THE ECSTASY OF UNEASE
Three shallow breaths are the most I can manage now because my heart’s fibres are stretching and compressing yo-yo-like under the pressure of my lungs until my throat’s vacuum stalls and my eyes scamper the room:
“Neon cock, Flower cock, Bike dildo, Paleolithic fuck, Pandas fucking, Balloon tit, Museum attendant, Approaching museum attendant. Oh fuck. Fuck. FUCK,” Sweet nothings garotted by the attendant’s fast-moving mouth when a neon pink “Museum of Sex” employee pin dances on his acrylic uniform.
“Sir, we’re going to have to ask you to quiet down or leave.”
“I’m sorry” I beg. “Need to get going anyway, to the doctor. Just got a call that my test results are in and was trying to calm down. It helps with panic, you know? Saying what you see.”
“Right,” the attendant says in a hurried tone. “I’m sorry about that. It can’t be in here though. Not with you talking like that.”
“But it’s the Museum of fucking Sex,” I say.
“Sir, either you move along, or I call someone to ensure you do. Are you here with anyone else?”
“No… I mean, my girlfriend, but she left. Whatever, fine. I’m going,” I say, drifting forward in a boneless way. A collage of neon dildos and elephant-skin bullwhips melts around me before the street smell of piss-fermented rot brings 27th and 5th into blistering focus. On the road a Sherpa-style bike courier disappears through the fog flowering from a copper-red manhole when he whips no-hands alongside the cars. My ass clenches for him: I never learned to heed a bike no-hands because when I was seven a F-150 gleamed the summered sidewalk with my no-hands-riding cousin’s corpus callosum. It’s vital to always be in control.
My phone barks 5 o’clock, and Dr. Cohen says I have to see her by 5:30 if I want to get my results today. I need to, because I’ve barely slept since the test last week, and I won’t take another sleepless night where I’ll have the same premonition that the sun won’t come back up in the morning, having finally burned itself out to leave me alone in an endless state of lightless hypnagogia. My girlfriend, Rachel, thinks my shit sleep is why I haven’t been able to get it up. We both hoped the museum visit would arouse anything.
The intersection at 28th and 5th may as well be a wall of Jericho because Ubers and Lyfts stream in airtight unison like schools of fish. Although unlike fish, these bodies hate each other; they scream, yell, and honk, probably aware but completely apathetic to their shared struggle. I daydream about the accidents at this intersection caused by hasty, angry, distracted drivers, or impatient pedestrians, and the many others that will happen and how they might happen and how many lives they will claim and then a jarring
HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK from an Uber driver banging his banged-up pleather steering wheel ushers me across the street.
At the subway entrance I choke on my held breath when I join the rush of people pouring inside like sewer rats into a sinkhole, everyone here racing violently in their solipsistic swimlanes to the song of hot-rolled steel, guiled by an urban Siren that sings with the promise of a little more time with loved-ones before jumping back on their Sisyphean ships.
By the time I’m down at the southbound track, a new crowd nearly pours onto the rails in anticipation of the next train. I can feel the warm breath and empty eyes of strangers and try to hold my respiration: I’m late on my flu shot and experienced a particularly bad flu last year -- a continued issue I know is a byproduct of my bronchitic childhood.
“Man with laptop, Man with crack pipe, Man with briefcase, Man masturbating,” I mutter, trying to calm myself in the absence of constant movement. I don’t want to think about my test results, but can’t allow myself not to, out of fear that somehow by doing so I’ll ill-prepare myself for the worst possible outcome. I think it’s impossible I have something dire, but isn’t that what everyone who gets something dire thinks? There are people behind statistics, you know. We all become part of them one way or another.
See I’m certain that I’m not actually scared of death’s finality, just the unpredictable cruelty of the process, and so hovering weightlessly over the magnetic polish of the subway tracks, I can’t help but think to myself: why not just make a choice and make my own luck for once? Death can be a choice, after all.
Before my thought can settle, the subway races to a halt. I screech in.
28th Street Station, North of NOMAD or OBSESSION
A homeless woman tramples and wavers against the train’s motion, reaching out for money so she can eat. Nobody looks at her, of course, and I lazy-eye a neighbourly smile when she passes. Her upper arms are Seurat-esque, pale canvases stained with blotted red dots, which makes me smile -- not sadistically -- but because I have the same dots, Keratosis Pilaris, and hers look identical to mine, meaning my case of Keratosis Pilaris is Keratosis Pilaris, in line with my twice-sought diagnosis, and not Petechiae, a symptom of Leukemia.
My Keratosis was one of three symptoms that started the two-week chain of visits leading to my test. I went in for:
1. Keratosis on my deltoids.
2. A swollen feeling in my right testicle.
3. What I determined to be Peripheral neuropathy, caused by an autoimmune disorder or brain tumour.
My mom booked me an appointment with her family doctor, my first with a non-pediatrician, non-walk-in-GP, somebody city-renowned for making effective diagnoses from oblique patient descriptions. Mom wasn’t able to bring me, of course, busy with a new deal she was in the last stretch of closing. Afterward, another deal awaited, Mom in a perpetual pie-eating contest where the prize is always more pie.
You see, Mom’s only real passion is getting into places and people. It took Mom six years to get on this doctor’s regular client list, and walking into the doctor’s office two weeks ago, I understood why. Nestled between West 71st and 72nd, the office had a gorgeous view of the park, Herman Miller chairs, and your choice of grapefruit or cucumber infused sparkling water. A lot of people died for doc to make all that money.
Despite the office's gaudy glitz, the routine there was the same: my name was called, and a nurse led me to a sanatorium-white examination room with the same lifeless-charisma of the hospitals I tried to avoid. Waiting frenetically for my damnation in the room’s white void, the doctor disassembled me upon entry. Under her medical gaze I wasn’t a person: I was a time slot, a healthcare number, 2 testicles, 32 teeth, 206 bones, 600 muscles, and 86 billion neurons; a dysfunctional organic machine and nothing more.
“Stand up,” she ordered, placing me against a wall and then a scale, where I learned I’m 6’2” and 145 pounds, the 90th and 30th percentiles in the respective measurements. She examined my transparent skin and my yellow-green eyes, then peered in my nose, ears, throat and mouth. Could she tell what had been in all of them? She listened to my lungs like an iPod, nodding and humming throughout, then tested my reflexes with a vacant smile. When she felt my pulse I focused on her movements: these checks should be mine.
“All good,” she said. “For peace of mind, I’m happy to order you an ultrasound for your testicle, and an STI test if you have any concerns about transmission. The spots on your arms are not of concern, something benign called Keratosis Pila-”
“I know,” I said, desperate to establish authority.
“Oh, okay,” she said, indifferent. “Anyway, your nervous functioning is fine. Nothing to be concerned about.”
“I have this burning sensation in my legs though. And sometimes, my foot falls asleep and I can’t wake it up. I also get really bad floaters in my field of vision. And I twitch in my upper arm sometimes.”
“All very normal,” she assured. “Try to make sure you're doing the basics, like exercising, sleeping well, eating well, et cetera. Vitamin B12 will help with the-”
“I’m already taking it,” I boasted.
“Well maybe start with exercise then. A lot of these symptoms can be psychosomatic or manifestations of anxiety, you know. I see it all the time.”
I nodded sharply.
“I think seeing someone might benefit you, and I can refer you to a good psychiatrist downtown, a Columbia alum, who has immense success with all of his patients.”
“Columbia isn’t a top three medical school?” I said, confused.
“You’ll be lucky to see him, okay?”
“Okay.”
After the appointment, I stood outside of the office and scaled the park and the surrounding buildings with my eyes. Which would last longer? Under the sun I pulsed.
That first appointment was two weeks ago, and the seasons had already changed. Two weeks seems like lifetimes on the subway, spaceship-like with black-filament windows and dilated time. My head dribbles as it drifts transfixed into the window’s void while the speakers above me fart alive to a spasming MTA announcer’s THIS IS 23RD STREET.
The train slows; the world reappears.
23rd Street Station, South of NOMAD or RUMINATION
The train moves; the homeless woman falls.
Only one person moves to help her, and from the side, the person resembles Rachel, so much so that I deseat to greet her but reseat incel-like when she looks over at me. Every day I see people on the street who look like people I know, or have known. In particular, my friend Moe, dead since my sophomore year. I see people with his same meandering gait, same square frame, and call out, half-hoping his passing was some perturbed hallucination because his absence doesn’t cease to feel derealized. Of course, he’s dead dead dead, but somehow his doppelgangers make it feel like he lives on. It makes me hope there are thousands of others who look like me, so that the few that care might find spontaneous solace when I’m gone, though I’m not sure what the corollary of that is when I’m still living. Hopefully I find out.
Speaking of Rachel, an iMessage from her came through the 23rd station wifi hotspot at 5:12 bearing the words “i dont think i can do this anymore.” She’s probably right. Rachel endured the results of my ultrasound and STI test last week with me (both perfectly clear), and waited for me when I met the psychiatrist I was referred to by the first doctor. His office, in contrast to the examination room from the week prior, could’ve doubled as a cigar lounge, with bleeding mahogany, little-to-no natural lighting, and quilted leather couches.
“I’m Dr. Lersack,” the man said, thick thumbs resting on the edge of his Presidential desk. He had a Wellesian demeanour and thin hair, which made me wonder if he had excess growth hormone.
“Nice to meet you,” I lied.
He grumbled in acknowledgement before asking when I started feeling bad. “Eighteen” I said. The end of youth, but not the beginning of any new coherence or maturity. “Ah,” he relieved, “Was that the year your father passed away?”
“No, he died a few years earlier.”
“And do you miss him?”
“Of course,” I said, though the question wasn’t so straightforward. It’s hard to wade through memory and recall how people really were. Most people I miss don’t actually exist.
“I see. And how far are you from your baseline now, would you say?”
“I’m at it,” I said, somewhere in the chasm between happy and sad.
“And when were you last happy?”
I paused. It’d been that morning: not when I met Rachel outside her apartment in Alphabet City, or when we kissed in Tompkins, or when she grasped my hand in Union Square, but rather, for a brief moment when the ultrasound technician told me my dick and balls are clean. I told Lersack as much.
Lersack said you're anxious and should consider taking medication. “Ativan works,” were his exact words. Sunk in my chair, the gravity of Lersack’s psychiatric gaze had pressed me into another fucking pill.
I contemplated explaining that I didn’t want a prescription because my father, a Podiatrist, had become addicted to Alzaprolam after taking it to reduce anxiety before a prototypical middle-age knee surgery, leading to his abuse of a handful of -tins and -ones that took his life. Instead, I said no thank you, I’d prefer pursuing more holistic avenues, and asked about a psychologist instead. He gave me someone’s number.
Outside the office, Rachel grilled me for refusing to try anything because she herself has been on Librium and Luvox since the Batman movie theatre shooting. “Doubt is an abyss,” Rachel said, “why don’t you just consider that maybe you’re physically okay, and mentally not. Then you can start to confront your shit.” I told her then that I first needed to get a second opinion on my self-diagnosed Neuropathy, which I’d have to reach out to one of Dad’s specialist friends, Dr. Cohen, to get.
At the Museum of Sex today, Rachel asked me the same question about ailment versus anxiety at the feet of two skeletons fucking. It isn’t that simple, I told her, because what if something went awry as soon as I stopped worrying? Standing by the fucking bones, Rachel looked through me, defeated, and walked out with the same wailing pitch that the train is making now as we pull into the next station.
Across the subway the homeless woman sits securely, and I scan my phone half-awaiting a text from Rachel that’ll retract her previous message, that’ll say she was kidding, or wants to talk, or isn’t thinking straight, and that she loves me. But, looking at my dying liquid crystal display, there’s only spam mail from WebMD warning me I have early signs of dementia.
With the wifi hotspot connected again I review my recent browser tabs. In 2021, the Wikipedia page for Xanax has 4,007 words; Integrative psychotherapy, 1,629.
14th Street Station, UNION SQUARE or COMPULSION
When the doors at 14th close, a familiarly angular face squeezes onto the subway car, and I nod hello to him. He doesn’t nod back, even after I notice his beady brown eyes, the same ones I’d looked at Bobst Library two years before. Tim was a master's student studying psychotherapy who I met through an online chronic pain group I frequented. There, he boosted the benefits of microdosing shrooms and acid. When we met in person, it turned out Tim was more of a small-time drug dealer than health-savant, and our chat quickly soured from curious discourse to failed business deal. I’d seen Tim around since and he’d acknowledged me, but maybe now he’s trying to shed that experience -- that life -- so he can be someone else. Or, maybe he just doesn’t remember.
A week ago I had the same fear I wouldn’t be remembered by Dr. Cohen, even though her and Dad had been old friends. When I made contact she was shocked by how old I was, like somehow Time had grown old and demented and forgotten me, and was even more shocked that I remembered her. Her office, embraced by natural light and adorned with wall-to-wall bookshelves, was at once personal and assuring. I told her about my previous concerns, the testicle, the spots, how I hadn’t been able to get much attention paid to my misfiring nerves. When she ran the same reflex tests as my first doctor, the results were the same. Though in light of my concern, Dr. Cohen offered to run a cursory MRI in her office, which Rachel protested by phone because of my claustrophobia and what she considered redundant radiation exposure. I did it anyway.
Emerging from the magnetic chamber, I stepped into a less suffocating world with more space for me to occupy and grow. Then, the space felt hopeful and free-flowing. Sitting on the subway now, the feeling’s gone.
Within five minutes I’ll know if my world is ending or beginning.
8th Street Station, NYU or RESULT
Standing at the door I notice the homeless woman is resting. For her sake, I hope this train never stops moving.
When the door splits open the pressure of the crowd propels me to the urban purgatory above. Dr. Cohen’s office is west of Astor Place, and I dance around jammed intersections and distracted couriers before wading through the brouhaha exploding entropically from the office building’s helicopter-like revolving doors.
Pushing forth my desperation to know competes with the desperation of an erupting crowd urgent to forget the calamity of the quotidian: that their employer wanted their brains, but they’d traded their souls, and inside I nearly crash into the security guard by the door when I rush to the elevators and swivel my head to the big lobby-clock that emits 5:28 in nuclear green. Beneath it is a Stendhal-scale piece by Elaine de Kooning that looks blood-splattered, as if the pneuma of everyone who’d clocked into this place were slapped against it, beaten into a withered nothing. Above the cockroach crowd the painting sits unnoticed.
I commandeer an elevator that smells like Finasteride and Macy’s perfume and open my empty phone to tell Rachel “At the office rn, hope things r OK. Promise if things r OK then this will b a changing point. Promise.”
On the sixth floor I stand outside Cohen’s waiting room, hesitant to open her office door, half-expecting it to be white-hot, the office burned to nothing and everyone inside it dead. I silently hope that it’s the case, as if somehow it’d renege the test, the results, and cauterise this miserable rabbit-hole. But, when I touch the door handle it’s cool, and it seems to unlock itself. Inside, the waiting room is vacant besides the receptionist closing shop. “I’m trying to catch Dr. Cohen,” I say, “she has test results for me.”
“She’s in the washroom,” the receptionist quips, “you can go into her office down the hall and to your left. She’ll be right with you.” I nod and hold my breath when I walk to Cohen’s office. Seated, the room hums with the breeze crashing against her window. Outside the dimming sky is frostburnt television static, and without natural light the room’s former comforts feel a bit fucked up under the interrogative glow of the Halogen light bulbs. “Apple computer, manila envelope, pen, nice pen, Mont Blanc pen? Who the fuck uses--”
“Hi Charlie, glad you could get in before I headed out,” Cohen says, her voice preceding her body as she walks to her desk.
“Of course,” I say, “I was in the neighbourhood. No trouble at all. Oh, and it’s Connor, sorry. Not Charlie.”
“Oh my goodness! I’m so sorry Connor. Long day, you understand I’m sure.” I don’t. Cohen licks her lips and logs into her computer, pulling up some chart that I can only obliquely understand. “So what are we doing here,” she mutters rhetorically. “Oh, yes, yes.”
My temples pulse.
“Well,” Cohen says, staring emptily into her screen. Her eyes are galactic black -- singularity black. “There were some findings.”
I feel a pit in my stomach.
“But that’s the risk of tests like these: incidental findings, sometimes.”
Nails dig into the etches of my palm as if gripping a bomb-wire to prevent complete implosion. I think this is it: what I know needs to be known.
“We did detect some white-matter sensitivities in your MRI, which is not necessarily expected in an MRI for someone your age…”
A beat.
“...But given the concussion you received as a child on your record, it isn’t of concern. Everything else on the scan came back normal. You are completely okay, and given what your mother has told me about your undergraduate performance, I feel confident in saying your brain is healthy, if not overperforming.”
“I’m okay?” I say.
“You’re okay,” Cohen mimics, her face creased into a smile.
“That’s good to hear,” I say, releasing the grip of my hands. “That’s good to hear,” I repeat, unsure of my own honesty. “Are you sure there were no issues with the MRI? One of the nurses seemed concerned afterward. I just want to confirm we’re considering the right chart.”
“Look, Connor. Everything came back perfectly OK. That said, I do suggest you get in to see someone. You remind me a bit of myself when I went through medical school, all of this concern. I can get you into a psychologist who specializes in OCD.”
“Okay,” I say, “Great.”
“You have your whole life to worry about health. Try to enjoy being young, please.”
I died when I was 18, I think.
Outside the office door I debate double-checking that the MRI machine wasn't faulty or that the nurse did his job properly or that the concussion I got won’t give me dementia when I’m 23, but when I grip the handle it’s locked stiff. This saga is over. There are no new answers; no new beginnings or ends. For now, I accept that I’m okay, because I understand intellectually that Dr. Cohen’s right about my worrying and all. I guess that’s where most people go wrong: it’s terribly difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile thinking and feeling.
In the plummeting elevator I text Rachel “GOOD NEWS-IM OK!!,” and three dots appear before I pass the fourth floor. By the second, they’re already gone. Taking three deep breaths under the shadow of the lobby painting, I’m waiting for a notification that won’t come. No matter what I know I’ll never get the response I want, anyway.
By the door, the security guard yells out to me. He says that I need to keep moving.
I do.
by Conor Truax
Conor Truax writes, designs, and makes in Toronto, Canada. He can be found on Instagram @conortruax.