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the seven-hour drive to Rochester every six weeks. The clinic is a vast medicalcomplex like something out of Kafka, complete with towers of paperwork, dimly lit waiting rooms, beeping machines, and inexplicable procedures. Shuttle buses run between the local motels and the main entrance to the clinic, where wheelchairs are stacked like shopping carts. My mother has learned to test a few, checking for stuck brakes and speed wobbles, before choosing the one she will use to push me to appointments and tests and follow-up appointments, stopping now and then to consult the map we’ve been issued along with my patient ID. Tiled halls lead to elevators that open onto tiled halls. Underground tunnels connect the clinics, crowded with people wearing the uniform mask of exhaustion: families in street clothes, doctors in scrubs, outpatients glancing at watches and maps, inpatients on stretchers, or pushing their own IVs. There are subterraneous boutiques, wig shops and flower shops, beauty parlors, restaurants. Balloons bubble out of doorways, bright colors jaundiced by fluorescent lights. Small battery-powered dogs—the year’s impulse buy—shudder and yap in the display windows. When the corridor bends, fish-eye mirrors mounted near the ceiling let you see who or what is racing toward you—an EMT team, a power wheelchair, a defibrillation unit with BE CALM painted on its side.
    At each appointment, I leave the wheelchair behind in the waiting room, crutching more and more slowly after thenurse, who assures me we’re almost there, it isn’t much further, or do I want my mother to bring me the wheelchair? I do not. It is desperately important that I meet each new doctor, each new technician or nurse, standing up—or, at least, sitting in a regular chair and not a clinic wheelchair. I want to prove that I’m not like the others, the sick, the hurt, the hopeless. Nope, not me, I’m different, I’m fun. One look at me and the doctor will see, must see, that this is some kind of mistake, that I’m really not like this at all.
    But the truth is that my body is just one more mystery to be solved. Already, there are patients piling up in the waiting rooms. Appointment schedules have fallen behind. There are medical students who must be instructed, who stand in a weary half circle around the examining table as a nurse moves my crutches aside. The doctor may or may not look me in the eye, may or may not speak my name. Once again, I recite my medical history, the story that has swallowed all the others I might tell, a story that stretches out in front of me like the map my mother unfolds before pushing me off to my next appointment, an arrow pointing to YOU ARE HERE, a circle that represents the place I must go. There are halls and doorways, elevators and waiting rooms. The walls are painted in gentle pastels that are neither blue nor green, but something that is neither, indescribable, in between.
    And then, after the last appointment, the new prescriptions, the cortisone injections, after the final restless night at the motel, there’s the seven-hour drive back home. Mostly, the landscape does not change: bare-knuckled trees and barbed-wire fences, skeletal clouds drifting across an endless sky. Snow squalls pass like identical seasons, and sometimes we pull over to wait them out, and sometimes we pull over to wait them out, and sometimes we do not. In the distance, we see dairy farms, Holsteins picking their way across frozen muck. A dog, coated in ice, lying dead in the median. A white cross hung with plastic flowers that have faded from red to fingernail pink. My mother fills the air with words as if she believes the right ones, the right combination, can somehow put everything right. I myself say less and less on these trips; I am exhausted, numb. But if I think, My stomach hurts , my mother’s hand pats her purse for the Saltines. If I need to use the bathroom, my mother says, “I