Migraines and Metamorphosis
by L. B. Zinger
part 1
You have me at a disadvantage, Doctor. My glasses are broken, and I can't read your name tag. You introduced yourself, but I didn't catch it. They haven't let me shower, and I'm sitting here in a hospital gown, dirty and shivering. The room is hot, but I am cold inside. My feet are shackled and my hands are cuffed and chained to a bar in the middle of the table between us. You control me.
I sense that you are afraid of me. That makes me wary, not trusting. It's an easy equation. You fear me; therefore, my fate is in the hands of a coward. I have a sudden urge to take advantage of you, but I quickly suppress it as futile. My head is relieved of the intolerable pounding, but my thoughts are fuzzy from the drugs you filled me with.
We are in an interview room in a hospital. A mental hospital, I think. It must be so, although I cannot remember how I got here or why. It's not the first time for me, nor is it likely to be my last. You are not the first doctor who has interviewed me, but perhaps one of the youngest. They sent a woman this time. Were they expecting us to bond? Only young people can do your job, and they do it badly. Your kind tries to empathize but never seems to truly understand. My life hangs on your reports and assessments: what you perceive as truth will determine the drugs, electroshocks, surgeries or confinements I will receive. You are too inexperienced to have this much power over me.
You ask me who I am and where I live. You know all of that from the intake forms, so why should I answer? I watch you circle around to the true reason we are here: what happened and for what reason? Honestly, I don't know the answers to those questions, but I watch you struggle with how you can get “true” answers. You say that “this time” I attacked a stranger on the street. I don't recall doing that and I'm not sure that I would tell you if I did, it would only confirm the diagnosis that you've pre-determined: homicidal schizophrenia.
I try to see you as you see me: disheveled, probably sub-normal intelligence, violent and disturbed. I'm none of those things, but I won't waste time trying to convince you because it really isn't worth the effort. This is my first hospitalization in ten years, but I haven't forgotten how the game is played. Nothing I say will change what happened before, and everything I say will be used against me in legal proceedings. I can't win but I will make you lose if I can.
You are my opposite, a mirror to what I once was. You wear your hair pulled back in a fierce bun from which no strand escapes. Your hair is an enviable golden blonde and perfectly straight. Your skin is smooth and your eyes are a soft blue. You look kind, but I'm not fooled; you are still the enemy.
You ask me about my headaches.
These aren't common headaches to be tossed away with a casual word. By calling them headaches, you have, like everyone else, trivialized them. They are migraines. And they are not ordinary migraines. I correct you, and you rephrase the question to ask about them as migraines. You request a sequence of events and a time of life when they started. That I can give you.
My migraines started when I was fourteen, at puberty. For the first few years they occurred a week before my period every month. It was a long time before I realized that there was a pattern: a period of extreme lucidity came first, a true aura. I feel well, almost euphoric, and there is a sharpness to the world of color and piercing light offset by darkness. One time while walking in Manhattan, I saw jagged spears of sunlight and shadow split by the skyscrapers. It was beautiful and terrifying at the same time. My pre-headache euphoria is like that: everything in photographic staccato so intense it is painful. I dread those days when I feel exceptionally well because they foretell of a migraine to come.
Inevitably, my euphoria is followed by scintillating vision that starts as a peripheral shadow, as if a ghost is passing to my side. The tiny prisms of light and color gradually consume all of my vision, leaving a thin pinpoint in the center to define the limits of my world. This lasts twenty to thirty minutes. Then the lights fade to the periphery, and I have a half-hour of clarity before the headache starts.
I was sick the year that they started. I had Graves' disease and the kids at school had started calling me “Bug Eyes” because the disease made my eyes stare and stick out. The migraines were worse. My eyes got better, but I was still “Bug Eyes.” My doctor, who had little interest in an adolescent with a fragile ego and volatile emotions, decided that my headaches were all due to tension and gave me drugs that made me sick and didn't touch the pain. I gave up on headache medicine. I went to bed in a dark room with a pillow over my head and surrendered to a deep sleep that left me with a hangover the next day, when bright sunlight could easily trigger a relapse. My eyes are still very sensitive to flickering lights.
The first time I dissociated — that's what I call these episodes where my consciousness disappears from time and place — was during a summer visit to my grandparents on Cape Cod. My parents and brother decided to drive to the beach for a walk after dinner. They made me come with them. When we got to the beach, I didn't feel well — my stomach hurt — so they left me in the car.
A dense fog rolled in as the sun set. I was cold and afraid that they were never coming back; it took them so long. I believed that they were lost. My eyes flickered with the unnatural light and color, and I shivered with an internal cold. A sense that I needed to find them, to not be alone, overwhelmed me. I got out of the car and started to run in the direction they had gone.
I wonder about telling you all this. You look interested, but I have been fooled before. It would be nice if at least one of the doctors saw me as a human being with emotions and intellect, rather than some kind of beast. You seem nice enough: pleasant, attractive, and wearing a nice sweater with a string of pearls and pearl earrings. Your watch is unexceptional, and, if I could see them under the table, I suspect that you have on sensible shoes. All of these are things that I would be comfortable wearing. Under other circumstances, we might become friends, but we are not.
I remind myself that I don't have clothes to armor me against the world right now. They have all been taken away as evidence. I have a hospital gown, and my bracelet jewelry keeps us separated by a four-foot chain, to protect you from me. Outside the door, I can see the shadow of a guard. Between us is a button either of us can push to stop the interview and summon help. In the corner, a light flickers over the television camera, and I am certain that somewhere a recording is being made. Not that anyone has told me that I am being recorded, but I have been in rooms like this before.
I must have stopped talking, because you redirect me. What happened next, you ask?
As I ran down the beach, I suddenly found myself somewhere else. It was another beach, but not the one I knew by my grandparents' house. It was totally unfamiliar, but somehow, I felt that I had been there before.
“Déjà vu?” you ask, and I nod yes.
The sand was scant, black and hot, like lava. It burned my feet. The sea was angrier and rougher than in the bay where we normally swam. There were more rocks, and I stumbled and cut my hands as I crawled over them. Out of the mist, a large animal — a panther or a big cat — jumped me. I fought it as best I could, blood pouring from scratches on my arms and neck, beating it with rocks as it swiped massive claws at me. I stumbled and hit my head, then I lost consciousness.
You don't believe me; I can see that already. Something in the file has told you that this is untrue. Your face is too blank, too innocent, carefully hiding skepticism. That is what happened. That is my truth.
What about the dog, you ask? I don't recall seeing a dog. They told me that I attacked a dog and beat it senseless with a rock, but I have no recollection of that. It wasn't me; I wasn't there. My parents found me huddled against the breakwater, covered in blood and crying. That's what they told me later, after the dog's owner had been paid off and calmed down .
Do I remember other episodes?
I don't want to tell you about them. I answer that I learned to deal with my headaches by going to bed and sleeping. Sometimes I have dreams, but I never had anything like that happen again. I know that isn't true, but it's all I can manage today.
You have a look of disbelief. I saw it before you carefully concealed it again. I was Phi Beta Kappa and have a Master's in American History; I'm not a savage. You believe I'm another sadistic psychopath who ends up in the mental hospital after brutally killing people. That's not me. I'm a librarian who works in a college library helping kids with their studies and research. I have a life outside this hospital. I take my meds and don't bother anyone.
You change topic and ask me why that beach, lava sand and a roiling sea? I was never asked that question before and it intrigues me. I am a visual person, and I search my memory for scenes like that. Finally, I think I have it: a book of Scandinavian Fairy Tales that I loved as a child had demons that arose from a dark and threatening ocean. There was always a village in the distance, a village protected by knights on horseback in one tale or by a variety of large predators in others. The village seems to represent safety to me and the enemy always comes from the sea. You scribble something on your pad and fumble for your next question.
Can I have a glass of water or maybe a little something to eat? It's been a long time in this room. My butt is sore and I'm getting tired of your questions. I'd like a break. Thank you.
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Copyright © 2021 by L. B. Zinger
