Sonya Huber
Prescriptions
Prescriptions
We fled to someone’s living room in Columbus, Ohio, and sat around the glowing
porthole of CNN, peering into New York’s ashy hell. In a somber toast to our new
lives in war-time, someone brought out the pot, rolled a joint. I drank my ice water
and passed the joint without inhaling, knowing that pot would make me still more
anxious and unsettled. Wondering whether another attack or nuclear retaliation
were imminent, I numbly wandered into our host’s bathroom.
On a low wire rack piled with bath products beneath the sink, I spotted an
amber bottle of prescription-strength allergy medication. I picked up the bottle of
Claritin. The ovals nestled densely like a cache of powerful larvae. In a flash of
denial and prosaic problem-solving mania, I numbly multitasked, stole, and became
overly involved with my boyfriend’s uninsured sinuses. I opened the bottle and
fished out one pill with the tip of a moistened finger. I put the pill in my pocket.
On the back porch, women’s palms exuded muffled clacks as cell phones
clicked shut like muted castanets. Calls to New York, where husbands and lovers
worked and lived, could not be completed as dialed. Our arms twined around our
torsos as if to hold in our organs. We chewed on our moisturized cuticles with the
edges of our white teeth, and our eyes scanned the still and flawless sky. Someone
changed the channel to Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, who sat at a round table
strewn with papers and gripped bottles of spring water.
Comfort looked like those plastic bottles of water, like a plastic bottle filled with
prescription medication. Comfort to my friends looked like ice cubes glinting in
glasses, like the lava-red glowing tip of burning marijuana. Comfort looked like
things we could put in our mouths to solve the small problems.
A strictly economist view of restitution might grant me absolution if I were to find
that almost-stranger and pay her for one Claritin, which was available only by
prescription back in 2001. She probably shelled out a co-pay of $15 for 30 pills, so I
might get off easy with a bill of 50 cents. Claritin can now be purchased over the
counter for about $1 a pill. Either way, the financial damage I inflicted on this
woman was minimal, and I hasten to add that I didn’t even take a hit off her joint,
which would have cost more than 50 cents per toke. But wait: the pot was offered
freely in a ritual of panic and bonding. Sadly, nobody hands out antihistamines as
hors d’oeuvres. So the meaning of my action contains the crime: I took something
that wasn’t given in order to give something that wasn’t requested.
I stole the pill for my then-boyfriend D., who sniffled daily, red-eye while
holding power tools, working outside in hay fever season. D. had been up on
scaffolding under the bright blue sky repairing a chimney when the towers
collapsed. The house was in a rough neighborhood; when a crack addict wandered
by and screamed, “Man, they’re bombing New York!” D. thought it a crack
fantasy and shook his head.
Tap water and a stolen pill in the glare of smoke and ash. How dare I breathe
the trivial and the catastrophic together? I reveal this petty crime because I’m
interested in its existence. I want to know what it means. How is it possible, in a
state of national emergency, to steal an allergy pill? How can I prove to you that it
somehow matters?
Without insurance, an allergy pill cost a $60 office visit and another $50 or so for a
prescription. A Western convenience; we were awash in material privilege, even if
we couldn’t get access to all of it. Sometimes the envy of knowing we were
surrounded by the well-insured, by healthcare, made my bones ache.
Living in a state of constant fear—or even low-level anxiety—is physically
toxic. I worried about D.’s lack of insurance. I made myself sick worrying about
sickness; I envisioned his circular saw slipping, had horribly maiming visions
slippery with blood. Then I tried to offer solutions. I researched, ran the numbers,
income versus outcome, flip and flip and allocate. I made calls, I ordered pamphlets
and price quotes for catastrophic health insurance policies for D. to look at.
Obviously, I am to blame for the direction of my thoughts and their results. My
worry solved nothing, and was an invasive attempt to protect Ds. body and his
health. My worry led me into irrational thinking.
I structured his existence in my image, like a fantasy in which democracy can
be spread from nation to nation around the world, with a little aggressive
intervention to get the ball rolling. I might claim that my intervention was
motivated by love and humanitarian concern. But I could not have been more
selfish. D. suffered loudly, and because I could not admit it was annoying, I tried to
solve it for him so he would be quiet and act the way I wanted him to act.
In the midst of my pharmaceutical theft, I was not thinking about a full-scale
cure. You might argue that in presenting my boyfriend with one stolen pill, I was
actually increasing his suffering by giving him a taste of temporary relief. What was I
thinking?
Although I did not articulate it to myself at the moment, one pill represented a
kind of bait. I almost believed that if D. swallowed the solitary Claritin, he would
be roused from the hazy, sleepy toleration of his iron-fisted, dictatorial allergies. He
would remember what it felt like to have a clear head and nose. Then, I reasoned,
with a “taste of freedom,” he would feel within him the stirrings of motivation and
take steps on his own behalf—steps I’d conveniently laid out ahead of time. I
planned to take quick and firm action, presenting my pill of freedom to pepper the
totalitarian regime of mucous with high-powered weapons. The vision: After a
quick surgical strike to shrink the membranes of terror, a motivated and awakened
D. would take up the reins of power and start to make his own to-do lists in order to
realize his destiny.
Some people cook when they feel adrift, and some clean, just to see the results of
their labor. I don’t always steal for comfort. I am either an honest person who has
moral lapses or a thief who practices infrequently.
Children steal because they want to even the equation; they often can’t imagine
that one day in the natural course of time, they will grow into power. When I was
small, I stole penny candy and plastic grapes from fruit arrangements in the upstairs
arts-and-crafts section of Bruns’ Drugstore. I squeezed the plastic purple and green
bulbs and held the open hole, once filled by the missing plastic stem, against my
skin. When I let go, suction adhered the bulb tightly to my arm or forehead like a
boil or a massive wart. The small objects of my theft represented my secret will.
They held mysterious significance and I wanted them in order to see myself.
Could I or should I have trusted, like a child, that one day we would grow into
insurance and stability? At the time, it seemed foolish to bank on hope with so much
evidence to the contrary.
As I got older, the infrequent targets of my theft became more symbolic. I took
an expensive name-brand shirt from a friend during a sleepover because I lusted not
so much for the shirt (unattractive, of the Coca-Cola brand strangely popular in the
Midwest in the late ‘80s) as for the elusive status it seemed to promise. I mailed the
shirt back to her later with a gift and an apology, but the damage was done and she
never replied. In my twenties, I was an infrequent shoplifter, hitting the jewelry
racks at the Dollar Store and Urban Outfitters when my life seemed particularly
bleak and unadorned.
I applied to well-paying corporate jobs and found myself unworthy and
unqualified. I worried that maybe I’d never been middle-class enough, or maybe I
had squandered my chance. As a temporary receptionist, I wore a sack-like black
skirt I bought for a dollar from Goodwill. I did not mind Goodwill or even taking
things from the trash and the curb when they appealed and fit me; that was fun. But
most of the small thefts were things I did not desperately need; my low income
created a general fog of lack that made anything with a price tag into a promise of
forbidden comfort.
I stole markers from my job at the photo processing store. I stole soap and
shampoo from the youth home where I was a counselor. I stole stacks of Post-it
Notes from office jobs, pens from doctors’ offices, and a vinyl drink coaster from an
expansive conference room table at a pointless job interview. I liberated things
from The Man. Or else maybe I wanted to be The Man. I resented people who had
disposable income. I wanted pretty things, and the world owed me these treats,
which it dangled just beyond the clear barriers of department store windows.
If you frame something as a crisis waiting to happen, warning signs of a crisis
abound. A sortie for reconnaissance often strangely leads to larger interventions, and
when one begins to focus on a problem as a problem, it tends to escalate and
provide evidence for further involvement and more complex solutions.
I lusted after safety, but I also hated those who had what I wanted, and I hated
those who had structured life to be so hard. I can’t tell now which of these two
emotions was stronger, and even though I am safe today, I can close my eyes and
feel a stripe of orange anger down the center of my belly, a nauseating desire for
revenge.
Terrorism is defined by drastic, sudden, and violent action, yet its corollary—long
term fear and anxiety, waiting for the next attack—is a side-effect also desired by
the terrorists. If the threat of future violence effectively leeches from a population
its sense of the future, its sense of agency and security, the terrorist has won the war
with a single battle.
One of the sad things about terrorism from a rhetorical perspective is that the
terrorist often attempts to communicate or draw attention to the plight of a
victimized group with an act of violence. The act of violence, however,
overshadows any attention to the meaning for the terrorist. In effect, the terrorist’s
choice of medium destroys the message.
What is the message, what is the meaning, of living for years with that anxiety?
An annual physical might reveal a chronic condition, the treatment of which could
lead to bankruptcy. Half of the personal bankruptcies today are triggered in some
way by medical debt. “Fair” in this context is drained of meaning. Life isn’t fair,
kids. What it is supposed to teach us? Maybe it’s some hard-edged version of the
American dream, some motivation to collect enough money to buy healing. But life
inside a tunnel makes you frantic; any lunge toward the light can look like a solution.
The glowing maps on the television began to envision the scenarios, to make
feverish plans. We ate doom for breakfast and nursed revenge. Blowback is the
military term for unintended consequences of foreign intervention. The United
States funded Islamic fundamentalist Afghanis in the 1980s in a cold-war fight
against a Soviet invasion of the country. More than $600 million a year through a
decade provided a launch pad for the growth of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. It
takes willful effort to not connect the dots. Yet in the aftermath of 9/11, asking for
reasons and meaning was akin to treason. If you wondered about the connections,
you were telling widows their husbands deserved to die.
I wonder what resentment and rage we nurse here, what blowback will taste like. I
know it, because I have felt it in myself. I know it is offensive to talk about health
insurance and terrorism in the same breath. It is offensive to bring together two
opposite systems; one is the American way and business as usual. The other is the
negation of everything that country stands for. And yet both can kill you. The threat
of death, the wanton harm of bodies, is the only common thread.
Insanity is fixating on any loose ends of healthcare and stealing whatever I could
get my hands on. Health insurance became the beloved, the obsession. Every
symbolic move toward healthcare was equated for me with a move toward safety. I
was not in danger of immediate death, but every potential condition felt like a
threat. I am not saying “insane” as if I am or was in the minority: Denial of
symptoms, denial of disease, denial of rampant problems and festering wounds. I
comforted myself with fantasies of control. I denied what was going on in my own
body to focus on someone else’s problems.
I swallowed a little red pill with my coffee, an over-the-counter Sudafed. I bought
a box of decongestants every time I went grocery shopping. I always had extra pills
rolling around in the corners of my purse. They looked like little red-hot candies. I
always had a stuffy nose, but Sudafed was cheap.
Then I started grad school and got student health insurance. I visited a doctor at
the campus health center and described the symptoms of obvious seasonal allergies:
the runny nose, scratchy throat and ears, buzzing head. The doctor sat diagonally to
my right behind a desk. He nodded, stroked his chin and flipped through my chart.
“Hmmm,” he said. “I don’t see any history of allergies in your chart.”
Correct. I’ve never received treatment for allergies. Because I’m lying, I might
have said to the doctor, because this is not for me. Because life is not going the way
I’d planned, because things feel gray-yellow, the color of a science laboratory’s
walls. Because the game is not going in my favor and so I’m going to cheat.
I held my purposeful little grad student shoulder bag, filled with pens and
appointments and shopping lists. I sat in the sunlight streaming in the window and
held out my prescription, which meant one thing: a vial of pills I could take home
to D. I stepped down the stairs slowly to contain my joy. I was in like an undetected
thief. I paid—a song, a nothing—and stuffed the amber bottle triple-wrapped in its
white paper baggie and assorted warning labels and receipts into my tote bag,
flooded with a sense of relief, wealth, and well-being. I wanted to dash home and
hand the vial to D. like a prize. I possessed the ability to change and master the
symptoms of illness, the illusion or reality of helping to heal.
And here is the truth another way: I stole that first Claritin from bitterness, and lied
to get the bottle from joy. I stole the first because it was an easy mark, not because it
would actually improve my life, our lives, in any significant way. That first theft was
motivated by spite, as if I’d run a car key along the shiny surface of a Mercedes out
of sheer bitterness, because it represented the other life I wanted for myself and my
boyfriend, the life in which we were both insured and enfolded in that sense of
physical, bodily security I craved. I took it because I was angry he didn’t seem to
want that life. I was frustrated and impatient and almost rageful at the world for
failing to conform to my image of how things should be. I took it because I was
afraid we would never get there. I took it because I was angry it was so tempting,
because I felt too old to be scrounging for pills.
The whole bottle: that was joy, a victimless crime. Faking a prescription is a
crime that carries a sentence of up to a $5,000 fine and five years in jail. Most
people create fake prescriptions to feed their addictions to controlled substances.
People who fake ailments to get narcotics are addicts who need help, or they are
criminals taking advantage of other people’s addictions. I was high on my own
thrifty resourcefulness, my ability to take care of a problem with the dormant power
of my student health insurance card. I wanted to help D., but more than anything
else I wanted the worry to stop, so much so that I was willing to easily slide from
misdemeanor to felony.
Two years later, lots of death on the news, and I was safely insured. Selfish, aren’t I?
Mentioning death and life in the same sentence is treason, and yet I have a
point.
An otolaryngologist looked up my nose and told me my sinuses were
permanently inflamed. He winced and told me I had a severely deviated septum,
probably the result of either a birth defect or a sharp blow to the face when I was
young, leaving internal structures all awry. “I think we’re going to have to do a little
surgery,” he said.
My face lit up. “Great,” I said. “If it will help, I’m all for it.” Put me under, cut
away.
He pulled his lighted scope away from his eye and laughed. “I’ve rarely had a
patient so calm about getting an operation,” he said.
You don’t understand, I wanted to tell him. Cut my face, use your skill, and I
rejoice. The essence of fear is uncertainty. Knowing, faith, choosing action and
certainty—these options lock in on a solution, illusory or real, that shows the route
to sanguine bliss.
porthole of CNN, peering into New York’s ashy hell. In a somber toast to our new
lives in war-time, someone brought out the pot, rolled a joint. I drank my ice water
and passed the joint without inhaling, knowing that pot would make me still more
anxious and unsettled. Wondering whether another attack or nuclear retaliation
were imminent, I numbly wandered into our host’s bathroom.
On a low wire rack piled with bath products beneath the sink, I spotted an
amber bottle of prescription-strength allergy medication. I picked up the bottle of
Claritin. The ovals nestled densely like a cache of powerful larvae. In a flash of
denial and prosaic problem-solving mania, I numbly multitasked, stole, and became
overly involved with my boyfriend’s uninsured sinuses. I opened the bottle and
fished out one pill with the tip of a moistened finger. I put the pill in my pocket.
On the back porch, women’s palms exuded muffled clacks as cell phones
clicked shut like muted castanets. Calls to New York, where husbands and lovers
worked and lived, could not be completed as dialed. Our arms twined around our
torsos as if to hold in our organs. We chewed on our moisturized cuticles with the
edges of our white teeth, and our eyes scanned the still and flawless sky. Someone
changed the channel to Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, who sat at a round table
strewn with papers and gripped bottles of spring water.
Comfort looked like those plastic bottles of water, like a plastic bottle filled with
prescription medication. Comfort to my friends looked like ice cubes glinting in
glasses, like the lava-red glowing tip of burning marijuana. Comfort looked like
things we could put in our mouths to solve the small problems.
A strictly economist view of restitution might grant me absolution if I were to find
that almost-stranger and pay her for one Claritin, which was available only by
prescription back in 2001. She probably shelled out a co-pay of $15 for 30 pills, so I
might get off easy with a bill of 50 cents. Claritin can now be purchased over the
counter for about $1 a pill. Either way, the financial damage I inflicted on this
woman was minimal, and I hasten to add that I didn’t even take a hit off her joint,
which would have cost more than 50 cents per toke. But wait: the pot was offered
freely in a ritual of panic and bonding. Sadly, nobody hands out antihistamines as
hors d’oeuvres. So the meaning of my action contains the crime: I took something
that wasn’t given in order to give something that wasn’t requested.
I stole the pill for my then-boyfriend D., who sniffled daily, red-eye while
holding power tools, working outside in hay fever season. D. had been up on
scaffolding under the bright blue sky repairing a chimney when the towers
collapsed. The house was in a rough neighborhood; when a crack addict wandered
by and screamed, “Man, they’re bombing New York!” D. thought it a crack
fantasy and shook his head.
Tap water and a stolen pill in the glare of smoke and ash. How dare I breathe
the trivial and the catastrophic together? I reveal this petty crime because I’m
interested in its existence. I want to know what it means. How is it possible, in a
state of national emergency, to steal an allergy pill? How can I prove to you that it
somehow matters?
Without insurance, an allergy pill cost a $60 office visit and another $50 or so for a
prescription. A Western convenience; we were awash in material privilege, even if
we couldn’t get access to all of it. Sometimes the envy of knowing we were
surrounded by the well-insured, by healthcare, made my bones ache.
Living in a state of constant fear—or even low-level anxiety—is physically
toxic. I worried about D.’s lack of insurance. I made myself sick worrying about
sickness; I envisioned his circular saw slipping, had horribly maiming visions
slippery with blood. Then I tried to offer solutions. I researched, ran the numbers,
income versus outcome, flip and flip and allocate. I made calls, I ordered pamphlets
and price quotes for catastrophic health insurance policies for D. to look at.
Obviously, I am to blame for the direction of my thoughts and their results. My
worry solved nothing, and was an invasive attempt to protect Ds. body and his
health. My worry led me into irrational thinking.
I structured his existence in my image, like a fantasy in which democracy can
be spread from nation to nation around the world, with a little aggressive
intervention to get the ball rolling. I might claim that my intervention was
motivated by love and humanitarian concern. But I could not have been more
selfish. D. suffered loudly, and because I could not admit it was annoying, I tried to
solve it for him so he would be quiet and act the way I wanted him to act.
In the midst of my pharmaceutical theft, I was not thinking about a full-scale
cure. You might argue that in presenting my boyfriend with one stolen pill, I was
actually increasing his suffering by giving him a taste of temporary relief. What was I
thinking?
Although I did not articulate it to myself at the moment, one pill represented a
kind of bait. I almost believed that if D. swallowed the solitary Claritin, he would
be roused from the hazy, sleepy toleration of his iron-fisted, dictatorial allergies. He
would remember what it felt like to have a clear head and nose. Then, I reasoned,
with a “taste of freedom,” he would feel within him the stirrings of motivation and
take steps on his own behalf—steps I’d conveniently laid out ahead of time. I
planned to take quick and firm action, presenting my pill of freedom to pepper the
totalitarian regime of mucous with high-powered weapons. The vision: After a
quick surgical strike to shrink the membranes of terror, a motivated and awakened
D. would take up the reins of power and start to make his own to-do lists in order to
realize his destiny.
Some people cook when they feel adrift, and some clean, just to see the results of
their labor. I don’t always steal for comfort. I am either an honest person who has
moral lapses or a thief who practices infrequently.
Children steal because they want to even the equation; they often can’t imagine
that one day in the natural course of time, they will grow into power. When I was
small, I stole penny candy and plastic grapes from fruit arrangements in the upstairs
arts-and-crafts section of Bruns’ Drugstore. I squeezed the plastic purple and green
bulbs and held the open hole, once filled by the missing plastic stem, against my
skin. When I let go, suction adhered the bulb tightly to my arm or forehead like a
boil or a massive wart. The small objects of my theft represented my secret will.
They held mysterious significance and I wanted them in order to see myself.
Could I or should I have trusted, like a child, that one day we would grow into
insurance and stability? At the time, it seemed foolish to bank on hope with so much
evidence to the contrary.
As I got older, the infrequent targets of my theft became more symbolic. I took
an expensive name-brand shirt from a friend during a sleepover because I lusted not
so much for the shirt (unattractive, of the Coca-Cola brand strangely popular in the
Midwest in the late ‘80s) as for the elusive status it seemed to promise. I mailed the
shirt back to her later with a gift and an apology, but the damage was done and she
never replied. In my twenties, I was an infrequent shoplifter, hitting the jewelry
racks at the Dollar Store and Urban Outfitters when my life seemed particularly
bleak and unadorned.
I applied to well-paying corporate jobs and found myself unworthy and
unqualified. I worried that maybe I’d never been middle-class enough, or maybe I
had squandered my chance. As a temporary receptionist, I wore a sack-like black
skirt I bought for a dollar from Goodwill. I did not mind Goodwill or even taking
things from the trash and the curb when they appealed and fit me; that was fun. But
most of the small thefts were things I did not desperately need; my low income
created a general fog of lack that made anything with a price tag into a promise of
forbidden comfort.
I stole markers from my job at the photo processing store. I stole soap and
shampoo from the youth home where I was a counselor. I stole stacks of Post-it
Notes from office jobs, pens from doctors’ offices, and a vinyl drink coaster from an
expansive conference room table at a pointless job interview. I liberated things
from The Man. Or else maybe I wanted to be The Man. I resented people who had
disposable income. I wanted pretty things, and the world owed me these treats,
which it dangled just beyond the clear barriers of department store windows.
If you frame something as a crisis waiting to happen, warning signs of a crisis
abound. A sortie for reconnaissance often strangely leads to larger interventions, and
when one begins to focus on a problem as a problem, it tends to escalate and
provide evidence for further involvement and more complex solutions.
I lusted after safety, but I also hated those who had what I wanted, and I hated
those who had structured life to be so hard. I can’t tell now which of these two
emotions was stronger, and even though I am safe today, I can close my eyes and
feel a stripe of orange anger down the center of my belly, a nauseating desire for
revenge.
Terrorism is defined by drastic, sudden, and violent action, yet its corollary—long
term fear and anxiety, waiting for the next attack—is a side-effect also desired by
the terrorists. If the threat of future violence effectively leeches from a population
its sense of the future, its sense of agency and security, the terrorist has won the war
with a single battle.
One of the sad things about terrorism from a rhetorical perspective is that the
terrorist often attempts to communicate or draw attention to the plight of a
victimized group with an act of violence. The act of violence, however,
overshadows any attention to the meaning for the terrorist. In effect, the terrorist’s
choice of medium destroys the message.
What is the message, what is the meaning, of living for years with that anxiety?
An annual physical might reveal a chronic condition, the treatment of which could
lead to bankruptcy. Half of the personal bankruptcies today are triggered in some
way by medical debt. “Fair” in this context is drained of meaning. Life isn’t fair,
kids. What it is supposed to teach us? Maybe it’s some hard-edged version of the
American dream, some motivation to collect enough money to buy healing. But life
inside a tunnel makes you frantic; any lunge toward the light can look like a solution.
The glowing maps on the television began to envision the scenarios, to make
feverish plans. We ate doom for breakfast and nursed revenge. Blowback is the
military term for unintended consequences of foreign intervention. The United
States funded Islamic fundamentalist Afghanis in the 1980s in a cold-war fight
against a Soviet invasion of the country. More than $600 million a year through a
decade provided a launch pad for the growth of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. It
takes willful effort to not connect the dots. Yet in the aftermath of 9/11, asking for
reasons and meaning was akin to treason. If you wondered about the connections,
you were telling widows their husbands deserved to die.
I wonder what resentment and rage we nurse here, what blowback will taste like. I
know it, because I have felt it in myself. I know it is offensive to talk about health
insurance and terrorism in the same breath. It is offensive to bring together two
opposite systems; one is the American way and business as usual. The other is the
negation of everything that country stands for. And yet both can kill you. The threat
of death, the wanton harm of bodies, is the only common thread.
Insanity is fixating on any loose ends of healthcare and stealing whatever I could
get my hands on. Health insurance became the beloved, the obsession. Every
symbolic move toward healthcare was equated for me with a move toward safety. I
was not in danger of immediate death, but every potential condition felt like a
threat. I am not saying “insane” as if I am or was in the minority: Denial of
symptoms, denial of disease, denial of rampant problems and festering wounds. I
comforted myself with fantasies of control. I denied what was going on in my own
body to focus on someone else’s problems.
I swallowed a little red pill with my coffee, an over-the-counter Sudafed. I bought
a box of decongestants every time I went grocery shopping. I always had extra pills
rolling around in the corners of my purse. They looked like little red-hot candies. I
always had a stuffy nose, but Sudafed was cheap.
Then I started grad school and got student health insurance. I visited a doctor at
the campus health center and described the symptoms of obvious seasonal allergies:
the runny nose, scratchy throat and ears, buzzing head. The doctor sat diagonally to
my right behind a desk. He nodded, stroked his chin and flipped through my chart.
“Hmmm,” he said. “I don’t see any history of allergies in your chart.”
Correct. I’ve never received treatment for allergies. Because I’m lying, I might
have said to the doctor, because this is not for me. Because life is not going the way
I’d planned, because things feel gray-yellow, the color of a science laboratory’s
walls. Because the game is not going in my favor and so I’m going to cheat.
I held my purposeful little grad student shoulder bag, filled with pens and
appointments and shopping lists. I sat in the sunlight streaming in the window and
held out my prescription, which meant one thing: a vial of pills I could take home
to D. I stepped down the stairs slowly to contain my joy. I was in like an undetected
thief. I paid—a song, a nothing—and stuffed the amber bottle triple-wrapped in its
white paper baggie and assorted warning labels and receipts into my tote bag,
flooded with a sense of relief, wealth, and well-being. I wanted to dash home and
hand the vial to D. like a prize. I possessed the ability to change and master the
symptoms of illness, the illusion or reality of helping to heal.
And here is the truth another way: I stole that first Claritin from bitterness, and lied
to get the bottle from joy. I stole the first because it was an easy mark, not because it
would actually improve my life, our lives, in any significant way. That first theft was
motivated by spite, as if I’d run a car key along the shiny surface of a Mercedes out
of sheer bitterness, because it represented the other life I wanted for myself and my
boyfriend, the life in which we were both insured and enfolded in that sense of
physical, bodily security I craved. I took it because I was angry he didn’t seem to
want that life. I was frustrated and impatient and almost rageful at the world for
failing to conform to my image of how things should be. I took it because I was
afraid we would never get there. I took it because I was angry it was so tempting,
because I felt too old to be scrounging for pills.
The whole bottle: that was joy, a victimless crime. Faking a prescription is a
crime that carries a sentence of up to a $5,000 fine and five years in jail. Most
people create fake prescriptions to feed their addictions to controlled substances.
People who fake ailments to get narcotics are addicts who need help, or they are
criminals taking advantage of other people’s addictions. I was high on my own
thrifty resourcefulness, my ability to take care of a problem with the dormant power
of my student health insurance card. I wanted to help D., but more than anything
else I wanted the worry to stop, so much so that I was willing to easily slide from
misdemeanor to felony.
Two years later, lots of death on the news, and I was safely insured. Selfish, aren’t I?
Mentioning death and life in the same sentence is treason, and yet I have a
point.
An otolaryngologist looked up my nose and told me my sinuses were
permanently inflamed. He winced and told me I had a severely deviated septum,
probably the result of either a birth defect or a sharp blow to the face when I was
young, leaving internal structures all awry. “I think we’re going to have to do a little
surgery,” he said.
My face lit up. “Great,” I said. “If it will help, I’m all for it.” Put me under, cut
away.
He pulled his lighted scope away from his eye and laughed. “I’ve rarely had a
patient so calm about getting an operation,” he said.
You don’t understand, I wanted to tell him. Cut my face, use your skill, and I
rejoice. The essence of fear is uncertainty. Knowing, faith, choosing action and
certainty—these options lock in on a solution, illusory or real, that shows the route
to sanguine bliss.
Sonya Huber is an assistant professor at Georgia Southern University in the Department of
Writing & Linguistics, where she teaches creative writing and composition. Her first book,
Opa Nobody (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), presents a portrait of her anti-Nazi
activist grandfather in fiction and memoir. Her second book of memoir, Cover Me, A
Health Insurance Memoir, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press. Her work has
appeared in Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, Oxford Magazine, Literary Mama, Passages
North, The Chronicle of Higher Education and in anthologies from Seal Press, University
of Arizona Press, and Prometheus Books. More information on her work is available at
www.sonyahuber.com, and you can contact her at sonya@sonyahuber.com. She loves dark
chocolate with almonds, black licorice, Swedish Fish, and Twizzlers (even though they
have nothing to do with real licorice).
Writing & Linguistics, where she teaches creative writing and composition. Her first book,
Opa Nobody (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), presents a portrait of her anti-Nazi
activist grandfather in fiction and memoir. Her second book of memoir, Cover Me, A
Health Insurance Memoir, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press. Her work has
appeared in Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, Oxford Magazine, Literary Mama, Passages
North, The Chronicle of Higher Education and in anthologies from Seal Press, University
of Arizona Press, and Prometheus Books. More information on her work is available at
www.sonyahuber.com, and you can contact her at sonya@sonyahuber.com. She loves dark
chocolate with almonds, black licorice, Swedish Fish, and Twizzlers (even though they
have nothing to do with real licorice).
