When she finished for the night, her steps were often too deliberately careful, and she always came and touched me one last time for the night, kissing my cheek and then left.
When the darkness took back over the room, and Leggett fidgeted in pain, grunting, the night belonged to Rose Epstein who came alive shouting her name through the wall.
Leggett grimaced and said in the darkness, “Did you hear about the deaf gynecologist?” He gripped the railing with one hand, his gold Masonic ring glinting. His other hand raised the morphine clicker like he was a contestant on a game show of pain, and he finally said, “He reads lips!” and pressed the button, and there was the snap of the solenoid, and on his monitor above his rising heart beat, the green 
appeared.
I began dreading his passing into sleep each night, the dose of morphine taking him away because then I heard the narcotics cabinet keys go swishing past our door, and I waited what seemed forever for Rose Epstein. “I’m Rose Epstein. . ”
It was hard to tell the difference between sleep and just living through the night, stranded inside my head, but this made me vulnerable to an experience that I have to write about if I’m going to tell the truth about everything.
A teaching hospital such as this is a surreal place where people often came into the darkened room — doctors and interns administering tests just outside the dome of light surrounding my bed, asking each questions about my condition, trying on diagnoses. I was often taken to different exam rooms in the middle of the night, once waking to a woman outside the light surrounding my bed, asking, “Babinski reflex?” I wanted to answer no I wasn’t Babinski Reflex, but someone uncovered my feet, which seemed a million miles from my head, like looking backward through binoculars. The man rubbed a tongue depressor along my sole, something I didn’t feel, and when my toes curled, everyone seemed to be impressed and said, “Babinski reflex,” and took notes on their phones.
I once woke in a strange room where doctors spoke Spanish and inserted needles below my skin delivering shocks that convulsed dormant muscles and produced peaks and waves on a computer next to my bed. The only English was “This will be a little uncomfortable,” though I wasn’t sure who spoke it. The needle pricked into my leg, and the electric stimulus was delivered to my thigh, then my calves, and when the needle and the wires were taken away, doctors in the dark began asking me questions.
“Do you have any thoughts of suicide?”
Thoughts of suicide?
“Are you generally happy about the world?”
No.
“Have you had unexplainable missing or lost time?”
No.
“Do you have any unusual scars or marks on your body you can’t explain?”
Just outside the dome of light, I saw the reflections on the surfaces of blank eyes, saw their slender bodies and the large heads of the classic Greys. It is happening to me, I thought, even though I write this with the confidence that it was a dream. In the dim light I saw the four-jointed fingers I’d read about, and a great wave of relief washed over my body, not because the pain had stopped but because there were aliens around my bed. I tried to catch my breath and at the time I only felt terrified and wonderful, thinking that at last something fantastic was real.
“Do you have memories of floating through the air?” one asked.
Yes. I was communicating my answer telepathically.
“Have you ever been paralyzed for unexplained reasons?” said another. These were all classic abduction questions.
Yes.
“Had any unusual nose bleeds?”
Yes.
“Have you had long-time problems with insomnia, the cause of which is puzzling to you?”
Yes.
“Are you more comfortable being in crowds, more comfortable with sleeping among people?”
In hotels.
“We will be releasing you from this paralysis.”
You are doing this to me, I said without speaking, and I remember floating out in the hallway, just my body, floating down the hallway toward the elevator and back to my room.
The next morning I simply woke in my room, and the nursing staff and Elizabeth rolled my body and I began the fifteen seconds of suffocation that started every day as my diaper was changed. Everything was normal, but I felt wonderful. When Elizabeth asked me if I was okay, as she did every morning, I blinked yes, yes, yes, yes. This was the euphoria of understanding.
During those strange few days of believing, I gave up my obsessive search for Rose Epstein. I didn’t intentionally stop, I just knew that every woman I saw was Rose Epstein who wanted to go home, and every man was Rose Epstein, and I was Rose Epstein and Rose Epstein was me, and I was also James Leggett and his jokes, and I liked his jokes, even the simple stupid ones. The jokes were funny. Why hadn’t I known this before?
I’m glad I couldn’t speak during this stage of my life because I would have shouted to everyone who would listen, It’s real! The lunacy of a new convert. It might be lunacy, but I think anyone would want it. If you make fun of people who believe in UFOs or Jesus, then you just can’t remember how great it feels, how fucking great it feels, to believe in something fantastic.
When Ursula read at night, I wanted to talk to her—yes, I know! My God, what would have happened if I could have talked? I would have become the most obnoxious convert. I was saved or destroyed by paralysis, whichever way you want to look at it. I was forced into a cooling-off period, and I went through a cold reawakening to reality, the tiny voice of my father through the headphones when she wasn’t there.
Let me dispense with my experience in the strange room. It was a dream, my brain filled with Ursula’s reading and convoluted by boredom and depression. What the doctors administered me that night was a real test to measure the conductivity of your nerves — an EMG, an electromyogram.
If conversion is a lightning strike, coming to your senses takes a few days, and that was what happened to me, slowly coming back to reality.
One night I just simply watched Ursula’s face as she read out loud and felt the same skepticism I always had, but I would have done anything to get that feeling back of believing something fantastic was real. I would have gone through the electroshock again, been paralyzed longer, anything.
In those days when the euphoria faded, the movement came back into my body. Ursula read from Jung: “‘These people are lacking not only in criticism but in the most elemental knowledge of psychology; at bottom, they don’t want to be taught any better but merely to go on believing. . ’”
One of my promises was to kiss those lips. I would declare my love for her as soon as I could speak.
A few days later, very normal human nurses loaded me in my wheelchair and took me down several floors to an MRI machine, a small tunnel fed by a gurney.
The motors pulled me along rails into the machine’s throat, and over a tiny speaker inches away from my nose, the tech gave me the absurd command to “stay completely still.” There was music to relax me: flute and Tibetan bowl. Air blew down the tiny tunnel, and then the music went off and then the drum roll began and the bass beat—“Viva Las Vegas” cued. It seemed like music from another world, a signal from a friend, and a bit of the euphoria of believing came on me and a drop of my body’s own saline leaked from my eye and found its way down my cheek, trickling in my ear. There was one last fantastic thing left, I thought, or was this a dream too?