Free Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors by Evan Handler

physical being was hurtling along in the opposite direction.  While I’d open my eyes from every meditation session having regressed a little further into the youthful era of curiosity and discovery, I’d be met by an image in the mirror of a rapidly aging man.  Each day I’d become more debilitated, a bit slower, my posture more stooped.  My hairline was receding hourly, and the pace of its retreat could be manipulated simply by reaching up and removing a clump of hairs with my fingers.  With that simple gesture I’d scroll forward on my lifeline to see myself reflected back from five, ten, twenty years down the road.  The mirror became the window through which these different chronological incarnations would greet each other and try each day to build a new bridge to reconnect the ever-widening chasm between.
     
    The techniques I learned were a result of the reading I was doing.  Immediately after the diagnosis I had begun collecting what would soon grow into a library of inspirational books and articles.  This collection started with a few well intentioned gifts from friends and relatives, but soon exploded with the addition of obscure pamphlets promoting alternative cures; letters from long-lost friends; letters from the friends of those friends; all giving hazy anecdotal testimonials of miraculous recoveries, typed out on worn typewriters and scrawled over page after page of personal stationery.  Several of the submissions contained audiocassettes of speeches given by the New Age gurus of the day, or bootleg tapes of their smaller support group meetings.  These tapes were often referred to as if they were treasured gems of the underground holistic healing circuit.  Their owners would pass them on to me with the solemn reverence of a devoted Dead Head, certain that it was
this
tape, of
this
particular performance, that would make me see the light, and change my life forever.
    Some of this stuff was brought in at my request – I was aware of and eager to read what Norman Cousins had to say about illness.  I devoured his book
Anatomy of an Illness
, and found even more valuable information in his later one,
The Healing Heart
.  In these books, Cousins explicitly states many of the discoveries I myself was making.  Namely, that disease was not the only obstacle to be overcome.  The institutions supposedly devoted to making the sick well could easily exhaust the stamina of the heartiest souls.  Even before I’d read his books, when I had first arrived on the twelfth floor of the hospital, the first thing I was told was that I couldn’t keep the VCR I’d brought with me.  Plugging it in was “against the rules,” as the only available electrical outlets were reserved for emergency medical equipment in case its use became necessary.  I learned then, and reading about Norman Cousins’s experiences confirmed for me, that my ability to survive was going to be closely related to my willingness to disobey.  I also started to try to emulate others of Cousins’s survival techniques, such as getting the nursing staff to consolidate their repeated requests for my bodily fluids.
    As invaluable as I found the Cousins books, there was another small blue paperback whose pages I adopted as my personal manifesto.  The book became my Bible. 
Getting Well Again
, by Stephanie and O. Carl Simonton was the book that planted most of these ideas in my head.
    Carl Simonton was a radiologist in the Dallas area who became intrigued with the question of why two individuals with nearly identical diagnoses and treatment protocols might come to have completely different treatment histories over the course of their illnesses.  Some patients recovered and lived long lives, while others succumbed almost immediately, in spite of identical interventions.  Dr. Simonton focused his investigations on the emotional makeup of these individuals; the stresses in their lives prior to diagnosis; and their ability and willingness to