant everything. I didn’t even want to be “cured.” I now belonged to an exclusive club of creatives.

Unconvinced by my self-diagnosis, my mom and Allen drove me back to Dr. Bailey’s office that Monday, March 16. The Miró painting no longer seemed as menacing. It matched my mood disorder. Dr. Bailey called us in almost immediately. His demeanor this time seemed far less jolly and grandfatherly, though overall he was pleasant. Again, he went through the basic neurological exam and wrote down “normal.” Right then, I did feel normal. He jotted down notes on his pad as he asked me questions. Only later would I learn that he was missing details, writing down that I was “on a plane” when the first seizure occurred.

His tone was light when discussing the seizure, but then he slid his glasses down his nose, and suddenly sounded very serious. “Is your job very stressful?”

“Yes, I guess.”

“Do you feel overwhelmed at times?”

“Sure.”

“Tell me honestly,” he said, as if preparing himself for me to let him in on a big secret. “There are no judgments here. How much alcohol are you drinking a day?”

I had to think about it. I hadn’t had a drop of booze in the past week, but normally it helped me unwind, so I tended to have a sip of something most nights. “To be honest, about two glasses of wine a night. I usually split a bottle with my boyfriend, though he tends to drink more than I do.” He made a note of this in his chart. I didn’t understand that doctors usually doubled—even tripled—such numbers because patients often lie about their vices. Instead of two drinks a night, he probably believed the number was closer to six.

“Any drug use?”

“No. Not in years,” I said, and quickly added, “I did some research on bipolar disorder, and I really think that’s what I have.”

He smiled. “I don’t have any experience in this field, but it’s a possibility. The receptionist will refer you to a very capable psychiatrist who will have more experience with these types of issues.”

“Great.”

“Okay, then. Well, otherwise, everything looks normal to me. I’m going to draw you up a prescription for Keppra, an antiseizure medication. Take that, and everything should be fine. I’ll see you in two weeks,” he said and walked me to the waiting area. “I’m going to also have a little talk with your mother if you don’t mind.” He waved her into his office. After he had closed the door behind him, he turned to her.

“I think this is very simple. Plain and simple. She’s partying too hard, not sleeping enough, and working too hard. Make sure she doesn’t drink and takes the Keppra I prescribed, and everything should be fine.”

My mom was filled with immense relief. It was just the answer she wanted to hear.

^{CHAPTER 10} MIXED EPISODES

Allen drove us up to a prewar brownstone on the Upper East Side, where the psychiatrist, Sarah Levin, lived and worked. My mom and I walked to the entrance and pressed the buzzer. A Carol Kane falsetto trilled through the intercom: “Come right in and sit in the waiting area. I’ll be right with you.”

With its white walls, magazines, and bookcases filled with all the classics of literature, Dr. Levin’s waiting area seemed straight out of a Woody Allen film. I was excited to see the psychiatrist. I wanted her to confirm, once and for all, my bipolar self-diagnosis, but also I considered psychiatric visits entertaining on a certain level. For a period of time after an old breakup, I had gone to three separate psychologists, testing them out. The exercise was largely self-indulgent, inspired by watching too many episodes of the HBO show In Treatment. First I saw the attractive young gay man who acted like my best friend and enabler; then a green and geeky (but cheap) shrink who took my insurance and immediately asked me about my relationship with my father; then an old curmudgeon who tried to hypnotize me with a plastic wand.

“Come on in,” said Dr. Levin, appearing at the door. I smiled: she looked like Carol Kane too. She motioned for me to sit in the leather chair.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I always take pictures of my patients to keep track of everyone,” she said, nodding at the Polaroid camera in her hands. I posed, not sure if I should smile or remain serious. I remembered what my friend Zach from work had once told me years before when I first went on live television during the Michael Devlin affair: “Smile with your eyes.” So that’s what I tried to do.

“So tell me a bit about why you’re here,” she asked, cleaning her glasses.

“I’m bipolar.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Say that again?”

“I’m bipolar.”

She nodded as if agreeing with me. “Are you on any medication for that?”

“No. I haven’t been officially diagnosed. But I know. I mean, I know myself better than anyone, right? So I should know if I have it. And I know that I do,” I rambled on, the illness imposing itself on my speech patterns.

She nodded again.

“Tell me why you think you’re bipolar.”

As I made my case through my strange, jumpy logic, she jotted down her impressions on two pages of wide-ruled paper: “Said she had bipolar disorder. Hard to conclude,” she wrote. “Everything is very vivid. Started in last few days. Can’t concentrate. Easily distracted. Total insomnia but not tired, not eating. Has grand ideas. No hallucinations. No paranoid delusions. Always impulsive.”

Dr. Levin asked if I had any history of feeling this way and wrote, “She’s had hypomanic attacks her whole life. Always has high energy. But has negative thoughts. She was never suicidal.”

Dr. Levin’s opinion was that I was experiencing a “mixed episode,” meaning both manic and depressive elements typical of bipolar disorder. She moved several large books on her desk around until she found her scrip pad and scrawled out a prescription for Zyprexa, an antipsychotic prescribed to treat mood and thought disorders.

While I was in the office with Dr. Levin, my mother called my younger brother, a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh. Even though James was only nineteen, he already had a wise, old-soul quality that I’ve always found comforting.

“Susannah had a seizure,” she told James, trying to control the wavering of her voice. James was stunned. “The neurologist is saying she drank too much. Do you think Susannah is an alcoholic?” my mom asked him.

James was adamant. “No way is Susannah an alcoholic.”

“Well, Susannah’s insisting that she’s manic-depressive. Do you think that’s a possibility?”

James thought on this for a moment. “No. Not in the least. That’s just not Susannah. Sure, she can be excitable and temperamental, but she’s not depressive. She’s tough, Mom. We all know that. She deals with a lot of stress, but she handles it better than anyone I know. Bipolar doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“Me neither,” my mom said. “Me neither.”

^{CHAPTER 11} KEPPRA

Later that next night, I had an epiphany. Forget bipolar disorder: it was the antiseizure medication Keppra. The Keppra must be causing my insomnia, forgetfulness, anxiety, hostility, moodiness, numbness, loss of appetite. It didn’t matter that I had been on the drug for only twenty-four hours. It was all the Keppra. An Internet search proved it. These were all side effects of that toxic drug.

My mother pleaded with me to take it anyway. “Do it for me,” she begged. “Just please take the pill.” So I did. Even during this time when I hardly recognize myself, there are still shadows of the real Susannah, a person who cares what her family and friends think, who doesn’t want to cause them pain. Looking back, I think that’s why, despite the battles, I often caved at my family’s insistences.

That night, as the alarm clock by my bed struck midnight, I lifted my head with a start. The damn pills. They’re taking over my body. I’m going crazy. THE KEPPRA. I need it out of my system. “Throw it up, get it out!” a voice chanted. I kicked off my sheets and jumped out of bed. KEPPRA, KEPPRA. I went to the hallway bathroom, ran the water, got on my knees, and knelt over the toilet bowl. I jammed my fingers down my throat, wiggling them around until I dry-heaved. I wiggled more. Thin white liquid. Nothing solid came up because I hadn’t eaten in longer than I could remember. DAMN KEPPRA. I flushed the toilet, turned off the water, and paced.

The next thing I knew, I was upstairs on the third floor, where my mom and Allen slept. They’d moved up there when James and I were teenagers because it had worried them too much to hear us coming and going at night. Now I stood over my mom’s bed and watched her sleep. The half-moon shone down on her. She looked so helpless, like a newborn baby. Swelling with tenderness, I leaned over and stroked her hair, startling her awake.

“Oh, my. Susannah? Are you okay?”

“I can’t sleep.”

She rearranged her mussed-up, cropped hair and yawned.

“Let’s go downstairs,” she whispered, taking my hand and leading me back into my bedroom. She lay down beside me, brushing out my tangled hair with her beautiful hands for over an hour until she fell back asleep. I listened to her breathing, soft and low, in and out, and tried to replicate it. But I didn’t sleep.

The next day, on March 18, 2009, at 2:50 p.m., I wrote the first in a series of random Word documents that would become a kind of temporary diary over this period. The documents reveal my scattered and increasingly erratic thought processes:

During a conversation earlier that day when we discussed my future, I’d told my father that I wanted to go back to school, specifically to the London School of Economics, even though I had no history of studying business. Wisely, gently, my father suggested that I write down all my racing thoughts. So that’s what I did for the next few days: “My father suggested writing in a journal, which is definitely helping me. He told me to get a puzzle and that was smart because he too thinks in puzzles (the way things fit together).”

Some of the statements are incoherent messes, but others are strangely illuminating, providing deep access to areas of my life that I’d never before examined. I wrote about my passion for journalism: “Angela sees something in me because she knows how hard it is to be good at this job, but that’s journalism, it’s a hard job. and maybe it’s not for me I have a very powerful gut.” And I went on about my need for structure in a life that was quickly falling to pieces: “Routine is important to me, as is discipline without it I tend to go a little bit haywire.”

As I wrote these lines and others, I felt that I was piecing together, word by word, what was wrong with me. But my thoughts were tangled in my mind like necklaces knotted together in a jewelry box. Just when I thought I had untwisted one, I would realize it was connected to a rat’s nest of others. Now, years later, these Word documents haunt me more than any unreliable memory. Maybe it’s true what Thomas Moore said: “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.”

That night I walked into the family room and announced to my mom and Allen, “I’ve figured it out. It’s Stephen. It’s too much pressure. It’s too much. I’m too young.” My mom and Allen nodded empathetically. I left the room, but then, a few feet outside the doorway, another solution emerged. I retraced my steps. “Actually, it’s the Post. I’m unhappy there, and it’s making me crazy. I need to go back to school.”

They nodded again. I left and then turned straight around again.

“No. It’s my lifestyle. It’s New York City. It’s too much for me. I should move back to St. Louis or Vermont or someplace quiet. New York isn’t for me.”

By now they were staring at me, concern creasing their faces, but still they continued to nod accommodatingly.

I left once more, cantering from the family room to the kitchen and then back. This time I had it. This time I had figured it out. This time it all made sense.

The Oriental rug scraped my cheek.

Oval droplets of blood marring the pattern.

My mom’s shrill screams.

I had collapsed on the floor, bitten my tongue, and was convulsing like a fish out of water, my body dancing in jerking motions. Allen ran over and put his finger in my mouth, but in a spasm I bit down hard on it, adding his blood to my own.

I came to minutes later to the sound of my mother on the phone with Dr. Bailey, frantic for some kind of answer. He insisted that I keep taking the medication and come in for an electroencephalogram (EEG) on Saturday, to test the electrical activity of my brain.

Two days later, that Friday, Stephen came to Summit to visit and suggested that we get out of the house and grab some dinner. He had been debriefed by my family about my deteriorating behavior and was on high alert, but he knew that it was important for me to leave the house (because of the threat of seizures, I could not drive a car) and maintain some semblance of an adult life. We headed to an Irish pub in Maplewood, New Jersey, where I had never been before. The bar was crowded with families and teenagers. People hovered around the hostess’s desk, jockeying for reservations. I knew immediately that there were too many people. They all stared at me. They whispered to each other, “Susannah, Susannah.” I could hear it. My breath got shallower, and I began to sweat.

“Susannah, Susannah,” Stephen repeated. “She said it’s a forty-minute wait. Do you want to wait or go?” He gestured to the hostess, who did in fact look at me curiously.

“Umm. Umm.” The old man who seemed to be wearing a toupee jeered at me. The hostess raised her eyebrows. “Ummm.”

Stephen grabbed my hand and walked me out of the restaurant into the freedom of the frigid air. Now I could breathe again. Stephen drove me to nearby Madison, to a dingy bar called Poor Herbie’s where there was no wait. The waitress, a woman in her midsixties with frizzy bleached blond hair and gray roots, stood at the table with her left hand on her hip, waiting for our orders. I just stared at the menu.

“She’ll take the chicken sandwich,” Stephen said, after it was clear I was incapable of making such a momentous decision. “And I’ll have the reuben.”

When the food came, I could focus only on the greasy french dressing congealing on Stephen’s corned beef sandwich. I looked down at my own sandwich despairingly; nothing could convince me to put it to my lips.

“It’s too… grizzly,” I told Stephen.

“But you didn’t try it. If you don’t eat this, there’s nothing but gefilte fish and chicken livers at home,” he joked, trying to lighten the mood by pointing out Allen’s strange eating habits. Stephen finished his reuben, but I left the chicken sandwich untouched.

As we walked to the car, two conflicting urges struck me: I needed either to break up with Stephen here and now or profess my love to him for the first time. It could go either way; both impulses were equally intense.

“Stephen, I really need to talk to you.” He looked at me oddly. I stammered, growing red before conjuring up the courage to speak, although I still didn’t know what was going to come out of my mouth. He too was half-expecting me to break up with him at that moment. “I just. I just. I really love you. I don’t know. I love you.”

Tenderly he grasped my hands in his own. “I love you, too. You just have to relax.” It was not how either of us had hoped this exchange would happen; it was not the kind of memory you recalled to your grandchildren, but there it was. We were in love.

Later that night, Stephen noticed that I had begun to steadily smack my lips together as if I was sucking on a candy. I licked my lips so often that my mom started to apply globs of Vaseline to keep them from cracking open and bleeding. Sometimes I would trail off midsentence, staring off into space for several minutes before continuing my conversation. During these moments, the paranoid aggression receded into a childlike state. These times were the most unnerving for everyone, since I’d been pigheadedly self-sufficient, even as a toddler. We didn’t know it then, but these too were complex partials, the more subtle types of seizures that create those repetitive mouth movements and that foggy consciousness. I was getting worse by the day, by the hour even, but no one knew what to do.

At 3:38 a.m., on March 21, as Stephen snored away upstairs, I wrote again in my computer diary:

Reading these entries now is like peering into a stranger’s stream of consciousness. I don’t recognize the person on the other end of the screen as me. Though she urgently attempts to communicate some deep, dark part of herself in her writing, she remains incomprehensible even to myself.

^{CHAPTER 12} THE RUSE

On Saturday morning, my mom tried to get me to return to Dr. Bailey’s for the EEG. I had had two identifiable seizures and had developed an increasing number of worrying symptoms in the past week alone, and my family needed answers.

“Absolutely not,” I grumbled, stamping my feet like a two-year-old. “I’m fine. I don’t need this.”

Allen walked outside to start the car as Stephen and my mother pleaded with me.

“Nope. Not going. Nope,” I replied.

“We have to go. Please, just come,” my mom said.

“Let me talk to her for a second,” Stephen said to my mom, leading me outside. “Your mom is only trying to help you, and you’re making her very upset. Will you please just come?”

I thought this over for a moment. I loved my mom. Fine. Yes. I would go. Then a moment later—No! I couldn’t possibly leave. After a half hour more of persuading, I finally got into the backseat of the car beside Stephen. As we drove out of our driveway and onto the street, Allen began to speak. I could hear him distinctly, though he wasn’t moving his lips.

You’re a slut. I think Stephen should know.

My whole body shook with anger, and I leaned threateningly toward the driver’s seat. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” Allen said, sounding both surprised and exhausted.

That was the last straw. Swiftly, I unbuckled my seat beat, yanked open the car door, and prepared to jump out of the car headfirst. Stephen grabbed the back of my shirt in mid-leap, saving me from launching myself out of the vehicle. Allen slammed on the brakes.

“Susannah, what the hell are you doing?” my mom screamed.

“Susannah,” Stephen said in a level tone, a timbre I had never before heard from him. “That is not okay.”

Obedient again, I closed the door and crossed my arms. But hearing the click of the child’s lock sent me into panic mode again. I flung myself against the locked door and screamed, “Let me out! Let me out!” over and over, until I was too exhausted to yell anymore, then rested my head against Stephen’s shoulder and momentarily nodded off.

When I opened my eyes again, we had exited the Holland Tunnel and were entering Chinatown, with its sidewalk fish, swarms of tourists, and fake designer bag salesmen. The whole sordid scene disgusted me.

“I want coffee. Get me coffee. Now. I’m hungry. Feed me,” I demanded, insufferably.

“Can’t you wait until we get uptown?” my mom asked.

“No. Now.” It suddenly seemed like the most important thing in the world.

Allen took a sharp turn, almost hitting a parked car, and took West Broadway to the Square Diner, one of the last authentic train car diners in New York City. Allen couldn’t figure out how to unlock the child’s lock, so I climbed over Stephen to get out of his door, hoping to disappear before any of them could catch up. Stephen suspected as much and followed me. Since I couldn’t get away, I sauntered into the diner in search of coffee and an egg sandwich. It was Sunday morning, so the line to eat was long, but I wouldn’t wait. I barbarously nudged an elderly lady out of my way and, spotting an open booth, sat down. I shouted obnoxiously to no one in particular, “I want coffee!”

Stephen took the seat opposite mine. “We can’t stay. Can’t you just get it to go?”

Ignoring him, I snapped my fingers, and the waitress arrived. “A coffee and egg sandwich.”

“To go,” Stephen added. He was mortified, rightly, by my behavior. I could be willful, but he had never seen me be rude.

Luckily the man behind the counter, who had been listening in on the exchange, called out, “I’ve got it.” He turned his back to us and cooked the eggs. A minute later, he delivered a steaming cup of coffee and a cheese-covered egg sandwich in a brown paper bag. I swaggered out of the diner. The paper coffee cup was so hot that it burned my skin, but I didn’t care. I made things happen. I was powerful. When I snapped my fingers, people jumped. If I couldn’t understand what was making me feel this way, at least I could control the people around me. I threw the egg sandwich, uneaten, on the car floor.

“I thought you were hungry,” Stephen said.

“I’m not anymore.”

Mom and Allen exchanged glances in the front seat.

The traffic was light heading uptown, so we got to Dr. Bailey’s quickly. When I walked into the office, something felt different about the place, odd, alien. I felt like Gonzo walking into the casino after he had dropped mescaline in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Nothing was as it seemed, and everything dripped with apocalyptic meaning. The other waiting patients were caricatures, subhuman; the glass window that separated the receptionist from us seemed utterly barbaric; the Miró was smiling down at me again with that twisted, unnatural grin. We waited. It could have been minutes or several hours, I have no idea. Time didn’t exist here. Eventually a middle-aged female technician called me into an examination room, wheeling in a cart behind her. She dug out a box full of electrodes and pasted all twenty-one of them, one by one, onto my scalp; first rubbing the dry skin, and then fixing them to my head with some kind of glue. She turned off the lights.

“Relax,” she said. “And keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them. Breathe deeply in and out. One complete breath for every two seconds.”

She counted for me, one, two, exhale; one, two, exhale; one, two, exhale. And then faster, one, exhale; one, exhale; one, exhale. It went on forever. My face flushed, and I started to get dizzy and lightheaded. I heard her fiddling around with something across the room so I opened my eyes enough to see her handling a small flashlight.

“Open your eyes and look directly into the light,” she said. It pulsated like a strobe, but with no apparent rhythm to its pattern. When she turned on the light to remove the electrodes, she began to speak to me.

“So are you a student?”

“No.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a reporter. I write for a newspaper.”

“Stressful, huh?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” she said, gathering the electrodes back into the box. “I’ve seen this dozens of times, mostly with bankers and Wall Street guys who come in here all stressed out. There’s nothing wrong with them; it’s all in their heads.” It’s all in my head. When she closed the door behind her, I smiled. That smile turned into a laugh, a belly laugh dripping with bitterness and resentment. It all made sense. This was all a ruse, set up to punish me for my bad behavior and tell me that I’m suddenly cured. Why would they try to trick me? Why would they arrange something this elaborate? She wasn’t a nurse. She was a hired actor.

My mother was the only person left in the waiting room; Allen had left to get the car, and Stephen, overwhelmed by my harrowing behavior on the ride in, had called his mom for consolation and advice. I gave my mom a wide, toothy smile.

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh! You thought I wouldn’t figure it out. Where’s the mastermind?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You and Allen set this all up. You hired that woman. You hired everyone here. You told her what to say. You wanted to punish me. Well, it didn’t work. I’m too smart for your tricks.”

My mom’s mouth fell open in horror, but my paranoia read it as nothing more than mock-surprise.

^{CHAPTER 13} BUDDHA

The whole time I’d been in Summit, I had been begging to return to my Manhattan apartment. I felt constantly under surveillance by my family. So on Sunday, the day after my EEG, my mom, exhausted by the week of sleepless nights and constant monitoring, agreed, against her better judgment, to let me revisit my apartment under one condition: I spend the night at my father’s house. Though my behavior was worsening day by day, it was still difficult for her to reconcile the old image that she had of her daughter as trustworthy, hard working, and independent with the new, unpredictable, and dangerous one.

I quickly consented to spend the night with my father—I would have said anything to get back to my own studio. I felt calmer as soon as we arrived in Hell’s Kitchen, being so close to freedom again. As soon as we saw my father and Giselle waiting outside on the front stoop of my building, I bounded out of the car. My mom and Allen didn’t follow, but they did wait until the three of us were safely inside before driving away.

I was delighted to be back in my safe haven. Here was my cat, Dusty, a blue-haired stray who’d been tended by my friend Zach during my weeklong absence. I was even glad to see the unwashed clothes and black plastic bags filled with books and debris and the garbage overflowing with stale food. Home sweet home.

“What’s that smell?” my father asked. I hadn’t cleaned my apartment since the last time he came, and it had only gotten worse. Some of the leftover shrimp from the meal Stephen had cooked had spoiled in the garbage. Without hesitating, my father and Giselle began cleaning. They scrubbed the floors and disinfected every inch of that small apartment, but I didn’t even offer to help. I just walked around them, watching them clean and pretending to gather my things.

“I’m so messy!” I said, stroking my cat triumphantly. “Messy, messy, messy!”

After they finished, my father motioned for me to follow him out of the apartment.

“Nah,” I said, nonchalantly. “I think I’m just going to stay here.”

“Absolutely not.”

“How about I meet you in Brooklyn after I get a few things together?”

“Absolutely not.”

“I will not leave!”

Dad and Giselle exchanged knowing glances, like they had prepared for such an outburst. Presumably Mom had warned them about me. Giselle rounded up the cleaning supplies and headed downstairs to get away from the unfolding unpleasantness.

“Come on, Susannah, we’ll grab some coffee. I’ll cook you dinner. It will be nice and calm. Just come over.”

“No.”

“Please. Will you do this for me?” he asked. It took a half hour but finally I agreed, grabbing a handful of underwear and a few other clean clothes. The illness seemed to wane momentarily, allowing the old, reasonable Susannah to return briefly. The three of us chatted a little as we walked toward the subway on Forty-Second Street. But the calm didn’t last long. Paranoia took hold as I was crossing Ninth Avenue. My father has taken my keys. I have no way to get back to my apartment. I am his prisoner.

“No. No. No!” I shouted in the middle of the street, stopping just as the lights turned green. “I’m not going. I want to go home!” I felt my dad’s tight grip on my shoulders as he pushed me out of the way of the oncoming traffic. I continued to scream as he hailed a cab. When the cab pulled up, he pushed me inside, and Giselle entered on the other side so I was wedged between them. They were determined to prevent another escape attempt.

“They’re kidnapping me. Call the police! Call the police! They’re taking me against my will!” I screamed at the Middle Eastern cab driver. He looked back in his rearview mirror but did not drive. “Let me go. I’m calling the cops!”

“Get out. Leave car. Now,” the driver said.

My father gripped the bulletproof partition and said, through gritted teeth, “You better fucking drive. Don’t you dare stop.”

I can’t imagine what the driver thought, because it must have looked tremendously suspicious, but he obliged. Soon he started to speed, darting in and out of traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.

“I’m calling the police when I get out. You’ll see. You’ll be arrested for kidnapping!” I shouted at my dad. The driver glanced at us warily in the mirror.

“You do that,” my dad said nastily. Giselle remained quiet and looked out the window, as if trying to block out the scene. Then my father softened his voice: “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this to me?” Honestly, I had no idea. But I was convinced I wasn’t safe in his care.

By the time we arrived at their brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, I was too exhausted to fight anymore. I had nothing left, which wasn’t surprising since I hadn’t eaten or slept in a week. When we got inside, Giselle and my father headed to the kitchen. They began to cook my favorite meal, penne arrabiata, as I sat on the couch in the living room, staring dazedly at my father’s busts of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. My father’s house is an ode to American wars, filled with antiques and memorabilia spanning the Revolutionary War to World War II. He even calls one anteroom that separates the den from the living room the “war room.” There are muskets from the Civil War; M1 Garands that were used from World War I to Vietnam; Colt revolvers from the 1800s; a Revolutionary War sword and a soldier’s hat from the same era. Before the divorce, he’d kept most of these possessions in our Summit house’s family room, which scared off many boyfriends during my high school years.

They set the long harvest table and brought over a heaping, pulsating dish of reds, greens, and yellows—tomato, basil, cheese, and penne—in a blue Le Creuset pot. Pancetta glistened unnaturally in the blood-red tomato sauce. I stifled the urge to vomit or throw the penne against the wall and just watched as my dad and Giselle ate the pasta in silence.

After dinner, I went into the kitchen to get some water. Giselle was cleaning. She walked past me to put the dishes in the sink, and as she moved, I heard her say, “You’re a spoiled brat.” The words hung in the air around me, like pockets of smoke. I didn’t see her mouth move.

“What did you say to me?”

“Nothing,” she said, looking surprised.

My father waited for me in his den in a patterned antique rocking chair that had belonged to his aunt. I opted for silence about what I believed Giselle had called me.

“Stay here with me tonight?” I asked him instead, sitting on the leather couch by his side. The TV was off, so we made small talk, our conversation punctuated by uneasy blocks of silence. “I’m scared of being alone.”

“Of course,” he said.

Then: “Leave me alone! Get out of the room.”

And then, all over again: “I’m sorry. Will you please stay?”

This went on for several hours, moving from hysterics to accusations and then back to apologies. Beyond that, I can’t remember much at all of that night, which might be my body’s way of trying to preserve some self-respect. No one wants to think of herself as a monster. My father doesn’t remember what happened either, although it’s more likely that he has consciously chosen to forget. I do know that I said something terrible to him—something so awful that it made my father cry, the first time I had ever seen him cry in my life. But instead of generating sympathy, this just added to my twisted need for power. I ordered him to leave the room and go back upstairs to his bedroom.

A few moments later, a sickening blast and boom came from upstairs. POUND POUND POUND. I chose to ignore it.

I walked into his war room; picked up the Revolutionary War sword; removed it from its sheath, entranced by the blade; and then returned it. Then I heard Giselle’s voice. She was pleading with my father. “Please don’t hurt me,” she begged. “Don’t hurt me because of her.”

Again, the imaginary POUND POUND POUND.

I returned to the den and sat back down on the leather couch. A painting depicting the drafting of the Declaration of Independence bustled with activity. Over the fireplace, a large oil painting of a railroad scene came to life, the train emitting tufts of coal-covered smog. The bust of Lincoln seemed to follow me with its sunken eyes. The dollhouse that my father made for me when I was a child was haunted.

POUND POUND POUND.

It was the sound of fists hitting a hard object, like a skull. I could see it all clearly. He was beating her because he was upset with me.

POUND POUND POUND.

I needed to find an exit. There had to be some way out. I clawed at the apartment door frantically but found it locked from the outside. Is he keeping me in here to kill me next? I hurled myself against the door, ignoring the shooting pains in my right shoulder. I must get out. Let me out.

“Let me out! Let me out! Someone help me!” I screamed, banging my fists against the door. I heard my father’s heavy footsteps on the stairs above me. I ran. Where? Bathroom. I locked the door behind me and tried to move the heavy eight-foot armoire against the door to barricade myself in. The window. It overlooked a two-story drop; I figured I could survive the fall.

“Susannah, are you okay? Please open the door.”

Yes, I could probably have made the jump. But then I caught sight of a small Buddha that Giselle kept on the bathroom counter. It smiled at me. I smiled back. Everything would be all right.

^{CHAPTER 14} SEARCH AND SEIZURE

Early the next morning, my mom and Allen arrived to pick me up. When I saw the Subaru, I bolted from my father’s house.

“They kidnapped me. They held me against my will. Bad things are happening there. Drive,” I commanded.

My father had already relayed the story of what had occurred overnight. After I had said those terrible things and insisted that he leave, he went upstairs to a room where he could monitor me through thin walls without my knowing. He tried to stay awake but nodded off. As soon as he heard me trying to break free, he ran downstairs to find me barricaded in the bathroom. It had taken him over an hour to coax me out and onto the couch, where he sat with me until dawn. He had called my mother, and they agreed that I needed to be admitted to the hospital. But they remained adamant about one thing: I would not be placed in a psychiatric ward.

Allen drove me straight back to Dr. Bailey’s office as I rested in the backseat, once again resigned to my fate.

“Her EEG was completely normal,” Bailey protested, looking through my file. “MRI normal, exam normal, blood work normal. It’s all normal.”

“Well, she’s not normal,” my mom snapped as I sat there, quiet and polite with my hands folded in my lap. She and Allen had made a pact that they would not leave Dr. Bailey’s office without getting me admitted to a hospital.

“Let me put this as delicately as possible,” the doctor said. “She’s drinking too much, and she’s exhibiting the classic signs of alcohol withdrawal.” The symptoms matched: anxiety, depression, fatigue, irritability, mood swings, nightmares, headache, insomnia, loss of appetite, nausea or vomiting, confusion, hallucinations, and seizures. “I know it’s hard to hear about your own daughter. But, really, there’s nothing more I can say. She just has to take the medication and knock off the partying,” he said and winked conspiratorially at me.

“Alcohol withdrawal?” My mother brandished a piece of redlined paper that she had prepared. “These are her symptoms: seizures, insomnia, paranoia, and it’s all just getting worse. I haven’t seen her drink in over a week. She needs to be hospitalized, now. Not tomorrow. Now.”

He looked at me and back at her. He had no doubt he was right but knew better than to argue. “I’ll make some calls and see what I can do. But I have to repeat: my feeling on this is that it’s a reaction to excessive alcohol consumption.”

He left the office for a brief moment, returning with news. “NYU has a twenty-four-hour EEG monitoring floor. Would you be happy with that?”

“Yes,” my mom said.

“They have a hospital bed ready this moment. I don’t know how long it will be open, so I would advise you to go to NYU immediately.”

“Great,” she said, gathering her purse and folding her paper. “We’ll go right away.”

We entered through revolving doors into the busy, recently remodeled lobby of New York University Langone Medical Center. Nurses sprinted by in green scrubs, followed by nurses’ assistants in purple scrubs; doctors in white lab coats chatted at the crossroads of the corridors; the patients, some with bandages, some on crutches, some in wheelchairs, some on gurneys, journeyed past, dead-eyed and unspeaking. There was no way I belonged here.

We found our way to Admitting, which was a group of chairs surrounding a small desk, where a woman dispatched patients to different floors across the gigantic hospital.

“I want coffee,” I said.

My mother looked annoyed. “Really? Now? Fine. But be back right away.” A part of my mom believed the old, responsible me was still in there somewhere, and she simply trusted that I wouldn’t escape. Luckily, this time she was right.

A small stand nearby sold coffee and baked goods. I calmly chose a cappuccino and a yogurt.

“What do you have on your mouth?” my mother asked when I returned. “And why are you smiling like that?”

The strange taste of foam, a mixture of saliva and steamed milk, on my upper lip.

White lab coats.

The hospital’s cold floor.

“She’s having a seizure!” My mom’s voice echoed across the vast hallway as three doctors descended on my shaking body.

From here on, I remember only very few bits and pieces, mostly hallucinatory, from the time in the hospital. Unlike before, there are now no glimmers of the reliable “I,” the Susannah I had been for the previous twenty-four years. Though I had been gradually losing more and more of myself over the past few weeks, the break between my consciousness and my physical body was now finally fully complete. In essence, I was gone. I wish I could understand my behaviors and motivations during this time, but there was no rational consciousness operating, nothing I could access anymore, then or now. This was the beginning of my lost month of madness.