Dancing in the dark

Before all the world, in a media circus, my sister was accused of crimes against the children she had lost, while their abductor, Stephen Fagan, now a convicted felon, became a hero in the eyes of many. I became "Kurth family spokesman," a role with special perils, and one I found I couldn't write about after the first shock and outrage had passed. I tried -- I would have forsaken Isadora for it. But what came out was only bile, ugliness and obsession. I lost 18 months of work in that ordeal, and if those poor girls ever think again -- but I won't say it. I wrote about the death of Isadora's children in a condition of perfect pain. "No," she replied, when friends inquired if they could help, "there is nothing, nothing, nothing to do."

By the time Y2K came and went without disaster, I'd written as far as "South America," Chapter 19. Then I had another collapse, and another pneumonia, when 52 pills a day began to poison my body and mind and I broke with the doctor I once trusted -- the same doctor who'd treated the Phantom in his final days. Hands down, this was the hardest thing I've ever done. I thought I'd die doing it -- I thought it would kill me.

Now, I take seven pills for HIV, two in the morning and five at night, and suffer from the side effects my life-saving drugs entail. My hands and feet are numb and cold from neuropathy, my legs are weak and I have dangerously high cholesterol -- I could die at any minute! AIDS, terror, airplanes, anthrax. "Always fire and water," said Isadora, "and sudden fearful death."

Five years ago, when I started on HAART -- "highly active antiretroviral therapy" -- I gave a talk on National Public Radio. I spoke about "the tranquility of hopelessness" and "the torments of optimism," as if I really knew something about them. But if I have any advantage over other people, after 12 years of this awful thing, it's that I'm used to being pitched forward, hurled into the next stage of life. And that's exactly how it came: a summer night, a car in wrong gear, a dock with no rail, bottomless grief and presto! -- I'm in the lake over my head.

Be aware that you can't open a car door underwater -- the pressure is too great. Try not to have electric windows, because if they aren't down already, at least a little bit, as mine were, your goose is cooked. And remember that the mind plays tricks: I could have sworn I was floating in the air when it happened, looking down on my own demise. I know that I dove back into the water three times after I shimmied out, trying to pull the car up by its fender, and that when I finally realized it couldn't be done, I was laughing -- hysterically, in shock, but laughing, just the same. Heraclitus: "If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out, and difficult." In a certain way -- and it took until now, believe me -- I've never been afraid of anything again.

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I still haven't filled out Little, Brown's author questionnaire, quite simply because I don't know how to answer: "Besides writing, what activities are you currently engaged in? Do you have any suggestions for promoting your book? Any personal media contacts? Is there anything in your book that you consider 'newsworthy'?" Among the few reviews I've seen so far, one's good, one's bad and one's dumb. The usual, but I don't know what it means anymore -- I've been away too long. When Fay Weldon recently announced that she'd taken money from Bulgari to promote its jewels in a novel, I suggested tying a Hermes scarf to every copy of "Isadora" and selling them together. For some reason, my editor never got back to me on that.

And there's no ending to this story, either -- you'll have to forgive me. On a good day, I can look at my finished work, all 652 pages of it, and thank my stars it got done at all. Still, I make no sudden moves. I don't ride in sports cars; I wear no shawls or scarves. "I do not doubt that someday someone will discover an instrument which will do for sight what radio does for hearing," Isadora wrote, "and we will discover that we are surrounded, not only by sounds, but also and invisibly, to our eyes, by the presence of all that is no longer. The music and the voices that we hear do not cease to exist but travel in space indefinitely and in time attain other stars ... Each word we speak, each gesture we make continues in the ether on an immortal voyage ... In this survival only I believe, and that is sufficient."

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