One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir (13 page)

She kissed my forehead, a trembling kiss, a collapsing kiss. And left. When the door clicked shut, I rested my head beside my keyboard. For a long time, I didn’t move.

A freshwater spring came up from the ground near the road I followed to Eliot’s duplex. The water made a reedy pond. We stopped by it one afternoon a few days before I was
going to move. On a lark, we had purchased koi, brilliantly colored carp, from a local pet shop, and carried them flashing in plastic bags to the pond’s muddy edge to release in the clear, cold water. We joked about returning after a long time to find the pond still teeming with life we had introduced to it, like an offering, a gift to commemorate our time in Tuscaloosa. We had three koi, orange and black and gold, metallic scales glinting in early spring sunlight.

Eliot slit the first bag open and poured it out: no longer than an index finger, the fish poured out like molten life and swam in long loops from the thickest reeds. I laughed and Eliot knelt down, taking off his glasses.

Then a wave shot from the pond’s deep, dark middle.

The koi vanished with an audible pop. A sound like the water had been slapped with an oar. We watched stupidly, waiting for the koi to reappear.

For a long time neither of us spoke. Eliot still held two other bags in which koi, fish which can outlive humans, thrashed.

“Jesus
,” I said, a long, whistling sound.

When the water was still, and the ripples no longer ran to the grass, we looked at one another. Maybe whatever had devoured the fish was sated now. Maybe the other koi could be loosed into the water and live. Maybe we kidded
ourselves, the owners of fish we had no place for. No place but this.

The second koi spilled from the bag like a doubloon. It fluttered forward and, again, we began to trust in our stupid hopes.

An identical wave rolled from the center of the pond. It came toward us. I cringed, and the same pop leaped up from the water like hunger itself. Gone.

“Fuck me,” Eliot gasped. “Fuck me.”

Eliot clambered down into the spring’s mouth, a shallow hole where the water pooled, where he let the last koi go. For a few days, when he salted the water with fish flakes, it ate at the surface, motion and light and chance.

And then it was gone, too.

High above Baltimore, which was cloaked with dense snow, we circled a long, unnerving time: my mother had accompanied me just in time for the city to be crushed by a record, freak blizzard. It was my first flight, occasioned by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference, and the first time I’d see my first book. Even in that pregnant pattern through the storm-thick night, I loved being aloft, even when the jet shuddered in the unstable air and others gasped, clawed fiercely at armrests, arms, anything that held some hint of purchase. My mother hated flying. The whole flight, from Birmingham to Baltimore, she had studied fabric in her lap, sewing fitfully, and now leaned back
against the seat, her eyes drawn shut. It was comical in its way, but I said nothing, all too aware of her sacrifice, her fear of the terrible height, all because I needed her help for the weekend I’d be there. I’d see my book and read from it, moments I’d long dreamed of, but these were dreams, somehow, that had, by their very nature, seemed likely to recede into impossibility. And yet, hours and altitudes away, I’d do both. We didn’t discuss it, trading instead on the long familiar turns of family gossip. At last we began to nose blindly down towards Baltimore and all its wet snow and serrated wind.

“It’s not that I’m afraid of dying,” she said as the plane began to perceptibly pitch downward. Her eyes were shut, still, tighter now, her arms crossed, hugged close.

“No?”

“I know where I’m going when I die. I’m not worried about that.”

By this she meant Heaven.

“Of course. Then what are you afraid of?”

“I’m not saying I’m afraid.”

“I could be wrong, but I think that’s exactly what you’re saying.”

The plane buffeted through bad air. Behind us, nervous gasps went up. My mother remained rock-steady, eyes shut tight.

“It’s the falling. The descent. Knowing what’s about to happen. That’s what I don’t like thinking about.”

“Then don’t think about it,” I said, dryly.

This brought one of her eyes open for a baleful moment. She said nothing, went back to her imposed blindness. I chuckled aloud. We were close now, below the clouds, city lights winking in the night.

When the airline employee brought my chair up from the plane’s cargo, where it had been disassembled, shoved in with all the suitcases, its frame was bent. The seat was at an odd angle and the electronic controls were in pieces in the seat. In that condition, there was no way to operate it. I was stunned: had they run over it? We insisted they fix it. The employees looked at me blankly, hoping I’d back down, go away. They radioed, then instructed us to have a seat, to wait. Two hours passed. A jet mechanic appeared, carrying an enormous wrench. He said nothing but bent the frame crudely back to a suggestion of its original shape. It was good enough.

An accessible cab, with a ramp that folded out for me to enter, rolled us slowly through the snowy streets. The hotel was dead, only employees standing around as though they remembered something regretful, all of them, all at once. In the lobby, the warmth of the heating was either oppressive or ineffectual when the lobby doors slid open and winter hissed in. Outside, a doorman stood in the cold. I walked out into the air to see the night and the snow
which came down from the clouds like lace confetti. There was no noise. A softened hush. A mute hour.

We regarded each other with nods but didn’t speak. I went inside.

The following morning I was scheduled to read from my book, even though I hadn’t seen a single copy of it yet. When we awoke, a washed-out snowy light entered the windows. My mother pulled jeans up my legs, over my knees, helped me to turn side to side. She helped me sit, then stand and manage to gently fall back into my chair. My left arm was the first she threaded through a sleeve: because I’m unable to use it at all, the arm is tight, its tendons contracted, painful if stretched. After that, she washed my hair in the hotel sink, which was not particularly accessible, as most hotel bathrooms are not, even when claimed to be. A cheap vanity beneath the sink prevented me from coming close; I had to lean to the side. Water ran down my neck and into my lap. It was the best we could do.

All this was done without much comment. Cheap complimentary coffee spattered in the hallway, filling the hotel room with a burned tang. Despite the difficult sink, the routine had run like that for fifteen years’ worth of mornings, except for when I had been away at school. What was there to say or acknowledge? Just the descent of snow from
the sky, its dirty accretion, the wind stirring up white corkscrews before scattering.

Our hotel was far from where the conference was being held, and I was relegated to walking, or to exact change and the bus. I wanted to make my own way, to practice a kind of pained meditation on the hammering cold. But that was a kind of hypothermic roulette, I had to admit. I wanted to go early, see people I knew; my mother would attend the reading later. I knew I couldn’t ask her not to be there, was not even sure I wanted that, but I felt a deep ambivalence: I couldn’t hide my work any longer. It was time that it came into whatever its meaning would be in the world, and this included my family finally reading something I had written. I had no time to think much more about it. Downstairs and out I went, still plotting to walk the way.

Outside, my lungs recoiled from the freezing air. My legs began to ache. All the bones felt large with pain. I hurried to the corner, to the bus stop kiosk which stilled the air, but nothing warmed. I waited.

When the bus shambled into sight a long way up the empty street, I moved out of the kiosk, right up to the curb. I wanted the driver to see me, to know I was there, and if he swooshed by without stopping, as drivers often had when pressed for time, when the delay of fastening a wheelchair in place was too much to bear, I wanted to know, for my own self, I’d been seen, that the driver had made a choice.

The bus bore up to the curb and halted. The doors slid open and some warm air fell out like it had mass. The driver leaned over.

“This lift ain’t worked in months,” he said.

“What?”

“I done put the work order in more than once. But they never fix nothing.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked, annoyed.

“You could wait for the next bus. Ten minutes. Maybe that lift will work.”

He shrugged, spread his arms wide, as if he wanted to say it wasn’t his fault. What could he do? The doors sealed back together like strange lips. The bus slid down the street, out of my sight. I retreated to the kiosk.

When the next bus came, the story was the same. I wanted to eye the driver, hard, wanted to say I knew better. But I was freezing. The air bit down on the lobes of my ears and my hands throbbed. I started away, toward the harbor, head down, eyes down, attempting to pretend I wasn’t cold.

I thought I knew how to get there. I thought the way was straight. The sidewalk glinted with ice and my wheelchair swam across it, never quite stopping. I struggled to keep from sliding off the curb, spilling me into the street.

But the hotel never appeared, and no one I stopped seemed to know if it even existed. They looked at me like a riddle.

I was lost. There was no denying it, even if I hadn’t strayed far. Waiting for a light to change and a crossing signal to flare, a man walked out of a building beside me. His manner was brisk as an arrow: he wasn’t one to lose his way, whoever he was. And then I saw it: the shield on his heavy coat. A mailman. I asked him and his finger jabbed to the right. A few blocks, he said. The light changed and he bolted away, packages under his arm.

Behind me, the bright yellow building he had left sang its three notes: XXX. Electrified canary was the only color in that weather. Two stories up it went, immense, bold black text on its walls. Every taste, every desire, served inside.

I felt no warmer. I followed the postman’s directions, toward the frozen creakings of the harbor. Before long, I saw the hotel, saw the scarfed throngs going in and out, their breath communal smoke.

I hurried in, all ache, and didn’t stop inside the lobby until the cold couldn’t reach. There, beside an ATM, I waited to thaw. Everything around me sang with bustle, but all I wanted was warm stillness. Time enough to feel my ears.

I looked down at my lap, nagged by something I couldn’t quite identify. A dark, wet blot spread from my crotch outward. The bag I wore had malfunctioned, as it sometimes would. I groaned softly.

Because of my injury, my bladder operates purely on reflex, stimuli arcing from nerves to the spinal cord and back.

Maybe an hour remained until my reading. I wanted back the use of my arms and hands, more intensely than I had in a long time, if only to put them to violent misuse, to break something, to smash it fine, to make powder out of a whole thing.

Hoping to find a phone, and someone to help me use it, I scanned the lobby. The concierge tapped furiously at a keyboard. People milled around with lanyards bearing their names looped around their necks. There was no one I felt I could ask. No one whose eyes seemed open, uncommonly kind. I spend much of my time trying to read the content of people, their capacity for kindness. It was all too much, then. I feared I’d be forced to do my reading in that condition. To go before a crowd of strangers and say nothing of the obvious. To enter into a pained pact:
I will say nothing if you say nothing
.

And then I saw my mother, entering the hotel. I hurried over through the crowd.

“Good news,” I said. I nodded downward towards the spreading wetness; she hesitated for a moment, considering.

“There’s no way we can make it back to the hotel.”

“Not in time, no.”

“OK, wait here. I passed a Gap store on the way. I can run in, buy new jeans.”

“And then what?” My mood was sour.

“What do you mean, then what?”

“Where do we change? How?”

“We’ll figure something out. I’ll be back.”

She returned with a Gap bag. All we could think to do was enter one of the lobby restrooms, take it over, try to ensure no one entered. I backed my wheelchair against the door, hoping to block it, to effectively lock it shut. The challenge then was to remove the soaked jeans while I sat and then pull up the new pair, which would be even more difficult. I had some good strength in my legs; I could hold my body up a bit from the cushion I sat on. My mother tugged the wet denim down and tossed it into the sink; she’d rinse it when we were done. It was not easy and we had no time to struggle. She washed me with hand towels and runny soft soap. I knew the whole day I’d faintly smell of that gummy soap and urine, a mix that reminded me of disabled strangers I sometimes met who were poor or who received poor care. In malls, on streets, we would chat a bit, for what we shared. But, always, I thought,
We are not the same
.
I am not you
. I clung to that a long time, with shame.

People tried to enter the bathroom, slamming up against the door, shoving, apparently certain a little more force would let them in. We said nothing, trying to hurry, to waste no time with them.

The new jeans went on easier than I feared. I looked a
little rumpled, a little tossed about, but there was no helping it.

We hardly said anything more, besides my quick thanks; she was rinsing the old jeans in the sink, cupping handfuls of soap into the filling basin. Her hair was a little astray. She held the door open for me.

“I’ll do something with these and then I’ll be there. I love you.”

Looking back through the closing door, I saw her pause for a moment, as though she took measure of the mirror. And not her tired face. She took to cleaning the jeans as the door swung to. Something inside me lurched.

The ballroom was already clotted with people when I entered; I paused in the doorway. I was nervous: a tingling in my gut, an itch I could not find. I made my way to the table, where the other poets waited: a group of us were to read. I felt some small gratitude for that.

At the table, a copy of my book waited beside a glass of water and a lapel microphone. On the cover, my name seemed strange, like it wasn’t mine in that first, dislocated moment. The cover art suggested blood, an abstraction of it, and I stared for a brief moment at it. I felt known, in a way I hadn’t expected, felt understood beyond what I even understood of my work.

I’m not sure when I first imagined that I might someday
write a book, that it could be published, but somewhere in that blur of time and aspiration, I grew to hope on that book. And there it was, a physical thing, an object with mass, that took up some of the world’s space. It seemed only barely real.

And then it was time to begin. In the audience, a few rows back from the front, I saw that my mother had slipped in. I smiled and nodded. Then it was my turn.

Whatever I read, whatever I said, I have no memory of it. Looking out, the audience seemed to swell like surf. I wasn’t nervous, really, but it was more than I could digest. I read for my few short, shared minutes, hardly looking up from the page until the last line ran out of my mouth. There was applause, which I could hardly meet with my eyes. My mother hugged me, then retreated into the crowd. When I’d signed a few books, holding a pen in my mouth, and chatted with strangers, I left with my book beneath my left arm. The snow still sifted from the sky as I made my way back, flakes of it melting in my eyelashes, but I was warm.

The moment, all its sweetness, its potent surreality, began to recede when the jet lifted away from Baltimore. We sat in the same seats of the same jet. Aloft in frozen air, returning to another world, an old world. I looked out the window, high as I had ever been, and wondered what might now change.