Dry Ice Stephen White

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.The list of possible consequences was endless.With MS, wherever there was a CNS pathway there was a potential symptom.But nothing emerged.No new symptoms.No reruns of old symptoms.Or so I thought.I’d never considered that the new symptom would be the infiltration of some nefarious music-killing poison into her ears.“Music hurts,” she repeated.“It irritates.It’s like.rubbing a burn.Or touching a blister.Or having an eyelash in my eye.It’s just so.unpleasant.”Oh.The recent cornucopia that she’d selected from the iPod suddenly made more sense.“All week long you’ve been looking for songs that—”“Don’t hurt,” she said.“Find any?”“Ground isn’t too bad.” Ground was the Tord Gustavsen Trio album.“And Satie’s not awful.But it all hurts.Loud, soft.20Stephen WhiteJazz, rock.Vocal, instrumental, country.Everything.Even the Wiggles,” she said, laughing a laugh that made me want to cry.The Wiggles had caused us pain for more months than either of us could count, but the pain of the Wiggles in the hands of a child was merely the pain of endless repetition.“Anything harder to listen to than the others?”I heard her swallow.“Dusty Springfield.And Don McLean.”Ballads? I thought.Odd.I lost a moment trying to imagine what it felt like—for music to hurt, especially music as comfortable as Dusty Springfield and Don McLean.I couldn’t get there.I also realized what I had missed as Lauren had left unconscious clues during the week.The most sobering hint?The melancholy lyrics of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”Bad news on the doorstep, indeed.“Any other new symptoms? Fatigue? Dizziness?” The conversation was easier in the dark.For both of us.Talking about her illness was something we had never done well.Since the previous autumn we’d done even worse.I kept telling myself that history and love would guide us through it.“Same as always.”“The pain in your legs?”“It’s okay.Whatever I’m doing.is working.”“What are you doing?”“Nothing.Some stretching.”She wasn’t convincing.Lauren was one of the few adult females I knew in Boulder who—despite a brief flirtation—didn’t at least dabble in yoga.I would have bet good money she couldn’t tell Iyengar from Bikram from Ashtanga.“Really?” I asked.“You haven’t gone back to Percocet?”“No.”I wanted it to be true.Some good news would be welcome.“It’s just whatever’s going on with your ears? Did you talk to your neurologist?”ESZ!JDF21After a poignant pause she said, “No.And it’s not my ears; it’s my brain.”I knew that.I did wonder about the edge in her tone, but gave her the benefit of the doubt and risked another question.“Will you talk to him?”I felt her abdominal muscles stiffen below my hand.She said, “Maybe.”There was a time in our marriage when I would have chosen that instant to press her.I might even have gone through the motions of trying to insist.Maybe I was older and wiser.I was definitely more weary.Fighting would have required energy I didn’t have.“I’m so sorry,” I said.A better spouse would have known better words.I once knew better words.But those days I wasn’t a better spouse.The path of least resistance was to provide compassion.Comfort if I could.“Is there anything I can do?”She didn’t even bother to tell me no.She asked, “Can this disease really take away music?” Her voice was hollow, disbelieving.But not disbelieving at all.“Can it?”She wasn’t waiting for me to answer.Hers was the most rhetorical of questions.We both knew that her disease could take away anything.“Maybe it will pass.Most of these things do.”My words were the literal truth.But the phrase also served as a palliative to the uncertainty of MS.“Maybe it will pass”was the artificial levitation of hope we inflated to counterbal-ance the gravity of looming sclerotic despair.Much of the time the illusion worked.I heard that sigh from her again.For the second time she said, “Yes.” To my ears, the word still shouted “defeat.” If the room hadn’t been so dark, I probably could’ve spotted that flapping white flag.I surrender, sir.Me, too.I thought.Me, too.GPVSI WAS ruminating when Lauren mumbled into the dark that music hurt.I was in the midst of an extended phase where I didn’t often see sleep before the bars emptied in the city below our home.I knew what was going on—if I had the courage to look in the mirror, I would have seen a cloud racing to catch me from behind.I’d lived for over two decades believing that I could outrun it before it consumed me.My refusal to look had long been evidence of hubris and of fear.The hours I spent after midnight longing for sleep meant that my hubris was in hospice care.It was dying.My fear wasn’t.I’m a clinical psychologist.As part of my job I learn other people’s secrets.I know secrets about drugs, and sex, and crime, and infi-delity.I know secrets about money—who spends it, who hoards it, who steals it, who borrows it, and where it’s stashed.I know work secrets, big-business secrets, old family secrets, boring secrets, and the occasional fascinating secret.I even know secrets about secrets.Most of the secrets are much less interesting than the person guarding the information suspects.I’ve learned by listening to the nuances of many confidences that the power of a secret is generated not only by the nature of what’s hidden, but also by the potential charge that is kept at bay by the act of segregating its existence.ESZ!JDF23When someone moves information from the category of“private” to the category of “secret” the knowledge takes on the kind of potential energy that is locked inside atoms and contained within huge concrete and steel domes.Infinite energy.Destructive energy.Because of that potential force the truth that is locked away takes on a connotation greater than simply “hidden.”Revelation of something private might mean embarrassment.Revelation of something secret would mean blame.Or guilt.Or worse, shame.But my own lifetime living with secrets had taught me that many of us had greater fears about our secrets, fears that did not diminish, but grew exponentially over time.The first oversized fear was that revelation would mean loss of control.The second big fear was that the act of having chosen to keep a secret from a loved one would become more potent than whatever knowledge was hidden.We choose secrecy at one point in our lives—presumably it makes sense to us at the time—and we protect the secrecy through the phases that follow.Do the facts truly remain dangerous later on? Worthy of all the subterfuge? Or does the existence of the secrecy become the real danger requiring protection?Often my job as therapist was simply to help my patients move the explosive information back to where it belonged—to shuffle it from the radioactive territory of secret to the safer land of private, or to the supposedly inert land of disclosed.Sometimes that work is as simple as it sounds.More often it is not.Secrets feel more powerful than they are.Once we create them we become the wizard in our personal Oz, and we guard the secrets with all the resources and all the artifice of our mythical kingdom.We willfully slaughter Toto before he gets anywhere near the curtain [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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