LITMIR.BIZ

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remember laughing. “I don’t have anyone. This is it, just me.”

      I remember walking like I was filled with lead to the campus, walking as if swimming in a pool of rubber cement. Everything was slow and impossible. I had ruined my life maybe. There was something wrong with me, many things wrong with me.

      And those things were drugs, I thought. Why not.

      There are ways drugs can coat all sorts of problems. You can think of drugs as pain relievers, and most of them are in some way or another. The body is asking for something, and drugs deliver something, but rarely that thing the body needs. In the end the needs of the body are unheard and another need opens to be filled. Drugs make holes so they can fill them for you later.

      And so it made sense that my friend Ray, who had never done a drug in his life, who was the first of our friends to get a book deal—the week of our graduation actually, just months later—sat with me that night after the hospital as I cried and cried, over not my health or the incident, but over the fact that he was going through every one of my drawers and removing baggies and pillboxes and rollies and whatever else he could find to destroy. I cried out like a wild animal in pain when he flushed the grams of coke that I had forgotten about under my bed, flushed them down the toilet with a big smile on his face.

      “Fuck you, that’s several hundred dollars, you know,” I bawled.

      He knew of course that I never paid for anything. “You need to live. That’s what I am here to help you with, Porochista.”

      Ray had already gone through one of my worst crises with me just the year before, when I’d emerged from spring break battered and broken. I had gone with a not-so-close friend and my boyfriend at the time to Martha’s Vineyard, to my not-so-close friend’s father’s estate. We drank and did various drugs for days and days. In the midst of a rager one night, I was sexually assaulted in my bedroom by two men, while everyone else—my boyfriend included—partied in the main living room. When my boyfriend found us, the two men pretended it was a ménage-à-trois-type scenario, nevermind my ripped clothes and tears. We left the island at dawn and our relationship lasted only another week. The worst part of all might have been the rumors swirling around me when I got back to campus. Everyone in that tiny campus of one thousand knew something had happened to me, something big. I pretended not to notice the gossip, those eyes, the smiles. I was changed, I was tainted, I was scarred, and only Ray knew how to comfort me in all that chaos. I became severely depressed and plagued by nightmares of suicide, but Ray was always there to hold my hand and remind me that I could survive it, that I would have to survive it.

      “You need to live,” he said to me then and he said to me again, still several years from losing one of his best friends, Rodney, to heroin. Rodney was only a pothead when I had my fling with him, which was already too much for Ray. “You need to live, okay?”

      I knew that was true. Some of my friends who would later lose their lives to drugs were still alive, though just barely. I knew I had to live because, well, I didn’t have the imagination to think otherwise.

      That infectious disease doctor who would eventually treat me in Pennsylvania nine years after college, Dr. E, had wondered about my life and my history with ticks. When he asked me about my time at Sarah Lawrence, I looked at him blankly. I had never thought or even heard of Lyme disease in that way until that one evening at the ER my senior year, but I did know this: I spent a lot of time lying around in the grass. Lyme usually lurks in tall grass and wild meadows, so manicured lawns should have been fine. But often when I think of Lyme, I think of those first months of spring each year and how all my friends and I spent them as scantily clad as possible, often in bikinis, splayed out on the quad lawn, our reward for having endured winter, a taste of summer freedom to come. And I’d get bites, all sorts of bug bites, but what did bites mean in a time of hickeys, and even more so a time of my friends’ track marks, when the only thing it seemed possible to die of was a drug overdose, with suicide a possible second? I did not think about bugs during that phase.

      The infectious disease specialist told me that Westchester had always had high Lyme rates, but that he did not think this was where I contracted Lyme. He bet hiking in Los Angeles as a child was more likely than in college, even when I told him I was a mess in college, that all sorts of things went wrong, that all sorts of things could have gone much more wrong.

      Only months out of college in 2000, I ended up heading back upstate periodically, in areas that I would later learn had more concentrated Lyme problems, such as Dutchess County and Stanfordville. It was there that my boyfriend Cameron’s mother lived with Cameron’s stepfather in a cross between a cottage and a castle. They were very wealthy—the stepfather was a retired surgeon, and Cameron’s mother had suddenly come into money as a real estate whiz kid. Her first real job was a junior stint in real estate, where luck led to her selling a notorious golden cluster of Riverside Drive developments in her first years in the business. She had paid for Cameron’s Ivy League education in cash, she’d say, not shy about it, not shy about anything really.

      Going to the country to stay with Cameron’s parents was a great escape from our life in a tiny studio in an East Village high-rise. Cameron’s mother would take us apple picking, on picturesque hikes, to Culinary Institute restaurants. For a brief time we’d feel like New Yorkers who had made it so big we had earned leaving New York here and there. In reality, we were young journalists living large on someone else’s dime.

      But after a few of our visits, Cameron’s mother developed Lyme disease—apparently she had gotten it from her dog, some kind of lapdog mutt, who had it too. She hadn’t known what it was and had let it go, and she had rapidly developed neurological complications as a result. This was the first time I was properly confronted with someone who had contracted the disease, and it was hard to listen to her stories of the constant ups and downs and think that this had just come from a tick bite. We’d end up assisting her and she seemed mostly herself, but then suddenly she’d be off—staring into space, apologizing for scrambling words, throwing fits at her mind going blank, all things I would only come to understand a decade later.

      “I’m never like not like this,” she’d stammer with tears in her eyes. “I mean I’m never like this. I mean . . . both.”

      “You’ll be fine,” I kept telling her.

      “Will she?” Cameron would ask me in the quiet of our guest room.

      “Why didn’t antibiotics work? Isn’t that all you need with Lyme?” I’d ask him again and again.

      Cameron would shrug, and sometimes in his passive indifference to his mother’s state I wondered if he actually believed her. When we had initially started dating, he had told me, My mother would do anything for attention. It didn’t seem impossible.

      “Not a single doctor can help me,” she’d mutter, which only made me more suspicious. How could doctors today not be able to help?

      I’d try very hard to recall my coldness to her over a decade later, my inability to channel full empathy, my distance from whatever it was that was happening to her that I felt so far away from, so I could understand better when it all got turned around on me.

      During that period, as we watched Cameron’s mother get loopier and more pain-struck by the week, we didn’t once consider that Lyme was something we also could get. She would beg us to check our clothes for ticks—you don’t want me to happen to you, trust me!— and I ignored it, still having no real idea what a tick was, having no worry in the world around that issue.

      Our longest visit was for a little over a week after 9/11, and it was a time when ticks were far from our minds. We killed the days outside, needing nature urgently, and never once did I think that while my life had been altered by that one danger we’d narrowly missed, there was another very different danger

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