What Others Say about Seeing in the Dark
“Kim Gledhill has a story that you’d have to call insane. Until you find out how sane it, and she, are. Smart, funny, lyrical, this is a book that keeps calling your name long after you’re done reading it.”
—David Henry Sterry, best-selling author of Chicken
“Seeing in the Dark is a vivid account of what the human mind is capable of, and how we can acquire information beyond the reach of the physical senses. Kim Gledhill’s amazing personal story will inspire others to go public with their own similar experiences. The eventual result will be a picture of consciousness that is more majestic and wondrous than we have recently taken ourselves to be. What greater contribution can an author possibly make?”
—Larry Dossey, MD, best-selling author of The Power of Premonitions
Seeing in the Dark
Kim Sillen Gledhill
Smashwords edition
Copyright 2011 Kim Sillen Gledhill
All art in this book is by Kim Sillen Gledhill,
Copyright Kim Sillen Gledhill
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
*****
Seeing in the Dark
*****
Introduction
Joan of Arc should not look so beautiful, I thought as a seven-year-old, while looking at a painting of her at the Met. People who heard voices in the woods would look more like crazy misfits with frazzled hair and rumpled clothes, wouldn’t they? I was drawn to Joan because I’d been having my own premonitions since the age of three, but those experiences never fit in with my everyday world as the owner of a Snoopy with a sparkly orange Elton John costume or as the diligent student who never forgot to do her homework.
There was a disconnect for me between taking part in the material world as a reliable, over-achieving child and having a spiritual life that might have been seen as...well, nuts. I was an obedient kid and it felt like the most immense act of bucking the system to embrace the idea of saying, Hey, World! Everything you’re trying to teach me about reality is wrong! It was more comfortable to doubt myself, to be the first one to call out the craziness of my dream-world before anyone else could do it.
I didn’t know how to make the two worlds of my dreams and my daily life coexist, and I had no role model. Except for Joan. Maybe. She didn’t fit into the tidy realm of fractions and photosynthesis and Brownie troops, either, but she looked well equipped to bridge the gap.
I paid her visits at the Met on occasion throughout my childhood. In the painting, she was earthy and warm and seemed completely trustworthy to me, not like some flighty, religious zealot who believed she was a messenger of God. As I reached my teens, having had my own inexplicable visions of needles, cantors and houses I’d never seen, she struck me as looking like the kind of modern college girl I had admired from afar. I could picture her nonchalantly throwing on a pair of beat-up Levi’s and a worn T-shirt and unknowingly being the coolest girl in town. Somehow she looked able to manage the regular existence I was after, even with all her angel-baggage.
I realized that Bastien-Lepage, the painter whose name I could never remember, knew nothing of all this when he painted Joan. But he had to know how magically he had crafted her, how she looked humble and gorgeous and strong all at once. He had breathed life into her and created an athletic girl who could paddle her own canoe with those thick, sturdy wrists; a girl whose merit you couldn’t question. I wanted to be someone beyond question, too—even though I already was viewed that way. But I always had the mild fear that if I spoke a wrong word, if I talked too much about my dreams, I’d somehow send my credibility crashing to bits on the National Honor Society’s meeting room floor.
Compared to Joan’s, my premonitions were often completely inconsequential, or at least I thought they were. Most of them came to me through dreams, and the ones that stuck out were oddly mundane, like the dream about an old-fashioned eggbeater with a robin’s-egg blue wooden handle. I woke up thinking, Why?
The next day, my parents spontaneously decided to drive to Bucks County, Pennsylvania to go antiquing with me in tow. (I hadn’t told them about my dream.) Later that afternoon, I found myself in a dusty flea market lot, in front of a long table piled with antique home goods. Amidst the andirons, stray chandelier crystals and marble rolling pins was the robin’s-egg blue eggbeater. I picked it up and cranked the handle, watching its rusty gears and whisks spin around.
When I looked up, there was a boy my age—about fourteen—on the opposite side of the table, staring at the eggbeater as I held it. We were dressed in exactly the same thing: a plain black t-shirt, khaki cut-off shorts, and black Jack Purcell sneakers. His image is engraved in my memory like a human exclamation point marking the experience.
Other times I would dream of running into people in places far from the context in which I knew them, and the meetings would invariably happen. There was the dream about seeing a guy from school at a Maryland rest stop on I-95, and he was actually there the next day as I walked in. There was another dream about my friends in a distant state making lemon tarts. They were shocked when I mentioned it in a postcard addressed to all six of them; they had just baked lemon tarts together. I was puzzled by the triviality of many of my dreams, and conversely amazed by the heavy significance of others, like the ones where deceased friends of my parents gave me information that turned out to be spot-on. (For instance, “Your car is about to be broken into right now! WAKE UP!”) I could not explain how it happened, but the mode of receiving knowledge through dreams was nevertheless very real to me.
I felt somehow protective of Joan of Arc while viewing the painted image of her standing in the wooded yard of a cottage with angels hovering behind her. “Look how spaced-out she is!” viewers around me would comment. Don’t judge her for this, I wanted to say to anyone who was looking.
In the painting, Joan’s left arm is stretched outward, fingers interlaced with the leaves of a nearby tree, and her gaze is fixed upwards in an otherworldly stare. What always affected me the most about this painting was the empathy and love that the painter embedded into Joan’s image. I remember feeling struck by the kindness that came right through the paint as a child. Even then, it was specifically this lack of mockery—the absence of any nudge and wink—that also unsettled me. There were no metaphorical quotation marks around her image; Bastien-Lepage painted her vision as though it actually happened.
I had learned about Joan of Arc in one of the young-reader biographies about women that my mother had lined up for me when I was in the second grade, so she occupied an adjacent spot in my mind next to Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Helen Keller, and Harriet Tubman. But I could never tell if she really belonged there. All of their facts were verified, but I had my doubts about whether her backstory could be proven, too. As I grew older, the questioning feeling I had while looking at the painting started to trouble me, and it stayed with me even during the long gaps between visits to the Met.
In my quest to live by the completely rational rules I believed highly-functioning adults had to embrace, I had even dismissed the possibility of ghosts, despite the fact that I had seen two of them with my own eyes at age twelve. If science couldn’t explain it, I sublimated it. Disavowed it. There was no Tooth Fairy or Easter Bunny, and I wasn’t about to put my money on a God who told a teenage French girl to free Orléans from the British.
So why was there no trace of patronizing this girl for her kooky hallucinations in the painting? How could the painter so convincingly portray her as sturdy and reliable if he didn’t actually believe in her mythology? He couldn’t seriously believe all that religious stuff, I figured. Adults just didn’t do that, did they? But the paint seemed to say otherwise.
Without consciously analyzing it, I interpreted the painting as heartfelt sincerity despite a foundation of disbelief. As years went by I began to feel embarrassed by this elaborate lie of compassion, and by the time I was college-age, I suspected that maybe this contradiction was a part of being human. Maybe it was a clue to finding the key to the universe that adults never told you about, that you’d spend your life being adoringly humored by others who actually doubt you but never want you to know it because they love you. Despite my own premonitions, even I found it impossible to consider any longer that maybe Joan’s story was true. Yet the painting made me desperately want to believe it.
I don’t remember having any knowledge as a child of Joan being burned at the stake; I just recall a vague sense that things ended badly. Maybe I conveniently forgot the death-by-fire part.
Up until my
early twenties, the uncomfortable distance between wanting to believe
someone out of kindness and actually knowing something else to be
true stayed with me. I guess I always realized subconsciously that
this might apply to how people related to me. And in a convoluted
way, I suspected that it might approximate the way I questioned
myself.
Chapter 1
Two Labrador mutts, Scooter and Maisy, were panting behind me. We were on the trail in the woods at the Botanical Gardens before we made it to a clearing on a scorching Georgia June day in 1995. I was twenty-four years old, and I was house-sitting in an antebellum mansion belonging to Bill Berry, R.E.M.’s drummer, while the band was on tour. The dogs belonged to the band’s manager, and part of my job was to take care of Scooter and Maisy. I loved them as if they were my own.
Everybody who saw them commented on how they loved each other, how they had a distinctive theatrical flair. If someone said that Maisy was doing something funny, like dragging her butt across the lawn by pulling herself with her front two paws, Scooter would put on a performance to outdo her—say, kicking up his hind legs like a mule. And he’d check periodically out of the corner of his eye to make sure everybody was watching.
I knew it was crazy for me to take them to the woods that day at noon. My running had turned into a compulsion. I was having a conversation with myself in my head about whether pushing myself like this would ultimately keep me healthy when my thoughts were cut off completely. My inner dialogue was boldly interrupted in a moment that changed my life forever. This was the Joan of Arc experience for which I had unwittingly been preparing myself throughout my entire childhood. I heard a clear, booming voice in the woods. I had never heard a voice like this before. It shook me in the fact that it was entirely sexless, without a trace of being either male or female.
“No, you’re wrong,” the voice said in response to my earlier thoughts. “You will either become paralyzed or you will develop multiple sclerosis.”
The voice was not scolding or reprimanding, simply informing me in a straightforward way. It was like there was a tacit clause—Excuse me, I hate to interrupt, but I just need to tell you—silently attached to the voice’s words. Before I tried to process any of it more deeply, I felt the need to give the owner of the voice my input: “Can I choose the multiple sclerosis?” I asked anxiously in my head. I’ll take the case behind curtain number two, Bob.
The answer was an implicit Yes. With words unspoken, I was made to understand that multiple sclerosis was what I was going home with. I didn’t believe in God or angels exactly, but when trying to figure out who was addressing me while running through the woods, either choice seemed like a pretty good guess. My rejection of the idea of a personified God—especially a white guy with a long white beard—had gotten me into plenty of heated debates over the years. In the past I had only believed in spirit guides theoretically, not as potential conversation partners to chat with while running alone in the woods. But the voice I heard was singular.
I didn’t really know anything about MS. As I kept running beneath the leafy green branches, I confused MS with muscular dystrophy and was puzzled by thinking that it was a condition people had at birth. The cicadas buzzed by the riverbank, punctuating the dense humidity with their drawn-out Morse code as I tried to process this unfathomable choice I had been given. In my mind anything was more bearable than being paralyzed and being unable to walk or run at all. Did the person doing the asking really think I might say, “Yes! Sign me up for the spinal injury”? I had seen that story played out before and there could be no happy ending for me. I didn’t need any time to opt for a mysterious diagnosis over a known fate I found intolerable. But why did I have a choice to begin with?
Oddly, it was the voice and not the message that unsettled me most. When I say that the voice was sexless, I don’t mean that it was vague and that I couldn’t figure out its gender. It was absolutely neither one. The dogs didn’t seem to hear anything; they kept on running along the red clay earth, tongues hanging out, tails wagging. I didn’t know what this could mean; I had no frame of reference for it, and it frightened me as though I had looked in a mirror and seen no reflection. If you asked me to recreate that voice, I couldn’t do it. Hearing it was like walking out of the house on a normal day and looking up to see two suns in a clear blue sky when everything else looks completely normal. My brain felt like it was short-circuiting. I wiped my forehead with the sleeve of my t-shirt. My clothes were saturated with sweat and my sneakers were caked with red Georgia clay.
I had no yardstick with which to measure this experience, no compass to comprehend where the voice could be coming from. I was dumbfounded and terrified, my head spinning, my heart pounding.
Had my entire life been a sham? My dreams aside, voices from above did not speak to people out loud where I came from. It took only seconds to make me wonder if I had been like an animal in a well-designed zoo, a captive in a microcosm who believes she is free in the wild. For the first time in my life, I was shaken to my core.
The words I heard were haunting and unequivocal. They seemed to reverberate from another dimension, yet they felt like they hit my eardrums tangibly in the physical plane of the here and now, right on the White Trail with the painted wooden trail markers. My feet pounded Nike tread imprints into the earth in rhythm with my heavy breathing.
I had to stop running. Maybe this was a set-up from something like Candid Camera and a film crew would pop out from behind the trees at any moment, laughing at my bewilderment. Or maybe someone was doing a wacky sound art installation and I’d uncover a speaker camouflaged by branches. I looked around nervously, gazing up into the leafy canopy of treetops above me. There was nothing unusual anywhere. I called out,
“Helloooo! Is anyone here?” I knew there would be no response. This was a voice from somewhere else in the universe. The dogs kept running, elated as they dashed through the clearing in the sun. All I could do was follow them.
In the next few weeks I considered seeing a therapist. What had happened to me was simply crazy and perhaps someone’s credentials could push it deeply enough to the back of my mind so that I could forget about it for a while and convince myself in a couple of years that it had been some kind of quirky hallucination. Within a month, however, I received the first sign that the voice was right. It was sweltering July, but my body seemed to be confusing hot and cold sensations in my legs.
Suddenly, when the fluffy grey cat I was taking care of as part of my house-sitting job rubbed against my bare leg, I felt as though ice cubes were touching my raw nerves. The scalding leather of a car seat made my skin feel as though Freon were running through my body. I did realize that this was a fortunate symptom to have during July in Georgia, and the universe seemed to have a good sense of humor about it. Yes, you’re going to be diagnosed with an incurable illness, but on the bright side, you’re not going to have to pay a fortune to get the air conditioning fixed. When I finally worked up the gumption to open a medical encyclopedia in the oak library where I was staying, I flipped the pages nervously to multiple sclerosis. There it was in black and white—a potentially debilitating neurological disease in which the body’s immune system eats away at the myelin, the protective sheath that covers the nerves.
I read on, shaking, as I diagnosed and undiagnosed myself with each symptom:
Numbness or weakness in one or more limbs, tremor, lack of coordination or unsteady gait: No, I can run five miles like a steam engine without breaking a sweat…definitely not me. Double vision, blurring of vision, partial or complete loss of vision, usually in one eye at a time, often with pain during eye movement: Nuh-uh, I have perfect sight. Electric-shock sensations: Oh crap! Tingling or pain in parts of your body: Okay, maybe not…Fatigue, dizziness: No, no. Cognitive impairment: WHAT the…?! Somatosenory disorder, where neurological receptors that produce sensory modalities such as touch and temperature are impaired and in some cases reversed, causing warmth to be perceived as cold and vice versa: (Loud primal sobbing.)
The phone rang and I don’t know why I answered it, but I did, and it was my mother. I continued bawling. Through my tears I explained to her what had happened in the woods. I could tell she was starting to cry, too, but was trying to keep me from hearing her muffled sobs.
“No, Kim, you’re wrong—you just had a false premonition this time and this isn’t going to happen,” my mother stated in a steadier-than-usual cadence, wanting to convince us both. “Sometimes you ARE wrong and you’ve just let your imagination run away with you. You can’t make a diagnosis by looking at a book.” It didn’t sound like my mom talking; she had never told me she doubted me before. I had told my mom about all my dreams and premonitions since I was a little kid, and she had faith in my sixth sense.
In fact, no one had ever told me that they doubted me before. By this point in my life, I was generally open about my dreams, and people regularly asked if I could dream about them.
“But Mom,” I cried on the phone, the tears still streaming down my cheeks, “this was the clearest voice ever!”
“You’ll see,” she said softly. “I just know it won’t happen like you think. It’s been very hot and you’ve been running too much, but there’s nothing wrong with you.”
My symptoms weren’t really terrible, but I knew I had to see a doctor. I wondered how I should phrase the problem, and I was terrified that I would sound like an insane hypochondriac. My complaints included feeling like Freon was coursing through my veins in one-hundred-degree heat; nerves that delivered electric shocks; and the feeling that it was all due to MS because of a voice in the woods. I could imagine answering the first question I would be asked: No, absolutely NO family history of mental illness. Ever.
I wound up in the office of a compassionate internist at the University of Georgia health care center. The tension in my shoulders softened a little as I walked into his office. Dr. Peteet was affable and seemed like the kind of guy who had young children. He had a lot of bushy, straight hair that poofed up around a side part, the way I would draw a cartoon character with an exaggerated stereotypical male cut. His eyes had a sympathetic droopiness at the outer corners. As I told him my symptoms, I prayed he wouldn’t book me the first open appointment with the school psychiatrist. But he seemed to take me very seriously and I finally worked up the nerve to ask him what was really on my mind.
“Is there any chance that this could be multiple sclerosis?” I asked tentatively.
His answer was thoughtful and deliberate. “Yes, there is a remote possibility…but that’s probably the very last diagnosis we’d need to consider at this point. There are many other factors that could be causing this, and MS generally first appears through other symptoms than what you’ve described. This could very well be an isolated incidence—we’ll just have to keep an eye on you.”
My gratitude
for his response swelled in me like a pink balloon as he went on to
ask me general questions about my past health history, caffeine
intake and stress levels. I was comforted by his manner, even though
I was still convinced that I was experiencing my first MS episode.
I’d rather have had MS and be sane than have nothing wrong with me
and be stark-raving mad. As the summer went on, I kept on running in
the woods with the dogs as usual. In a couple of weeks, the symptoms
completely disappeared. Maybe it wasn’t MS after all, or maybe the
disease would just never hit me too hard. Maybe it would.
Chapter 2
November 1st rolled around, and I woke up the morning after a string of Halloween parties to experience the worst hangover of my life. There had been blue punch involved, served out of a plastic Rubbermaid garbage can in the little independent bookstore where I had shown some artwork. Also involved in the evening was a boy I had been seeing, who went home that night with someone else. In my silver lamé go-go boots, I had let the blue punch work its temporary magic of numbing my emotions.
I was paying penitence with my hangover, or so I thought, but things still weren’t coming into focus three days after Halloween. Everything was moving and I felt unbearably nauseous. As my eyes darted around, it looked like objects were magnetized to them and jumped through space, too. The TV remote made a trail across the room as I turned my head. A tube of toothpaste broke free from the laws of gravity.
That’s how the worst of it began. Deep down, I must have known what it really was, despite the results of a three-hundred-dollar visit to a walk-in doctor’s office. I was still house-sitting at Bill’s, on sixty acres in the middle of a farming community, and I had chosen this unknown doctor there instead of going back to Dr. Peteet. After a blood test, the young rural physician told me that I must have had a really bad inner ear infection. I was willing to suspend my disbelief for a little while.
For an entire month, it felt like I was on one of those rotary amusement park rides where you’re held to the inside wall of a huge cylinder by centripetal force, while it pivots off the ground. I didn’t know which way was up, and all I did know was that there was something very wrong with me. The scariest part was that I had this insane double-vision that made it look like there were several images of an object in completely random locations.
Everything was moving around in a dizzying 180-degree arc—things appeared as asteroids floating through whatever I was looking at. My body had become a nightmarish fun house and I had no idea where things actually were, no sense of depth perception. Riding in a car became torture; the landscape would hurl itself at me unmercifully, a tumultuous angry blur. I wanted to crawl into a darkened box and be removed from all sensory input altogether. Simply existing had turned into an inexplicable burden.
At the time, I was staying in an upstairs guest room in the country mansion, with French doors that led out to a balcony over the front porch. Giant, white columns supported the structure, and looking out from my room, you saw acres of sprawling land—a rolling green vista into the countryside. In the evening the cows would gently low from down the dirt road, and the tree frogs and cicadas would chirp rhythmically. The room was dark red and furnished with enormous Biedermeier antiques and heavy silk drapes over the French doors. The imposing crown moldings were painted a crisp, white enamel and my dark, wooden bed was huge and stately. The room was so rich and lush, showing absolutely no reflection of my taste, but I loved it.
As I surrendered quietly to my alleged ear infection, I’d lay on the high bed and watch the room spin around—the drapes, the dresser, the huge round bales of hay outside blurring rapidly into an unbearable whirl of color, oscillating back and forth like a tornado in my eyes. I had grown weak, and for the first time in my life, I was emaciated. Holed-up in this bedroom, I decided I was going to get better before the end of the month, when I was supposed to leave on a trip to Munich with my brother. You’ve already bought the ticket and you’re going, I told myself. And you’re going to have fun. I convinced myself that it was a case of mind over matter, and that I would heal myself before I was due to leave.
Somehow, two days before my flight, I woke up in my glorious red room and I felt fine. Everything was still. I got on a plane and left my misery far behind. The young doctor had nailed it. It had been one nasty ear infection, after all.
* * *
In January, at the start of a new academic quarter at the University of Georgia, the twelve graduate painting students in my MFA program were beginning a critique class with an instructor named John. He was one of the bigger fishes in the small pond of Athens. Though he started out as a painter, his claim to fame was as a filmmaker, having directed several acclaimed music videos. One of my friends who knew John well had told me that he’d love my work. I was hopeful about beginning the term with him.
I should have realized when I had met John for the first time two years before at his big Victorian house that the negative vibe I sensed was real. He regularly took in students as boarders, and I had become friendly with Philip, a guy in my department who lived with him. I was twenty-two and just beginning the program when I met Philip, who was five years older than me and in his last year. At the beginning of our friendship, he introduced me to everyone as, “his new best friend.”
I should have also known something was off when a straight guy referred to me as his new best friend. He was intent on bringing me over to the house to meet John, and I was flattered and glad to go. But when I walked through the front door, a tall, thin man in his fifties with a grey ponytail held up a Hasselblad camera and addressed me without saying hello. I felt like I was meeting an aloof father figure.
“I bet you’ve never seen one of these things before,” he asserted boastfully, challenging me. They were really expensive cameras, I knew. This not the Southern hospitality I was growing used to. “Actually, my dad has one,” I tried to answer in a friendly way, unsure of what I was supposed to say in response.
He was vaguely annoyed but curious; I wasn’t the hick he had taken me for. “What is he, a fashion photographer?” he asked peevishly about my father, like I was a purple fly that landed on his butter.
“Uh, no,” I said, uneasily, at that point wishing that he was. I considered telling him that the camera had been a gift. “He’s in advertising but he loves photography,” I said, keeping it simple. That sounded wrong, too. I had foiled John’s bragging rights.
It didn’t help my case with him that I started to really like Philip and was hanging out so much with him. I was always pretty cautious in the boy department and usually needed the equivalent of a written announcement before thinking someone might be interested in me, but this one seemed to be a no-brainer. Philip fit vaguely into the mold of the languid Southern poet I always fell for. His wide-set, almond-shaped brown eyes peered out of their shallow sockets, falsely giving him an almost Asian-looking bone structure despite his good ‘ole boy Anglo background. Straight sandy hair fell randomly across his forehead. Obtuse angles defined the shallow planes of his face—nothing aggressive, all features softly boyish, with lips stretched wide across his jaw. He was of average build with no remarkable physical traits, just all-around nice-looking-guyness.
There was a first chill in the air on the last autumn night we made plans together. The onset of sweater-weather made me giddy after a sweltering, humid summer. I drove down Prince Street to pick Philip up, smiling in a subdued state of bliss as I took in the hot pink and lavender sunset in front of me. It was cool and crisp and I was headed out to the Globe for drinks with him, and there was nothing more I wanted in the world right then.
Why he cast himself as my close companion I’ll never know for sure, but that night I figured out the way things weren’t, which would become sort of a theme for me in Athens. Philip left me in the bar while he ran out, literally chasing an old girlfriend from out-of-town down the sidewalk while calling out her Southern two-part name.
“Mary-Connor, Mary-Connor!” he shouted desperately as I watched him run out the door, peel off down Clayton Street, and throw his arms around this Bohemian version of a debutante. Her hand slid around to the back of his neck. It was that simple gesture that jabbed me in the heart and would replay itself in my mind many times later. Their lips locked. I crumbled. And in the cartoon version of my memory, they strolled away into the sunset, flanked by shimmering unicorns, never to return that evening to the Globe.
A couple of weeks later, Philip and I were invited individually to a small dinner party thrown by a woman we both knew. Having to deal with his presence as he flirted charmingly with the art-appreciating young socialites, I consoled myself with a few more bourbons than I’d usually have. By the time Philip and I found ourselves out in the backyard with the intent of talking things over, I was tanked. And for the first time in my life, I let loose with my hurt and anger like an unhinged, crazy person.
I didn’t scream obscenities at him or lay on a guilt trip. Instead I ripped him apart with the self-righteous truth of what I thought of him, an opinion that even I hadn’t been aware of before.
“How can you even stand yourself, being twenty-seven years old and sponging off your parents to pay for everything? You don’t even have a job! And you let them pay for school and you never even paint! And you haven’t even been in the studio for the last two weeks! And when you do come, you only stay for twenty minutes and leave! That’s bullshit! You’re just posing as an artist! What do you even do with yourself everyday?”
Somehow, the women inside didn’t seem to hear anything at all. They were discussing antique auctions in Atlanta and the great prices they paid for armoires when I went into the house and said goodnight.
When I got home, I was already horrified by what I had done. I had never attacked anyone in any way before, and I hated myself for letting my wounded pride and drunkenness justify the viciousness of my words. The next morning I woke up feeling miserable. As soon as it was a decent hour, I sheepishly called Philip and apologized as sincerely as I could. I had never been so truly sorry for anything.
“It’s alright, don’t worry about it,” he said without a trace of anger but a hint of sadness. “You were drunk and I know you had your reasons.” He was generous and polite, but I still thought maybe I should apologize in person. Perhaps humbling myself in the flesh could somehow negate my words. I drove over to John’s Victorian house, and offered up my apologies again on the front porch. Again, Philip accepted my words without protest. “No worries,” he said.
My sins were not forgiven by all parties, though. I didn’t think guys really talked that much about personal stuff, and it had happened two years beforehand, but from Day 1 of my new class with John, he set out to cut me to pieces like bolts of gingham at a quilting bee.
The graduate painting studios were in an old physical plant building half a mile down from the rest of the art department. We were just around the corner from Sandford Stadium, home of the Georgia Bulldogs, but we may as well have been half a world away. We were in our own private galaxy, across the street from the quaintly-named abattoir and away from the glare of the university. There was an active smokestack adjacent to us and train tracks led right up to the loading dock alongside the building. I was stunned but amused to learn that a slow-moving engine with a single freight bin of coal would actually chug down to our studios periodically and drop off a load.
The squat white concrete building was in disrepair but we flew under the radar on every account: some of the painters seemed to have taken up residence in their studios, bathing in the bathroom sinks and drinking and smoking freely at night. It wasn’t exactly an environmentally-friendly place, but everyone loved it there.
This was the setting for John’s vendetta. It came in the form of the personal and the artistic, the somewhat-plausible and the utterly absurd. In my stubbornness, I refused to acknowledge injury as John would state repeatedly in group critiques that my work had no merit. The other painters seemed shocked and when one of them would praise or defend my work, John would tactfully sidestep the speaker and continue to trash my piece.
He once came into my studio while I was painting and announced that I obviously had some kind of juvenile, undeveloped sexuality, which anyone could see by the way I painted oversized hands. (I had missed Freud’s essay on that one.) He continued that if he owned a museum, he would never let my work be shown there. I simply rolled my eyes. When he saw me in running clothes one day, he took a shot at me in front of the other painters: “That figures, you’re the kind of person who has to go running every day just to prove to everyone you’re a runner. It’s people who can just go running whenever they feel like it once in a while who are the true athletes.”
One day, I was painting a portrait of a beautiful, wacky sixty-year-old who said literally anything that came to her mind. She was a yoga enthusiast and had flaming red hair and an amazing figure that she was rightly proud of.
As she sat on a green upholstered chair in my studio, she broke the hour-long silence and asked me earnestly in her Southern drawl, “Keeyim, do you only screw aaart-ists?” I giggled, completely off-guard. I had been lost in my painting world, and I was thrown by this sudden question.
“Oh, come on, Charlotte! You’re silly,” I said lightly, trying to dismiss her question.
“No—really,” she said, as if she were doing research on the subject. “Ah need to know.”
I sighed. “Um...well...I wouldn’t necessarily...choose...for it to be that way,” I stammered noncommittally, blushing and still laughing. As luck would have it, John chose that moment to walk by my doorway.
A few moments later, I heard him on the other side of the building, mimicking my voice loudly in a high-pitched voice and calling out for everyone to hear, “I’m Kim Sillen and I only screw artists!”
I should’ve done something proactive about the situation, but I still thought the right thing to do was to stay cool and collected and prevent John from getting the best of me. I thought maturity required having no negative emotions, and by the ripe old age of twenty-four, I wanted to have enough control over my feelings to prevent someone like him from having any sway over me.
Ironically, the harder he tried to shake me, the stronger my quiet conviction grew that I must have some talent. I believed he wouldn’t put that much effort into ripping apart a complete hack. I had the artistic support of most of the other faculty members, which I could tell drove him crazy. I got along with almost everybody—I had bonded with the women professors and I had broken through the barriers with the boys’-club-type men who usually mentored only male students. John’s close friend was my major advisor and we had a nice, friendly relationship. I was the youngest in the program and I seemed to have everyone else’s blessing. This apparently drove John nuts.
Despite my confidence in my art, John was definitely destroying my inner balance. When he came into my studio for what was supposed to be a private critique, I’d finally had enough. On that day, his theme was how my inclination to use cadmium red paint proved what a crappy painter I was. (Cadmium paint—rather than the cheaper, fake cadmium hues—had been one of my only splurges in graduate school.) I tried to be detached but polite. He went on to chastise me for an assortment of other reasons, and upon leaving my studio, he snarled at me, “I bet you won’t be able to paint for a month now!”
“Don’t flatter yourself!” I shot back, shocked at being able to even answer him at all in that moment. “I’ll be painting in the next five minutes!”
Ding! I finally got it. You never even paint. He was avenging his friend. I despised him, I hated him, I loathed him. But he had one of the qualities I valued the most: loyalty.
A few moments later, one of the other professors came by to tell me he had overheard the entire conversation. This instructor was known for his enigmatic, genteel Southern manners, juxtaposed with a curtness and a coarse sense of humor. But mostly, he was known for his homoerotic, S&M-oriented artwork. We got along well somehow.
He addressed the conversation that he had just overheard: “I think the only reason John came into your studio was to try to break you down and make you cry. And I can’t believe you didn’t cry. If anyone said those things to me, I would cry.”
I felt vindicated. A guy whose work was defined by leather, whips and pain said he would cry in my shoes. No one else had addressed the situation so bluntly with me, and it suddenly hurt that my friends in the department weren’t really speaking up on my behalf. I had heard curious whispers questioning John’s motives in acting like such a jackass to me, but no one publicly called him on it. It upset me that his status weighed more than anybody’s friendship with me, but somehow I was not surprised and understood his clout. Privately, a few people told me of their disapproval of his behavior, but I knew I couldn’t count on anyone to throw any punches or put up a block on my behalf.
On that early March day of the private critique in my studio, I went running later in the woods with my friend Bernie, a fellow painter in the program. My way of dealing with the insults had previously been pretending to let them roll off me, fooling myself that they would leave me unscathed. I had a visual metaphor of wearing a shiny, red raincoat that made me impervious to John’s attacks, like some kind of unwavering little Red Riding Hood who could foil the wolf in the end. On that day in the woods, though, I realized my approach wasn’t working.
“I’m going to get sick from this,” I told Bernie while running elbow-to-elbow, the red Georgia earth under our feet.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“This situation with John,” I said. “I just don’t think my body is going to be able to take it anymore. I mean, I’ve been trying to tune it out of my mind, but it’s been going on every day like this for months now, and I don’t think I can keep it up. I think my body’s just going to take the hit. It’s going to have to come out somewhere.”
“Maybe you should try talking to him,” Bernie suggested, without much conviction as we ran over a wooden foot bridge.
“How could I approach him?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, as we continued through the trees in a world of impatient browns, waiting for spring to come.
When my mother’s birthday rolled around in the third week of March, I surprised her by flying up to New York. It was then that my foundation started crumbling around me. As I sat in my parents’ dining room at the long antique library table, I suddenly panicked while trying to write out a birthday card. I was shocked to realize I had absolutely no motor skills in my right hand. None.
I’ve lost my handwriting! I thought frantically, crumbling in utter despair and disbelief. I couldn’t even sign my name legibly—it was incomprehensible chicken scratch. I remember thinking it was as if I had given a newborn baby a pen and expected her to sign. I had devotedly filled sketchbooks with hundreds of intricate pen drawings, and now I was incapable of writing the three letters of my name.
As I sat there with a wrapped gift and the butchered card in front of me, hot tears silently streamed from my eyes. I knew what was happening for sure this time. My parents walked into the room and saw my wet cheeks and somehow they also knew. I saw the panic transfer over to their eyes. They had been praying that this day would never come.
When I returned to Georgia, my health quickly deteriorated. My balance was so off that when I tried to go for a run down Bill’s country road, I accidentally veered off into a drainage ditch. Hours later, I couldn’t move my right leg without jerky motions. Luck being as it was, I had jury duty two days after I returned, and to be excused from it, I had to appear in court with a doctor’s note. I imagined the good citizen’s brigade coming to find me if I failed to show up, so I went to the Athens courthouse as required, after finally cramming in a very necessary visit with the neurologist Dr. Peteet had suggested. He gave me a note attesting to my “worsening neurological condition.” When the judge addressed the courtroom in the morning, he asked if anyone needed to be excused. I raised my hand.
“And wah can’t you be in-kuhn-veen-yunced this week?” he asked skeptically in his slow Georgia drawl.
“I’m not well,” I answered meekly.
“What—do yuh have the sniffles?” he suggested in faux sympathy.
I couldn’t keep a poker face for a minute longer. My eyes filled with tears and the bridge of my nose tingled. I knew I only had a few moments before I would lose it.
“I have a note,” I offered, sounding like the woman I actually was, who was in the midst of an emotional and neurological breakdown.
“Come up he-yuh,” he sighed, pronouncing the word here in two syllables and softening his voice ever so slightly. By this time I had really lost control of my right leg, and I dragged it behind me through the courtroom like a child’s pull-toy. All eyes were on me. Quivering, I handed the judge the letter from my doctor. He read it as I stood there. Then looking me in the eye above the bifocals perched on his long nose, he whispered sympathetically, “I’m ev-ah so sorry. Now you go get yuh-self well.”
The judgment scene I always imagined was over.
In the last days of March, after I was slid lying down and backwards into an MRI machine, I couldn’t help but laugh. The nurse had instructed me in her warm, kind way to look into the mirror at the end of the MRI tube, which would be reflecting a television screen. I wanted to tell her I didn’t like to watch TV and it was okay to turn it off, but I didn’t want to seem rude, so I thanked her and dutifully looked toward the mirror. Before they started the magnetic vibrations, a public service announcement came on, informing viewers of the horribly unpredictable and debilitating symptoms of MS. I had never before seen a commercial for MS, but there I was, watching one while tucked inside a machine that I knew would lead to my official diagnosis.
Around that time I read a poem by Jane Kenyon in The New Yorker called “The Sick Wife,” which had imagery that branded itself into my consciousness. A simple verse, it was from a woman’s perspective, waiting in the car on a rainy day while her husband runs into the grocery store to pick up a few things. She drums up sad visions of dry cleaning hanging from the ceiling hooks of the other cars in the parking lot. Because of her unnamed illness, she is unable to button her own clothes and dress herself properly. Even the old people she sees seem to get around so freely compared to her. I was not yet twenty-five, and I could hardly imagine being a wife at all, let alone a sick wife, but the poem pulled me into the passenger seat of the poet’s car, looking at the dry cleaning through the grayness, the rain.
A close family friend who was a physician was the one who officially broke the news to me over the phone. He had been in touch with my local neurologist, and I listened calmly to his words, hung up the phone and headed out to the acres of woods behind Bill’s house, where I was still staying. There had been some mention that with the worst-case scenario, life in a wheelchair could still be fulfilling.
My mother was staying with me, having flown down to Georgia to be with me during my week of diagnostic testing. She followed me out to the woods, despite my asking for the first time in my life to be alone. Amidst the thick foliage and the endless trees, I remember her hugging me and breaking down, saying that she knew that I had known my fate when I heard the voice in the woods. I finally broke down beside her. It was April 4, 1996, about nine and a half months after hearing those foreboding words.
After I composed myself that evening I decided—diagnosis or no diagnosis—that we still ought to go out for dinner. I wanted to go to the all-you-can-eat Western Sizzlin’ Steakhouse, which made Applebee’s look like fine dining. The buffet was mayonnaise-laden and filled with selections like double-fried chicken and deep-fried okra, but the salad bar had infinite fresh veggies that no one else wanted but us. My mom and I faced each other in our red vinyl-covered booth, amidst the obese red necks and the college students.
As I broke apart a biscuit and popped it into my mouth, it was as though an animated light bulb went off above my mom’s head. She announced, half regretful, half amused, “It’s Passover.”
We both started cracking up laughing, sadly hysterical as I ate the rest of my biscuit. For reasons I couldn’t really understand myself, despite being a fairly non-observant Jew, I had never eaten bread before on Passover. I always hated the concept of Passover and the Angel of Death, and now I wondered if maybe his metaphorical equivalent was coming for me...or at least coming to really mess things up.
I took another biscuit from the plastic lattice basket and gave it to my mom.
“They’re good,” I said. She took it.
* * *
Later that April I moved back into my own little house in town after R.E.M. finished their world tour and came home. A new version of my real life was beginning. One night that month I had a voice-over dream, which was something I had experienced a bunch of times before. It was an auditory premonition with a narrator that came through while I was sleeping. It felt just like a live newscast, where the announcer was updated simultaneously as he gave the news. It went like this:
Superman has become impotent. But wait...it’s not just any generic Superman. This just in: It’s Christopher Reeve. And he’s impotent meaning he has lost all his power. He can’t move. He’s paralyzed.
The next day Christopher Reeve was thrown from his horse in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I went to college. He became a quadriplegic, and for the remainder of his and his wife’s lives, they would play an instrumental role in supporting stem cell research, which also benefits people with multiple sclerosis and a slew of other diseases.
From the day of his accident onwards, I couldn’t help but feel inextricably tied to Christopher Reeve. What if I had chosen paralysis that day in the woods? Would he have been diagnosed with MS? And why was I informed of his accident through a dream in advance? I was just supposed to understand that I had actually chosen my destiny, my illness. And yes—maybe he had chosen his.
I can only see it as a cosmic joke that the universe chose to link me to Superman. I was being handed a simple message that I’m not supposed to be perfect, that not even Christopher Reeve can be Superman. All of my life, I had thought that if I got advanced warnings, I was supposed to do something about situations in advance. It took many years after my diagnosis to learn that I was not. I couldn’t have been whacked any harder or clearer with the message, but in my stubbornness I clung to the notion that not only I was supposed to still leap over buildings in a single bound, but that I was supposed to learn to do it with my hands tied behind my back. I wouldn’t let go of my overachiever tendencies, even when my body was breaking down and pleading with me to stop.
Had I received and heeded the message much earlier, I’m honestly not so sure I would’ve gotten MS, despite all possible environmental and genetic factors. I’m sure my neurologist would disagree with this theory, but I think the concept of “frayed nerves” had a basis in truth with me. I had always been a pretty calm person, but I never gave myself a break mentally or physically, treating my body like an old piece of luggage. It was as though my incessant demands on myself made my nerves literally fray, their myelin sheaths disintegrating.
The three years I lived in Athens were so rife with accurate, often-mundane premonitions, that they simply began to feel like normal daily events. I was no stranger to premonitions, but I hadn’t been used to having them this predictably in such a rapid-fire way. I relied on them like Post-it notes punctuating my day:
Have an excuse ready for that mixed-doubles invitation you’re going to get later…C is about to pull out of a street in front of you and drive to your house, get out of his car and want to talk…In the next week, that girl is going to kick her boyfriend out of her house and start sleeping with yours. The guy from the Taco Stand is going to show up unannounced at Thanksgiving dinner.
I could accept that it was my fate to get MS, but I couldn’t see the correlation between my mind and my body. I had compassion for just about everyone except myself. I never stopped cracking the whip. I thought any negative feelings I might have had were too inconvenient or self-indulgent to consider. I was incapable of acknowledging my very own thoughts and emotions, but I seemed to have a direct hotline to some other place in the universe that liked to keep me in the loop. I just couldn’t figure out why.
Chapter 3
The months before my diagnosis had been an incubation period that allowed me to accept my fate before the spinal tap and MRI. I was ready. I had been given a forewarning and a choice, even, and accepting the medical prognosis at that point wasn’t so hard. Even before I heard the voice in the woods, I had been given a warning that I would experience a severe illness. Sometime much earlier in the year, I had been walking with the dogs on a leisurely stroll in town. The direct voice of my soul suddenly piped up internally and said, “You know you’re going to experience a major illness right?”
I understood this to mean I would suffer from an illness in a subsequent lifetime.
“And you understand that you have agreed to this illness?” the soul voice replied.
Shocking myself with my answer, I mentally responded, “Yes.”
“And you know that you have agreed to major disfigurement?” the voice asked, continuing this mental dialogue. I still believed this would be many lifetimes from now when I would be a much more evolved being who could handle it.
“Oh shit. Yes.”
Although the content of this dialogue was unlike anything I had ever consciously contemplated, the exchange was something I had experienced through meditation on several occasions. It wasn’t an external voice that was talking to me that time—it was part of myself. I interpreted this future illness as being part of my karma, an experience that would teach me the lessons I needed to learn. I had no idea my soul was talking about this lifetime and soon. I wouldn’t have agreed to that. And just for the record, I’d like to strike my acceptance of massive disfigurement in this or any life right off the karmic journal.
The exacerbation I was dealing with at the time of my diagnosis left me temporarily without the use of my right hand, messed-up vision, and a limp on my right side. None of these symptoms is a good thing for a right-handed painter who likes to run or socialize with members of the opposite sex. I was getting ready to have my MFA painting show in May before graduating, and I was finishing up my paintings by holding my brushes in my mouth, which I found wasn’t necessarily the way to do my best work. Brushing my hair and my teeth, buttoning a shirt and even pulling on underwear had become a major ordeal. You wouldn’t think doing any of that one-handed would be so difficult, but each was a humbling task.
When I was adapting to this modified version of my life, sometimes my vision would unexpectedly slip away. Some days when I had driven to the campus to teach my class, I’d have to track down a friend to take me home because I could no longer see by the end of the afternoon. I wore an eye patch some weeks to block out half of what my inflamed optic nerves were seeing. The double vision and erratic, moving imagery made me feel like I was on a drug-induced trip, though my mind felt lucid. I couldn’t trust anything I saw.
At this time I was teaching perspective to my drawing class at the university, which must have seemed like a comedy routine, but I loved my students and was grateful to still have a job. After having had a substitute for a few days, my students pleaded good-naturedly with me to come back, which was a good boost for my morale when I needed it most. Teaching and my students’ concern kept me going, and my exchanges with them were probably the best medicine I could have received. I tried to be generally honest about what was going on with me, but I kept it as light as I could. With my eye patch and my right leg dragging behind me, I imagined myself looking like some kind of absurd peg-legged pirate from a character sketch, standing in that cavernous classroom. Ahoy, ye maties! Get out ye charcoal—’tis time to draw!
I held a panel of Plexiglass in my hand towards the ceiling, encouraging my students to trace the receding perspective lines of the walls to their vanishing point on the transparent sheet. I had little idea where the lines of the room even were because everything was floating in space to me, but the students seemed to be grasping the concept.
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