Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

skepticism of witchcraft and religion overall, I found myself wanting to believe.

“I need your help,” I said. “Things are not going well. Will you do a reading?”

“Hmmm,” she said, laying out a deck of tarot cards. “Hmmm.” She drew out each syllable. “So I see good things. Positive stuff. You’re going to have some sort of a job change. Something freelance outside the Post. Financially, I see good things for you.”

Waves of calm coursed through my system as I concentrated on her words. I had needed someone to tell me that I was going to be okay, that these odd setbacks were just blips on the radar of my life. In retrospect, Liz may not have been the right person to go to for this kind of reassurance.

“Oh, man. I feel all floaty,” Liz added.

“Yeah, me too.” I did.

When I returned to my desk, Angela looked depressed. A fellow Post reporter, our resident renaissance man who covered all sorts of beats for the paper, had passed away from melanoma. An e-mail was circulating throughout the newsroom, outlining the funeral arrangements for that Friday. He had been only fifty-three years old. It made me think of my own melanoma diagnosis, and for the rest of the day, even as I should have been researching John Walsh, I couldn’t force the sad news out of my mind.

The next morning, after another sleepless night, I used the few remaining moments I had to prepare for the interview to Google melanoma relapse rates instead. I was completely unprepared when 9:50 a.m. hit, but I headed out to meet Walsh in an empty office down the hall anyway, hoping I could just wing it. As I walked through the hallway, framed Post front pages began to close in on me, their headlines contracting and expanding.

BILL CHEATED ON ME!

SPACESHIP EXPLODES MIDAIR, ALL 7 DIE

DIANA DEAD

THE KINK AND I

CHILLARY

The pages were breathing visibly, inhaling and exhaling all around me. My perspective had narrowed, as if I were looking down the hallway through a viewfinder. The fluorescent lights flickered, and the walls tightened claustrophobically around me. As the walls caved in, the ceiling stretched sky-high until I felt as if I were in a cathedral. I put my hand to my chest to quell my racing heart and told myself to breathe. I wasn’t frightened; it felt more like the sterile rush of looking down from the window of a hundred-story skyscraper, knowing you won’t fall.

Finally I reached the office where Walsh was waiting for me. He still had the makeup on from his Fox News interview, and it had melted a bit under the bright lights of the studio.

“Hi, John, my name is Susannah Cahalan. I’m the Post reporter.”

As soon as I saw him, I started wondering, oddly, if Walsh was thinking right then about his murdered son, Adam, who had been abducted from a department store in 1981 and found decapitated later that year. My mind wandered through this macabre subject as I stood smiling blandly at him and his manicured publicist.

“Hello,” the publicist said, breaking my train of thought.

“Oh, hi! Yes. My name is Susannah Cahalan. I’m the reporter. The reporter on the story. You know, on the drug smuggling, drug smuggling—”

Walsh interrupted here. “Submarines, yes.”

“He only has five minutes, so we should probably get going,” the publicist said, a hint of annoyance evident in her tone.

“Many South American drug smugglers are making homemade submarines,” Walsh began. “Well, actually, they aren’t in fact submarines but submersible crafts that look like submarines.” I jotted notes: “Columbian” [sic], “homemade,” “track about ten a…” “Drug boats, we must stop boats…” I couldn’t follow what he was saying, so I mainly jotted down disassociated words to make it seem as if I was paying attention.

“It is very cunning.”

I laughed uproariously at this line, though I didn’t know then and still can’t figure out what about that word seemed so funny. The publicist shot me a puzzled look before announcing, “I’m sorry, I have to interrupt the interview. John needs to go.”

“I’ll walk you out,” I said with pressured enthusiasm and led them to the elevators. But as I walked, I could barely maintain my balance, bumping into the walls of the hallway, reaching for the door to open it for them but missing the handle by a solid foot.

“Thank you, thank you. I’m a huge fan, huge fan. HUGE fan,” I gushed, as we waited at the elevators.

Walsh smiled with kindness, possibly accustomed to this type of eccentric effusiveness that was in fact divorced from my typical interview style.

“It was a pleasure,” he said.

I still don’t know—and probably never will—what he really thought of the strange Post reporter, especially because the story never ran. This would be the last interview I conducted for seven months.

CHAPTER 7 ON THE ROAD AGAIN

I don’t remember how I got home after the interview or how I filled the hours in the wake of yet another professional debacle, but after still another sleepless night—it had now been over a week since I’d slept fully—I headed to the office. It was a gorgeous early March morning, the sun was out, and the temperature was a crisp thirty degrees. I had walked through Times Square twice a day for six months, but today, once I hit the rows of billboards at its center I was accosted by its garish colors. I tried to look away, to shield myself from shock waves of pigment, but I couldn’t. The bright blue wedge of an Eclipse gum sign emitted electric swirls of aqua and made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I could feel the colors vibrating in my toes. There seemed to be something exquisite about that rush; it was simultaneously enervating and thrilling. But the thrill lasted only a moment when, to my left, the moving scroll of “Welcomes you to Times Square” caught my attention and made me want to retch in the middle of the street. M&M’s on an animated billboard to my left pirouetted before me, forging a massive migraine in my temples. Helpless in the face of this onslaught, I covered my eyes with mittenless hands, stumbling up Forty-Eighth Street as if I had just gotten off a death-defying roller coaster, until I hit the newsroom, where the lights still felt bright but less aggressive.

“Angela, I have to tell you something strange,” I whispered, concerned that people might be listening in, thinking I was crazy. “I see bright colors. The colors hurt my eyes.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, worry evident in her smile. Every day my behavior had been growing increasingly erratic. But it wasn’t until this morning that my ramblings had begun to frighten her.

“Times Square. The colors, the billboards: they’re so bright. Brighter than I’ve ever seen them before.”

“You must be really hung over.” She laughed nervously.

“I didn’t drink. I think I’m losing my mind.”

“If you’re really concerned, I think you should go back and see a doctor.”

There’s something wrong with me. This is how a crazy person acts.

Frustrated with my inability to communicate what was happening to me, I slammed my hands down on the keyboard. The computer glowed back at me, bright and angry. I looked at Angela to see if she saw it too, but she was busy with her e-mail.

“I can’t do this!” I shouted.

“Susannah, Susannah. Hey, what’s going on?” Angela asked, surprised by the outburst. I had never been histrionic, and now that everyone was staring at me, I felt humiliated and on display, and hot tears streamed down my face and onto my blouse. “Why are you crying?”

I shrugged off the question, too embarrassed to go into details I didn’t understand.