By Catalina Forister
You have never read Anna Karenina. You tried once, but you had to stop because you found it difficult to read while puking and shitting simultaneously.
You and your parents took an Alaskan cruise over the summer. The day before you left to set sail out of San Francisco, you told them that if you got seasick and threw up, you would throw yourself off the boat. Only partly did you believe this to be an overreaction. Your relationship with vomiting was not a healthy one, although as you write this, you realize that there is probably no one who can claim that their relationship with vomiting is healthy. In any case, yours was particularly tumultuous. When you were six, you got an intense stomach flu which kickstarted years of therapy revolving around obsessive hypochondria. You are still in therapy to this day, though not for the same reasons you once were. Old habits die hard, however, and the fear of vomiting never left you.
At the cruise’s inception, you were reading a novel called Strange Loops by a woman named Liz Harmer. You picked it up at City Lights because the cover font was neon orange, and because you had come across a review of it previously that had used the word “unputdownable.” Opening it for the first time at sea, you very quickly realized that it was porn written in the guise of a novel. Which is fine, of course. You have never proclaimed yourself to be a literary Puritan, nor will you start now. If enjoying pornographic novels was a crime, you would be deserving of a modest sentence. You did not, however, enjoy this one. For one, it took you by surprise. Should the picture of a woman’s bare backside on the cover have clued you in to its subject matter, at least a little? Sure it should have. But you were more distracted by the etymology of unputdownable. In any case, you found this novel to be cheaply written and far too phallic for your taste. But you finished it, because you had three days of open ocean to kill before you got to anywhere with land. This was how you passed the first phase: in an idle jumble of yearning and gin and tonics and people watching.
Jesus loves me from my head tomatoes. This is the shirt that you saw on an old woman who walked by while you waited for your food. You thought about this repeatedly over the rest of the trip. Occasionally you still think about it. Head tomatoes. You understood the pun, of course, but there’s something about those two words put together that stuck with you. Out of context you think it sounds perverse. Or perhaps authoritarian. Anyway. You and your dad are drawing pictures of distressed crabs on a paper tablecloth. “Uh oh,” you’re making them say. Feel free to interpret this as foreshadowing. That would not be a far-off assumption.
For the next hour, you waded through a sea of arthropods. You were presented with a display of tools that reminded you of a dentist’s office, except they were not for looking at the backsides of molars but instead for prying open the shells of mussels and for cracking the joints of crabs and for shielding your eyes from wayward bits of crustacean. There is an essay collection by David Foster Wallace called Consider the Lobster. You’ve never read it, but you hardly feel like you need to now. You ordered a virgin daquiri that came with a straw that was about twice the length of the glass and gutted you in the uvula. No part of this meal was graceful. You took pictures of this meal in stages. You still can’t bring yourself to look at those pictures.
In the hours that followed, feeling satiated by fleshy bodies and lethargic from an excess of butter, you sat on the small balcony that connects to your parents’ room. Over the course of the afternoon, you consumed two glasses of white wine and 75 pages of Tolstoy. Almost immediately, you realized this is going to be a serious project that you may not be ready to undertake while on vacation. At some point you stepped into your parents’ room and expressed this to your dad. Your dad, who prides himself on only having read deceased authors for a straight decade, said something like “yeah I told you Tolstoy was hard,” or “everyone knows Tolstoy takes work,” or something equally annoying. Incensed, you plopped yourself back down on your balcony and read more Tolstoy. At some point your mom suggested you go down to the main deck to observe whatever commercial absurdity was being put on down there.
As you are walking down the hallway from your room, you feel an intense wave of vertigo and realize you are acutely sweaty. You tell your mom you drank too much wine and need to eat something. You sit down on the side of a ballroom and anxiously peel an orange. You watch a couple play the guitar together. It’s saccharine.
A cruise ship is an excellent window to the absurdities of consumerism. You and your parents are huffing perfume samples and coffee beans when you decide you feel distinctly bad. You announce that you are going to bed early, walk back to your room, pop three antacids, and park yourself on the toilet. At this point you have made a conclusion. You must subconsciously be very anxious about something, which is causing the diarrhea which is causing the hot flashes which is causing the nausea which is causing the panic attack. You’ve done enough therapy to know that a panic attack is a mental game. So for the next four hours, you employ every tactic you’ve ever been taught, with frequent intervals allowed for defecation. You force yourself to wash your hair, to take deep breaths, to speak your worst fears out loud. “So what if I throw up?” you say. “Bring it on, anxiety.” You repeatedly watch a video posted by an Instagram account called “Old Jewish Men,” in which they proudly display their prunes and their Metamucil capsules, neither of which you need in this moment.
Once you are able to leave the bathroom, you drop to all fours and drag yourself up onto your bed. Wrapped in a damp towel you begin to shake, violently and uncontrollably. This is extreme, even for you. You haven’t had a panic attack in years, and you’re not even sure what you’re worried about. Clearly, though, you are worried about something. You keep forcing yourself to be normal. You put on clothes, repeat your mantras. You get a text from your dad. It’s 11:15. “Goodnight!!” he says. At this moment you have a choice. You can tell him that your body is scaring you and that you need help, or you can act like everything is fine. You want desperately to pick the first option, but you know your ability to spiral your anxiety out of control. Don’t give the performance an audience. So you simply say, “Goodnight!!!” and leave it at that. Your fate feels sealed now. Having closed that door, you simply cannot reopen it. You have to ride out this storm by yourself.
The next few hours pass by in a blur of sweat and shit and suppressed nausea and YouTube videos called “How to get through a panic attack,” and “Panic Attack Meditations,” and “Watch This if you’re Having a Panic Attack Right Now.” You scroll through comments on these videos that say things like Who else is shaking right now and feeling like crying because you’re so exhausted? and I find soothing the fact that we are all in this together. Sincerely, thank you. You are not feeling calm enough to express any kind of gratitude out into the void, but you do feel like you can attempt sleep, if your stomach will let you rest. Before you do this, however, you have to write in your diary. You’ve written in it every day for almost four years, the entries stacked on top of one another in a gradually unfurling saga of self-reflection. You have never skipped a day and you’re not starting now. The entry reads as follows:
Oh my god I am coming down from the worst panic attack of my life, it is a struggle just to write this right now, I’m so afraid I’m gonna wake up and not move, even though I know that won’t happen. Night!
You cannot bring yourself to look back at the pictures of the meal that landed you in this situation, but you love to go back and reread this diary entry. You can see that your hand was shaking. It is almost illegible. It is the most Victorian thing you have ever done, writing in a diary despite being in the throes of a feverish stupor.
You wake up at 4:45 am. You were having a stress dream about lobsters. Not as creatures but as food. You are in a surge of sweat and you cannot force your mind to think of anything else. Lobsters are so fucking sweet. You stand up and run to the bathroom. “No no no no no no,” you are saying aloud. You sit down on the toilet, shaking. You will never forget how this felt. Consider the Lobster. This is what you’re doing. They’re so fucking sweet and flesh-colored. It’s the lobster that you are considering. A guttural noise comes out of your mouth. You pitch yourself forward over your knees and everything that you put in yourself over the last day comes out onto the tiles. This is a smell that will remain stained into the grout for the rest of the trip.
You can’t stop laughing. You, who asked your dad every morning for a year straight if he thought you would throw up today, have thrown up. You, who used to do everything in cycles of fives, avoided threes at all costs, and slapped the tops of your hands till they bruised, are suspending your feet so as not to dip them in your dinner. You laugh till tears drip down your face. You look down at the ground and you see that orange. The condom that you optimistically tucked in the pocket of your toiletries bag next to your retainer is staring at you, mocking you. Over the next several months, your OCD is going to regress severely, but you don’t know this yet. Right now, there’s only yourself, that unused condom, and the lobster, which you have considered, and regurgitated.
