It all began with the bird.
It all began with the fire.
It all began with the plant.
It all began when they started running away.
Also, this is a love story.
THE BRAIN SCAN: MORNING
No, it isn’t going to hurt, the technician assures me. ‘We’re just going to stress your brain.’
‘Okay.’
How will that be different?
The technician is a lovely woman who introduces herself as Parvati and explains patiently that evidence is being sought for a faulty brain. The word ‘tumour’ is skirted carefully, but the shadow its absence casts into the conversation throws it off kilter, and We Both Know. Temporal lobe seizures …? Epilepsy, perhaps?
(If we break apart the word chains then different thoughtforms become possible—like molecular chains, so our symbols of language)
See Apocalypse:
`//o\o c|o/`\|o () c-
And Madness?
/`_/ o | o_/ `( |`< {{
I feel it prudent not to draw that word into the room either: twin shadows, then.
Parvati will be creating stimuli to provoke my brain into seizing or otherwise behaving abnormally. This will involve noise, flashing lights, and so on. Electrodes will be attached to my skull with globs of sticky wax. This, too, will be painless.
I sit up straight and submit to her touch on my head, a child to her mother’s fingers, braiding her hair. The technician has a calming effect on me. I imagine how good it must feel to be Parvati: to have her supple, slender, purposeful limbs, her dark braid, expertly plaited, her spectacles. I glimpse a perfect little lunch box in her tidy tote, sitting by the door. Parvati is calm and intelligent and helpful, and I am sure she would know exactly, at every point in her day, where her feet should be placed.
She turns off the lights and retreats to an illuminated box on the far wall.
Would this ever end, this testing and compiling and checking and assessing? Before All This (and I include some of the first half of my marriage as Before) I was the sort of person who went to the doctor once a year, and that was usually for a vaccination for travel somewhere remote, or for a sliced finger needing stitches.
Check-ups became regular during and right after my pregnancies, but they were pragmatic, (for me, fortunately) largely untroublesome, and joyful. I went to all my appointments alone, but I didn’t mind that. He was very busy, and these baby appointments were something I could manage by myself. We would discuss the results later at home: I would show ultrasounds or explain cervical strength; He would ring the obstetrician—a friend of His—and confirm what I had told him. I learned to breathe calmly. He breathed with me; that was something we could do together.
I sit up straight and submit to her touch on my head, a child to her mother’s fingers.
Seeing the very first ultrasound of my grain of rice with a heartbeat like a whale hit me with shock and wonder, with a wave of love that has yet to leave me, that never will.
I floated in this state of delicious anticipation—the Italian phrase for it is dolce attesa, the ‘sweet waiting’, which strikes me as a far more romantic and beautiful notion than ‘pregnancy term’—until my contractions started nine weeks too early. Then all was management, and a taut, humming concern sang along undersea cables, twanged, hummed subsonic. I did everything exactly as I was told; I did everything I could to keep my baby inside for as long as I could. I learnt then my first great lesson of surrender: there are so many things you cannot fight against—in fact, many of them grow stronger if you do fight; so many things that you must cede to, gracefully or not: a swelling body, muscles spasming and contracting so hard, so ineluctably, that there is no choice but to cede all will to the giant invisible hand that is crushing your insides. I surrendered to steroid injections into the balloon of my belly, and the idea that I could not hold my baby inside me through sheer will or grit; I surrendered to an eventual birth that took four days and had me vomiting with pain.
I held my baby, born so small he weighed two-and-a-half blocks of butter. I surrendered to the eternal patience of pumping milk every three hours into a feeding tube to his nose and trying to teach him to suck, to get him strong enough to feed on his own. I learnt that hospitals cannot have you stay with your baby more than a few nights, and I surrendered to leaving him in Special Care for four weeks. I drove myself there every day for the 6 am feed and did not leave until after 9pm. Each time I drove away from the hospital, my womb started cramping, my breasts filled, my eyes filled with tears. My baby was still part of my body.
I napped in the feeding room and ate Anzac biscuits with the nurses who taught me how to care for my baby with such kindness; I embroidered muslin cloths—with no skill but all the love in the world—by his crib as he slept, watching the monitor attached to his foot pound its small steady rhythm and picking out ducklings in yellow thread.
I willed my entire being into my tiny son, to make him okay. I surrendered to Him bringing streams of visitors, two by two, into the nursery, bringing men I did not trust or even like to watch me struggle to breastfeed. I spun a protective cocoon around my baby and me, and shut out the world.
I surrendered to a force far greater than Him, or hospitals; I surrendered utterly and completely to Love. Real Love. I surrendered to the utter vulnerability that comes with it. Nothing has been the same since.
My brain kaleidoscopes, and the inner voices slip out between the moving pieces to have their say. I have nicknamed them so it’s easier to keep track of the conversations in my mind, but they are no less insistent for it. Some voices are more helpful than others, but none will be silenced easily.
THE POET: The Queendom of your love has been a provocation to the delusions of wealth, of self, to the violent arrogance of physical power. You have destabilised a pillar of this world and this world is resisting.
(The Poet is a little florid, but her language is tolerable because occasionally her insights get to the heart of the matter; The Nanny is pragmatic to the point of bossy and she almost always has something to say.)
THE NANNY: This world is about to electrocute your head! It’s just to establish—
THE ARCHER: If you could only see yourself. You look freakish. You look absolutely mad.
(And, of course, The Archer—always the snide take, always hitting a bullseye in my psyche, but I can’t ignore them. The Archer keeps me safe.)
In that dark room, on the hard plastic chair, I shake myself and draw down thoughts like kites. It is important to retain some cohesion when dealing with these matters.
I learnt then my first great lesson of surrender: there are so many things you cannot fight against.
‘Shall we begin?’ Parvati speaks through a microphone. I see her reassuring smile from the lit box, Mission Control to my Laika.
I nod and return her smile, picturing every horrific asylum electroshock-therapy scene from every film I have ever watched. Strobe lights, noises like machine guns, bursts, flashes, booming—all designed to see how your brain responds to distressing elements. I allow the sensorial provocation to break over my head like so many eggs; I keep my mind blank and still.
Parvati’s experiments do not upset my equilibrium. My physical brain is as steady as a rock.
At the end, Parvati explains that she cannot tell me the results, as she is not a doctor. But we have enjoyed each other’s company, been equal participants in this strange experiment—I have been respectful of her skill, and she has been careful to explain the process to me (this is not always the case)—and she seems to relent as she begins tugging the electrodes out of my hair:
‘You don’t have epilepsy.’
I nod. Remind myself that this is a Good Thing. A Good Thing that, however, leaves a chasm of the Unknown still yawning.
‘And there is no sinister mass.’
She pauses, so I can understand what she is referring to. Ah.
‘That’s a … relief.’ But the other question remains. ‘So, why?’ ‘Anybody can be induced to have seizures if the conditions are right.’
The wax is sticky and all through my hair now. I’m glad I brought a brush and an elastic to tie my hair up when I leave the hospital.
‘Dehydration, altitude, extreme emotional distress … these can all trigger seizures in a healthy brain.’
Parvati stops what she is doing, and we pause again to absorb this. My eyes feel huge in the dark room.
This is an extract from Fireweather by Miranda Darling (Scribe), available now at your local independent bookseller.
