Superpowers
by Dorothy Spears
For a while, the hardest part of that little skid towards oblivion would be the vague sense that I had lost something, or not make good on a promise, in particular to Alexis, my partner of seventeen years, who I couldn’t remember I’d finally married. Before that, friends, family, and more pointedly, Alexis, were often awed—and sometimes even irked—by the crazy vividness of my memories.
Alexis is a painter. Nine months ago, he had a studio in Tribeca, where he’d been making art for thirty-three years. I’m a writer, but I’m less of a creature of habit than he is, and I did not grow up in New York. Like most future brides, I was consumed by preparations before our wedding. I also couldn’t wait to return to a book I’d been writing on and off for almost eight years. I was in the home stretch of the narrative—I had a manuscript—but now it was time to shape and edit. When our friends Eric and April offered Alexis and me two weeks at their empty house in Sag Harbor as a wedding gift, I, for one, jumped at the opportunity. It became a kind of joke among our friends: Dorothy’s spending her honeymoon alone in Sag Harbor.
Alexis and I exchanged our wedding vows at City Hall in Manhattan on a Friday in early October. My two adult sons were our witnesses. The following night, we hosted a celebratory margarita party in our home for a hundred or so friends and family members. The next day, Alexis drove me out to Sag Harbor, where I planned to edit the manuscript of my book during the week. A survey of Alexis’ paintings was opening in Minneapolis that Friday. He planned to return late Saturday, so we could spend the weekend together.
That first day was lovely, the weather cool, the sky white like an eggshell. I worked all day. Then, my dear friend, Kate, invited me for a sunset walk on the beach. The following afternoon, Kate and I walked again, but the sky was much darker, and the ocean looked like molten lead. Huge waves broke in multiple rows. Seeing the white trails of riptides everywhere, I told Kate about a birthday party I’d attended ages ago when I almost drowned.
“I can’t imagine going back to the party after that,” Kate said.
And I admitted it was hard. “Nobody even noticed we were missing,” I said.
Kate returned to the city just as a big storm blew in. The next three days were marked by gale-force winds and rain thick as sheets. I had forgotten to bring a coat, or even an umbrella, so frantic was I to leave the aftermath of Alexis’ and my wedding party, which had left a red wine stain on the pale Oriental rug in our living room and a den reeking like vomit.
Alone in Eric and April’s sparely furnished old house full of exposed wood, I heard mysterious knockings and creaking that began to haunt me for hours during the night. Eric and April had plans to turn the house into a writer’s retreat. “You can be our pilot resident,” Eric said. After two fitful nights, I resorted to Lorazepam, grateful for the press of the pill’s hard, white disc under my tongue. The slow melting brought relief and sleep. Alexis’ opening was a success (I had attended the exhibition’s inaugural opening in Grand Rapids, but now it was on its third or fourth leg, and Alexis no longer cared if I came). On Saturday, he arrived in Sag Harbor after midnight. I was already asleep. In the morning, he was up before me.
“You are my wife!” he exclaimed, pouring me coffee, when I entered the kitchen.
“Goodbye, city life!” I teased, hugging him. We both shared an appreciation for the sitcoms of our youth. I was quoting Green Acres, a seventies-era sitcom about a white married couple who abandon their glamourous whirlwind of a life in New York City for a back-to-basics life in the country. I had grown up in Connecticut, and he knew I’d always felt like a fish out of water in the overly stimulating city.
Alexis went to play basketball in a men’s run at the local high school and since it was the weekend of the Hamptons Film Festival, I went to a screening at a local theater that afternoon. I didn’t stay long at the reception. I missed Alexis and was eager to get back to him.
On the walk to the house, I had a vague sense of looking up, and seeing the sun finally breaking through the clouds. I was eager to bring Alexis to the beach before it got dark. I found him looking at his computer in the upstairs bedroom. I think he wanted sex, but then he agreed that a bit of relaxation in the sun would do us both good.
The ocean was calm and glistening. The storm had left puddles everywhere. The low tide had left eddies. We probably walked along the sand—we may have even sat down. “There are riptides in the clouds,” Alexis says I told him. I imagine the soft dampness of the ocean air. Did I raise my face to glorious autumn sun? At some point, Alexis confessed he was afraid that now we were finally married, I would leave him. I’m sure I hugged him and promised him no, I would never leave him. I’d just made a vow to that effect. That was how I felt. But I don’t remember this conversation, and my recollection of the beach feels like a window with the shade pulled down.
An hour or two later, we were up in the bedroom making love. Alexis says he went down on me, and I can almost see his face lowering over the side of the bed. He says his iPad was playing music. “You wanted 70s,” he reminds me, “and I said, ‘Hell, no,’ and put on Tropocalia.”
“You are my wife,” he says he said, again.
“Goodbye, city life,” I probably joked. Then, after that, I remember nothing.
Alexis said I came many times, really fast, faster than usual. Then, he went to take a shower and left me lying in bed listening to Maria Bethânia. I was probably lying kind of sprawled on my back with my leg bent. He says he told me to get dressed and meet him in the kitchen so we could have a glass of wine before meeting Eric and April for dinner. He asked me to bring the iPad so we’d have music.
I put on red faux-leather pants, a black long-sleeved top. I even thought to insert gold hoop earrings. I forgot the iPad, which was nothing unusual. A sidebar to my impeccable memory: I am often absent minded. Alexis poured me some wine and handed me my glass.
I looked at the wine. “What’s this?” he says I asked him, and even now, it feels like there was someone else in my body, someone pretending to be me but not really me. An imposter.
He took the glass from me and led me into the living room. He sat me down beside him on the couch. (“You were on my right,” he tells me, as if this detail proves that it really happened, since he can no longer rely on me.)
“I don’t know where I am.”
“How do you feel?”
“I’m not sure.”
I don’t remember any of this. Or, rather I almost remember. But it’s like putting your ear against a thick brick wall and trying to hear people whispering on the other side. He says, “That was when you were the furthest away.”
“What are you doing in Sag Harbor?” he asked and then the doctors asked. I didn’t know. What’s the name of your book? Book? I didn’t remember any book. What year are we in?
“You’re in Sag Harbor,” Alexis says he told me. “Do you know this house?”
“No.”
“We’re at Eric and April’s.”
I didn’t know who they were.
He told me their full names, Eric Fischl and April Gornik.
“Oh, yes.” When I’m not writing my book, I regularly write about art for the New York Times.
He asked, “Do you know the address?”
I didn’t.
Then, I asked again, “Where am I?”
Alexis went upstairs to get his iPad. “Do you remember going to the beach today?” he asked, while apparently typing short term memory loss into his search bar. Then—this was what makes him cry—I couldn’t remember marrying him. He showed me pictures he’d just taken of me on the beach. I didn’t remember. He consulted a medical site on his iPad. Then, he studied my face. No droopy eye. No slurred speech. No motor problems. There was something called Transient Global Amnesia with an advisory: Must confirm not a stroke! He called Eric, and said, “I’m sorry, we’re not going to make it to dinner. Dorothy has lost her memory.”
In the emergency room, a lot of people were asking me my name, my date of birth, what year we were in. What month, and who is he? Who is that man? And I said Alexis, but he was right. I had promised never to leave him, and I had broken that promise.
I kept telling the nurses and doctors: “My memory is my superpower. I don’t know how this could have happened,” I said (or Alexis says I said). “This is the worst thing that could happen to me.”
“We understand,” said the nurses.
But they didn’t understand. How could they possibly? To prove it, I quoted Flaubert. I said, “You know how Flaubert says, ‘Madame Bovary, c’estmoi’? ‘Je me souviens, c’estmoi.’” My memory is me. Do you understand? Do you know that without it I am nobody? (I thought I said this in the emergency room; Alexis insists it was later. “That was the next day,” he says. And since I’m no longer the designated rememberer of our duo, I have no choice but to believe him.)
I didn’t remember that Alexis and I spent the summer in France. I didn’t remember a bird we’d saved, that he had affectionately called Chirping Chicken after a fast-food restaurant he used to love on the Upper East Side. I didn’t remember that Chirping Chicken, who I had simply called Birdy, had met her demise one night, after having been devoured by something, probably a wild boar, before ending up a mass of blood and feathers in our neighbor’s pool. I didn’t remember City Hall, or our party.
“Do you know you’re writing a book?” Alexis asked, then the nurses asked, referring to the memoir I’d been writing, a showcase for my vivid recollections.
Nope.
I kept asking Alexis if I’d fallen. He kept telling me no. He wrote a list of the answers to the questions I kept asking on a piece of paper. I’d ask, “Where am I?”…He’d say, “Look at the paper.” Then, I’d ask, “Did I fall?” He’d say, “Number 3.” “Why am I here?” “Did I have a stroke?” “Number five.” “Number 1.”
“I feel like I’ve been drugged,” I said. I could almost feel the hard disc of Lorazepam like a ghost under my tongue.
I was admitted into the hospital. Alexis stayed until 11:30pm. Visiting hours were long over. I didn’t want him to leave. This I remember: I cried for a long time after he left. Hearing someone mention a possible TIA, or small stroke, I remarked that my grandmother Nonna had suffered TIA after TIA after TIA, her mental and physical decline so slow and excruciating, it was a relief when she finally died.
Was this the beginning of the end for me? My maternal grandmother, Mimi, had died of breast cancer when she was sixty-three. My mother had died of ovarian cancer when she was also sixty-three. I’d had my own ovaries removed as a precaution, and some breast tissue was biopsied a week before our wedding, a procedure that had left me traumatized and bleeding, though the diagnosis, crystals from an exploded cyst, was benign. It had never occurred to me that my demise might come from the disease that had plagued Nonna. Weren’t TIAs caused by high blood pressure?
“I have low blood pressure,” I assured the nurse, as she closed the blue Velcro cuff around my bicep. “My grandmother…”
“Yes, I know.”
“But I don’t have—.”
“No, you’re blood pressure’s fine.”
Someone gave me cups for my contact lenses, and I continued to cry and tell blurred attendants—and whoever would listen— “My memory is my superpower.” Then, I heard a groan behind the curtain divider in my hospital room.
My roommate was a two hundred and fifty pound Black woman padding to the bathroom. I heard her talking in her sleep with her TV on. She asked the nurses for Oxycontin for her recurring hernia. Then, she said to me, “So, you’re a writer,” in a weary voice, that made me worry that the hospital staff was spending more time on me than they were her, and she was annoyed. She must have heard me repeating myself ad nauseum. She was reading a vampire thriller by a novelist, all of whose books she loved, she said. Her brother called, then hung up on her. “Fuck him,” she said.
Miss Jones, as the nurses called her, was a regular. “Dorothy,” she called me, with a hint of world-weary irony. I called her Miss Jones at first, but then, aiming for the same ironic tone, “Linda.”
A blurred nurse told me that an MRI in the morning would tell us a lot more.
“Did I have a stroke?” I asked, probably for the millionth time. “Look at the sheet,” Alexis would have said if he were still there. “Did I have a TIA?” “Number 5,” Alexis would have said. Or number 3, or number 1, or whatever. I held the sheet close to my face.
“Ruling out a TIA,” the blurred nurse said now.
“So, they still don’t know.”
“They want to rule it out,” she repeated.
Then, I was crying, and I couldn’t stop, swabbing my nose with tissue after balled-up tissue. “But…my memory is my superpower,” I must have said for the trillionth time. “I wrote a memoir.”
“Here we go, again,” Linda said, with a cluck of irony. She seemed to know I was from out of town. She was from North Carolina, she said. She had been living in Bridgehampton—along the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor turnpike—for years. I told her Alexis and I used to spend the summers in Sag Harbor, but lately we’d been going to—I was a bit sheepish about this—France. I said, “Believe it or not, it’s like a tenth of the price.”
Linda said she understood. She dreamed of moving to Alabama, or even Jamaica, where she’d traveled recently. She mentioned a realtor who had been walking on her property lately, looking at her house, not even caring that Linda was sitting right there on her porch. The realtor left her business card. Linda reported her to the cops. Apparently, this realtor was known. Others had also reported her. Linda said she’d been tempted to get a gun and shoot the realtor, who was trespassing on private property, envisioning a big McMansion where Linda had lived for decades. Where she still lived.
As my results came back, and the tests kept turning up nothing, the doctors diagnosed what Alexis had found with a quick Google search on his iPad: Transient Global Amnesia. Giddy with relief, I told the nurses I’d always found the word “amnesia” very romantic. As a girl, I said, I had wanted amnesia. There’s this episode of I Dream of Jeannie, I told them. Once? Twice? Five hundred times? It became my new mantra. This episode of I Dream of Jeannie when Jeannie falls and, suffering from amnesia, forgets that Major Nelson is her master. Then, he finds himself in the usual predicament, needing her magical powers, and she has forgotten she has magical powers. She cannot help him. In some ways, she is free. Oh, but poor Major Nelson.
Later, I’d realize that the only notable holes in my memory occur when I am very upset, and my mind shuts down. I’m pretty good at disappearing. “Out of body,” as a therapist might say, or “disassociating.” Was TGA a long-form version of the same skill? And if so, was there message encrypted in my brief ellipsis? Was forgetting my marriage to Alexis my mind’s last-ditch attempt to untie the knot that now bound me to another man? All I knew was that, at least for the time being, I needed to trust Alexis to remember what had happened to me.
While I was waiting to be discharged, an Eastern European-accented neurologist on the hospital staff said she’d studied Transient Global Amnesia when she was in med school. It’s not at the top of neurological research, she said, because it’s not that serious. There’s no increase in strokes or TIAs or decrease in patient life-expectancy. It doesn’t often recur. One of her interns said, “I’m studying it.”
“It’s mysterious,” the neurologist repeated. “And fairly rare.”
I said I liked being a mystery.
My discharge papers included the diagnosis, TGA, and a recommendation for a follow-up. It was not lost on me that the difference between TGA and a TIA was a single letter, like the difference between a bullet that had just grazed your skull and one lodged between your eyes.
While I was waiting for an orderly to bring a wheelchair, Linda said she’d been a cook at a restaurant in Southampton, and now ran a food truck with her brother. They parked outside Amy’s, across from the Milk Pail, in Bridgehampton. She liked to make stews and seafood dishes, she said, Cajun and French. Jambalaya and bouillabaisse.
“Ooh,” I said, “With saffron aioli?”
“Uh-huh,” Linda nodded.
She wore a black do-rag, I saw now that I’d put in my contacts. I told her I would visit her food truck, although saffron aioli was something the doctors said I should avoid (according to my bloodwork, my cholesterol was on the high side).
“Right by the Milk Pail,” Linda said. “You’ll see my brother. And remember: less stress.”
Since then, I’ve learned that although the exact causes for TGA remain unknown, Linda was right, stress is believed to play a part. So is heavy exertion—and sex. One of the hallmarks of this rare condition is that the brain simply stops recording new memories. Another is the brevity of the symptoms. After a period of hours—less than twenty-four, for the vast majority of sufferers—a patient’s memory is restored (except for those few hours when no memories were made). Life picks up where it left off.
For a few days, as I recovered, Alexis resented me for having scared him, unnecessarily. “All the literature says it’s the person taking care of the patient who suffers most,” he said, as if I’d been dancing naked in some beautiful woodland, blithely free of all worldly worry, while he faced the horrible prospect of caring for his demented new wife, alone.
“All the literature,” I repeated. “All the literature…” I didn’t ask, but I thought it: wasn’t all the literature written by the caregivers? I began to wonder if maybe I remembered too much, if that caused stress. Alexis often relied on my vigilance to an almost absurd degree, asking me the names of random people he’s met at parties without me, the onus being on me to supply proof that I was not present. Have you seen my thumb-drive? he’ll ask. No, I’ll. Well, I really need it, he’ll insist, as if describing its importance will suddenly call up its whereabouts for me.
My first marriage was to a man named Vance, and I remember how trapped I felt. In marrying Alexis, was I afraid of again feeling trapped? Marriage is a patriarchal construct, I’d told Alexis over our many years together. “I’m not a part of the patriarchy,” he’d kept insisting, reminding me he was an independent-minded artist, and raised by a working mother. “But if you don’t want to get married,” he added, kindly, a month before our wedding, “could you give me at least two weeks’ notice?” A few nights later, I dreamed that Alexis’ therapist—our former couples’ counselor—told him she didn’t think we should get married. I told Alexis about the dream. Again, he was stoic. “You know all of the characters in your dream are you,” he teased. “But don’t worry, it’s natural to feel ambivalent.” Finally, he and I were standing on a subway platform when I realized I hadn’t asked him, was he ambivalent? “No,” he said, his eyes fixing mine. “Not a molecule in my body has any doubt that I want to marry you. But,” he went on, “I can understand why you’d be worried, because I was mean to you in the beginning. You’ve never been mean to me.”
My fear of getting married, I now realize, was related to this meanness. Alexis tends to give his feelings more weight than mine. And in the aftermath of my TGA, after all his wonderful care, his behavior became suddenly bullying. Alexis was a hero during the crisis but as I navigated the less-dramatic, but still-unsteady road of my improving health, he felt traumatized (as if I didn’t). He’d been through so much (as if I hadn’t).
“You left me!” he ranted one evening, during that first week of recovery. “I thought I’d lost you forever!”
“I thought I’d lost my fucking mind!” I ranted back.
It began to feel like a zero-sum game, or maybe the age-old tug-of-war of a child with his mother. Take care of me, was his unspoken message. No, take care of me.
I remembered, yes remembered all the crises he had responded to so well, only to make me wish afterward that I had never needed him. I reminded him of a remark he’d made on our drive out to Sag Harbor after our wedding: “I love driving in the city. I love fighting for my lane. But driving on empty highways puts me to sleep.”
I love the empty highway, I told him. And now the doctors, and even Linda, all agree: I need rest.
The thing about riptides: you’re supposed to let go. At my friend’s birthday party all those years ago, the waves pummeled me so many times I no longer knew which way was up. Gasping for breath in the white froth, I remember hearing my then-husband, Vance’s cry above the roaring surf, “Find the bottom. Then, push off!”
At first, I was angry that he was too cautious and level-headed to risk his life to come save me. I fought with all my strength to get back to shore. Then, empty of air, I surrendered to the mighty ocean. I gave in, or up, or out, finally. Okay, you win. I let go—finally!—my limp body hitting the ocean floor. Then, a dreamy recollection of Vance’s final cry urged me to push off the bottom as hard as I could. My body catapulted to the crest of a huge wave that I rode until I was close enough to shore that he was able to grab my hand. His feet planted firmly, he dragged me out of the surf. For a while, I lay in a waterlogged lump on the wet sand, grit in my teeth and hair, my bikini bottom strapping my ankles.
The days became more solid. Weeks passed. Now, my memories have all filled in like old friends, except for my brief bout of amnesia, which feels like it never happened. Alexis’ rage at feeling abandoned, I now see, was merely misplaced fear. He believed he had lost me. In an apt reversal of our roles, he will always be the only one who remembers that disturbing period when I forgot not just that we were married, but nearly everything that mattered to me. And he will probably always be haunted by that. Meanwhile, I am grateful for how steady he was when I’d expressed doubts about our marriage, and for the numbered list he made in the hospital. He had faced down his fear, and brought me to safety.
A month ago, Alexis and I bought a house in upstate Connecticut. Last week, he moved the paints and half-finished panels from his Tribeca studio into our new two-car garage. We’re still carving out our new routines. We still have not visited Linda’s truck. Eric and April have put the house where I stayed up for sale, for financial reasons; making me its pilot resident, as well as its final resident. I’m still finishing my book, albeit with an added thrill: from a pond down the hill, the frogs croak like plucked bass- strings.
“You are my wife,” Alexis repeats, in what has now become a running joke.
“Goodbye, city life!” I laugh.
If time is the ultimate patriarch, maybe I did defy the patriarchy. For a few strange hours, no one could find me. I had swum out too far. I had disappeared—or let go. For weeks, I had felt a new sort of lightness, my mind clean and re-booted. If my amnesia was, indeed, a message from the gods, their follow-up advice would sound a lot like Linda’s: less stress.
Now, looking back, I’m convinced my grandmother Nonna said it best. After her first TIA when, having just finished lunch at her country club, she and I were standing in a yellow wall-papered ladies’ lounge outside the women’s restroom. Having wasted precious hours of childhood bored in stuffy country clubs, I considered the lounge, with its overstuffed couches and armchairs, as a lavish waste of space. “Have you ever seen anyone sitting here?” I scoffed.
Nonna smiled a little mischievously and lowering her still-trim body into an armchair, she said, “Sometimes, it’s nice just to take a break.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dorothy Spears graduated from Brown University with a BA in Comparative Literature. After studying at Parsons School of Design in Paris, she worked at the Leo Castelli gallery in SoHo. Her features and artist profiles are regularly published in the New York Times, Art in America, ArtNews, Elle, Architectural Digest, and other publications. Her personal essays have appeared on mrbellersneighborhood.com, and in the New York Times, including the Magazine. “Labor Day Weekend,” an essay published by Epiphany Magazine, received notable mention in Best American Essays in 2017. An anthology she edited, Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories About Flying, was published by Open City/Grove in 2009. You can find her on Instagram @dorothyspears and at www.dorothyspears.com.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Steven McCrystal lives in a town called Bo’ness in Scotland. He started painting in Art Therapy and found the creative outlet very beneficial. It helped him come to terms with the traumas he’d been through and enabled him to look at his troubles in a different light.
McCrystal enjoys painting abstract art, but his repertoire also consists of emotive work and elements of his bipolar experiences. He has found that there is nothing better than feeling an emotional connection to the art he produces and hopes viewers of his art find that same connection.