Water and earth

It’s 1:28am. I’m sitting cross legged on my chair, fan heater on beneath me (it’s too hot to lower my legs to the ground, which I do when I dash inside from my car). I’m listening to a song called ‘burning river’, by a New Zealand boy that a friend knows. An empty wine glass with red residue, papers, a coffee mug with a spoon inside (used for ice cream), a bottle lie scattered around papers I haven’t sorted yet.

Sorry for not writing. I’ve been sick. But more than that, in my last week of Haematology (last week), I didn’t quite have the heart to. Bone marrow transplant was too depressing in some ways; people’s stories were too personal. This week I started Respiratory in a different hospital. I still see Prof S. around, because he is also working in this new hospital, strangely. I’m so shy, I tentatively wave and hope he waves back, and I know it’s just rude not to talk to him but there’s always a little fear in love for me. Even professionally.

An old high school friend, A, moved to Melbourne this week to start her working life. We go way back, to the very first day, the very first class. To S., who I credit to making me grow up in a short space time, and later after my life came to be here, in this city, to the girl in red scarf.

To be honest, I had been nervous. Catrina put her thumb on it before she left for the UK: when you move to a place for the first time, you become territorial. It’s suddenly your city, to people back home. It’s safe. You go back to this place, live a compartmentalised and somewhat secretive life (secretive only in the sense that it’s impossible to talk about everything that goes on in your day to people back home).

This old friend happens to be the kind of person who has the amazing talent for taking something and making it her own. In school, I would recommend a book to her, then weeks later someone would come up to me and ask me if I had read the same book, because A. had recommended it to them, and that the whole school attributed her for such a fantastic suggestion. Even having dinner with her and her friends, taking them to some of the restaurants I had taken her her previous visit, it was amusing to see her still the same, making recommendations on the menu to the others who had never been. It always used to annoy me a little, but I’ve come to realise that it’s just that we have different personalities - I am quiet about my likes and dislikes, unless conversation happens that way. Even when pressed for a recommendation, I feel uncertain - how am I sure that the other person will like the same things I like? I always make recommendations based on what I think the other person would like, not what I personally like.

It’s strange to see A, and the friends who she knows here, and even girl in red scarf, and the New Zealand visitors going through all the uncertainties, the learning curbs that I had to go through at 17. Except they have each other, and at that time I didn’t really even have my parents (we were fighting that first year I was here, on and off - and we had never fought before, so it was even harder).

I wish I could say that the divide that I used to feel when I went to New Zealand between my friends and myself was removed with this event of immigration, but leaning against the wall or comforting A. (suddenly unsure of herself at times, eliciting rapid cries of encouragement from her peers who had come down to visit her), or offering advice about practical things that had helped me, and echoing the encouragement — finding a flat for oneself, for example — and watching her pick and choose because she was used to getting things with certainty and getting anxious when nobody was phoning her back —

I felt it more than ever.

It’s almost as if I were in a different stage of life. Five or six years beyond where they were. Ready to settle down, get on with my career. I’ve had enough of moving around, instability - the kind that comes from traveling, only spent sadly domestically.

Sometimes I’d even feel absurdly saddened, suddenly placed back to the early days when I was here, and feeling the aloneness. It’s happened. The thing I wrote about all those years ago has come true, so soon before my leaving my life forever for the first time (the first of many times I have left in some form in my life; the first of many goodbyes):

1:34 pm on 02-11-06

”We burn brightly, furiously, incandescently. There is touch - there is the immediacy of life, and its transcendence into the extraordinary. We are not human beings. We are immortals trapped inside these damp skins. Trapped by each cell, and each cell trapped inside a plasma membrane, living. We collide to break free - we yearn.

[…]

I am being torn away from this. When I come back everything that is burning now, that I am burning with now, will have evolved and cooled - become rock, stone. I want to burn here with everyone and become part of the same solidness. Be made out of the same things, and if thrown and blown around, still carry the same residue or the earth that we all made ablaze.”

I am a different person here. The same me, just different decisions. Different people, different jokes. Different stories and quirks. A kind of hardness that may be new.

I have a different life. It made me realise: A. moving here had no impact whatsoever, apart from distance. I had somehow completely separated myself from everything in my life here. Part of it was having no existing contacts when I moved here, unlike A. I guess it’s easy to slip back into the old circles - it’s so funny, R.G. (the primary school friend I had dinner with a while ago) was just saying the same thing. She felt disdain for people who just slipped back into their old crowds; she wanted adventure. She tried not to keep in contact with anyone she used to know.

Don’t get me wrong. I am so happy that A. is here now. That our adventures can be adventures together sometimes; always places to go, life to be created. :)

The city, and Medicine — they feel like it’s a part of me. It’s alive, in my veins, the way I dress, the way I talk. My mannerisms, the things I laugh at. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not made out of the earth here too, baked over the long summers, the indistinct times away from home.

The only things left to me is the strong feelings I have about certain people, certain things. Memories. A love of parks and waterways and a longing for the sea. Empathy, a love of things that grow, bad singing. The same laugh, I guess. I still like laughing. Those are unchanging.

Or perhaps these things were in me all along. A few people have told me I haven’t changed much at all. It always makes me happy to hear these things.

“If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?”

We used to ponder that question (from Fight Club) — always one of my favourite quotes. The answer is yes, you can. But not in the way you think. :)

Or maybe not at all.

There are days when I think it’s one thing, and then the other.

Knowing and not knowing

Day 1 on the bone marrow transplant: almost cried twice. My registrar before this one warned me that it would be sad, that he couldn’t do the job. I didn’t believe him because I didn’t know enough about bone marrow transplant, and because I’m young and optimistic.

To be fair, most patients recover, and can even be transplanted mostly as outpatients. When people are sick though, they are really sick. Sometimes they die.

The intensive care unit houses some of the most vulnerable patients. It’s beautiful, the ICU in the hospital I am at. In my first week, doing a consult for plasmaphoresis with my old unit, I admired the skylights that made the place seem perpetually happy. My registrar caught me and said, “It’s amazing isn’t it. This is the biggest ICU in Australia. The windows in the rooms? If they have to change a patient, they just flick a switch and it goes opaque.”

“Like on House!?”

“Just like House.”

All my previous visits to ICU were for patients on other teams I’ve been with, who by and large were old and frail, and nearing their time. They’d never been my age before. They’d never been barely ten years older. They’d certainly never been younger.

I couldn’t do intensive care - I’m too scared, to be honest. I look at some of the people in my year who want to be intensivists and think to myself, you’re awfully bright but will you ever learn how to break bad news? Ask for organs? Perhaps I am still afraid of death, in my own way. There are so many people who are dying.

A woman lies in bed, bald. She’s just been transplanted but things aren’t going right - her blood’s been filtered because her kidneys aren’t great now, and she’s delirious because all the toxins are going to her brain. Sometimes she gets fevers. The registrar motions me outside the cubicle and says, “Transplant is one of the worst palliative methods in the world.”

It’s a joke - transplant is not a palliative method at all. He means, we transplanted her but she was going to die anyway.

So ask him why.

He said, “Without it, she had six months to live. She could have spent it at home. Transplant offered a small chance of cure, but the chance that if things went wrong like they were likely to do in her, she would spend the remaining six months she had in hospital, very unwell. If it were me, I would have chosen 6 good months. In the end it’s up to the patient. Everyone has personal reasons. You have to respect them. This woman has a very young child. She chose to be transplanted.”

Everyday we go in there, wake the woman up and try and talk to her. Some days she remembers where she is, or a name or a face. Other days, nothing at all. The registrar is cheerful, after each conversation. He asks her every day if she knows who he is. Her grunts sound the same to me but he says happily, “she’s more and more interactive every day.”

We are optimistic. It’s hard to tell how much time this will buy her, if any. I think of her young daughter, and the choice she made. When my mother was her age, I was just starting school. This could have been my mother. I hope her child realises the choice she made.

That’s not even the saddest story.

The bone marrow transplant registrar, M, who I will only know for a week, is probably one of the most important registrars I’ve met. He’s only on for one week and already I sense he’s taught me something that I will never forget in my entire life.

“They try and tell you to separate your emotions from your practise,” he says. “But all of the good doctors I know do precisely the opposite of that. Don’t ever be afraid to feel things, as long as they don’t destroy you. I’ve sat in rooms with the families and patients and cried with them. “

Sometimes I wonder, is it better to know or not know your own fate? At times people say it’s not their place to say something. Having been a patient, it’s always your place to say something.

Don’t get me wrong, the majority of our patients make it out perfectly fine. I guess we’re having a bad run. This morning our entire team (which is usually very cheerful) made it up 7 floors in almost silence, and headed to make ourselves a cup of tea. The registrar stole us lollipops from the ward next door so we could cheer up.

On the tram back from the city to my car, I wondered if people really knew the kinds of heroic things that went on every day. Decisions like sacrificing your quality of life for your child. Knowingly facing death. People cling onto life. The kinds of winning and losing that people can’t even dream of.

‘Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close’, by Safran Foer

12 September 2003

Dear Oscar,

I am writing this to you from the airport.

I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?

I am an old woman now, but once I was a girl. It’s true. I was a girl like you are a boy. One of my chores was to bring in the mail. One day there was a note addressed to our house. There was no name on it. […]

[…]

I took the letter straight to my room. I put it under my mattress. I never told my father or mother about it. For weeks I was awake all night wondering. Why was this man sent to a Turkish labor camp? Why had the letter come fifteen years after it had been written? Where had it been for those fifteen years? Why hadn’t anyone written back to him? The others got mail, he said. Why had he sent a letter to our house? How did he know the name of my street? How did he know of Dresden? Were did he learn German? What became of him?

I tried to learn as much about the man as I could from the letter. The words were very simple. Bread means only bread. Mail is mail. Great hopes are great hopes are great hopes. I was left with the handwriting.

So I asked my father, your great-grandfather, whom I considered the best, most kindhearted man I knew, to write a letter to me. I told him it didn’t matter what he wrote about. Just write, I said. Write any-thing.

Darling,

You asked me to write a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I am writing this letter, or what this letter is supposed to be about, but I am writing in nonetheless, because I love you very much and trust that you have some good purpose for having me write this letter. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.

Your father.

[…]

Next I went to the penitentiary. My uncle was a guard there. I was able to get the handwriting sample of a murderer. My uncle asked him to write an appeal for early release. It was a terrible trick that we played on this man

To the Prison Board:

My name is Kurt Schluter. I am inmate 24922 I was put here in jail a few years ago. I don’t know how long it’s been. We don’t have calendars. I keep lines on the wall with chalk. But when it rains, the rain comes through my window when I am sleeping. And when I wake up the lines are gone. So I don’t know how long it’s been.

I murdered my brother. I beat his head in with a shovel. Then after I used that shovel to bury him in the yard. The soil was red. Weeds came from the grass where his body was. Sometimes at night I would get on my knees and pull them out, so no one would know.

I did a terrible thing. I believe in the afterlife. I know that you can’t take anything back. I wish that my days would be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

I have tried to become a good person. I help the other inmates with their chores. I am patient now.

It might not matter to you, but my brother was having an affair with my wife. I didn’t kill my wife. I want to go back to her, because I forgive her.

If you release me I will be a good person, quiet, out of the way.

Please consider my appeal.
Kurt Schlater, Inmate 24922

My uncle later told me that the inmate had been in prison for more than forty years. He had gone in as a young man. When he wrote the letter to me he was old and broken. His wife had remarried. She had children and grandchildren. Although he never said it, I could tell that my uncle had befriended the inmate. He had also lost a wife, and was also in a prison. He never said it, but I heard in his voice that he cared for the inmate. The guarded each other. And when I asked my uncle, several years later, what became of the inmate, my uncle told me that he was still there. He continued to write letters to the board. He continued to blame himself and forgive his wife, […]

[…]

[…] I went to my piano teacher. I always wanted to kiss him, but was afraid he would laugh at me. I asked him to write a letter.

And then I asked my mother’s sister. She loved dance but hated dancing.

I asked my schoolmate Mary to write a letter to me. She was funny and full of life. She liked to run around her empty house without any clothes on, even once she was too old for that. Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and hurt me. She loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for some many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?

[…]

Seven years later, a childhood friend reappeared at the moment I most needed him I had only been in America for only two months. An agency was supporting me, but soon I would have to support myself. I did not know how to support myself. I read newspapers and magazines all day long. I wanted to learn idioms. I wanted to become a real American. Chew the fat. Blow off some steam. Close but no cigar. Rings a bell. I must have sounded ridiculous. I only wanted to be natural. I gave up on that.

I had not seen him since I lost everything. I had not thought of him. He and my older sister Anna were friends. I came across them kissing one afternoon in the field behind the shed behind our house. It made me so excited. I felt as if I was kissing someone. I had never kissed anyone. I was more excited than if it had been me. Our house was small. Anna and I shared a bed. That night I told her what I had seen. She made me promise never to speak a word about it. I promised her.

She said, Why should I believe you?

I wanted to tell her, Because what I saw would no longer be mine if I talked about it. I said, Because I am your sister.

[…]

I had gone to him when I was trying to learn more about the forced laborer. I had gone to everyone.

To Anna’s sweet little sister,

Here is the letter you asked for. I am almost two meters in height. My eyes are brown. I have been told that my hands are big. I want to be a sculptor, and I want to marry your sister. Those are my only drams. I could write more, but that is all that matters.

Your friend,
Thomas.

I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up next to him. I went right up next to him.

Are you Thomas? I asked.

He shook his head no.

You are, I said. I know you are.

He shook his head no.

From Dresden.

He opened his right hand, which had NO tattooed on it.

I remember you. I used to watch you kiss my sister.

He took out a little book and write, I don’t speak. I’m sorry.

That made me cry. He wiped away my tears. But he did not admit to being who he was. He never did.

We spent the afternoon together. The whole time I wanted to touch him. I felt so deeply for this person that I had not seen in so long. Seven years before, he had been a giant, and now he seemed small. I wanted to give him the money that the agency had given me. I did not need to tell him my story, but I needed to listen to his. I wanted to protect him, which I was sure I could do, even if I could not protect myself.

I asked, Did you become a sculptor, like you dreamed?

He showed me his right hand and there was silence.

We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.

He wrote, Are you OK?

I told him, My eyes are crummy.

He wrote, But are you OK?

I told him, That’s a very complicated question.

He wrote, That’s a very simple answer.

I asked, Are you OK?

He wrote, Some mornings I wake up feeling grateful.

We talked for hours, but we just kept repeating those same things over and over.

Our cups emptied.

The day emptied.

I was more alone than if I had been alone. We were about to go in different directions. We did not know how to do anything else.

It’s getting late, I said.

He showed me his left hand, which had YES tattooed on it.

I said, I should probably go home.

He flipped back thorough his book and pointed at, Are you OK?

I nodded yes.

I started to walk off. I was going to walk to the Hudson River and keep walking. I would carry the biggest stone I could bear and let my lungs fill with water.

But then I heard him clapping his hands behind me.

I turned around and he motioned for me to come to him.

I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go to him.

I went to him.

He asked if I would pose for him. He wrote his questions in German and it wasn’t until then that I realised he had been writing in English all afternoon, and that I had been speaking English. Yes, I said in German. Yes. We made arrangements for the next day.

His apartment was like a zoo. There were animals everywhere Dogs and cats. A dozen birdcages. Fish tanks. Glass boxes with snakes and lizards and insects Mice in cages, so the cats wouldn’t get them. Like Noah’s ark. But he kept one corner clean and bright. He said he was saving space.

For what?

For sculptures.

I wanted to know from what or for whom, but I did not ask.

He led me by the hand. We talked or half an hour about what he wanted to make. I told him I would do whatever he needed.

We drank coffee

He wrote that he had not made sculpture in America

Why not?

I haven’t been able to

Why not?

We never talked about the past

He opened the flue, although I didn’t know why.

Birds sang in the other rom.

I took off my clothes.

I went to onto the couch.

He stared at me. It was the first time I had ever been naked in front of a man. I wondered if he knew that.

He came and moved my body like I was a doll.

He put my hands behind my head. He bent my right leg a little. I assumed his hands were so rough from all the sculptures he used to make. He lowered my chin. He turned my palms up. His attention filled the hole in the middle of me.

I went back the next day. And the next day. I stopped looking for a job. All that mattered was him looking at me. I was prepared to fall apart if it came to that.

Each time it was the same.

We would talk about what he wanted to make

I would tell him I would do whatever he needed..

We would drink coffee.

We would never talk about the past.

he would open the flue

the birds would sing in the other room

I would undress

He would position me

He would sculpt me

Sometimes I would think about those hundred letters laid across my bedroom floor I f I hadn’t collected them, would our house have burned less brightly?

I looked at the sculptures after every session. He went to feed the animals. He let me be alone with it, although I never asked him for privacy. He understood.

After only a few sessions it became clear he was sculpting Anna. He was trying to remake the girl he knew seven years before. He looked at me as he sculpted, but he saw her.

The positioning took longer and longer. He touched more of me. He moved me around more. He spent ten full minutes bending and unbending my knee. He closed and unclosed my hands.

I hope this doesn’t embarrass you he wrote in German in his little book.

No, I said in German. No.

He folded one of my arms. He straightened one of my arms. The next week he touched my hair for what might have been five or fifty minutes.

He wrote I am looking for an acceptable compromise.

I wanted to know how he lived through that night.

He touched my breasts, easing them apart.

I think this will be good, he wrote.

I want to know what will be good How will it be good?

He touched me all over. I can tell you these things because I am not ashamed of them because I learned from them. And I trust you to understand me. You are the only one I trust, Oskar.

The positioning was the sculpting. He was sculpting me. He was trying to make me so he could fall in love with me.

He spread my legs. His palms pressed gently at the insides of my thighs. My things pressed back. His palms pressed out.

Birds were singing in the other room.

We were looking or an acceptable compromise.

The next week he held the back of my legs, and the next week he was behind me. It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone make love?

I looked at the unfinished sculpture of my sister rand the unfinished girl looked back at me.

Why does anyone ever make love?

[…]

- Chapter 4: ‘My Feelings’,  from “Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer (Penguin Books, 2005)