Читать книгу Sick - Porochista Khakpour - Страница 15

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NEW YORK

Ever since I can remember, I dreamed of escaping. Escaping what was always the question, but my life had been one of escape since I was born—revolution and war sent us through Asia and Europe and eventually to America. We were in exile, my parents always reminded me, we had escaped. It was temporary. But escape was also something I longed for in eighties Southern California, which constantly felt foreign to me, a place of temporary settling but no home. Everything was tan in a way my brown skin could not compete with. Everything was blond in a way my bottle-blond mother could not re-create, gilt upon gold upon gilt. Everything was carefree and smiles, gloss and glitter, and money to no end. We, meanwhile, were poor and anxious and alone. When my brother was born in our neighboring city Arcadia, California, in 1983, I watched his pink squirming body stowed into a giant felt red heart—it was Valentine’s Day—and even stuffed in all that makeshift American affection I thought he didn’t have a chance. None of us did.

As the tremors continued, as my body somehow grew smaller rather than larger—my mother always quick to slap my hand when I reached for the leftover cake batter the way sitcom kids did, her ritual baking more American obligation than motherly delight—I also began feeling a need to escape the body. All my few friends got their periods before they were teenagers, but mine waited deep into my first teenage year, on the brink of fourteen, like an afterthought. Everything about my body felt wrong to me, especially as California went from the eighties to the nineties, and I knew escape would have to be a real revolution of presence.

My mind always went to literal distance, eyes on the globe landing without fail on New York. It’s hard to know if all the movies of the era did it, Fame and its many knockoffs, Annie and all the stories of rags-to-riches miracles in Manhattan, told me New York was the motherland for misfit creatives to thrive, for foreigners with big dreams, for girl authors. But I think where it really came from was my aunt Simin, who was the only living role model I ever had. My mother’s world, as it sought to merge with the average American woman’s more and more, spoke to me less and less—I found myself cooling from her endless mall outings, Estée Lauder free gifts, diet everything, soap operas, and department store catalogues. Instead my eyes went to my father’s sister.

Simin was not only the first model of a woman I could aspire to, but also my first example of an artist, a New Yorker, and ultimately a sick person. My father’s three sisters were all supermodel-tall and bone-thin and prone to throwing on amazing mod dresses and thick black eyeliner with a messy casualness, like the heroines of old French cinema classics, all vaguely tragic and uncontainable and iconoclastic. I loved Simin the most, her skeletal frame always bearing the strangest clothes hung like modern art, grays and metallic and blacks and whites, thoroughly avant-garde. Her dyed long copper hair was witchy and perpetually bed-headed. Her face was all bones and lines and perfectly crowned the whole look, always a bit haunted but in this punk, high-art way that I did not have the words for then but could now describe as New York. She was an artist and spent half her time in New York and half her time in Paris, where her artist husband and grown son lived.

She loved me so much, and she was someone who always pored over my drawings and paintings and encouraged me to pursue visual arts, which was the one vocation competing against writing for me, but ultimately one that I did not have as much talent in. Still, she told my parents I should put my art on postcards and pass them out, always giving me confidence at the most unexpected moments. At my most awkward phase, early teens, she announced out of nowhere at a family gathering that I had the “perfect profile” and she’d like to draw it. (She never did.) Like me she seemed to hate our extended family gatherings, and more than once the two of us would stay in the car for hours while my family attended some function. It was there that she told me stories about New York City, how she lived in an apartment in a big building, with a view of Fifth Avenue—I remember her telling me how she saw Princess Di in some procession out her window. She had so many stories about the art galleries and boutiques. She once advised me that the way to deter crazy people on the street in New York was to act crazier yourself, advice I never forgot and still use on occasion. She told me one day we’d be in New York and do it all together, and I imagined her as my first roommate, I as her apprentice, going to art parties and gallery openings, sharing chic little meals together, never sleeping.

It never happened because on one of her many visits, this time when I was sixteen and was just two years from moving to NYC, she had a persistent cold and visited a doctor, and it suddenly turned out she had terminal brain cancer and had only months to live. Within weeks she ended up in a nursing home near my high school. I never once visited her, haunted so much by stories of my parents’ visits, where she would spin paranoid tales and would be lost in hallucinations and nonsense plots, as her brain deteriorated at an alarming rate and eventually killed her. I refused to believe we’d lose her, but she was gone just like that.

For years, I was left with these memories of her, and I wondered how long she’d been ill. She was emaciated in a way I admired. She barely ever raised her voice above a whisper, which seemed elegant of her. There was always something a bit psychologically off with her, which I related to. Her fragility was almost a look for her. And all those years alone, away from her Parisian family—what did her life look like?

There began my fear of the woman artist alone in New York, who lives a wild and unconventional life only to succumb to the most standard and conventional institution of all: death. Premature fatal illness getting in the way of not just the accumulation of your years—aging never had much allure for me until later—but getting in the way of your artistic endeavors suddenly felt like a huge threat to me.

The greatest tragedy of the disappearance of my aunt, who had visited us in California—a place I knew she hated, always tagging along to the mall or beach with a sort of pained weariness—and never returned to her artist’s life in New York and Paris, was that there was work of hers that would never be done. And my greatest apprenticeship, my old role model, was no longer there. I had no idea what image I was going to carve myself in, but I began praying I lived to achieve a few dreams at least, premature death and illness suddenly feeling like contenders in the many things from terrorist attacks to earthquakes to serial killers that could get me.

I never imagined a tick-borne illness on that list.

Plus, it would only be a matter of time until I’d set about destroying my body in other ways.

I felt more dedicated than ever to making New York my home, and indeed when it came time for colleges, all but the few obligatory California state schools were on the East Coast, and if not directly in New York like Columbia and NYU, then close like Brown. In the end, the school I chose—that chose me—was a surprising one: Sarah Lawrence College. I only knew a few things about it. One was that its pamphlet in the mail had announced iconoclasm was deep in its culture: You Are Different. So Are We. I also knew that it had a creative writing program, and that ensured I could be in those magical-sounding writing labs called “workshops.” And finally, I knew that it was known for its lesbians—I remember one of my first female crushes, a beautiful Middle Eastern punk girl named Kara who was the star of our school’s jazz band, once mentioned wanting to go to “Sarah Lesbian College.” There was much of sexuality I felt I needed to at least have the option to explore outside of the supervision of my parents.

Westchester County, New York: Sarah Lawrence College in green suburban Bronxville. Even though the student body was made up of about one-third boys, it was still the typical rich girl’s liberal arts college. I was the only scholarship kid I knew for a while and too many students felt okay to tell me their dads paid for me to go there. I had never even spent the night at a friend’s house—slumber parties were not allowed back home, just like teen magazines, makeup, and dates of course—and suddenly I was going to be on my own twenty minutes outside the city I always dreamed of living in. Part of it was not knowing what to expect; part of it was that very actualizing of the fantasy, the New York girl I had fantasized about being.

In my first week there I marched to the college bookstore, knowing that you could charge all sorts of things to your parents’ account and it would all come up as “bookstore,” and I purchased a full carton of Marlboro Reds. As I child I’d watch old movies and pose with crayon cigarettes in front of the mirror, always looking forward to a day when I could become an actual smoker; my first crush was the Marlboro Man and I imagined sharing drags with him somewhere on a horse in Malboro Country. So here I was now, with my own cigarettes and no one to disapprove, as it seemed the whole campus smoked in 1996. I took them to my dorm room and spent hours practicing in front of a mirror, smoking a quarter of a pack a day to ensure I’d be addicted in no time. And I achieved just that—this would be an addiction that would plague me for over half my life. It would also be an affliction I brought onto myself that every doctor later in my life would note as a serious disadvantage in battling chronic illness, the body ultimately unforgiving of that vice, they warned.

I brought a wardrobe of all black and it only grew—it was the nineties and black on a scrawny girl like me meant instant fashion and art. I couldn’t understand the Sarah Lawrence girls at first—too many were from the Midwest and South, regions that did not make sense to me at that point, and so I spent almost all my time in the city. I’d often miss the last 1:30 a.m. train back to Bronxville just so I’d be forced to stay out all night in New York City.

And there I was at semisweet eighteen, the girl in the neo–Malcolm X glasses and black turtleneck writing in East Village twenty-four-hour cafés all night, who subsisted on coffee and cigarettes and bagels, who had friends who were downtown artists and poets and writers. Soon I knew where to drink without being carded, and soon I was the girl drunk for the first time in her life, on St. Mark’s Place, vomiting on the sidewalk, not a single gutter punk or club kid blinking an eye. (I’m soooooo happy right now, I remember slurring into my friend’s arms, who had tried to stop me until she realized my whole point was to get out-of-control drunk that first time I properly drank, trying every single mixed drink on the menu of the cheap café.) Suddenly I was the girl at every reading at St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the Nuyorican Poets Café, dragging notebook papers full of poems I’d never read but wanted to baptize in good creative energy by carrying them in those spaces. Suddenly I was the girl who was going to clubs alone, who’d only return to campus to sleep away a few remaining daylight hours. Suddenly I was the girl with New York City boyfriends; suddenly I was the girl making out with girls casually as if it was nothing to me, at good old Sarah Lesbian College.

And suddenly I looked sick—looked like we all did, as heroin chic had taken ahold of the nineties and certainly our campus. To look just barely on the wrong side of life and the right side of death was a desirable thing, my friends seemed to agree. And that worked, because just as suddenly: drugs. Since that first hallucinatory surgery experience as a child, I had not had a drug experience. But at Sarah Lawrence drugs were all around me, in abundance. It was both a golden age and last gasp of counterculture; drugs were a part of life for nearly every young person I knew. It was hard to resist. The girl I’d imagined, the one who smoked cigarettes and wore all black, and went to poetry readings and puked on St. Mark’s, was of course a girl who dabbled in drugs. I remember reading Go Ask Alice back home in LA a bit feverishly, all its warnings sounding mesmerizing, like all the This Is Your Brain on Drugs ads that had a secret allure to me. I always wanted that escape, and before I could even escape the body, I realized there were easier ways to escape the mind.

Dabbled I did. Pot doesn’t count, everyone would always say, and so I went back and forth with that at first. It did little for me unless I mixed it with alcohol, always a bad idea but my kind of bad idea, the centerpiece of so many lost nights and wayward weekends. But then I had a boyfriend who confided in me that he’d begun taking coke, and if I wanted to, I could come to a “cocaine party.” Hard drugs were not so inconceivable to me, as my first friends at Sarah Lawrence were all in “MacCrack-House,” what they nicknamed the dorm hall MacCracken, which was known for its junkies. The first drug I saw done in my life—before marijuana even—was heroin, when I wandered MacCrackHouse’s halls freshman year. I was eighteen and was being invited to watch friends shoot up in their rooms. It was all vaguely glamorous—everyone in black patent leather, the soundtrack mod and industrial, people exhausted and beautiful, nodding in and out, luxurious and wasted. I dreamed of trying it, but I never did—one reason being that I saw the negative effects quite rapidly (and I ended up losing three friends to heroin from that time to a few years after graduation). But cocaine was something else to me, something that somehow seemed less deadly, but nonetheless sparkly and dangerous. I agreed to go to the party.

And that night—in a cramped dorm room filled with students I did not know and had never really even seen on our campus, sitting cross-legged on a dirty carpet, with action movie soundtracks blasting in the background, and a CD cover with a rolled dollar bill and white dust on it being passed around—was the start of a casual relationship I had with cocaine all the way to one last bump in 2015.

“Am I doing it wrong?” I whispered to my boyfriend over the Pulp CD, as I rolled and rerolled the twenty-dollar bill, hoping there was no residue on my face.

He squinted to inspect my face like it was a science project—people could be so serious on coke—and said, “No, you got it. Someone is a natural!”

I was. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would—it was like coffee but the high was very positive for me then, no anxiety at all in the mix, and it lasted for just the right amount of time, no long trips to worry about. It also did not seem to addict me in the way I feared, but my love of it also told me—just as cigarettes had proven—that I was indeed an addictive type. The drug found me over and over my next few years—once in the form of a present from a socialite who liked me and left an eightball in a cracked chocolate rabbit on Easter Sunday morning, often in the form of bumps from someone’s back pocket, and then in daily endless supply from a friend who became one of the premier dealers on campus, and who in exchange for hiding her stashes in my room gave me as much access to it as I wanted. I dipped in and out of lines and bumps, often using them when big papers and early mornings were involved. It felt like just another part of me that I’d discovered in New York City—what New York City artist girls did if someone else was buying, especially.

In one of my earliest encounters with email I wrote to my California hometown best friend that I had tried cocaine.

Wow, you have changed, she wrote.

No actually I’m just more myself than ever, I wrote back.

And because this was the nineties, Ecstasy and mushrooms soon came in the mix, and marijuana became another staple as the thing you used to come down from all the other stuff. On any weekend night, either at Sarah Lawrence parties or at a downtown club in the city post-internship hours, I had all sorts of substances running through me. And not only that—I was well aware my substances involved other substances. You knew your E was cut with either heroin or amphetamines. Sometimes even your pot could be laced with PCP or just a “cocopuff” (pot sprinkled with cocaine). Once I even accidentally smoked crack thinking it was a cocopuff. None of these were big events, eventually, just things you did.

God Bless the Nineties, I remember scrawling on the whiteboard outside my dorm room in dry erase cursive—I would have tattooed it on my body, except I was still some years from being able to afford tattoos. But it was the right era for me, I always felt, I still sometimes feel. Everyone I knew was an iconoclast, a misfit, so different that we never considered we could all be the same, never thought that if enough people owned “alternative,” wasn’t it just mainstream? Never mind. The halls were always vibrating with nineties conscious hip-hop or druggy rock, like Gang Starr or Pulp, and we were always on something. Time was always running out, but in the best way, semesters just a hurdle to another break that I didn’t want anyway—why go home when you could be in the middle of all of it, whether on campus or in the city? Who needed parents, stability, goals, a future? I was alive, in a moment, for once. My friends were free spirits, losers, anarchists, skaters, punks, taggers, club kids, strippers, professional junkies. I have very few memories of getting any work done, but I did remain diligent about my New York City journalism internships, as they were more than anything an excuse to have a purpose in New York City. I got to tell people, I work in New York City, even if it was for free.

There’s a photo my parents took of my first day at Sarah Lawrence. I entered that first day in cutoff jean shorts, Pumas, a white T-shirt and baseball cap, styleless ponytailed long hair, makeup-free—the suburban uniform of any Southern California nineties kid. It took only a few hours there to realize I stood out, and in not a good way. By the end of my time there, in a photo from my senior year, I had a calculated mask of red lipstick and black eyeliner, hair in a studied frizzy shag, neck and fingers covered in costume jewelry, a frayed leopard coat on top of a black leotard and leather pants. I was at least a dozen pounds skinnier, my skin a bit gray; I gave off an air of dirtiness, in all meanings of the word. I had become something else, something that I would have once been frightened of, and that was the point.

Along the way, I just barely made it from tipping over completely into the dark side. We didn’t have exams, grades, finals, any of that, but we had the equivalent and I was never sure how I passed some classes. There was one semester in my sophomore year when I hardly went to class at all, always in the city, school just an afterthought. While friends of mine dropped in and out of rehab and took leaves of absence, I was proud that nothing got out of control for me. I couldn’t have afforded it if it had, after all. I treated my breaks at home as “drying out” and would assume my parents had no idea what I was up to, as I’d spend the entire summer in a dark curtained bedroom with my staple hoodie hood up, sunglasses on, with an impressive selection of vitamins, sleeping too many hours a day, sweating all sorts of things out. I’d work some shifts at the local Urban Outfitters in Pasadena, maybe intern at a magazine a day a week or so, but I was mostly glad I did not have my own car and did not know my way around Los Angeles. I didn’t feel as if I was from there. I didn’t want to know its troubles. It was now just a place for me to buy time, before the showtime of Sarah Lawrence and New York City.

There was one time my body announced itself and nearly escaped, a time when I came close to losing it all. It was my senior year. I had come home from SPIN magazine, my final internship, on a Friday night, and my central campus dorm hall was raucous with sounds of indie hip-hop, a Pharcyde and Dr. Octagon sort of night, which had to mean my friend Missy was up. She was a refugee of the old MacCrackHouse, and she always had the best pot, the only drug she claimed she did at that point. It had become my post-internship ritual to go to her dorm and smoke cigarettes with her in the hopes of getting a hit or two of her bong. She always shared, as she did that night, but this time the pot hit me badly. My other friend, also a former MacCrackHouse character, Ace, was in the room, and he and Missy were fine, but I was very much not. For a while we all assumed I was having some sort of panic attack—I had had my first few panic attacks those Sarah Lawrence years, often tied to drug use—and we tried to ride through it.

“You’re cool with us, you’re cool here, all is well,” Missy said, swaying with the bong in hand above me, as I reclined on her floor, everything spinning. Missy was very rich, like all the Sarah Lawrence kids, but she worked on the side, which meant stripping in Yonkers, something I could never get out of my head every time I saw her.

“Please stop freaking out!” Ace was less consoling. “I can’t deal with it.”

It was bad drug etiquette to freak out. Back then nobody went to the ER, or called a doctor, or turned to help. You knew the risks—if you were going to do drugs, then it was all fair game. Even death. Back then we lost friends, so it was never unthinkable but rather built in to the experience, the risk maybe even part of the thrill. There was no going back. You had to do your best to live, but there were no guarantees.

I realized after a while that both Missy and Ace thought I was on something else. At some point I must have gotten sicker, much sicker, and they were more panicked, hovering over me, demanding to know what else was in my system.

I yanked myself up, suddenly lecturing them, “Fuck, nothing is in my system. I’m not a junkie like you guys! Cigarettes are in my system! That’s it! I didn’t even drink tonight!”

Somehow I stumbled out and made it to the doorway of my own room, and I realized my vision was a mess and I was seeing things. Orange cats were multiplying. Everywhere and fast.

Before I knew it, I was with Missy and Ace again, demanding they call 911.

Orange cats.

“Why? Just relax,” Missy kept saying.

Orange cats. Orange cats. Orange cats.

“We can’t be here if the paramedics come, Missy,” Ace kept saying. Fucking junkies.

I demanded they help me, my heart beating too fast, saying I needed help and there were too many fucking orange cats.

“What do you want us to do, we’ll do it, but what?” Missy was panicking.

“Dude, Porochista, we know how to speed up your heart not slow it down,” Ace said at one point.

Like the druggies they were, they disappeared by the time I or they or someone called 911 and the paramedics showed up at my building, the very center of Sarah Lawrence’s sole quad.

For some reason, I could not get out of Missy’s chair—I told the paramedics that I was stuck, that my grip on the legs was not something that could be undone. I even laughed for a moment that someone had glued me—and the paramedics were not amused, just lifting me and the chair outside the dorm and into their vehicle on the lawn, past half the campus standing in their Friday evening best. The red lights of the ambulance gave the quad a sort of haunted emergency quality, like something very bad was wrong, but what?

Me.

I was what was wrong.

I was still seeing orange cats.

In the ambulance they gave me oxygen, the first time of many times I’d be given it, and they asked about drugs. I told them everything, and I begged them not to report it to my parents.

“You are an adult,” one of the paramedics said.

I was an adult. He was right. I was twenty-one at that point. For years, without even noticing, I had been an adult.

At the ER, various hallucinations continued—this time I saw the male receptionist in blue sequins and a beehive wig, the sort of illustrious drag my favorite performers at the East Village’s Lucky Cheng’s would wear. I laughed and laughed, as I struggled to breathe and the various monitors beeped soberly.

I had lost all sense of time, but according to the nurses I was fine. I’d had something more than pot; it had to have been cut with something. But they were concerned about my other vitals throughout the night and kept me there for more bloodwork. Apparently I had disturbingly low blood pressure, an erratic heartbeat, and a slight fever. “Have you been sick for a while?” the main doctor kept asking, it felt like every hour, over and over.

“I told you, I don’t know,” I would say, because I didn’t. How did I know if I was sick? I didn’t have a life of thermometers and chicken soup and a mother and a good doctor. In New York I had a life of endless nights, sex worker friends, drinking too much and smoking too much, doing drugs whenever I could, keeping whatever hours I could build internships and classes around. I had a life of New York City. I barely ate, often some beans and rice from the cafeteria, a pie, too much soda, fries. In the city I’d hit up vending machines at work, and if my saved-up pennies allowed, a lemon cookie from a bakery at Grand Central, which had become a sort of reward for me. Reward for what, who knows, but I was living a sort of life that needed rewards, I had decided. I was also too skinny—an editor at the magazine had once said I was the skinniest human being she had ever seen, and I, remembering my dear aunt, had taken it as a compliment.

So I had no idea what normal was. I never felt good. I never felt not sick. I told the doctor that.

He wanted to know how much I smoked. Too much, I said. Had I been anemic before? How was my thyroid? What were my periods like? Had I been tested for STDs? Had I been tested for Lyme?

I shrugged it all off to get out of there, wanting the night to end, hoping for anything that would allow me to leave, but having no good answer for any of it. No one I knew went to doctors. No one I knew was healthy. No one expected it. If you were alive, then you weren’t dead. That was it. It was just not in our culture to care.

The dean of studies came by some time around dawn.

“Look, I’m sorry, nothing like this will happen again,” I blurted to him, embarrassed and shocked to see him there.

He looked resigned and disappointed in a gentle fatherly way, and for a moment I worried I was hallucinating him.

“Are you really here?” I gasped.

And there came his kind, booming voice, “Yes, Porochista, I am really here.” We had never interacted much, so hearing my name pronounced correctly by an administrator astounded me.

“Please don’t tell my parents, please. They won’t understand, they don’t know . . .”

And there it came again, like a taunt if it hadn’t been so true. “Porochista, you are an adult.”

I was an adult. An adult who had been dragged out of a dorm room on a chair, a chair she thought was a gluetrap, who had hallucinated orange cats and then a drag queen in a shiny blue dress, who had no health history, who had only junkies for friends, who had taken something that was laced with something and had nearly lost it.

Long after he was gone, when it was well into the bright Saturday morning, they discharged me and asked if someone was going to pick me up.

I remember laughing. “I don’t have anyone. This is it, just me.”

I remember walking like I was filled with lead to the campus, walking as if swimming in a pool of rubber cement. Everything was slow and impossible. I had ruined my life maybe. There was something wrong with me, many things wrong with me.

And those things were drugs, I thought. Why not.

There are ways drugs can coat all sorts of problems. You can think of drugs as pain relievers, and most of them are in some way or another. The body is asking for something, and drugs deliver something, but rarely that thing the body needs. In the end the needs of the body are unheard and another need opens to be filled. Drugs make holes so they can fill them for you later.

And so it made sense that my friend Ray, who had never done a drug in his life, who was the first of our friends to get a book deal—the week of our graduation actually, just months later—sat with me that night after the hospital as I cried and cried, over not my health or the incident, but over the fact that he was going through every one of my drawers and removing baggies and pillboxes and rollies and whatever else he could find to destroy. I cried out like a wild animal in pain when he flushed the grams of coke that I had forgotten about under my bed, flushed them down the toilet with a big smile on his face.

“Fuck you, that’s several hundred dollars, you know,” I bawled.

He knew of course that I never paid for anything. “You need to live. That’s what I am here to help you with, Porochista.”

Ray had already gone through one of my worst crises with me just the year before, when I’d emerged from spring break battered and broken. I had gone with a not-so-close friend and my boyfriend at the time to Martha’s Vineyard, to my not-so-close friend’s father’s estate. We drank and did various drugs for days and days. In the midst of a rager one night, I was sexually assaulted in my bedroom by two men, while everyone else—my boyfriend included—partied in the main living room. When my boyfriend found us, the two men pretended it was a ménage-à-trois-type scenario, nevermind my ripped clothes and tears. We left the island at dawn and our relationship lasted only another week. The worst part of all might have been the rumors swirling around me when I got back to campus. Everyone in that tiny campus of one thousand knew something had happened to me, something big. I pretended not to notice the gossip, those eyes, the smiles. I was changed, I was tainted, I was scarred, and only Ray knew how to comfort me in all that chaos. I became severely depressed and plagued by nightmares of suicide, but Ray was always there to hold my hand and remind me that I could survive it, that I would have to survive it.

“You need to live,” he said to me then and he said to me again, still several years from losing one of his best friends, Rodney, to heroin. Rodney was only a pothead when I had my fling with him, which was already too much for Ray. “You need to live, okay?”

I knew that was true. Some of my friends who would later lose their lives to drugs were still alive, though just barely. I knew I had to live because, well, I didn’t have the imagination to think otherwise.

That infectious disease doctor who would eventually treat me in Pennsylvania nine years after college, Dr. E, had wondered about my life and my history with ticks. When he asked me about my time at Sarah Lawrence, I looked at him blankly. I had never thought or even heard of Lyme disease in that way until that one evening at the ER my senior year, but I did know this: I spent a lot of time lying around in the grass. Lyme usually lurks in tall grass and wild meadows, so manicured lawns should have been fine. But often when I think of Lyme, I think of those first months of spring each year and how all my friends and I spent them as scantily clad as possible, often in bikinis, splayed out on the quad lawn, our reward for having endured winter, a taste of summer freedom to come. And I’d get bites, all sorts of bug bites, but what did bites mean in a time of hickeys, and even more so a time of my friends’ track marks, when the only thing it seemed possible to die of was a drug overdose, with suicide a possible second? I did not think about bugs during that phase.

The infectious disease specialist told me that Westchester had always had high Lyme rates, but that he did not think this was where I contracted Lyme. He bet hiking in Los Angeles as a child was more likely than in college, even when I told him I was a mess in college, that all sorts of things went wrong, that all sorts of things could have gone much more wrong.

Only months out of college in 2000, I ended up heading back upstate periodically, in areas that I would later learn had more concentrated Lyme problems, such as Dutchess County and Stanfordville. It was there that my boyfriend Cameron’s mother lived with Cameron’s stepfather in a cross between a cottage and a castle. They were very wealthy—the stepfather was a retired surgeon, and Cameron’s mother had suddenly come into money as a real estate whiz kid. Her first real job was a junior stint in real estate, where luck led to her selling a notorious golden cluster of Riverside Drive developments in her first years in the business. She had paid for Cameron’s Ivy League education in cash, she’d say, not shy about it, not shy about anything really.

Going to the country to stay with Cameron’s parents was a great escape from our life in a tiny studio in an East Village high-rise. Cameron’s mother would take us apple picking, on picturesque hikes, to Culinary Institute restaurants. For a brief time we’d feel like New Yorkers who had made it so big we had earned leaving New York here and there. In reality, we were young journalists living large on someone else’s dime.

But after a few of our visits, Cameron’s mother developed Lyme disease—apparently she had gotten it from her dog, some kind of lapdog mutt, who had it too. She hadn’t known what it was and had let it go, and she had rapidly developed neurological complications as a result. This was the first time I was properly confronted with someone who had contracted the disease, and it was hard to listen to her stories of the constant ups and downs and think that this had just come from a tick bite. We’d end up assisting her and she seemed mostly herself, but then suddenly she’d be off—staring into space, apologizing for scrambling words, throwing fits at her mind going blank, all things I would only come to understand a decade later.

“I’m never like not like this,” she’d stammer with tears in her eyes. “I mean I’m never like this. I mean . . . both.”

“You’ll be fine,” I kept telling her.

“Will she?” Cameron would ask me in the quiet of our guest room.

“Why didn’t antibiotics work? Isn’t that all you need with Lyme?” I’d ask him again and again.

Cameron would shrug, and sometimes in his passive indifference to his mother’s state I wondered if he actually believed her. When we had initially started dating, he had told me, My mother would do anything for attention. It didn’t seem impossible.

“Not a single doctor can help me,” she’d mutter, which only made me more suspicious. How could doctors today not be able to help?

I’d try very hard to recall my coldness to her over a decade later, my inability to channel full empathy, my distance from whatever it was that was happening to her that I felt so far away from, so I could understand better when it all got turned around on me.

During that period, as we watched Cameron’s mother get loopier and more pain-struck by the week, we didn’t once consider that Lyme was something we also could get. She would beg us to check our clothes for ticks—you don’t want me to happen to you, trust me!— and I ignored it, still having no real idea what a tick was, having no worry in the world around that issue.

Our longest visit was for a little over a week after 9/11, and it was a time when ticks were far from our minds. We killed the days outside, needing nature urgently, and never once did I think that while my life had been altered by that one danger we’d narrowly missed, there was another very different danger that would strike instead.