Free The Best American Essays 2015 by Ariel Levy Page B

putting them together into anything that matched what I then went through. Not that I went through anything beyond what had been described—no part of that had been exaggerated or understated. But how can you warn a person about actual physical sensations, or about time, how it changes? Weeks before I went in I could already see myself there on the couch, set up with occupations; I could put myself in the room, tally up the hours of the day when my wife, Lynn, would be away working and I would be alone. I pictured with great accuracy the downstairs where I’m now confined—the couch set up on risers in the sunroom, bookcase right there in arm’s reach, the big dining-room table where I would spread my papers out, that whole afternoon atmosphere of a still life inhabited. But I featured the passing of hours without accounting for how they would feel. I had forgotten the great lesson of Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain
, a novel I had lost myself in in my twenties. I had not remembered (because I had never really known) that illness—or in my case, waiting to gain back health—rearranges the world.
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    I think right back to the start of the strangeness, to the business of being
out
, being under, that step in the process that they explain so matter-of-factly, almost in passing. “After the anesthesia is administered,” the doctors say, as if they were setting out the simple schedule: “And in the morning, after breakfast . . .” I hardly gave it any thought either, at least in the weeks before the operation. But as the day neared, I began to realize what was involved, that I would be lowered down very close to the root of consciousness. The thought of it—the dread—was there with me all the night before. It was not dread of the surgery, the
cutting into
—though of course that was also on my mind—but the dread of the total blackout, the erasure. That an IV chemical would so deaden me to the world that I would not know that my thigh was being opened along a seam, that a major piece of metal (I had seen and handled the implant at a mandatory pre-op meeting) was being inserted . . . The idea gave me a pit in the stomach.
    At the same time, though, it also pulled me, it fascinated. I have to say that images of such oblivion have always found their way into my fantasy life, I’m not even sure why. I know I have always been hyperattuned to those moments in movies when a character is rendered unconscious, after which—always—comes the briefest pause, a single beat or two of cinematic nothingness. And then the eyes snap open. He or she is in a hospital bed, being tended to, and everything that had happened before is erased by the image of white sheets and restorative sunlight streaming in through the window. That beat or two of nothingness is so powerful, that pocket of timelessness between A and B . . . Such unconsciousness suggests to me the possibility of some complete existential reset.
    So it happened—just as I had been told it would. I was in the room, alert through the IV hookup for the anesthetic. The anesthesiologist said I would be awake as I was wheeled into surgery, that there would be more drug given through a ventilator. But that’s where it all stops. I remember no wheeling, and I remember no sudden heaviness or drowsiness, no slipping away. I remember nothing. One minute I was on my back wearing a hospital johnny, the very next I was in recovery, by merest increments becoming aware that something important had happened to me, while still swimming in a pleasant chemical stupor . . .
    In a sense, the last few weeks have been a continuation of that indeterminate state—the world drawing back, though really, I know, it is the self that has pulled away; the terms of attention completely altered, and all actions affected by that alteration. Is this what old age will be? I have to wonder. I study the changes. I,