A few years ago, back in Colorado, I went to bed with a bit of a nagging pain in the bottom of my stomach. It was really hard to explain the exact location of it, sort of above the groin but below the stomach…and more like a strain than a dull ache, with intermittent bursts of sharp pain that seemed like a miniature lightning bolt to the rectum. Super fun, right? I woke up in the middle of the night, and the pain only seemed to have gotten worse, like someone was trying to rip apart my two bodily hemispheres from the inside. The next day I opted to go to the Urgent Care and get some answers, but as is usually the case with that place, they didn’t have any, so they told me to go to the ER and have a scan done, a tall order in the height of the pandemic when maximum Covid measures were in place.
8 or 9 hours later, I had my answer: Diverticulitis. At first I was super relieved, as, being of the WebMD generation, I was certain that I was dying of cancer, but I realized quite quickly that I had absolutely no idea what Diverticulitis even was, only that my mom had also been hospitalized with it a few years prior, stupid genetics. For those who DON’T know, Diverticulitis (or Diverticulosis, when dormant) is an inflammation of the little offshoots of your small intestine, akin to estuaries of an intestinal river, that can trap bits of fecal matter and become inflamed - the estuaries themselves being the Diverticula. I was peeved because, though I had a history of poor decision making vis-a-vis my body and its ecosystems, I did not drink, smoke, or overly indulge in crappy food, it was just bad genetic luck, I thought.
The truth is, when you are forced to question EVERYTHING that you put into your body on a daily basis, you confront some uncomfortable realities which perhaps have been conveniently ignored…in the Diverticula of your mind, as it were. Sure, I was exercising 6 days a week, but I was also consuming a scoop of “pre-workout” every morning, followed by a big scoop of whey protein powder afterwards. If the aches from the previous day’s lifting were too uncomfortable, I often added 600mg of Ibuprofen to that regimen. Weekend concerts, or sluggish during the day? Red Bull! Turns out I was not actually as healthy as I thought.
To combat the inflammation, I was given some meds to take for 10 days, one of them being Ciprofloxacin, at the tail-end of which I started to notice a whole new malady: my joints and tendons ached like hell, as though I was suddenly an 80 year-old arthritic geezer. I certainly did not feel like my normal self, and my rapid weight loss, though probably needed, was a bit disconcerting as well. I poked around a bit and discovered that Ciprofloxacin has a QUITE common side-effect of causing tendonitis, and in many well-documented cases has even led to ruptured or torn tendons. Turns out, there are whole communities of people online with similar side-effects (they call themselves “Floxies”) who are pretty pissed that their doctors did not warn them about these things, or outright refused to believe that they were suffering any side-effects at all!
I made an appointment to go see my doctor (I had Medicaid at the time, so there was a long wait), and I was shocked when I explained my plight to him and he literally fucking LAUGHED and said: “No, I don’t think this drug is causing you any problems…”. The asshole tried to Jedi-Mind-Trick me! His advice was that I should “lose some weight”, even though I was a healthy 188lbs with a rather solid muscle mass, and even suggested I should “try running”, even though, in my diminished state, I could hardly even jog up the stairs. What a dick. If you can’t tell, it makes me mad even thinking about it again.
The tail end of this story (no pun intended), was that I ended up seeing a (much more compassionate) gastro doc who scheduled a colonoscopy for me. They used to not recommend this procedure until people turned 50, but with such an uptick in cancer cases, they dropped that age to 45, and even 40 if there is a history of cancer in your family (there is). If you are lucky enough to have gone through this procedure, you know how wonderful all of the preparatory work is! For the uninitiated, 24 hours before your procedure, you have to start drinking, every 30 minutes, a cupful of a sickly viscous liquid which makes you vacate everything (and I do mean EVERYTHING) from your bowels for the remaining time before you go in. It’s no joke, I remember it taking 5 hours to watch a movie because every 7-8 minutes I had to pause and either drink more liquid, or run to the bathroom.
So why am I sharing all of this? Because, when my procedure was done and I came to (which is really like 2 seconds in real time, since you are fully sedated…) I was told that the doctors had found, frozen, and removed some troubling pre-cancerous growth in my colon. “Nothing to be alarmed about” they assured me, “but thankfully we caught it when we did”. Yeah, no shit. It was wild to get some news like that and think of all of the chance occurrences that led me to even get a colonoscopy at 39 in the first place! It was like my body new exactly what was going on, even though I remained blissfuly ignorant all the while. So:
THIS IS A PSA! SCHEDULE A COLONOSCOPY AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE!
The other reason that this has been on my mind is that I woke up in the middle of the night with that familiar stabbing pain in my groin, and I am keeping my fingers crossed that it is only something I ate.
Ironically, I am less worried about it here in Chile because, unlike in the USA, I have received nothing but fantastic medical/dental care here for a fraction of the cost. Just last week, we took the whole family of four to get dental cleanings, without insurance, for less than the price of one person in the States…go figure. I am starting to understand this whole concept of “Medical Tourism”…
“Comfort is something that sticks to one’s mind like a damp shirt, and only after making an unexpected move does it become clear that one is stuck.”
— Andrés Barba - A Luminous Republic (translated by Lisa Dillman)
Wow! Well, it appears as though my “bad book slump” has officially come to a close, because everything has been coming up aces recently. I previously wrote (briefly) about another Barba book, “Such Small Hands” (translated by Lisa Dillman) here. I have a really bad habit (though perhaps that is a misnomer, as it’s really not my fault) of seeing a book I want to read in my Libby app (that is to say, available from my library) and then forgetting about it altogether ten seconds later. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there was a handy “Want To Read” tag built into the platform, and I had never utilized it.
This book centers around a subtropical village in an unnamed country, where a group of feral children descended from the jungle and began to wreak havoc. Slowly at first, through organized shenanigans involving petty theft and whatnot, but later in a more violent form, culminating in a pivotal moment after which the townspeople begin to fear for the safety of their lives, as well as those of their OWN children, some of whom begin to run off to join the misfits. The children seem to speak their own, indiscernible language, they are filthy and unkempt, they tiptoe beyond the adults’ notion of misbehavior and into the territory of maliciousness, or even outright evil.
The narrator is a social worker who relocated to the area after falling in love with a local woman, marrying her and stepping in to raise her daughter from a previous relationship. He informs the reader in the first paragraph that the “Group of 32” as they are labeled, will all be dead by the end of the story, one which is told in the past tense. The tension here lies in knowing that the children will die, and with a reference to a press photograph showing “all 32 little bodies”, you know that they will all die together, but HOW this will transpire keeps the pages turning quickly.
This is a technique that I am SUCH a sucker for, and, of course, it wouldn’t be a proper post without a hat-tip to Márquez, who employs this technique often, but never as masterfully as in “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”, which is essentially a murder mystery told in reverse. It works well, if done properly, and Barba manages to once again leave me wondering if he wasn’t a child psychologist in a past life, the way he expertly crafts an almost clinically precise analysis of what must be occurring in the minds of the children (as he also did in “Such Small Hands”). The catch, though, is that nobody ACTUALLY knows what the motives of the “Group of 32” is, but every adult within earshot is convinced that they do, and that their opinion outweighs that of the others. By the end of the book, you are left wondering who was more misguided: the children, or the townsfolk who tried to force them to exist within the confines of their rigid, unwavering opinions about how children should behave.
As one reviewer, more eloquent than me, put it: “I suppose a Hollywood hack pitching this novel would say: Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness. That would give only the crudest suggestion of this miraculous book, which is at once so strong and delicate that music alone comes to mind as a correlative”. Yeah, that too. Great book!
“By the time we woke up, the members of the cult had committed mass suicide. They had slit their own throats. I felt the same pang of disappointment I had last felt on the airplane when I missed the duty-free. Why did they eat their portion of the food if they planned to kill themselves anyway? Sometimes I truly don’t understand people”.
— Attila Veres - The Black Maybe: Liminal Tales (translated by Luca Karafiáth)
Even as someone who used to devour books in my youth, I never gave much thought to the horror genre. Though I was raised on Stephen King movie adaptations, many of which are among my favorite flicks, I always scoffed at the idea of being genuinely “scared” by a book. Then I started reading Mariana Enriquez’s “Things We Lost in the Fire” (translated by Megan McDowell), and I found myself unable to progress beyond the first story for an entire year. Sure, I have read some Poe, Lovecraft, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula is among my favorite books of all time, but I never really explored much beyond that. This book gave me nightmares for two nights straight.
Firstly, it helps if you understand the idea of a “liminal space”, which Wikipedia says is an aesthetic characterized by “empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal. Liminal spaces are commonly places of transition, pertaining to the concept of liminality”. Actually, now that I have typed that, I can think of a perfect example which ties into the whole King-adaptation theme: The Overlook hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s magnificent adaptation of The Shining. More specifically, the abandoned hallways that the young Danny Torrance speeds around on his tricycle.
To apply this adjective to a whole series of tales was a new one for me, but holy shit, I cannot for the life of me think of a better adjective to describe the stories in this collection. Every single one has an impending sense of doom that has your hair and skin on edge at all times. The unease we fear within a liminal space is, basically, a product of the thought that ANYTHING can happen, regardless of how grotesque, bizarre, or unlikely.
The quote I pulled above was from one of my favorite of the stories: “Multiplied by Zero”. It is presented as a trip review, written by a satisfied client (and one of only 3 who survived) of a burgeoning travel agency which takes its adventurers to…well, you never really find out. However, as you can note from the above passage, there is a sardonic, black humor with which the author of the review lays out the dangers of the trip. “In the pub you can buy snacks, nachos, and peanuts. There is no hot food. I ordered nachos, but when the Spanish guy brought it out, we found worms in the sauce, crawling in the red liquid. This should be taken into account by those who are fond of snacks with their beer”.
There is a heavy Lovecraftian influence in many of these tales: strange beasts, ancient religions with inexplicable rites, nonsense languages, but at no point was I ever let down by any of them. Each one ushered me into that liminal space in its own way, and the manner in which I was shown the door at its conclusion was always surprisingly clever, leaving me thankful to have made it out the other side. A top-notch read, but certainly not for the easily spooked (unless that’s your thing…). As I said, I had nightmares for two nights in a row, and they all contained strange creatures within liminal spaces.
That’s it for now! Next week I will be discussing Mariana Enríquez’s first novel, Bajar es lo peor, and why I doubt it will ever get an English translation. In addition, I will be reviewing the much anticipated concert of Los Fabulosos Cadillacs in Santiago!
Be Well
Andrés
Feel better soon!