Coming To: A Lexicology of Fainting

1. vein

From Old French veine, from Latin vena. The earliest senses were blood vessel and small natural underground channel of water. See also: blood, artery, channel, the channeling of the dead.

It’s a wake, we are told, my cousin and I, but we hear it like one word: awake. Who is doing the waking? We don’t ask. We are six. We know there’s a body and the body is her father. But how the body is her father is harder to say. He’s become a dark spot hovering just above our eyelids, a presence that tilts the whole room. We move through it like we would a funhouse, not knowing what’s real—everything swollen and overwrought, red velour everywhere and grown-ups stiff as wax. They whisper out of the sides of their mouths like bad renditions of ghosts. Beneath them, we cling to each other—hands, wrists, fingernails dug into arms—and we move this way, like one four-legged creature, up the narrow carpet toward the coffin.

A small stool sits beside it, waiting. We look at each other and know what we must do. She whispers as if to prepare me: They drain all the blood out of you when you die.

We are bowed heads in the dark, wakeful at 1 a.m. We are shapeless, we are voices—saying and unsaying.

She tells me again about the man who fell on a nail and punctured his wrist. This is the year she’s interested in death.

So what happened?

Her so-what shrug. He died. He spilled out through his veins.

This is the year we are eight. This is the year we become creatures with blood, veins: spillable things. I start looking away from my own wrist, fragile now as a bird’s neck and equally fraught. Blue-gray veins run there like thin wicks of flame. Veins are terrifying; veins are bewitching—a ghostly glimpse of some bad end. Veins are inside you, which means there’s no escape.

But the first time it happens, there’s no blood, no veins. I’m sixteen and sitting in a doctor’s office. The nurse squeezes her blood pressure pump and sighs. Can’t get a pulse on you.

Maybe you don’t have a pulse, suggests my mother. Maybe you’re dead.

I don’t know yet what to expect. Later, it will start to prick faint and familiar—the way gravity loosens and churns, the way the back of my head becomes a queasy universe, unfathomably deep. But that first time—the time I faint on the word dead—I wash straight into Nothing.

Fainting undoes the world and remakes it. It seeps: once it begins, it won’t stop. It becomes its own logic, a mythology slowly coalescing around itself. I faint in doctor’s offices, in bathrooms. I faint at the mention of blood, hearts, veins. I faint at the mention of sex, alien probes, enemas. I faint once at the word epidural, having confused it with enema. (Fainting is an imperfect lexicology.) I faint trying to use a tampon. I faint at the sight of three drops of blood on tile. I faint at the thought of fainting. My own heartbeat unnerves me.

2. faint

Middle English: cowardly surviving in the phrase faint heart; from Old French faint, related to feign, stem of feindre: to make a pretense of a feeling or response, invent a story or allegation. From Latin fingere: to mold, contrive, make.

I’ve been in Phnom Penh a month when the faintings begin. They come across my desk as a brief: sixty workers fainting in a garment factory. They faint not one by one but all together—fainting at the sight of fainting, as though they’ve seen their own ghosts falling to the factory floor. Like most garment workers, they are women, nearly all of them very young.

More mass faintings follow at other garment factories: sixty, seventy, a hundred women at a time. The women speak of dizziness, of ghosts. Sometimes these are the same thing...