For the last few nights I've been waking up every two hours feeling exhausted and on edge. I've had insomnia, but this is new, a restless fatigue that drains my strength as it goads me along. Maybe it's different for everyone, but for me chemo is beginning to feel like a forced march through the dark on rocky ground. It has already deadened my sense of taste and balance; now it's taking away something I've worked on all my life—the ability to wake up instantly at any hour, completely alert. Like a proud athlete, I have a prize-shelf full of memories of times I yanked myself awake from the deepest sleep, ready to respond to the knock at the door, the creak in the hallway, the person who came into the room.

Wherever I slept, I learned to be up at once: from our big home in Beverly Hills where we lived till I was three, to the much smaller place my father bought when the studios stopped hiring him, from the villa we rented in Mexico with its terraces and scented breezes, to the two-family house my grandfather owned in New Hampshire, a crowded layer-cake of lives with tenants on the top floor, my mother, father, aunt, older brother, aging French poodle and me on the floor below, and Grandfather in a basement bedroom he had built for himself when we came to stay.

All our moves had been sudden, disruptive and unexplained. Being ready for anything had its value. Now I was losing that skill, what was next? Chemo was already altering my appearance, drawing dark circles under my eyes and draining the color from my skin, making it harder for me not to stand out in crowd. I dreaded that change, too. I already had enough experience of not fitting in to last a lifetime.

As my father's troubles deepened, the fear of being associated with him had scared friends from our door, deepened the growing silence in our home, and planted a permanent scrunch of worry on my parents' faces they never discussed.  Outside in the neighborhood and at school children started calling my brother and me names and giving us dirty, complicated looks hot with hate and cold with fear.

That look of fire and ice had appeared again in Mexico in the eyes of passing strangers who called us gringos and, toward the end of our long stay, in the eyes of the jovial Mr. Zamudio, our frequent guest from Mexico City, who took all my father's money and disappeared.

In my childish way I had struggled to make sense of the rejection we all felt and never talked about. By chance I found a safer place to study it than the street. I discovered I could see the same unsparing looks in the cool shelter of the Ocampo Movie Theater, magnified enormously on screen. By the time I was ten my brother Jim and I had sat there and seen every Dracula, Frankenstein and Werewolf movie Hollywood had made. In the baleful eyes of those creatures Dracula called "the children of the night," I saw the same malevolence that trailed us daily in the burning sun.

Of those three ghastly creatures, I felt a special fascination for the werewolf, the most tortured shape-shifter of them all.  Again and again, with a mix of horror and compassion, I'd watch the pull of the full moon draw the sweet human form of Larry Talbot (played by Lon Chaney, Jr.) out of his house and into the night, peel away his kindness, lengthen his teeth into fangs and fingernails into claws, mat his face and hands with fur and send him roaring and famished for human flesh into the night. I told no one, of course, but it was a transformation I longed for myself.

Sometimes, I remember, when I was alone, I would stop in front of the dusty windows of the stores and bars that lined the main street into town and watch my face. If the sunlight was just right, the cheap glass threw back twisted, overlapping reflections like cinematic special effects. I would crouch there, bare my teeth, watch my face transform, and for a moment feel safe and fearless in a world of monsters. Then I'd go back home and, just as secretly, go to sleep at night with my slippers arranged in the form of a cross, to keep my family safe from harm.

I don't cross my slippers any more, of course. In fact a brand new pair Harriet just bought me lies innocently at the side of my bed. But I can still feel the same thick atmosphere of uncertainty and worry in my lungs. And this time the dark magic is real. It is chemo washing in, growing stronger, getting ready to fill my days and nights. I already sense it will be rough and uneven, full of unpredictable pushes and pulls. Unlike any other cure I have experienced it is itself a transformer. Whether or not it cures my cancer, just as deep down, it is dissolving my ability to run and hide.