The Kiss: A Memoir by Kathryn Harrison

don’t reassure my father I won’t give him the satisfaction, nor will I relinquish the facade of independence my relationship with my boyfriend has not survived my father’s sudden entry into my life. In a few months, my boyfriend will move away. We won’t break up, exactly. Instead, we’ll allow his being hired for a job in a far-off city to redefine us as a long distance couple, this geographic estrangement a useful way to excuse the alienation we continue to suffer in the long wake of the kiss. Apart from my boyfriend, my closest female friend is the only person I see, and we don’t talk about my father. The changes wrought in me over the past months have been so profound and, perhaps on a level neither of us can acknowledge, so worrisome that we always find some subject other than what is happening to me. I am beginning to learn what it means, unspeakable. And yet, for as long as we live, we express ourselves. With or without words, we speak. There are stories of mad people, of people possessed, on their bodies writing appears to tell of the anguish they hold inside. In an earlier century, a case of shingles might have been cause for exorcism. The skin on my neck breaks out in blisters, each the size of a match head and clustered in patches of twenty or more that open to form raw sores. Before a week passes, the “lesions, ” as the doctor calls them, have spread onto my shoulder, my back, my chest, and down my right arm all the way to the tip of my thumb. The infection follows nerve paths that originate from my seventh cervical vertebra, where herpes zoster, the chicken-pox virus, has lain dormant since I contracted it, at age five. What a memory the body has, events recorded in our bones, our blood, our nerves. It was the summer of my father’s first visit, just after he left, that I came down with chicken pox. “But why would it become active now? ” I ask the doctor on my second visit. “Why now, after fifteen years? “
    “Stress, ” he says. “Physical or emotional stress. ” He raises his eyebrows meaningfully at me. “What’s happening in your life? ” he asks.
    “Oh, ” I say. “Not much. ” I tell him that I’m moving out of my apartment, that I’ll be traveling during the summer and returning to college in the fall. “You’re underweight, ” he says. “Are you eating properly, taking your vitamins? “
    “Oh, yes, ” I say.
    “What about sleep? Do you sleep well? “
    He frowns. He knows I must be lying. I can’t turn my neck. My right arm is so weak I can’t use it, and my right hand, the one with which I write and eat hand of volition, of purpose can’t close around a pencil or a spoon, can’t make a fist. The pain of shingles is worse than any other I’ve experienced, so bad that dressing myself requires an hour, during which I take breaks to cry. There’s no cure for shingles, not in 1981, the drug that suppresses the virus is not yet available. My case will have to run its course.
    The doctor gives me another cortisone shot for the pain, and prescriptions for topical medications and poultices to help dry up new blisters before they break and become vulnerable to local bacterial infections. “Maybe you should postpone your trip, ” my mother says when she sees me, my arm in a sling, a whiplash collar around my neck. My father and I have planned to meet in the city where he was born. I’ve had the plane tickets for weeks, long before I got ill. “No, ” I say. “I want to go. ” And I do. As frightened as I am to be with my father, I can’t not see him. My need for him is inexorable. I can’t arrest it any more than I could stop myself from falling if, having stepped from a rooftop into the air, I remembered, too late, the fact of gravity. On this visit my father has promised to show me the house he lived in as a boy, his missionary grandparents’ house with walls three feet thick.
    We’ll eat at the diner where he ordered malts, we’ll drive past his old