The Two Kinds of Decay

Relevance

If you could know anything about my disease, what would you want to know? Did it change me?

I don’t know if it changed me. It happened in spacetime, which is a bad place to conduct a controlled experiment. Spacetime has too many variables already. It’s not even a controlled experiment by itself.

I don’t know if I changed because of my disease or in spite of it.

What if I don’t mention the disease for eleven years? Was I thinking about it all that time? What if I talk about it constantly for eleven years? Am I avoiding thinking about something else?

Did anything important happen to me before the disease happened? After it happened? How important was the disease? More important than getting my driver’s license? Having sex for the first time? Getting put in lockdown? What about when I moved to Iowa? What about when Victor died?

What about when I crashed my mother’s car?

I am quite sure I crashed the car so everyone would see I wanted to die. I wanted to die, but I didn’t want to tell anyone. So I took a left turn through a double lane of oncoming traffic, only one lane of which I could see, and I hit a van full of kids.

Their mother came out laughing — was she laughing? Why have I made her laugh in this memory? She knew I was at fault. I knew I was at fault. And the police knew.

I think they also knew I wanted to die. I was a frail-looking twenty-five-year-old woman driving an immaculate fifteen-year-old black BMW sedan and I’d just hit a van full of kids, and I knew I looked sedated but I couldn’t help it, and the two officers who came to the scene were very gentle with me. They asked me if I were all right. I wanted to die, but I wasn’t hurt, so I said I was all right.

I could feel my face lying on top of my skull. I could feel it not moving. I could feel my mouth move when I spoke, if I concentrated.

One of the officers explained very kindly that I was at fault by definition, as I’d been the one turning into oncoming traffic. It was all right. My mother’s car was wrecked. I’d never been in a wreck before. I wasn’t concentrating on being in a wreck. I was saving the wreck for later.

Then I went into the library, returned the books I’d brought to return, stopped in the alcove, put a quarter into the pay phone, and told my mother I’d been in an accident.

Then I drove home in the wrecked car. Did I drive home in the wrecked car? Or was it towed, and did someone pick me up and drive me home? I don’t remember.

No, I do remember. I remember driving home in the wrecked sedan, but it had grown to the size of a Viking ship, and all other traffic had disappeared, and the roads had disappeared, and there was only me in my broken ship, floating home.

I wouldn’t have to say a word. My friend Shane had just died. I could just have gone home in my broken ship, the ghost of my dead friend hovering above it, and everyone would know I wanted to die, too.

And the relevance of my disease would be obvious. Everyone would see that it was the culprit, that it was why I wanted to die.

I don’t know how to write a novel. I like to ask writers who write novels how they do it. How they write something longer than what can be held in the eye comfortably, at middle distance.

How can I stop thinking about the disease long enough to write about anything else? How can I stop thinking about everything else long enough that I can write about the disease?

My friend Isabel says, When you’re writing even a short novel, with at least a couple of subplots, and God only knows how many characters, your brain holds the volume of it beyond the ability of your consciousness.

Of course.