Free Lying by Lauren Slater Page B

false—got all mixed up and merged together. I believed he was touching me; keep this in mind as events unfold. I believed he was. I had four more electrical probes after that one, and each time I would stay over in the hospital while my head healed up. Sometimes, also, I would stay over in the hospital for CAT scans, for angiograms, for extended encephalograms. I loved the beds that rose up and dipped down. I loved ordering my food from a menu and getting my meals in little packets, a present, each part. Iloved socializing with the nurses, who liked me and played Parcheesi with me as late as 10:00 P.M . I was practically popular on the ward. In addition, the sheets were softer than at home, and people touched you kindly, and low lights burned all through the night.
    What happened is this. The rest of the world began to feel far away, a land I no longer knew how to live in. I felt bad for everyone in this land, and I looked at them with scorn.
    Instead of learning to live in the land, I went to the doctor’s almost every day after school, and once or twice a week I slept over at the hospital, packing my red carrying case like I was going to a girlfriend’s house. I looked forward to socializing with the nurses in the solarium. When I wasn’t there, I missed them and thought about when I’d go back. I started to have a daydream in which it was always winter. Dressed in a Lycra skirt, bright white skates laced around my petite legs, I looked as perfect as a toy. In my daydream I skimmed over the ice, cold shavings flying from my blades while people stood in the bleachers and clapped. This was the Olympics, and I was winning the world. People clapped as I jumped into the air, came down on a rose tossed into the rink. My balance buckled. I was not at fault. I fell like a winner, like a warrior; I fell with all the innocence of a victim. When I woke up, I was in a hospital and a doctor who spoke French was healing me with his hands. With his hands he worked my broken bones like they were Lincoln Logs, snapping me softly into place. He fixed everything except my left leg, which instead he plastered in a cast. I went back into theworld like that, and everyone who saw me said, “Oh. Oh. I’m sorry.”
    Sometimes, if I had this daydream in bed, I would fall asleep before it was finished. Other times I would get to the end only to start the story all over again, only this time I had broken not only my bones, but many of my organs too, and the doctor who spoke French had to work on me using many experimental cures.
    Understand, I would have told no one back then. The experimental cures involved pins and touch. Maybe I was becoming mentally ill. Actually, I was becoming mentally ill. If you’ve read my other books—and I have written other books,
Prozac Diary
and
Welcome to My Country
, which I suggest you rush out and buy—you would know that mental problems have been issues throughout my life.
    Is epilepsy mental or is it physical? A long time ago, when van Gogh was alive, people with epilepsy were put in insane asylums, where I’m sure, with their froth, they fit right in. In my own life, even though she pooh-poohed psychoanalysis, Dr. Swan had once told me my seizures were the result of repressed things, and if I could just let my feelings fly free I would get better. I had asked Dr. Neu about that and he said bosh, and he’s brilliant, whereas Dr. Swan was merely bright. But still. When I look back on myself now, from the vantage point of many years, and see myself as I was, all thrash and spasm, I have to wonder what it meant, if my sickness was like longing for things in the past I had never had, and for things in the future I was too afraid to try.
    •  •  •
    “We might be able to cure you pretty soon,” Dr. Neu said to me one day.
    “What?” I said.
    “Cure you,” he said. “I think you have the type of seizure that would respond well to a sectioning of your corpus callosum.”
    I knew the corpus