Containment Diaries: living with chronic illness

The first symptoms from Dr. N’s treatment was mostly pure exhaustion. Still, I managed to, somehow, pack up the apartment in Park Slope which I was giving up the lease of and move into a sublet for two months at which time I’d move permanently to Delhi.

I had loved this apartment on Eighth and Eighth. The most of all the various apartments and neighborhoods I had lived in in the city. But ever since I’d left E, I’d felt a desperate need to leave, move out of the country. I wasn’t sorry to let it go. It took me several months to get my rent deposit back from my landlord T. He had screamed hysterically on the phone at my audacity for asking for money while his mother was dying. Eventually I did. He drove up to the sublet I was staying at and I had to get into the car as he counted the notes like a quick drug deal.

The sublet was in Clinton Hill. The ugliest tenement building on a stretch of Clinton Avenue that had the grandest of mansions. I often walked down the avenue, imagining what it might feel like to live in such a grand building in New York City—many were built by Charles Pratt during the late 19th Century. What struck me the most was how different each were to the one next to it. A mishmash of different periods. As though the rich merchants, who built the avenue had come at different eras, built a memento and left. I was staying in what used to be free housing for the workers working on the Navy Yard. I had rented it from an advertisement I saw on Craig’s List. The posting specifically said No Pets! But the poster was a writer as well and his last name was Sidhu—an Indian. I hoped these two commonalities would make him reconsider. He did.

R’s apartment looked like a vintage furniture store—a mishmash of various findings. There was an old Eames Chair in a nook which I never got to sit on. Bookshelves in the bedroom. The most impeccable taste in reading I have ever seen. As though someone had gone through an Nobel Laureate’s recommended catalog and ordered all their books. Only, these were worn and the pages, one could tell, had been turned. So many  names I’d long admired, so many I never knew, which I always find a bit daunting. There was about six years of dust coating the white shelves but I didn’t care. I flopped down on the bed and didn’t get up other than walking Scylla twice a day and meeting my friend L once. I stopped taking the dog to the parks and would turn around to walk back as soon as she had done her duties.

L, On our way to a restaurant in Bushwick where one had to wait in line for pizza for nearly two hours—  a fact about Brooklyn I still don’t understand — said she read up all my symptoms, and thought I had something called Conversion Theory. L had a Masters in Psychology and thought she could diagnose everything. I shouted at her for the second time in our seventeen year friendship and she knew it was time to shut up.

That same week I got an email from a friend of my sister’s. He was in town. Would I like to have a drink. He had, I later gathered, texted straight from the airport. I had met him twice during my time in Delhi. My voice was quivering when we spoke at a lunch at an eminent Historian’s home. My arms were clasped tightly around me and I was more annoyed that I was aware of all this than anything else.

I told B I would meet him at KGB, a bar on East 4th Street, where the interior decor, the price of drinks and the people who went there had remained unchanged over the decade. It was where I had met E and had spent a formidable part of my college days. It was where I took every out of towner.

He commiserated on my bad back because that is what I thought I had. I drank four glasses of wine and have no memory of the conversation that took place over the next three hours. But already Dr N’s needles had made me pensive and feeling weak.  We were sitting at the bar, on the high chairs and I was so worried because I didn’t know what was holding me up, that nothing else mattered.

At some point I pined for a falafel from Mamoun’s on East 8th—not the original, the one on McDougal— but the next best. I ordered mine the way I always did—a sandwich with no salad and extra tahini. He asked for the same. We ate it on the sidewalk and walked back to 4th where I said it was late and I must go home. Scylla was waiting. There was a new restaurant at the southwest corner of 2nd and 4th. Every time I came down to this part of town, that restaurant always had a different name. But the corner Deli on the northwest side still had its blue awning with white lettering and the workers in there were still Indian, although I don’t remember if they were the same ones. Outside,  the sidewalk was still busy. Taxis went by streaking their light across the avenue. I hailed one but before I had a chance to get in, he pulled me close. His kiss was strong and hard and it made me realize I had had no human touch in many weeks. I was shaking inside from weakness and probably shock.

The next day we had dinner at an African restaurant in Fort Greene. He walked me back to the sublet. Dekalb was empty at that time of the evening but there were still a few cars coming over on Washington with force.  He held me back when I started to cross at a red light.  I told him to wait downstairs while I went up to get Scylla and give her a quick walk. He jumped backwards quite some distance when he saw her and I was disappointed he was, after all, like all other Indian men. A man from my building went by and he said, “Have a good night.” Americans are always so polite, I found, to the point of discomfort.

Afterwards, B came upstairs and soon he’d taken all my clothes off but suddenly, he left, struggling with his pants, before we’d had sex. This would have been my first time with a man after E. I had to presume it had to do with the fact that he was married.

Under no circumstances was I to mention this to my sister, he said. He left and I returned to staring at the ceiling, lit grey by the light outside. The window was open and once in a while a light breeze slid in. I could hear voices of two old men in the courtyard below. Lit apartments across the courtyard made the adjoining building, also part of the complex, look like a checker board. I fell asleep as I awoke every morning, in the haze of dizziness and not knowing.