The Brooklyn Rail

Virginia Woolf famously revealed how strange it is that though illness is so common and so consciousness-altering, we have few great works of literature even attempting to explore the subject with sufficient attention. She also noted that a migraine can change language itself, revealing candor in expression and a shimmering quality absent in words of the hale and hearty. “In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality,” she writes. This is the mode of Zach Powers’s The Migraine Diaries. Powers understands the instant obliteration of a headache and, brilliantly, juxtaposes that with the loss of a friend. Should someone ever take up Woolf’s challenge and assemble a literary anthology of maladies, they should look first to Powers for his descriptions of the headache.

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March 14

How do you write about a blur?

The hurt proper sets in after I get home from the beach. A pulsating, consuming pain behind my left eye. When I think it’s as bad as possible, it worsens. Pain that numbs me to all else. I lie down and close my eyes and count breaths. Ibuprofen fails. Time and space morph into one looping spacetime.

I’m sure Death is coming. I’m hung up on the idea of dying, but I hope I can be forgiven for that. This pain, inflating inside my head, trying to pop out my eye and explode my skull, seems deadly. There’s no good description of a deadly feeling. Anybody who feels death for real doesn’t have time to jot down notes.

Maybe a smudge would be the best description, a blot of ink.

I should write this diary with quill by candlelight.

The hurt on that first day rings new, but the more headaches I’ll have, the more I’ll doubt I haven’t been in pain all along. As weird as the other symptoms are, it’s pain that defines the experience, that defines me.

A stranger might point me out on the street and explain to a child, “That’s the person with the hurt.”

But I’m ahead of myself. This is a future I can’t yet know.

All I do know on the morning after is that the hurt has drained me. My ass has been kicked from the inside. My muscles work at half-capacity. A sip of water turns my stomach. I’m aged by decades.

I lie on my couch and watch episodes of Naruto I know by heart. A dull ache settles like a bruise where my headache has been. It’s nighttime and then bedtime and then morning. Space and time are broken.

 

March 15

I wake up and walk the forty yards to Gallery Espresso. Out my building’s side door, through the cobblestone lane. In summer this stretch turns funky from the dumpsters. A quarter block on Bull Street, and I’m there.

Behind the register, Chris slops coffee for groggy tourists. Chris is always working. If I ever showed up and he was absent, I’d file a missing person report. He pours a house blend and hands it over without asking me to pay.

“Didn’t see you yesterday,” says Chris.

To be fair, I’m here about as much as he is.

“Had a headache,” I say, the first of countless times I’ll say this.

“Yeah, I finished off a bottle of bourbon when I got home after the beach. I don’t know my last hangover like that.”

I take my usual seat at the counter. There are six stools, facing back toward the rest of the shop, where clusters of vintage chairs surround squat tables. A wall of windows to the right overlooks Chippewa Square, full of tourists and live oaks. There used to be fewer tourists.

I panic at the sight of the empty stool at the end of the counter. KJ’s stool. I can almost see him, a shadow in his shape. Or the cartoon corgi sitting there, speaking in KJ’s voice.

The bruise-like ache in my head sneaks to the foreground.

Not a headache, but the memory of one.

Chris squints at me, concerned. I must have winced. “Jeezus,” I say, “that seat.”

“We should put a plaque there on the counter,” he says. “Like the Jimmy Carter one at Pinkie’s.”

Chris refers to the plaque embedded in the bar at Pinkie Masters, marking the spot where the former president once stood

to deliver a toast. We’ve all sipped beers off Jimmy Carter’s embossed brass face.

Pinkie’s is another place that KJ will haunt. His ghost is a blur, or a smudge. I want to knead the diffuse edges of the apparition back into solid lines.

In the square, a flock of small, dark birds lights from a live oak, shedding feathers.

Ahead, the windows face an old four-story townhouse that’s now a law office. A pair of tourists pause to photo the house’s fish-shaped downspouts. Farther to the left there’s a British pub, complete with a red London phone booth out front. A man wearing a Savannah-branded sweatshirt poses by the booth for a selfie.

I startle at a hand on my back. Hildie’s snuck up on me. How did I miss her entering? I’m facing straight at the door. She sits in her usual seat to my right. Chris brings her an espresso. How did he prepare it so quickly?

Hildie leans in, her shoulder bone poking into my shoulder muscle. I give her a one-armed hug. I’m often accused of being a poor hugger.

Hildie recently showered. Damp hair. A shampoo scent, bubblegummy. She got a haircut recently, too, an undercut, tips dyed teal. The tips shift color so often as to be symptomatic.

She tilts forward to look past me. “His stool,” she says.

I’m stuck in the turbulent point between normalcy on one side and novelty on the other.

“Chris suggested a plaque,” I say. “Like Jimmy Carter’s,” she says.

KJ, Dolores, Hildie, and I have sat in a row at this counter for years of mornings. Breakfast Club, we call it. We sit here and work on our creative projects, a couple writers and a couple artists, and then we disperse to day jobs.

“Do you remember,” asks Hildie, “when we found out Dolores and KJ had been secretly dating?” She’s still regarding KJ’s empty seat.

“Have you seen her?” I ask.

“I called. She said her folks were smothering her, but at least she doesn’t have to cook her own meals.”

“I ate some toast yesterday.”

Hildie flags down Chris. She flicks her thumb at me and says, “Get this dumbass a croissant.”

“Thanks,” I say.

Hildie straightens her posture and sets her hands on the counter. She inspects each hand in turn. Short nails, dried paint caught up in the cuticles.

“It feels weird sitting here,” she says.

The hurt expands deep inside my head, deeper than seems possible, as if instead of a brain I have a wormhole, descending through space. The hurt comes from distant galaxies. I think about the hurt in hurtle.

“Will it stay feeling like this?” I ask.

“I hope so,” says Hildie. “I hope it doesn’t go back to feeling completely right. Because that’d be bad, wouldn’t it?”

Her voice arrives from a great distance. I’m hurtling through the wormhole in my head, seeing where it takes me. To or away from. Or it’s looping, and the journey leads back to the empty seat beside me.

Hildie nudges my arm. “You okay?”

I leave the wormhole. The sounds of the coffee shop and the smell of coffee and the sight of the worn wooden counter drift toward me. Ashes on a sea. I’m back in my seat again.

“My concept of bad has been greatly altered,” I say.

“I like Chris’s suggestion about the plaque,” she says.

I nod, but I know we’ll never follow through on the idea.