Seizure Fugue by Max Klement

When my head hurts, the shiny brass kettledrums play late into the night.

At first, I tried not sleeping. One day without sleep left me feeling a little unsteady; after two days I was getting stupid. By the third day it got bad—“all of the above” as they say on multiple-choice tests with little black dots that have to stay in the circles and hurt my eyes—plus, I felt like my head was filled with Rice Krispies. After that it just felt like my brain was deep-fried.

Then I taught myself to sleep with my eyes open.

I’m an epileptic. I guess that’s not said these days, I’m supposed to say I have a seizure disorder. I have blue eyes, but I am an epileptic. Or maybe I should say that epilepsy has me. Let the comments begin. When you’re an epileptic you get used to all kinds of comments. I was having a coffee and some guy from across the room yelled “You! Epileptic! I know you!” I only vaguely recognized him—was there a red “E” on my forehead? This isn’t something I simply am or have, it’s like a symbiotic being, a vine twisted around the trunk of my core, my very essence.

My seizures started when I was fifteen. They’re not easy to describe—there’s no good language for the experience—and much of it became inscribed in my memory without language, like things we record as small children before we have speech and then never can truly remember.

I only have seizures in my sleep. I’m tinkering with my sleep to avoid the passage into a world of unimaginable torture. The typical tongue biting and limb thrashing don’t really interest me; it frightens others who witness it, but they can’t see the real horror—the horror within: I hallucinate when I have a seizure. I don’t remember the hallucinations in the ordinary way, but if I look at them—think of them—kind of sideways as if they’re shy and need coaxing to show themselves like a wild animal, I get a little bit of a feeling, a glimpse: it’s hot and the air is thick; there’s a heavy crushing pressure on my chest that feels like an old iron radiator on top of me; and there’s a blinding shriek like metal crashing on metal. Recollecting that, lifting it out like a worn yellowing card in the library card catalog, makes me feel sick, sweating, terrified.

There’s also a lock of blonde hair, golden blonde hair in a curl. I didn’t know where that fit in exactly, but it scared me.

Even when I cover my ears, I hear the strident metallic shriek of the cicadas. With my eyes closed I still see the curled lock of golden blonde hair, following me wherever I go.

When my head hurts, the shiny brass kettledrums play late into the night.

I’m an epileptic, but they don’t say that now. My pediatrician was out of town, so I went to my parents’ man on an emergency basis: Doctor Sheinin. He was awful. He got my parents out of the examination room and started shouting at me: “Are you on drugs? Are you on drugs? What drugs are you taking?” Over and over and over. I was just barely holding it together. I was terrified. I was sobbing and saying “no, no, no….” He never apologized for his cruelty. That night mom had to keep me up, keep me from sleeping. Early the next morning was my first EEG. They wanted me asleep during the test.

My poor sweet mom. How awful for her, seeing her only child half out of his mind. It’s a terrible thing, there’s nothing I could’ve done to stop it, but I feel so bad that she had to witness them, that she had to take it hard into her soul like a fierce blow to the heart.

The EEG. They attached little sensors on wires all over my head, sticky with gel, some on my chest too, then instructed me to go to sleep. Jittery from staying up all night, terrified—I just couldn’t. They seemed irritated with me, they seemed to have no compassion. Finally, they gave me chloral hydrate to knock me out. At last, I drifted off into a strange half-sleep while the machines whirred and scratched little hills and valleys on strips of paper. A couple of days later that bastard, Doctor Sheinin, phoned me. “You have grand mal epilepsy. Click.” That was it. No explanations, no questions allowed, just a loud “click.” Mom never saw that doctor again; my father continued to think the man walked on water.

Mom found me a pediatric neurologist, Doctor Huttenlocher. He was a kind, gentle man. It does make a difference, that kindness, it really does. Terrible things were happening to me that I couldn’t control, couldn’t understand: my own brain was attacking me. There was a thing inside me, a terrible beast waiting to attack, to destroy, to scorch the earth.

What I want to know is where is the hallucination? Where is there? It’s in my mind, in my brain, something make believe—I think. I described it once to a young woman I went to school with. She was a very devout Catholic. Her eyes went wide, and she took a step back away from me—like something in a play—and her face went white, actually white. “That’s hell,” she said.

“Yeah, it sure is.”

“No, you don’t understand,” another step backwards, “I mean that’s Hell. You’ve been to Hell.”

I’m an atheist, so that doesn’t mean anything to me. But her reaction, the look of shock and horror on her face—the terror of me as something contaminated—that left a mark. Though she didn’t say it, I imagined her voice hissing: epileptic.

Even when I cover my ears, I hear the strident metallic shriek of the cicadas. With my eyes closed I still see the curled lock of golden blonde hair, following me wherever I go.

When my head hurts, the shiny brass kettledrums play late into the night.

I’m an epileptic and no one is supposed to know. The seizures, my seizures, are in me: unwanted residents living rent-free in my head, but unwanted or not, they’re still mine. The hallucinations are terrifying, horrifying, but what’s in some ways worse is the seven-to-ten-day period after the seizure. They talk about a postictal period which lasts up to an hour, so I don’t know what to call this. It’s more than a week of being completely disconnected from everything around me, from people, objects, all life. A total disinterest in the world, not knowing how to reconnect, to break through the barrier, but also simply not giving a damn about it.

My seizures got me in trouble in high school. For a while I was having them frequently while the doctor adjusted my medication—little white and pink capsules—and I often walked the halls like the mere impression, a stain, of a human being. When it came time to write papers words no longer made any sense to me—I couldn’t concentrate, I barely existed. I copied from books, I plagiarized, I didn’t care—nothing mattered, I wasn’t in the world, I was dead to the world. I just barely didn’t flunk every class. I couldn’t explain what happened: thought was too hard; words were meaningless; I wasn’t part of reality.

Interacting with objects in that week-long period was agony. I remember sitting on a nicely cushioned armchair talking with a teacher during one of those episodes. I wasn’t really present; all I could think of was the feeling of the hard, unyielding, frame of the chair beneath the cushion. It was like looking at a person and only seeing a skeleton, except it was a chair, and I was gripping the arms trying not to scream. My bed was no better: I wanted to scream and scream and scream because I couldn’t feel the mattress—I was lying on the bed’s bones. Gradually that fades away, slowly, like the Cheshire Cat.

The recollection of my hallucinations is a different kind of memory—like a dormant memory, something with potential energy, waiting to be activated. Just drawing up that memory starts something in motion: it’s not in front of me now, but it’s back there, back someplace in my head. I can feel it lurking, I can feel that curled lock of golden blonde hair waiting—waiting for me, the symbiotic being ready to curl and uncurl and curl again around me.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. I feel that huge heavy hard thing, like an iron radiator, just outside the bedroom door. I can’t see it with my eyes, but I see it in my mind’s eye; I feel it over there in my body. It feels like a massive inanimate creature that would crush everything in its path, cracking the floorboards as it slowly heaves and grinds its way towards me, hissing with terrible wheezing breaths. I leap from the bed, hands pressed to my mouth to muffle my screams. It’s there, someplace, I know it’s there—that curling lock of golden blonde hair twisted around my soul—waiting for me. I don’t know what it will do to me, but it can’t be good.

Even when I cover my ears, I hear the strident metallic shriek of the cicadas. With my eyes closed I still see the curled lock of golden blonde hair, following me wherever I go.

When my head hurts, the shiny brass kettledrums play late into the night.

I am an epileptic, or maybe I should say that epilepsy has me. I pace quickly up and down the hallway, trying to return to the real world. I learned how to slap myself across the face—hard—which wasn’t easy to do. I feel nothing. I rush to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face. I feel nothing. Pacing, slapping, splashing… screams cosseted in my hands, “no no no….” Bit by bit I begin to feel again, to escape from the staggering magnetic pull of that awful monstrous thing out there, that thing I see inside but not in front of me. I start to feel the pressure of the slap, then the pain. Then the water stings like a thousand needles each sharper than themselves, until at last it’s just cold and wet. The terror is gone, the crushing iron ribs of the radiator are gone, and I can go back to bed, exhausted, too drained to cry.

But the curled lock of golden blonde hair… Now with my eyes closed or open, I see the lock of golden blonde hair, curled, following me wherever I go. I sleep with my eyes open hoping to escape to be free. Even when I cover my ears, I hear the strident metallic shriek of the cicadas: You have grand mal epilepsy, click. The lock of blonde hair is epilepsy itself, stalking me everywhere I go, curling around my spine, my mind, my brain—whose is it, who gave it to me?—it follows me, waiting for me to let my guard down, to forget to pace and slap and splash, to twist around every part of my being, to curl and uncurl and curl and curl again, twisting and squeezing like a golden snake a snake of blonde hair waiting to squeeze me to steal my soul to squeeze me with terror to tighten its grip until I beg I beg I beg to kill me please please just kill me let me die I beg let me die I can’t go on I can’t go back to hell…

When my head hurts, the shiny brass kettledrums play late into the night.

I’m an epileptic and I’m not supposed to say that.

Max Klement

Image by NomeVisualizzato from Pixabay – Page showing the print out of brain waves from an EEG test