Lucia Perillo: I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature

The doctor’s English was barely decipherable to me, and I understood that I represented just a small subset of his patients too stupid to be able to speak Chinese. He responded the same way Americans do when traveling abroad and wishing to be understood — he made his voice so loud I cowered.

Stick out your tongue! he commanded. Then he consulted his big book of tongues, whose photos’ lurid colors so contrasted with their orderly array that they left me dizzy.

It is the liver! he shouted after a few minutes of flipping. Taking a Q-tip and unwinding the cotton from one of its ends, he stabbed a spot inside my ear. I understood him when he said I should do this throughout the day, I should stab hard enough to hurt.

6

When I first moved to this town, there was only one therapist who practiced the technique called Jin Shin Jitsu. She also was a counselor, so our sessions comprised two distinct halves. First I would weep and then she would touch me.

She placed her hands on two different topographical features of my body — say, nose and shoulder — creating a kind of circuit while soothing music played. Soothing music annoys me until my annoyance builds up enough momentum to burst through to surrender like the car leaping through the paper skin inside the hoop of flame. Then I can stand the soothing music.

But I grew suspicious, as our weeks of weep-and-touch went by, that she wanted to cut down on the weeping and up the touching half. I got the impression she didn’t think I was gaining ground on my misery quickly enough. And was it just me, or had she changed her manner of offering the tissue box? Where once had been her tentative nudge, now there was a disgruntled thrust?

7

It was in my hunt to score some vitamin B shots that I learned of Dr. N, whose office I found — oddly — in a residential apartment complex south of town. The person who mentioned his name was the same woman who’d sent me to the Chinese doctor in Seattle, and she confided that, though she knew he gave the shots, she wouldn’t necessarily recommend him. She’d seen him for a case of strep throat and had allowed him to give her a pelvic exam because he said he needed to check for signs of yeast. Then she learned other women had filed complaints. Though her humiliation obviously pained her, she said she was grateful for his recipe for a delicious soup that she still made.

No, she said in answer to my question, it was not called Bieler’s Broth.

Dr. N himself answered the door of his apartment/office, which was long and narrow, with a windowless storage room between the front office (no receptionist) and the back bedroom, which served now as his examination room. Before he gave me the shot, he asked a dozen standard questions. When he asked if I had any sexual dysfunction, I asked him why he wanted to know, though I am usually not assertive in the presence of authority.

“Sexual dysfunction is indicative of many underlying conditions,” he answered, backpedaling but not quite defensive: it seemed as if he knew I knew. But soon he gave up on his line of questioning and administered the shot into my buttocks, after I cinched down my skirt as few inches as necessary in the storage room.

Afterward he said, “I believe there is hope for you. I had another patient with multiple sclerosis who came here crying”—here he did a pantomime of a woman in distress—“and now she is getting married, after I made her better.”

He lifted his shirt and swatted his chest with the back sides of his hands. “Guess how old I am!” Fifty? “Almost sixty! And I win swimming competitions with men half my age.”

And his body was remarkably taut — it was only his eyes that looked defeated, their black interiors like prunes — or some other kind of shriveled, desiccated fruit.

8

Soon I learned that I could get the vitamin shots from a naturopath. The one whose office was nearest where I worked specialized in colon irrigation. She wore heels and tight-fitting, brightly colored business suits that did not flatter her figure.

This amused me because, soon into our first meeting, she told me about how she’d been so constipated as a child that she moved her bowels only once a week. Her parents kept a stick by the toilet so she could chop her stools before she flushed. Though she must have told the story all the time, it amused her too, so much so that afterward she’d used a tissue to blot the mascara stains that were ruining the rest of her make-up, before she signaled that it was time to return to more sober work by hitching down her skirt where it had ridden up her thighs, having skidded along the shimmering surface of her nylons.

9

Kombucha is the name of a rubbery fungus that resembles a moon-glo frisbee. My first job associated with its care was to procure a large pickle jar to keep it in, as though it were a pet like a snake in need of a terrarium.

It lived by floating — quivering it seemed — on a lagoon of sweet green tea. Clouds and specks and ghostly tentacles appeared, drifting below it in the jar. Fermentation caused the tea to taste like apple cider vinegar, and each day I was supposed to siphon off a cup to drink. The brew was said to have healing powers that I never investigated too thoroughly, though my mushroom, which I obtained from a friend, came with a sheaf of Xeroxed testimonials.

Kombucha replicates by spawning a twin, a flat clone that grows slowly until its thickness equals the parent’s. This meant that each week brought a new fungus to be given away, and soon all my friends had their own mushrooms — the mushroom’s curative powers were general enough to suit all our needs. Our collective fungal propagation came to be a civic rite that required an ever-increasing group of participants, like a pyramid or Ponzi scheme, and everybody knew it couldn’t go on forever.

The end may have been foreshadowed in all the ghost-gook our creatures produced. We didn’t stare at our jars too long. Soon we began procrastinating about the chores of making their tea and pulling apart the new offspring, until we all had layer on layer of the tan mushrooms, pleated like accordions left to rot in tannic puddles in the middle of a rainy woods.

10

The friend who gave me the mushroom that united so many of us for just a season lived on a shoestring, yet she invested in an expensive machine called The Voyager. When I asked her recently how she came to possess it, she didn’t remember: the afflicted are never at a loss for people who show up on their doorstep with a tool or a pill to sell. This is a form of celebrity, to learn that one’s name is being whispered in far-off rooms. And yet the vendors seem sincere when they arrive at the door with their products, which they look down at so hopefully, as if they held a new baby in their arms.

The Voyager could be set to various modes: Relaxation, Energy, Sleep. Put on its black visor and shooting stripes or dots appeared, like when you hurt yourself and reflexively your eyes clamp shut.

When my friend loaned me The Voyager, I found its painlessness disorienting: its visions looked like they’d been birthed by trauma and so I thought pain should accompany them. Every so often I’d take The Voyager off to orient myself once again to the non-Voyager world. Then I’d scan myself and become angry when nothing hurt.

11

Evening primrose oil, niacin, olive extract, garlic, flaxseed oil, grape seed extract, [forgotten herb X], ginseng, bioflavinoids, [forgotten supplement Z], lecithin, Coenzyme Q10. Though I forget why I took them, some names I remember simply for their jangly quilt of syllables: Pycnogenol, Sphingolin. This last pill was made from cow brains, and I thought it made sense to ingest the neural coating that my immune system was attacking. If I ate a bit each day, I thought my body might get used to it. Then mad cow disease made my theory seem imprudent.