MAL À La TÊTE
Your landlady explains it.
You are looking at a photo: printed, charmingly faded. In it, the bed’s unmade, with light coming in through the window. The man is handsome, thirty maybe, shirtless and slim with thick hair on his head and a bare chest, washed-out Levis. There’s a cat on his lap: so sweet. He looks at the camera like a lover. And around his head with its black hair, there’s gauze, wrapped thick and white.
My husband, your landlady says. Brain tumor. He has been missing now for over twenty years. Or does she say thirty. You try to put together the time frame.
It made him crazy, she says, meaning the tumor or maybe the surgery. He disappeared. You are drinking tea together in the garden. Outside, it is bright and cool like a screensaver. You don’t like it here; you can feel yourself burning.
* * *
Every three months I go into the city for my Botox appointment. It’s for headaches. They inject it all over my scalp and forehead so my nerves can’t talk to my other nerves. Apparently, my nerves can’t be trusted. So their distress signals are blocked by paralyzed muscle: They’re sent out over and over but never received.
Calling them headaches is misleading. Yes, the injections are for the ache, but also the falling, the pulsing, the confusion and vomit, for the noises that are not really there—or rather, are there as much as anything else, but with internal instead of external causes—and for the strange vibrating lights, the dull begging, please, for rest, for the pain to stop. The French is better, I think: mal à la tête. Meaning: bad in the head.
My neurologist says anything can be a headache. Or rather, a headache can cause anything, since all sensations start in the brain. Sometimes the anythings are very strange: Once, I tasted salt where sugar should have been. A spoonful of it made my mouth pucker. Mango was pickled and sharp. Another time, the signs at the train station squiggled and the pixels moved forever inward in little spirals. And then there was that terrible season, early on, when I was always falling down and tasting chlorine, seeing black. I woke up confused. They thought it was seizures. That was a long time ago.
* * *
Probably you are just adjusting to the summer, which is still new: the change of scenery, air pressure, and time zone. The garden that you and your landlady share is full of plants you don’t know the name of, which bothers you. You like being able to call out the names for things as you move past them; to name something is to add it to your lexicon and thus take claim to it.
Sitting with the pictures and someone else’s grief, you have to look away. You stare at a bright patch of purple climbing up the wall. Tiny white stamens in the middle of each flower like neat buttons. You watch them while your landlady keeps talking about the picture. She focuses more on the cat—now dead—than the man.
Such a sweet one, she says. Always on your lap. You move your eyes back to the picture. This time, you avoid its subject and look at the background, trying to make out the details of the bedroom. You see a few picked flowers on the nightstand in a little mug filled with water, a book whose title you cannot make out.
* * *
The last time I got Botox I felt very strange, like I was a bone that had been stripped of marrow. I hadn’t eaten all day.
When the appointment finished, at four, I was crying. I often cried after Botox for one reason or another: pain, hunger, a vague sense of violation. Or maybe it was just physical: Needles close to nerves which regulate pain cause water to well up in the eyes, the throat to ache, etc. Or it could be that every appointment I visited, for an hour or so, the land of the sick—somewhere I had once lived and now try hard to forget.
* * *
With my landlady’s photo, there’s a passport. In it, an ID picture—the man again, still handsome. This time he’s unbandaged and unsmiling. There are also a few manilla envelopes and clean plastic bags, filled with cash and documents and you don’t know what else. And two stacks of CDs, a large bag of cat toys.
All of this was hidden in a mini fridge in the dilapidated shed, a fridge which you hadn’t even noticed because, when you moved in, it was sheltered in vines and junk and inexplicable wooden beams.
You only found it because you found the fridge in your new apartment broken when you arrived. The repairman couldn’t come until Tuesday, and the landlady blamed the previous tenants. To her credit, when you made a fuss she took 100 dollars off your rent for spoiled food and had the upstairs neighbor walk you into the shed to take the mini fridge she stored there.
She used to rent it out, your neighbor says about the shed. The two of you are trying to get to it, walking through the tangle of vines and junk and inexplicable wooden beams.
Was that legal? you say, meaning the renting. He shrugs. It’s not even a nice shed. There are holes between the wooden slats where blue comes through. The blue is beautiful like this, more so for being fragmentary. What did Robert Frost say? Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—you look at each sliver. They burn your eyes.
* * *
In the elevator down, there was a strange old woman. She looked at me straight on, like she needed something. There are often strange people around the headache center—migraines are comorbid with various mental illnesses, they tell me, though the order of operations is unclear and, I suspect, bidirectional.
The woman asked for the time and I told her. Thank you, she said. Thank you so much.
I have a bad habit of appearing very open to strangers. By the end of the elevator ride, the woman had grasped my hand. I helped her adjust her backpack over her shoulder. By the time we reached the security exit—another reason I hate the headache center is it feels a little like a jail or a school—we’d formally introduced ourselves and shaken hands.
She told me a story. I used to be a professor, she said. At Penn, she said. Something in the sciences. Once, when giving a presentation, her shirt had an open button. It was all men she was presenting to. I didn’t realize until later, she said. And none of them noticed! In the bathroom, afterward, a woman pointed it out to her as they both washed their hands. The punchline being: Men don’t notice those things. I thought to myself: Everyone notices. But only another woman would point it out.
She told me this story because my shirt, too, had come unbuttoned. She could see a soft sliver of my skin: almost as white as my shirt, cold, with a trail of dark hair going down from my belly button. The curve of my stomach where the organs go.
She told me that I was missing a button after we got out of the elevator. At this point, I did not feel well. I had this sensation that my head had been flattened like a sandwich in a panini press, and I wanted the woman to go away. I tried to close myself. I did not look at her. Though I did ask, Is someone coming to get you? And then thanked God the answer was yes, though I couldn’t tell if she was lying. She had noticed by then that I wanted her to leave. She did, and I loitered by the door until I was sure that she was gone.
* * *
When you and the neighbor open the fridge and find everything, he summons your landlady to the garden. You all have tea. This is when she shows you the photographs.
After a moment of quiet, she says, I wonder who put these things in here, meaning the fridge, the photographs, the passport, etc. The neighbor says to her, You, probably. He is very blond, even his eyebrows. He has a soft voice and slightly nervous way of speaking, but you like him very much because when you offer him things he says yes. A glass of wine, a cup of tea. And he offers things back. Leaves grocery bags outside your door for you to use. Fixes the lock on the fence when it breaks. The landlady likes him too. He takes care of her like a son would.
Quiet again. You want to go inside. She sighs a long sigh and touches one of the papers spread out on the table. I do not like it here, she says. I want to go home. Home is Switzerland, and she speaks with a little accent, though she has been here for a long time—you don’t know how long, exactly, but decades, not years.
When she says this, the neighbor smiles a little. You’ve been saying that since I moved in, he says.
They won’t let me, she says, until I declare him dead. When they were young and in love, she took him to Switzerland. That’s what the little blue book is for—not a passport, you see now, but something similar, with the writing on its cover written in Italian, not English. It was documentation for his visit. So were the papers in the manila envelopes. Because he is documented as her husband, to go back to Switzerland, she has to file him as dead. When you’re with your landlady, you feel pulled in the direction of unreality. Sometimes you hide when you see her puttering around in the yard, though you do feel towards her a nagging tenderness, a sort of itch, which makes you call your parents on the phone and repeat her stories to them. They ask for clarification and the stories, which once felt whole, begin to fracture. In this case especially, the details are unclear. You do not pry.
But I won’t do it, she says. We don’t know—
* * *
Outside the Headache Center, the sun was so bright I could hear it. A buzz. All around me, traffic. I stood at the bus stop, sucking on a plastic container of hospital apple juice. The light turned green, and suddenly, in front of me, my bus—and then it kept moving, kept moving. It had picked people up a few feet away, I realized, from where it usually did. And now I called out Wait! too late, brandishing my apple juice like a weapon. The driver didn’t see or he didn’t care. I was so tired. Fuck!
I yelled—yes, yelled, yes—into the city. Fuck! Goddamnit!
A few feet away, a man stood at the bus stop too. I had moved away from it in my yelling, towards the street. He looked at me. I looked back at him. My face was all used up of expressions: It hung like laundry on the line.
He wasn’t judging me, nor was he sympathetic. He was just looking, the way you look at crazy people in the city near the hospital. They’re part of the all of it: like traffic, like streetlights.
Another bus came a few minutes later. I got on; the man didn't. I was grateful for that. The driver said Hello in a friendly sort of way, and I said it back. He doesn’t know, I thought, that I was just crazy. I moved away before I could blow my cover.
Sitting on the bus, holding the empty cup of apple juice in my hands, I felt a sort of premonition. Not necessarily the future, but a future at least.
Listen: I’ll have to go to the Headache Center, or somewhere like it, every three months for the rest of my life. And so it is possible to imagine a young woman in the elevator, hollowed-out and feeling sort of violated, though she can’t quite place the feeling. I was a student near here once, I’ll say, at a very good school. I’ll lie as much as I want to. And tell her about myself, my career, my life. She’ll nod along, polite, her shirt missing a button. And I, overflowing with want, will move towards her, grasping her hand.
Ella Harrigan is a poet in the Bay Area. You can find her work in Harpur Palate and Small Craft Warnings. She is the recipient of the Virginia Ball Writing Prize, the Claudia Ann Seaman award, and the Morrell-Potter stipend, among others. She is happy to be here.