The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 18: November 3

Today I gossiped with a new friend about the illness of a woman we scarcely know. She and I are both living in a German villa along with a lot of academic policy experts and, in my case, my family. (We are here because my husband received a fellowship from the academy that occupies this villa; the academy awards people, for the length of a semester, money, housing, and food.) The sick woman — she is German — disappeared from the villa a few days after we arrived. This was over two months ago. No one knows what is wrong with her. We’ve asked around. Not even her close friends have a clue. Her story, we assumed, given the secrecy surrounding it, must be incredibly worth knowing. (My friend could offer this single detail about the sick woman: “Her husband was killed a few years ago in Antarctica.”)

My friend, who is Italian, wondered if the refusal to discuss or acknowledge sickness was a specifically German trait. She herself had recently fallen ill; she said she couldn’t stop talking about her illness. She couldn’t stop calling people and telling them how sick she was, and how scared. She narrated in detail her sickness to everyone who would listen. Now she is better, sort of. She’d lost her innocence. Health, she now understood, is the pause between afflictions.

I’d recently lost my innocence as well. I was an illness iconoclast until I wasn’t. At the age of forty-four, after decades of health so entrenched it was mistaken for chronic, I, like her, became sick.

The word “sick,” however, doesn’t accurately describe what befell me. I had pain. I had pain all the time. I was informed by doctors that I would have all-the-time pain for the rest of my life. They used the phrase “pain baseline.” I’d played basketball and tennis in high school. I felt as though I was being initiated into a strange endurance sport, one without a clock or any means to keep score and end the match.

I did not deal with this news well. I asked my husband if he would mind if I killed myself. I tried to sell him on the benefits of my suicide; this stricken, whining person, who wants her around? I described to him the far greater damage I’d inflict on our children by living. By insisting on living, rather than taking an elegant bow (the elegant particulars had yet to be worked out). To insist on living, I lobbied, was sheer selfishness.

I did not want to be selfish.

Eventually I stopped thinking about suicide. Instead I became regularly beset by deep topics like time. I said to my husband, “Perhaps I am meant to be one of the great convalescents.” By which I meant writers who popularized the lap blanket or wrote in bed, and whose literary greatness was proportionate to their physical misery.

So I filled my time with thoughts about my possible future greatness, and about time. Time, since my getting sick, had assumed a new shape. It was no longer linear; it did not cut through my day like a road. I did not see time ahead of me. I experienced time on top of me. I experienced time underneath me. Time became a hollow, vertical enclosure. I moved up and down inside this enclosure; occasionally I would remain stationary, or stable, at a fixed altitude that might be called “the present.”

But because of the pain, I was vulnerable to sudden and extreme altitude shifts. As I dropped or ascended through the enclosure — my tube — I registered the change in air pressure physically. My stomach lifted to my throat. I often experienced my life in fast-forward, as though hurtling toward my death. Not that I cared about dying. What I could not bear to witness was the previews of other deaths that would, if I chose to stick around, precede mine. The eventual death, for example, of the affection my young son feels for me. Suddenly he wasn’t next to me spinning tops. Suddenly he was grown. I did not experience the incremental shifting of his fondness toward me as he became four, and then five, and then twelve, and then thirty-six; I experienced it in a fraction of a second. I experienced it like a stabbing. This little boy whom I was, in the present, gamely entertaining with toys. He was already gone.

The same with my daughter, and my husband, and my parents, and my career, and the tree outside my window. Everything around me sped up and vanished and then, when my altitude stabilized, reappeared, but something had changed. Everyone and everything existed as a future ghost to me. This sounds unpleasant. It was. However, I was so acutely alive during those four weeks. The pain of my aliveness was occasionally unbearable. I’m not referring to physical pain, though I experienced that too. I’m referring to emotional pain. To the emotional intensity that the passing of time should incessantly inspire; to the sickening countdown that every person should be registering every moment of her so-called aliveness, but is she? Until I got sick, I wasn’t. How had I been so immune?

And then — I got better. I’d been misdiagnosed. With distressing quickness, time resumed as a road along which I traveled unthinkingly; when I had a spare reflective moment, and I rarely did, I’d turn my head to the side to admire the blur.

I am no longer immune, however, to the occasional plummet in time altitude. A plummet happened the other night. I found myself lying in bed and thinking about Mexican wineglasses, the green kind with the air bubbles. They are the size of goblets. I’d put a lot of identity stock, at one time in my life, in Mexican wineglasses. I’d bought some in my twenties, and they represented a pinnacle achievement in self-realization. Thinking of these wineglasses reminded me of a trip I’d taken through Mexico with a boyfriend when we were both in our twenties; we’d driven a two-piston rental through mountain ruts. We slept in fields. We emerged in a town with white walls and cafés, and were there also Mexican wineglasses? Did I buy mine there? I don’t think so. I only remember a photo I took in that town of a white adobe wall and, rising above it, a crucifix atop a church dome. I was not religious, yet the photograph was so religious that I felt I shouldn’t or couldn’t be as fond of it as I was. But now, lying in bed and thinking about wineglasses, I found myself thinking of this photo, and the girl who took it, and that town — I’ll never know its name — and I felt the kind of longing for that girl/town/photo I feel for my children at night when they are asleep.