Hypochondria

It only occurs to me after I’ve tapped “End Call” on my phone that nothing is wrong. I flip my wrist to the fleshy side and see a rhythmic throbbing, a tiny footloose fetus. So: I am alive. But not comfortably.

There is a sensation where the stair meets my butt, and I search for the word it belongs to.

Cold, I determine. Hard.

I lift my body half an inch north and slide my puffy coat beneath to dispel the sensation. That’s better. Well. Still kind of cold, but better than the thin film of my nightie to buffer ass and stair. I paw at my pockets knowing I’m not going to find my keys in there, but imagine maybe God intervened and delivered them when I wasn’t looking. No, still no keys. I sigh, stare impotently at my locked apartment door. Don’t @ me, says God.

I dial 911.

Hello, how are you, I say. I just called. I’d like to cancel my ambulance.

Unfortunately, the ambulance has already been dispatched and will be arriving shortly.

 Oh, shoot. Yes, I actually hear the sirens now. (A shrill sound peals Dopplerishly around a distant bend). Well, I’m very sorry to waste your time. I sincerely thought I was dying. I think I was just having a panic attack.

 Okay.

 I haven’t had one in a very long time, so it took me a minute to realize what was happening. I apologize.

 That’s okay. Just let the EMTs know when they get there.

 Right, sounds good. Also, I have one more question—will I be charged for this ambulance?

 You’ll only be charged if you are taken to the hospital.

 Oh, what a relief. That’s awesome. That’s great news. Okay. Well, thank you so much for your attention, I really appreciate it…?

 Emilia.

 Emilia. Thank you so much for your help, Emilia. I feel a lot better. Take care now.

 No problem. You too. Buhbye.

 Buhbye.

*

After I locked myself out of the apartment, the EMT guys drove me to Furry Sundae on Knickerbocker Ave, the gelato shop for dogs where Rhea works. No one had come in all night, so she told me she’d lock up early and meet me at home in an hour. 

I’m scared to be alone, I told her. It’s just one hour, she said, handing me the keys to our apartment. We’ll go for drinks. You’ll forget you ever thought something was wrong.

Now we’re on our third whiskey sour outside the only bar in Clinton Hill we could find open this late on a pandemic Tuesday. I’m Juuling and prospecting on Hinge, while she smokes and rhapsodizes about modern romance.

“I just want every man to be completely fucking in love with me, okay? When he pulls out his dick I want it to be like a young King Arthur just unsheathed Excalibur from the stone.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” I say, smudging words together. “That makes it sound like he’s more into his dick, which is the sword, than your pussy, which is the stone.”

Rhea’s cigarette flares maple; she seethes smoke like syrup through her teeth. “Can you actually maybe stop policing my metaphors for a second? Do you mind?”

“Sorry,” I say, tapping my screen to recon a profile. This year, I really want to: Breathe publicly, he answers. Between a picture of a dalmationed banana and a picture of an animatronic bull is a photo of a boy with broad, complex features wearing a pair of chemistry goggles. “I’m listening, it’s just also, I’m scrolling.”

“Uh-huh,” says Rhea, blindly using her tongue to locate the thin red straw in her drink. “Well,” she says after a long pull, “the metaphor still stands. Men are always more besotted with their own cocks than whatever neck muff happens to be wrapped around it.”

“What is a neck muff? Did you just call women neck muffs?” Rappelling down the profile, I find a full body shot: the blade of summer light shears his face into a profile, like the side of a coin; there’s a small Lola Rabbit tattoo incised on his right ribs. A little chichi, I think. He’s 6’3”.

“It’s like a Narcissus thing,” Rhea says. She sits next to me on the stoop and docks her chin on my shoulder, kneading its soft hollow as she talks. “The phallus-as-a-mirror or whatever—you know. Aren’t you studying Lacan?”

“Not really. I just transcribe the Écrits Adele has me highlight at work.” I can feel Rhea’s eyes scan my screen.

“That guy is twenty-two.”

“I know he’s twenty-two, but he gave me his rose,” I snap.

“Whatever. Your life.” She nuzzles my neck like she’ll fall asleep there. My nerves go static with the brush of her curls, the February air. It’s balmy, apocalyptic, and Rhea’s breath is sweet in a way it shouldn’t be—a carbon-whiskey bay breeze. “Are you feeling better now?”

“I guess,” I say. “I can’t really feel anything.”

“Mmm,” she says. “Are you ready for your trip?”

“To cat-sit? I guess.” I’m leaving tomorrow to spend a week in Sy and Theo’s Prospect Heights apartment to help their cat, Ms. Pretty, lose 2 lbs. I still have work at Adele’s in the city, culling distant quotes from philosophers and psychoanalysts and stitching them together, searching for common threads. She’s writing a book on Gestalt psychology, and is paying me to help her with research while I look for a job.

“There’s this story I read,” Rhea says, eyes closed, jaw nodding. “‘I Am Shy A Hole’. You’d like it. It’s by Gary Lutz. Or, actually, Gari with an I.. She just came out as trans a few days ago, I think.”

“I am a shy hole.”

“No, ‘I Am Shy A Hole.’”

“I am shy a hole.”

 “Yes.”

I tap “Like” on the boy’s profile and shut off my screen. Rhea unlatches her head from my shoulder as I tip my head back to drain my whiskey. Ice chips sling into my mouth and back to the glass like a shower of castanets, and I resurrect with an upper lip that’s slick and wet and shiny. I’ve kept a chip of ice between my front teeth. “I am a sigh hoe,” I lisp around it. “I am a sigh hoe.”

* 

Last night he told me we could narrow it down to a boy-girl thing, and I let him disrobe me. I had to think about the knees of the girl I sat across from last year in school.

This much is figured out: the thing about being a girl is that stuff is stuck inside you—but with a boy, stuff goes away and never comes back. A boy keeps losing himself. A boy just keeps watching himself run out.

It happens while I’m reading the book Rhea gave me. A darkness froths at the edges of my vision. The apartment, a sinister universe, could sit on the head of a pin. At its center, Ms. Pretty distends the scratch box with her tummy, a menacing velvet reservoir. White walls gape and gleam like a febrile Alhambra, the houseplants reach for me, clutch at me, threatening to capsize their pots.

Please, please hurry, I am dying. There is a hole in my throat. I am bleeding deep inside. Something is wrong with me. Please help, I don’t want to die.

I take my hands off my throat and stir the premises to collect my phone, wallet, keys. I find my coat, stuff an arm through a sleeve, and let the rest drag behind me like a beaver tail. I check the kitty feed in the kitchen, where dry brown curds spill onto the kitchen floor. If I die she’ll have enough to eat, but not so much as to defer her weight loss goals.

I wrench the front door open and heave my body down the hall towards the elevator. The chamber shudders on the way down, and I stand very still so the hole in my throat won’t retaliate. When I get to the lobby, I sit. I choose a spot next to the door so if I slip from consciousness before the EMTs arrive they will see my lifeless body right away, and not think they went to the wrong building or something.

A pitter patter. There’s a man descending the stairs to check his mailbox. He looks at me, flinches, and fumbles a tiny key into the lock. The door opens to a fathomless black peg-hole which he peers into, like an Amazon package is stuffed all the way in the back. Help me, I think, my cheek pressed to the cool stucco wall, tears sliding down my face and into my mutely open mouth.

I forgot my mask upstairs, I realize. Keys, wallet, phone, mask. I slit my lips, try to breathe smaller. I am defiling the air with my breath. There is too much air surrounding me, crushing me. I am drowning in air. There’s been a pressure shift inside my organs: they can no longer regulate the amount of oxygen they’re taking in. My trachea and esophagus have congealed and distended like a pair of overstretched trousers. Air is flushing through me down the wrong channels, the wrong pipelines—I picture my body as porous and chaotic as an old volleyball net next to a guy with a leaf blower. I will die from too much air. And I will kill this man with my protrusive, unchecked breathing.

He closes the mailbox door with potent disappointment and begins a weary ascent up the stairs. I hear sirens. Then I see Adele is calling me, so I pick up the phone.

“I’m breathing too much,” I say. A bolt of adrenaline impales me and pulls my knees taut, and I stand, quaking.

“That’s not possible. You’re having a panic attack.” I start to loop around the lobby. If I move, maybe the air will have somewhere to go, some physical exertion to feed—the air will have a reason to aerate, to be aerobic, and not just float around in me anarchically, bidding death. I begin to loop faster.

“But how do you kn-n-now that-t-t?” I say. My teeth are chattering. A mutinous rattling at the back of my skull. The sirens ripen. “Something is very wrong. I k-n-now it. S-s-something is wrong with me on the insid-d-d-e.”

“There is nothing wrong with you,” she stresses, and keeps repeating—there is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with you.

Something undams in me, a valve, a floating lung. My breath accelerates, heightens. My ribcage is a flooded house and the attic is the only place untouched by water, where my breath sequesters as water scales to the  ceiling.

 “SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH ME.”

"THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU!"

“YOU DON’T KNO-O-OW THA-A-A-T-T-T.”

 “BREATHE.”

I hear a rapping on the door. Two guys in uniforms, a smaller black guy and a large white guy, stand outside the lobby. My ambulance is here.

“Hold on, I have to get the door for the EMTs,” I tell Adele.

 “Somebody call for an ambulance?” one says.

"Yes, that was me. I’m dying.”

The white guy squinches his eyebrows and the black guy squinches his lips into a Sourpatch shape. “You’re dying?”

“Yes.”

Is everything okay? says a tiny Horton Hears A Who-sized voice beneath me. I hold the receiver beneath my chin and ask Adele if she can give me a minute for a second.

Tell them you’re having a panic attack, says the Who-voice as I lower the phone.

“I actually feel a lot better now that you’re here,” I realize. My teeth have stopped chattering.

“That’s great. What happened?” I read his name tag. KAREEM, it says. BRENDT, says the other.

 “I might be having a panic attack. But there’s also definitely something wrong with my throat.”

“What’s wrong with your throat?”

“Well, it’s making a weird sound when I touch it in a certain way.”

“Okay,” says Brendt. “Well, let’s take your vitals and you can show us in the truck.” The truck.

We step outside, me and my men in uniform, one on either side. They’ve parked the ambulance on the corner by the fried chicken place. Scarlet pinwheels of light flagellate the KANSAS ORIGINAL sign like exploding flashbulbs, paparazzi. I pull my bloated winter coat closer around me like it’s a mink. I feel glamorous.

The inside of the ambulance has a lot of buttons, knobs, and contraptions to administer an order to the body. I sit on the bench and denude my arm of its sleeve so Brendt can velcro a pressure band around it. He begins to pump, and I am soothed by its cool vinyl astringency. “Sexual Healing” is playing on the radio. My head bops against my will.

“So, what’s the thing with your throat?” asks Kareem.

I take a deep breath and show them. I press on the cavity at my clavicle, where the Adam’s apple dives deep below the surface, down to the body’s unknown leagues. I take a breath. There it is: a rasping, the sound of breathing underwater—a dead man’s throat.

“You hear that, right?”

“I hear it.”

“Me too.”

“Wait, I want to see if mine does that,” says Kareem. A memory scans behind my forehead: playground, jungle gym, smell of sooty rubber. A cluster of children, our shirts raised to compare innies, outies, in-betweenies.

Kareem unbuttons his EMT coat. It looks ill-fitting, scratchy, pilling at the hemlines. He digs two fingers into his neck, presses on the cavity above his clavicle, and breathes smooth. “Nope, mine doesn’t sound like that.”

“Do you know what it could be?”

“I don’t know. But you definitely aren’t dying.” He checks Brendt’s clipboard. “Your vitals are fine. Blood pressure’s a little high, but that’s probably because you were hyperventilating. You’re not in any pain, right?”

“Not really. But I should be.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t treat my body well.”

“Ah.”

“I was on a date last night. I got very drunk. I threw up,” I tell them. “I vape.”

“It happens,” he says. “You have a boyfriend?”

“No. I’m on Hinge.”

“I’m on Tinder.”

“Tinder’s no good. You gotta try Hinge.” I look at Brendt. He seems pinker than before. I ask him: “Have you ever had a panic attack?”

He shrugs. “I don’t think so.”

“They’re terrible. You really think you’re dying. And then, you really start to die.”

Kareem starts buttoning up his EMT coat again. “I had a panic attack once.”

“You did? What happened?”

“I was driving on the highway. I got really tight, like the ceiling of the car was crushing me. I couldn’t breathe. Had to pull over on the shoulder and call my sister.” He puts down the clipboard and leans against the ambulance’s back doors. “We’ll wait with you until you’re ready to go.”

“You don’t have somewhere else to be?”

Brent shrugs. “We just drive around ‘til we get a call. We’ll probably just go eat lunch after this. It’s no problem.”

“I guess I’m ready to go,” I say. “I just don’t want to be alone. When I’m alone I start to feel like something’s really wrong.”

“You’re going to be okay,” says Kareem.“You should see someone about your throat thing, but you’re young. You’ll heal. The body is an amazing thing.”

“It really is,” I agree. “It’s a mystery.” 

* 

When I arrive at the CityMD the next morning, I find there’s something narcotic about the regiment of Q-tips, cotton swabs, and rubbing alcohol staged on the counter. The air inside my mask is stale and sap-like, but the clinic’s air is cold, harsh, perennially sterilizing itself in the ducts and turbines of central air technology. Loose hairs flutter at my temples. My paper gown confers butterfly kisses to each of my knees. My legs dangle like a child’s off the tracing papered chair, and I hush.

I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon screaming in Adele’s face:

I AM AN ANIMAL! I AM AN ANIMAL!

You’re not an animal— 

I AM AN ANIMAL!!!!!

You are a lovely, intelligent, bright, sweet girl—

She couldn’t hear me, I realized. I let the words denature in my mouth, go shy. I’m an animal, I thought, compacting them into a smaller size, a softer decibel. I folded them up in my mouth and passed them along, like paper planes sailed over a fathomless black gap.

I’m an animal, Adele. You are too.

After the panic subsided it was like my body was too tired to uphold the partition it placed between itself and everything else. I leaked through my eyes without cessation, plates of me drifting irretrievably out to sea. The whole world had been exposed, a burlesque of distinctions. My mind washed with watercolor versions of faces I had loved; I could feel each thing that separated us like an original division, like mitosis. Back to before bliss had first uncoupled from annihilating pain. I cried so hard I was afraid I’d break a rib, dislodge my heart. My heart was a sore globe.

Adele brought me a glass of water, a glass of rose-colored coconut water, and a smoothie. Later, my back turned to the guest bedroom door, I heard her slide three coasters beneath each of them after they’d begun to pool with neglect. I resigned myself to the hole in my throat, watching the watercolor faces spin around the drain. Staring at the unborn baby kick its foot against my wrist. I fell asleep like that, before the sun ran out, looking at my wrist, marveling at the fragile, tugboat pulse of life persisting, coaxing itself along.

The doctor enters the examination room.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Nigel,” he declares. His coat is crisp and white like a paper crane. He has a South African accent and seems imperturbably cheerful. “What’s going on today?”

“I’m worried there’s a hole in my throat,” I tell him, my voice catching in my mask. 

 “You can take that off,” he tells me. “I’ll keep mine on.”

I name all the reasons I’ve given my body to desert me. I ruin my lungs, I get drunk often, I sleep around, I don’t eat properly, don’t have health insurance, don’t have a job, don’t have a savings account, I can’t see the big picture of anything. “I’m sick,” I tell him. “I want to be better.”

“Let’s listen to your heart,” he says, and finds a spot beneath my gown to press the stethoscope to my chest. “Good.” He moves around my back. “Now, lungs. Breathe in.”

I breathe deep accordion breaths.

“Can I show you the sound my throat makes?” I ask. He nods. I steady myself, press two fingers to my throat, and breathe. It curdles, like breathing underwater, like a clogged drain.

“Ahh, yes,” he says. “That’s your esophagus. You don’t have a hole in your throat. You have acid reflux.”

Maggie Weiler is a writer and editor who writes thinly-veiled fiction from Philadelphia, PA and Brooklyn, NY. You can find her lurking in the inter-ether at @seriousgirlfriend on Instagram.

Image by Mart Productions