Oprah's Dead Son: Chapter Three

A 9/11 Novel

The last time she and her Iranian neurologist had taken a look at her most recent batch of MRIs; Giselle saw the face of Jesus among the shades of gray in the dark recesses of her brain. That had been in July of 2001—before Mame died in August and before the world came apart in September. The image was vague, something along the lines of a miniature version of the way the face of Jesus appeared on the Shroud of Turin, but it was definitely the face of Jesus. Her neurologist didn’t see the face of Jesus, even though Giselle kept pointing it out to him on the x-ray against the light panel in the exam room. “Right there,” Giselle had said. “Come on. How can you not see that?” She touched the image with the tip of her index finger. Her short fingernail, polished bright red, hovered over the rivers and eddies of gray inside her brain. “What are you? Blind? If that’s not Jesus, I don’t know who is.”

“Remind me never to give you a Rorschach,” Dr. Javid intoned in that singsong Iranian way he had of talking. He peered over the tops of his black-rimmed Wal-Mart reading glasses, smiled a sweet smile and twinkled his extraordinarily large, extraordinarily brown, tired-looking Iranian eyes as best he could.

He may have been flirting with her. Giselle could never tell. She may have been flirting with him, for all she knew. She could never tell that either. Whatever boy-girl stuff she’d ever done had always just sort of happened. Out of the blue. When she least expected it. Especially with Father Gregory. Wow. Had that ever been a surprise!

She looked for something to get her off her train of thought and settled on the white plastic name tag above the breast pocket of her neurologist’s dark blue Men’s Wearhouse blazer: “Fariboz Javid, M.D.” He didn’t wear fancy clothes, except for that diver’s watch—but, generally, Dr. Javid didn’t seem to care whether he impressed anyone or not. He did his job. He was thorough. He was patient. If he didn’t know the answer to one of her questions, he didn’t lie about it, and sooner or later found out the answer—if there was an answer. He wasn’t condescending. He laughed at her jokes. That was what Giselle liked best about him. It was what she always liked best about anyone, and maybe he needed a diver’s watch. Maybe he was a diver. She didn’t know. “So, what do your friends call you? Fariboz? Fari?”

“Bo,” the doctor said quickly. He sounded both proud and embarrassed. “It came from a daytime soap opera.” He smiled a shy smile despite himself. “One of the other interns at the UC San Francisco and myself…Noc Nguyen was her name…she was Vietnamese…we used to watch it together in the lounge when we could. I forget now the name of which soap opera it was…”

“Days of Our Lives,” Giselle had supplied.

“That’s right!” Dr. Javid pointed a dark, hairy finger into the air. “We were engaged to be married. Dr. Noc and Dr. Bo.” He bobbed his head as if he were introducing the two of them somewhere in the dark recesses of his own brain. “I was very happy.” He looked down. He pronounced “happy” like “hoppy.”

It had to have been hard being a doctor in a foreign country. He was both a neurologist and a psychiatrist, Giselle knew, but had given up his psychiatric practice. She wasn’t sure why—probably ’cause his patients couldn’t understand what the fuck he was talking about half the time. She wanted to make him feel like he was helping her. That was impossible, of course. They both knew that. Her brain was going to do whatever it did. He squeezed his hairy hands together and sighed a deep, foreign sounding sigh. His eyes were the saddest brown she’d ever seen—with dark, foreign, hardworking circles under them. “What happened? Did you get married?” Giselle asked.

“Sadly, no.” The doctor took off his glasses. “It was a very long time ago.” The way he talked reminded Giselle of Apu on The Simpsons.

“So, Dr. Bo.” She smirked gently. “Anything good going on in my brain?”

The doctor put his glasses back on and cleared his throat. Giselle knew there was nothing good he could tell her. Her head was a mess. There was something terribly wrong with the blood flow to her brain. Capillaries kept collapsing. There were lesions on top of lesions. She’d had the equivalent of hundreds of small strokes. She already knew all that. Doctors had been examining her since she was seventeen. Now she was thirty-seven. That was what? Twenty years? Thirty-seven take away seventeen equals twenty. Ha! Giselle loved math. Sometimes when one of the mini-strokes occurred, she had seizures; she’d black out and fall down and get thrown into huge, vivid, complicated dreams—but usually they just gave her the most gigantic headache anyone could ever imagine. The headaches, even at their most severe, often lasted for days. She’d gotten used to them. The condition was both inoperable and incurable. There was nothing anyone could do. It could only be treated “symptomatically.” Giselle hated that word. “Symptomatically, my ass,” she used to say to herself, but, really, it was all she had. Intramuscular injections of DHE relieved the pain some if she caught it early enough. It was a balancing act. If she shot herself up too soon, the pain increased. If she waited too long, she had to tear off to the hospital in her Firebird to get intravenous injections. Sometimes she just passed out.

“How have you been tolerating the medication?” the doctor asked.

“Oh, just peachy after I get through puking my guts out,” she said.

“I can prescribe something for the nausea.” His expression brightened.

“That might be sort of cool.”

“I wish there were more that could be done, Giselle.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m tough. Let’s try the nausea stuff. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I’ve gotten used to puking my guts out.”

“You remind me a great deal of my mother.”

“Oh, great. Thanks.” She reared her head back in a way that might have looked like a cobra in a basket and wondered if it was in Iran that they had cobras in baskets…probably not, that was probably India, but for all she knew, it could have been Iran too. All she really knew about Iran was that it used to be Persia and figured that must have been where the cats came from. Well, that and that now it was some kind of Islamic Theocracy. Whether Dr. Javid was political at all, or religious, she didn’t know. He’d mentioned that he’d lived in Iran under the Shah but hadn’t seemed to give much of a shit about him one way or the other, either.

“No, no,” Dr. Javid put up his hand like a traffic cop. “You remind me of my mother only insofar as she also was a very strong woman, a very brave woman.”

“Is she still in Iran?” Giselle pronounced it like her father always had, I-ran.

“Iran, yes.” Dr. Javid pronounced it E-ron.

Aw. He liked his mother. How nice was that? Damn, she thought, and wished, again, that she liked her mother. His mother had liked him, though. That made all the difference. Dr. Javid’s eyes were so sad she wanted to cry. He looked like some big, morose, slow-moving animal; Eeyore, maybe, or that old mother cow she’d seen in Wisconsin with Mame. Giselle had been a kid; five or six—seven, maybe, at the most. It was just the two of them, her and her grandmother, driving way, way far out into the countryside one day, singing songs about teapots and spiders and rain barrels, laughing and licking Dairy Queens and dishing the dirt on Giselle’s mother and dad. “Do you miss her?”

“Yes, I do. Very much. She was the light of my life,” he said.

Giselle couldn’t tell whether he was talking about his mother or his fiancé…probably both. The way he’d said it had made her even sadder, had made her want to cry even more, but she didn’t cry. She almost never cried, no matter how much she sometimes felt like crying. Maybe her life didn’t have a light, Giselle had thought…but, no, that wasn’t true. Father Gregory had been the light of her life. Her dad, too, had been the light of her life until he just seemed to give up one day. It had been like he’d had to choose between Giselle and her mother, and he chose her mother, of course. Then there had been Mame. Her life had had a bunch of lights, now that she’d thought about it—even Dennis had been the light of Giselle’s life for a while. If she had to pick one, though, it would have been Mame, hands down.

When they were as far away from her house as Giselle had ever been before, Mame pulled over and stopped the car on the side of a dusty dirt road. Wisconsin was a whole different state, for gosh sakes, like almost a foreign country. Giselle had a hard time believing the grass was still green. There was a cow with its head hanging over a barbed-wire fence. Giselle had gotten out of the car. It had been okay with Mame. “Sure, sure, go ahead, dear,” Mame had said, shooing her out of the car with the back of her left hand—the hand with the real diamond wedding ring still on it, though her husband was dead already. He’d died young, everyone said.

The cow was standing in the shade of a tree with green nubs of unripe apples growing out from clusters of dusty leaves. Giselle got as close to the cow as she dared. Dried twigs cracked under her shiny black Mary Jane’s. Prickly weeds tickled her legs. The cow flicked its raspy tail at flies buzzing around its rusty haunches. That made Giselle jump. She’d wanted to look back over her shoulder at Mame but hadn’t wanted to take her eyes off that fidgety cow. She held out her hand. The cow’s huge nostrils were dripping snot like it had a cold. She wanted to wipe its nose, but she could tell the cow didn’t want its nose wiped. She could see from its eyes that all that old mother cow wanted was to be left alone in the shade of that ripening apple tree, out of the blistering heat of that midday sun. As Giselle backed away, reaching behind her to find the edge of the open door of the old Buick Mame drove, the cow blinked her sad eyes, slowly, out of gratitude, out of relief, out of pity and affection and understanding. It was a look, a feeling, a bond, a shared experience she knew she’d remember always, her and that cow, her and Mame and the door of the old Buick and Wisconsin and an innocuous apple tree.

She’d wanted to tell Dr. Javid—Bo. Bo! Ha! She’d wanted to tell Dr. Javid about the cow but didn’t know how. She doubted they even had cows in Iran and wasn’t sure how he’d take it that he reminded her of an old mother cow. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings. She didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. She wanted to cradle his head in her arms, to tell him not to worry, that everything was going to be all right. She wanted him to cradle her head in his arms and tell her not to worry, that everything was going to be all right. “You’re lucky,” Giselle had said. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t miss anyone.”

“It is difficult, I suspect. Either way,” the doctor had said.

On her way home from the doctor’s that day back in July of 2001, Giselle had thought about dropping by Mame’s house, just popping in for a quick cup of Earl Gray tea and whatever kind of butter cookies or angel food cake Mame might have on hand the way she always used to whenever she felt like it, but for some reason which she could no longer remember, didn’t. Then Mame was dead. Just like that. Giselle heard it from her mother over the phone.

“Mame’s dead,” her mother had said.

Now it was February. February of 2002. It had been six months since Mame’s funeral. It had been five months since September Eleventh. She had another semester under her belt. A new semester had started; different kids were learning Algebra and Geometry for the first time the way kids had been learning Algebra and Geometry since Euclid. Then it would be summer again. Then it would be November, and she’d be thirty-eight, then thirty-nine, then forty. Even thirty-seven was a lot of years old…one after the other after the other for as far back as she could remember, for as far back as it had been since Mame had shooed her out of the Buick to get a close-up look at that cow…that dead cow, that cow that had long since been ground up into hamburger and eaten on buns with ketchup and mustard by people who were now dead themselves, who’d been ground up themselves and had been eaten by bacteria.