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  • The Lost Years
  • Patricia Foster (bio)

It happened so quickly I couldn’t remember my other life, the life of the well, that ordinary wake-up-in-the-morning-have-a-cup-of-coffee-and-get-on-with-it self. One day I had a routine: I’d write for an hour each morning at the kitchen table, go to work at nine, come home at six, fix dinner with David, and then read or write until midnight. The next thing I knew I was too tired to get out of bed. Something had happened, but for weeks I was too woozy to know what it was. The flu, I assumed. A really bad flu.

My new life did begin with the flu, some virus weaving its way through Los Angeles, perhaps carried toward the ocean by Santa Ana winds. For several days, David had lain absolutely still in bed, sandwiched between the sheets, getting up only for full glasses of water and then long pauses in the bathroom. I’d hear the toilet flush and see him stumble back to bed. Then the third morning he emerged as if nothing had happened, fixed a pot of coffee, took a shower, and raced off to work. He’d been gone barely an hour when I felt the first flush of fever, the ache in my limbs, the sudden pull of exhaustion. I knew the drill. I called in sick and slid quietly between the sheets.

This new life began in 1982, the same year that Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” hit the stores and teenagers drove in from the Valley, hanging out at Tower Records and Music Plus and Fat Beats. Adults fixated on another icon, real estate, which was booming. Everyone believed they could make a killing.

But I was too sick to make a killing. For weeks and then months, I remained listless, my mind drifting, my head as light as scattered straw. My lymph nodes slightly swollen, my bones aching, I felt as if I still had the flu and longed only to lie in the dark. I knew that something had gone quietly haywire inside my body, but so quietly that nothing definitive showed up on empirical tests. When I’d first become ill, I’d gone to the medical men: an internist, an endocrinologist, an allergist. On such visits I was told, “We can’t find anything wrong except maybe [End Page 72] some allergies.” I was told, “Go home, young lady, and drink some coffee.” I was told, “It might be psychological. You seem an anxious sort. Try not to worry so much.”

True, I didn’t have cancer or ms or aids or any of the other horrible diseases I could list, and yet always there seemed to be a fever behind my eyes, a raw soreness to my throat, an infection swimming through my blood, making me tired. Perhaps worse, my mind felt switched off, as if all the lights inside me had been turned down very low. Why wouldn’t I worry?

I wonder now if it was because I’d become so curiously ill that so many of the things in my world seemed absurd, or if it was merely a reflection of the times. Exhausted much of the day, I began observing rather than responding to the oddness around me, noting, for instance, that a homeless man slept under my car each night, his head cradled near the left rear wheel, his legs sprawled, flip-flops twisted; that our landlord, a man richer than God—in a penthouse above our apartment—created a maze of newspapers stacked chest high, forming a passageway through his apartment to a wall-sized bird cage where eight cockatiels lived in ornate, stinking squalor; that a new acquaintance at a party insisted on showing me his colostomy bag; that the couple next door, both engineers, dropped in to introduce themselves, the woman topless, her denim shorts, I noticed, neatly hemmed. I’d tried not to stare at the woman’s pendulous breasts as I invited them in, offering tea and cookies as if this were the most ordinary introduction to neighbors: Let me just get...

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