“The lions,” she’d whisper. “They are not stories!” She was defensive, eager to repel all argument. “It is still happening each year, in Bombay! In Delhi, in Calcutta!”
XXIII.Chester
MAURIE kept leaving messages but Chess didn’t feel like returning. He was moody and pissed. He still hadn’t met with that attorney.
The bone doctor X-rayed and found nothing. He said Chess should probably see a neurologist for an MRI. He now had shooting pains in both hands and numbness in one of his thighs but wasn’t sure if the numbness was “real” or some sort of byproduct of pain. He hated being a pain patient; when you spoke to doctors it was like you’d fallen down the rabbit hole — the habit hole — where all perception was up for grabs. In order to gauge your “distress,” the nurses asked you to point to emoticons on a sliding scale: primitive renderings of faces that were smiling, indifferent, frowning, crying, screaming. It was infantile and regressive, demeaning and asinine. He saw his fellow travelers — the tired, poor, huddled asses of the waiting room — as losers, the low rung of doomed complainants in a new kind of hell. New to him, anyway. He was still a virgin, but pretty soon he’d be like one of those African girls forced into marriage that Oprah went to visit who were too young to give birth and wound up with fistulas from miscarriages, incontinent of feces and urine (Saint O gave them little purses with C-notes tucked inside; more than he would get) — soon he’d be turned out right and proper, gangbanged by the Ubangi pain tribe. Chess always imagined that if ever he got sick, it would be something definitive: a burst appendix, a kidney stone. Diabetes. Something organic that hadn’t been done to him. As a joke, and for money! At least his jawbone wasn’t rotting away from an OD of Fosamax.
WAITING for the neurologist, he thumbed a brochure that said 30,000,000 Americans suffered from chronic pain that was so bad they wanted to die. Then why was the FDA busy pulling meds? Someone wanted us to believe that if we took a vestige of Vioxx, a soupçon of Celebrex, a vial of vitamin C, a wicked wedge of Mom’s apple pie, well, then, we were right behind the stroke/heart-attack 8 ball. Someone really wanted us to believe that iddy-biddy Bextra caused “fatal skin reactions”—what the fuck was that, terminal psoriasis? People just wanted to feel better. Had to be some Recondite Brand vs Generic showdown, with trillions at stake.
He flipped through Reader’s Digest, Metropolitan Home, and Surfrider. Read an article about a woman on disability heading to a conference that she organized. Staying at the Grand Hyatt in Washington. Loved her room. Got vertigo and breathing problems from what she thought was the chlorinated water in the decorative pools. Wasn’t the hotel’s fault. Turns out she and who knew how many goddam thousands of others have something called multiple chemical sensitivities or environmental illness. Then there was a thing in Elle about a chick with “impingement syndrome” and decomposing cartilage. Her vertebrae were “slapping” against each other, bone spurs throttling nerve roots. Chess pictured barbed wire wrapped around fresh green stems from Whole Foods. The essay reinforced what he had learned: that chronic pain eventually became not a symptom but a disease in itself. Poor bitch wound up getting steroid injections right in the tailbone, which gave her “a faint beard and a kind of extreme PMS.” Well, far out! The piece ended by informing the reader that an operation often created a worse problem than the one it set out to repair (thanks for the tip). In fact, there was new evidence that, in some cases, exploratory surgery actually revitalized dormant cancers. But none of it mattered to Chess, because by the time you were so miserably desperate that going under the knife seemed like a rational option, well, by then your central nervous system was already so welded to pain that nothing could break the cycle, not yoga, pot brownies, hypnotherapy, methadone, not beaucoup $, not zip. Even making love, as they used to put it, could mortally exacerbate whatever was wrong. George Clooney said he got the sniffles and leaked spinal fluid through his nose after getting injured on the set, but Chess wondered if he’d actually wrenched his back on a 12,000 dollar Lake Como Duxiana.
Chess had been online reading about useless surgical amphitheater interventions. Like the lady with bullet-proof pain whose bones kept crumbling; the drug she took cost $600,000 a year because her disease was so rare. Her joints broke like teenage hearts and they kept cutting her — the doctors were addicted — until she didn’t want to live. Every putz and putter on the golf course had had a knee or back torpedoed — the drill and scalpel were supposed to be the last resort but greedy Hippocrats could never get enough. One guy’s calcified endoskeleton was strangling a bundle of nerve-endings and the sonofabitch was still crawling to the bathroom 6 months after being carved. His blog said he was planning “death by cop”—get loaded, get naked, and run into traffic waving a gun. The Yahoo! watchdogs were probably gonna shut him down any day now. Could be too late.
When they called him in, the panic momentarily receded. The physician was a brawny, handsome guy of about 60 who looked like he could fix anything. They scheduled the MRI and Chess voiced some of his fears. “You have a very active imagination.” He told the new patient not to worry, he’d dealt with far worse. Chess asked if in the meantime it was OK to get acupuncture and the doc said, “Sure, if it helps.” What about a massage? “Nothing too vigorous.” He even made one of those “happy ending” jokes but somehow it didn’t grate. He gave him an Rx for sleeping pills, anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxants — and more painkillers. Percocet.
“And stay off the Internet,” the doctor cautioned, smiling again as he left the room. “Sometimes too much information is not a good thing.”
Chess put on his shirt.
XXIV.Marjorie
SHE watched the DVD that Nigel, “the travel gal,” gave her — a very professional presentation, very theatrical, with the same high quality of those Mystery! shows on PBS. It starred a familiar-looking Indian actor (hosting). He was probably quite famous.
Marjorie was thrilled to see the hotel again. Sure, the interior had been modernized but plus ça change, as her daddy used to say; it seemed to have the exact same feeling. She remembered the name “Tata,” they were like the Trumps of India, or the Rockefellers, actually, and still very much entrenched. (The Tatas were Zoroastrians, which the Encyclopaedia Britannica said was one of the oldest religions.) The family owned the Taj chain and even manufactured cars and trucks that bore their name. How divine it would be to rattle around in one’s very own Tata! The film was interspersed with black-and-white stills showing how “the palace” looked in the 20s, 30s, and 40s — and how it looked in the early 50s, when she made her sojourn as a young girl.