THE BEAUTIFUL SICK MAN BY JODIE NOEL VINSON

Published in SICK issue 4, 2022

Jodie Noel Vinson’s essays and reviews have been published in Ploughshares, The New York Times, Harvard Review, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature, among other places. She lives in Providence, RI, where she is writing a book about the creative expression of chronic illness.

I stretch out on the jewel green lawn of the Champs-Elysée. You pull out a journal and begin to sketch. Last night your subject was my body, which, at 29, retained the angular, broad-shouldered build of a high school athlete.

A few time zones and a day before, beside the Concord River, we’d said our vows, including in sickness and in health, and we’d meant it. But we also didn’t know what it meant.

 
The other night, when we didn’t have breath to speak, I found a journal and handed you a pen. This is how we’d communicate when the illness took away our words.

“Words only come when everything is over, when things have calmed down,” Alphonse Daudet observed during his long suffering from syphilis. “They refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful.”

Daudet’s unfinished record was curated into a staccatoed opus on illness, with swaths of sick time passing wordlessly in the white spaces between broken passages. The translator, Julian Barnes, called the book In the Land of Pain.


Beneath that bright Parisian sun, you’d traced the sculpted angles of Daudet’s statue residing over our picnic: pensive, dashing, head cocked in a winsome way. His jaunty charisma, apparent even in stone, makes it clear why Proust referred to the author as ‘the beautiful sick man.’


A decade after the honeymoon, we plan a different journey. As our flight to India lifts off from the East Coast, the first American life is lost to the virus out West.

Though it erupted with violence on our return flight, it must have begun upon arrival. A slight tickle spidering through sinuses, a strange malaise. Then, as if building toward a crescendo, a throb like an ominous drum deep within my cranium that night I ran across the palace square.


Daudet contracted the disease in his youth, but it lay dormant for decades until it reared its head in the 1880s, manifesting in an excruciating tertiary stage, an anguished finale.

“Warning signs going back a long way,” he observed. “Strange aches; great flames of pain furrowing my body, cutting it to pieces, lighting it up.”


When we met, everything aligned, alight with the synchronicity of story. We’d grown up within 50 miles of each other, in Iowa City and suburban Cedar Rapids. I’d played basketball in your high school gym. You’d shopped at my Barnes and Noble.

We arrived in Seattle within months of each other, worked at different branches of the same bookstore for two years by the time you walked into mine. Our apartments lay a mile apart.


You’d known all along, in your quiet, perceptive way. You looked at me with sadness the night I hissed at you not to be paranoid; it was just jet lag. The pandemic had barely begun.


By the time illness became the dominant focal point of his life, Daudet had asserted himself as a man of letters, admired for his ceaseless storytelling. Given this oeuvre, this penchant, this personality, it makes sense the sick man would bend what creative force he had left toward the shrinking circumference of life encapsulated by illness.


At first, I attribute my stomach’s churn to turbulence on the small plane we took from Udaipur to Delhi, en route to home. I leave you at the baggage claim to buy bottled water. By the time I find you, wrangling backpacks, I know in that awful, inevitable way: I am sick.

On the plane, I watch the nausea hit you with something more than empathy — I’d just been there myself. I could still hear the roar that filled my ears as the stall door slammed behind me and my body convulsed. I don’t know if the white-hot noise was something I made audibly, or only filled my ears from the inside. I felt possessed.


I remember you then: lanky and lean, with touches of feminine beauty — long lashes, deep brown eyes. I worried I might fall inside them that night our gazes locked. I had a premonition, something you’d known from the beginning.

Uh oh, I thought, as my stomach leapt: This is it.


His usual form, the novel, doesn’t seem sufficient; but, like a good memoirist, he worries about the truth’s effect on his family, considering his desire — when the pain is at its worst — for death.

Daudet’s compromise: couch the truth in fiction, in which the character takes notes on illness. “This notebook allows me a fragmented form, so that I can talk about everything, without the need for transition,” Daudet tells his friend, the publisher Edmond de Goncourt.

Pain calls one into the present; pockets of time pulled into sharp focus by the aperture of suffering. The reader is left to draw the moment’s connection to everything else.

The result is a searing account of the minutiae of Daudet’s illness, meted out over a decade, compressed into small doses. Between one entry and the next, untellable years of suffering are present on the page.


When we wake, it’s like rising from the dead. Fourteen hours have passed since we were last conscious. The nightmare flight, the incompetence of the CDC at the airport, the Uber ride through a whitewashed world after the vibrant colours of India — all seen through a haze.

What’s present now is you and me in our apartment, and that’s all there will be for quite some time.

You notice it first, in the shower: the chest pressure, the shallow breath. I stay in bed and call my mom, and then there it is, just as you said. A “web,” then, when it tightens, a “corset.” Impossible to describe, but I look in your eyes and know you feel it, too.


Fatigue was the first sign Daudet’s illness was returning. Then: “The ‘breastplate’: my first awareness of it. Suffocation, sitting up in bed, panicking.”


We lie on our backs after folding laundry, without energy to stand. In the face of caring while being cared for, we are patient and nurse, often in the same moment.

This is so hard, we tell each other.

From then on, our symptoms are synchronous. And even when they diverge in the way they manifest — a vise around the back of your head, while it grips me about the ribs — they flare in tandem, as if we are two ships tossed by the same sea.


“My friends, the ship is sinking, I’m going down, holed below the water-line,” Daudet wrote. “Beginning of the end.”


Our symptoms might be aligned, but our response to them is not. You are the perfect sick man, lying on the couch inert and lifeless, still as a log. I heap blankets on top of your shivering torso, heat bags of sweet-smelling rice, or rub an ice pack into the back of your head where the pressure persists, unrelenting.

When my symptoms flare, I resist and carry on, controlling what I can of the situation by checking another thing off my list. Put on a bathrobe, you urge as my pain mounts with each task. Stop cleaning the bathroom. You sneak an item onto my endless to-dos: Let my body rest for four hours.


The servants watch as Daudet hides his agony from his wife Julia, standing in her presence, collapsing when she leaves.


When the pain passes an unnamable threshold, you drive me to the ER. The hospital is so close I could walk, if not doubled over by the blades twisting through my lungs. Barred by Covid restrictions from entering, you sit in the parking lot, fielding texts from family. Sometimes you leave the car to pace the pavement, but it never occurs to you to go home.

Seven hours later, I emerge, disoriented by the sudden darkness. Headlights flash from the lot. You are there behind the wheel.


Proust remembers Daudet medicating himself in the midst of conversation. The sick man leaves the room, talking through the doorway as he administers the injection without breaking his flow of thought. He rejoins the others.

Even when pain made him absent, Daudet made sure to be present.


With no answers from the ER, we begin to research. Along with our notebook, we purchase a stool so we can rest while washing dishes; we buy compression tights in men’s and women’s sizes, and gallons of Gatorade, all recommended for the ‘orthostatic intolerance’ that can follow a viral infection, making it difficult to stand.


A statue of the author in Nimes tells a different story than the sculpture that looked down on our bliss in the Champs-Elysée. Daudet’s head seems too big for his body, which appears shrunken beneath an overcoat. The facial features have a haggard, drunken look, accentuated by the weary tilt of the head as he leans, the crook of one arm supported by the stone he is carved from, as if it is holding him up.

“I’ve suddenly turned into a funny little old man,” Daudet notices. “I’ve vaulted from forty-five to sixty-five. Twenty years I haven’t experienced.”


What we assumed would take decades to arrive manifests from one day to the next, compressed into thresholds: the desire for sex eclipsed by the demand for sleep; my productive drive utterly usurped by sickness. Where there had been energy, there was lethargy; where the skin was taut, a release; where we once felt joy — exhaustion.


Clearing a hard drive, my brother-in-law sends video clips taken on his digital camera a decade before. A few are from our wedding, which he officiated. The camera frames the three of us beneath an old oak. When invited to read our vows, I recite Whitman, and you read me Yeats.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep…


From the top of my part I catch flashes of silver laced into blonde. Then my hair begins to fall out, spiralling in the cyclonic tides of the shower floor. “Hairicanes,” we dub the swirling snarls, sometimes rescuing them from the drain and then forgetting them in the soap dish until it looks like some creature has nested there.


Another depiction — this time a daguerreotype: Daudet’s hair is dishevelled, beard untrimmed. A monocle obscures the shadow under one eye, a half-moon darkens the other. “I’ve felt this strange collapse of my face and my whole body,” he writes, “a sort of hollowing-out that doesn’t go away.”


Our eyes have sunk like ships with heavy cargo, a crescent water line etched above cheekbones by some unseen freight. On bad days these lunules tinge lavender, giving us a bruised, damaged look by which we are able to measure the minute gradations of each other’s pain.


Daudet’s vision is not always turned inward. He begins to look around the rest cures where he is sent to “take the waters.” At the thermal station of Lamalou he writes of the “astonishment and joy at finding others who suffer as you do.” He notes a grotesque spectacle of diseases, records ailments and treatments. He quotes a proverb: “The illness of a neighbor is always a comfort and may even be a cure.”


After months of symptoms, I join an online support group. I discover the relief of recognition. Of comradery. Of Schadenfreude.


Daudet looks for “the fellow whose illness most closely resembles your own.” At Lamalou, he pieces together two cases: an Italian painter and a member of the Court of Appeal. “Between them, these two comprise my suffering,” he writes with satisfaction.
  
You come home from seeing a client, whose Covid infection has left him with a daily pressure at the back of his head. It’s in the exact same place, you say with awe, indicating the base of your own inflamed skull.

You feel awful for him. You are gleeful.


Within the support group, I’m more or less silent, lurking at the edges. Part vociferous voyeur, part heady empathiser, I am drunk on companionship, on our collective sorrow.

When sickened with it, I break away.

“The man who watches the others suffer,” Daudet writes, murkily self-referential.



One day, I come home from an appointment I’d been looking forward to for months with the assumption that I’d be, if not healed, at least helped. But neither was the case. Because my illness did not appear on any tests, I’d been disbelieved and dismissed.

 
When the season is over and the baths close, “this whole agglomeration of pain breaks up and disperses,” writes Daudet. “Each of these patients turns into a loner . . . a strange creature with a funny illness, almost certainly a hypochondriac.”


When I reach the top of our stairs, I crumple. In the exam room, beneath the fluorescent lights of science, it had been as if the illness didn’t exist. But here in our apartment, with its reminders of struggle: the stool standing sentinel at the sink, compression socks drying limply on the rail, your face, socked in with exhaustion — it comes roaring back, along with a realisation: we are alone.

 
“Only at Lamalou is he understood,” writes Daudet, “only there are people truly interested in his disease.”
  
When I couldn’t convince the doctor I was ill, I’d told her about the support group. At the time, thousands had joined, reporting symptoms lingering long after Covid. Their stories, I thought, corroborated my case.

I think you’d better stay off those groups, the doctor said, eyeing the tears beginning to soak the top of my mask.

The specialist had mentioned the medical archives she would’ve turned to, had my diagnosis been, say, West Nile, and not a novel disease. I hadn’t realised how different the support group’s archive of anecdotal experience was from cases that bore the stamp of science.
  
Away from the baths, Daudet turns to the annals of history. Without contemporaries, there are always predecessors — those who’ve already succumbed. He pours over their letters and poems as if they are mirrors. He calls these men — Baudelaire and Flaubert among them, “my forebears, my doppelgängers in pain.”

 
You bring a Zoom meeting to an abrupt end and rush to help me stand. Sobbing, I let you wrap me in a robe. Lay me down.


When, four hours later, I get up, I sign back on to the support group.


Along with the validation of history, in Daudet’s observations there’s acknowledgement of what is to come. He spots a professor with a more advanced case, and prophetically records his tremulous condition.

Goncourt: “He knows what will happen to him next year, and what will happen to him the year after.”
  
On occasion, the light returns. I step out of the shower, peer into the mirror and there’s a flicker of recognition; something — a self — is back. You might simply call it health.

I’m not sure you’ve noticed. Our love no longer relies on sparks, perhaps because amidst all the fierce dependency something has been forged in the blaze of our feverish passion, or in the hot flame of our fevers themselves. Something immune to disease in ways our bodies are not.
 
“I’ve been nervy and bad-tempered all day. And then Julia sight-reads a folio of gypsy music for me. Outside there’s a storm, hail, thunder — inside, I relax at last.”


And I recall the words you said, before this sickness altered us: One man loved the pilgrim soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face…


Poem as prophecy, a pledge made truer by time: not that the promise was empty before, but it had yet to be fulfilled.

 
“I walk with more confidence when I can see my own shadow,” wrote Daudet, the disintegration of his spine making his step unsteady: “just as I walk better when someone is alongside me.”



Notes

Daudet, Alphonse. In the Land of Pain. Translated by Barnes, Julian. Knopf, 2003.

Yeats, William Butler. “When You Are Old” in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Collier Books, 1989.