Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss Page B

not something most drivers register.)
    Mrs. Zilke’s extracted promise felt immutable. Each equivocation and hedge, every dawdle, each dereliction and misdemeanor—all the human stuff of growing up—seemed to count against me on some celestial checklist. I’d later think of Celine at my wedding and when my wife told me that she was pregnant. Name an experience: it’s a good bet I’ve thought of Celine while experiencing it.

When I was twenty-eight, my hair went gray and I had stomach surgery. I’d been grinding out my insides. The squinch, the clench, had followed me from freshman year of college on. I was almost six-two and weighed a hundred and fifty-eight pounds. There’s only a certain amount of acid you can create before it starts consuming everything. I was eating myself from the inside.
    New York’s best stomach surgeons—the surgeons you would want to cut you open, if such a cutting were called for—didn’t take insurance. So I had to settle. I needed a procedure called a Nissen fundoplication . This marries a fairly caveman straightforwardness to NASA-grade sophistication: a doctor manipulates two laparoscopic robot hands to tie your stomach around your gullet and stick it there. (When the tummy is pinned in the shape of a folded-up change purse, acid can’t spew back up the esophagus.) I had the surgery in 1998 at the one shitty local hospital that would take my shitty insurance, the Cabrini Medical Center.
    Heading to one of Cabrini’s surgery theaters, I’d gotten stuck in a bizarre traffic jam; different hospital people wheeled me and two patients I’d never seen before to a bottleneck point (stretchered, gowned, at one of the obviousprecipices of a life), and they simply left us there. Our gurneys lined up side-by-side, in a kind of vestibule. The scene felt ghostly and almost comic, a small-scale First Circle. I hadn’t eaten in twelve hours and, in my condition, every swallow came like an act of courage. We patients all raised our heads to look at one another—three men made of bedside promises, of cold feet, of life lurch. I was the youngest by fifty years. We each kept totally quiet, very somber. I remember the room as eye-stingingly bright. The other patients showed the frog spots and lack of vehemence that men often have in the last panels of their lives. The hospital went bankrupt pretty soon after this.
    I don’t want to valorize anything. I don’t want to make this more than it was. No false drama: my stomach hurt, and then it didn’t. The Nissen fundoplication worked. I thought I’d been fixed for good, but this turned out to be not so. A few years later, I’d lost weight again. I found myself under that haze of mystery discomforts called IBS. It was pretty rough. And as soon as I had handled that , I suffered another murky ailment called CPPS (chronic pelvic pain syndrome). My internal climate was a hurricane alley. Emotions blew through, downing power lines, hefting cars onto roofs, destroying the finish. Low trees, dead wood thrown across traffic. That’s the force of guilt for you.

During the worst of this I was essentially alone. Then I met my wife.
    “I want to tell you something,” I said to her, to the woman I’d ultimately marry.
    “Tell me what?” Susannah said. This was several weeks into our romance. It must have been about a year after my stomach operation. I was standing at the farthest edge of the twenties, and the sad, steel-gray bridge I mentioned—the thirties and beyond—it wasn’t so bad once you looked at it. I was getting to know that most things, as you approached them, were like that. The scary thing about drawing near milestones was merely that you weren’t there yet. Once you arrived, they turned familiar—you were in the landscape. They could be dealt with.
    Susannah said: “Something bad?” and I scooched around to find the carefree side of my chair.
    I tried not to feel the two poles: the excitement of saying something that was sure to