Study in Perfect (15 page)

Q2:
How do you feel this emotion in your body? Draw anything you wish
.

Hundreds of pen scratches were stacked, layered one over the other, the human shape with lines crossing and recrossing every inch of its body. Some strokes spill over the edges too, though they concentrate in several places: palms, radial arteries, and most obviously, the torso—a fat black smudge from lower abdomen to the tip of the skull. Fear lives in the body's core, taking up light residency in the extremities, where we experience that tingly feeling as an oncoming bus nearly side-swipes us standing at the curb.

The on-call resident flipped back the sheet so he could observe her incision: a jagged eye shape below and to the right of her navel. It was time to remove the drain. The wound would stay open, heal from the inside to prevent infection, he explained, but first this catheter's got to come out. He planted himself at bedside, unclipped the waste bag, let it fall to the floor; then prodded around the outside of the incision with gloved fingers, hoping to force the tube out by itself. With each bit of pressure, the patient sucked in her breath and held. She was not a vocal child, but she was hurting.

A thin nylon cord snaked within the tube and this the doctor stretched, released, stretched, released, stretched, released. My daughter twisted right and left, angling for the ceiling or anywhere else but here. The resident's tug of war was past her bearing, but he scarcely looked up. He focused instead on her belly and his trouble unhitching the thing, as if he'd hooked a fish somewhere deep inside her abdomen and was now wrestling it into the air. She whimpered, “Can we call for someone else?” when finally the apparatus popped out with a spurt of bacteria-rich fluid.

A nurse muttered pessimistically, “Looks like secondary infection to me.”

“Fear, jealousy, money, revenge, and protecting someone you love,” said Max Halliday, listing the five important motives for murder. I was furious:
Whose fault would that be, all that stirring around in her wound by a novice, a novice who doesn't half know what he's doing, would you please get someone in here who does, this hurts, she's hurting, PLEASE?
I then chose this moment of all moments to slip away from the child, swing
through the hallway, down the elevator, through the automatic doors over the blacktop and into my parked car. There I let loose a howl—cheeks drawn, mouth like a pie plate. My tongue dropped into the pocket of my lower jaw. The sound was coarse, unmusical, void of letter, syllable, or phrase. What else can I tell you except no one screams like this in the movies, it was too chest-deep and ragged. Inhalation, sigh, inhalation, then another animal wail into the sour air of our Toyota van. Fear, not surprisingly, makes you stink.

Q3:
Where do you feel fear in your body? Draw one spot only
.

And now the emotion rises from the paper like a corpse from water. Just the forehead, nose, mouth, throat, and chest. Damp spots in the gut. We know the figure has arms and legs for the silver imprints where his hands, groin, thighs, and shins would be. But he has forgotten them. Fear looks like a mounted insect, or a skeleton without the small connecting bones. One envisions a body semiburied in mud, clay, or sand, the archaeologist patiently brushing.

Q5:
Does your fear have direction? If yes, draw arrows
.

Cue the giant made of arrows, hundreds of them, like a disorganized Celtic wicker man. Throw in a few twigs and broomsticks. His belly stuffed with whatever might be conceived as desirable or delicious to the gods: cattle, chickens, garlic, goats, criminals. Burn it, set the wicker man aflame as sacrifice. If you believe, it will put your mind at ease.

Quietly I wished for a bit more of my rightful inheritance and spoke of Marianne's promises. We were close, and the jewel casket reminded me of her reassuring cornflower-blue bedroom with its canopy bed and Chinese carpet. So the mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles suggested they ship it to Sarah. Upon my return from Wisconsin, the little casket was lying inside my front door wrapped in bubbles, duct tape, and a white cardboard carton delivered ground-to-ground by FedEx.

I named it the God Box and, right here and now, apologize if I must for the born-again, Hallelujah touch. A no-nonsense friend suggested this reasonable alternative to praying, which at the time I didn't really care for: Write it down on a note card. Drop it in the box and let God handle it. Repeat as necessary. Don't worry if you fill the thing up. Just keep stuffing it in there.

Curious, how anxiety matures over a lifetime—pure imagination at first, like masked men under the bed or giant lizards in the basement. Later some realism slips in—car accidents, airplane crashes—bicoastal flying possible only with fingers and legs crossed and palpitations at the very sign of turbulence. At forty, on folded index cards, in complete sentences, I scrawled my grown-up requests:
Keep my girls safe and healthy. Find me a job. Stop his drinking
. Later, as these fears recurred, I took to shorthand:
Jeff. Martha. Paycheck. X-ray
.

Psychologists hypothesize that fear motivates religious faith. For this dreamer—who willingly suspends disbelief in literature, even in bad movies, who toyed with the idea of an afterlife
blanketed with clover and poppies, who saw the world as unlikely without a sentient, larger-than-the-world being—it helped. Sometimes for a minute, sometimes for a week. My anxiety, transferred to featherweight bits of crumpled cotton and water, sat apart from me, mingling for a time with the rest of the world's dander and dust. I felt oddly light and insignificant and that was good.

If you can listen objectively, the sound of fear is amplified tinnitus. Movies have caught on with their edgy violins. What would a murder be without that dissonant sawing? Eagles scream. Harpies, winged death spirits, scream. There is even a bird called the American Harpy Eagle named for the mythological bird with a woman's head.
Harpy
means “to snatch.” Food. Fleeing creatures.

The earliest recorded use of the noun
scream
was in 1513. The sound appeared as soon as there was a mouth, any kind of mouth or beak or scaly slit. German artillery in flight in World War II made a terrifying noise and thus, the term
screaming meemies
came into existence to describe battle fatigue caused by exposure to enemy fire.

A scream is the prayer of an animal who cannot speak or write or draw or assume the posture of a saint.

My daughter's body torqued on the sheet like a butterfly pinned to white paper. Reason enough for a mother to shriek like a harpy.