To Feel Stuff (3 page)

At that point in time I had been picturing the inside of my lungs as a Navajo sweat lodge. I pictured the TB as some loser who wore Tibetan prayer beads and believed in wearing “I believe in whirled peas” shirts. He'd come into the tent to plumb the depths of his theories about himself, but he wasn't welcome. He was an alien there. I had a fantasy that if I could breathe in enough smoke, I'd get rid of him. So I breathed in as much as I could, but my chest kicked back.

I remember seeing some white and getting confused that I had magically landed outside in the snow. The white, however, was all in my head, and when the color passed, I was on the floor.

My forehead hurt, and I realized that I'd hit it on the windowsill on the way down. Before you came, I passed out often. That night, while collapsed, I saw the tally marks I'd made near the baseboard, indicating how many days I'd been here. People in jail do this. People on TV on islands do this. For a while I'd been adding a mark every day with a pencil sent from a new anxiety medication, and I kept the pencil on the windowsill. Since I was already down near the tally, I reached up, grabbed the pencil, and marked myself another day. Hello, 622.

Still, your “oh-ay-oh-ay-ohs” were continuing. They barreled their way into the infirmary and found me even when my ears were an inch from the floor.

Sarah entered the room then with a ceramic bowl of macaroni and cheese balanced in her palms. I looked up at her. She sucked in air and flew to my side to help me. Balancing the macaroni and cheese in one hand and pulling back my bangs with her other, she asked, “Which is it?”

Suddenly I felt like my lungs were disintegrating and taking the world with them, so I hunched over.

Sarah: “Tell me. Tell me. Tell me.”

Your voices belted out toward the stars. Some of them—but not you—had vibratos so thick that I could feel them shaking in my stomach. It was like I was involuntarily digesting them. They reminded me of how my dad used to read me
Goodnight Moon,
and I had always felt sick at the line “Goodnight mush.” There was an illustrated bowl of mush on the page that made me feel even sicker. Whenever I heard that line, I felt like I'd swallowed that shit and it all grew warm inside me like baker's yeast.

This is how I was that night.

“Come on, Elodie. The TB? The anemia? The fibromyalgia? The encephalitis again? The—” Sarah questioned, and I didn't want to make her put in any more time.

“It's the TB,” I told her. “And those voices!”

Right then I heard a painful, crunching thwack outside and your voices stopped. After that, wild yelling. In the moment, though, all that registered was the absence of song.

Sarah curled me up into a sitting position and asked, “The voices?” She offered me the macaroni and cheese.

And I wanted to articulate how pissed and sad I felt that you guys had encroached on my territory. How I'd been wishing that someone would really send all of you into a jungle, so I could have my space back. You guys could have sung anywhere—under a fucking canopy—I wanted to explain, but I was the one who couldn't go anywhere else.

The usual thing happened, though, and I found that when I went to open my mouth, all feeling subsided and I was left with nothing to say.

I've never told you that my mom had wanted to name me Melody, and my dad had wanted to name me Ellen (after his grandma), so they'd compromised. You wanted to know this soon after we met, and I was pretending to sleep.

From The Desk of Chester Hunter III

 

Dear Elodie,

This is a love note, although for a while, it may seem more like a deposition. I'm trying, El, and what more can a person ever do? Maybe I don't know what kind of words should go in this type of letter, so maybe I should just be as obvious as I can. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.

There.

Okay?

Of course it's not.

You have no idea who I was before I met you. Because when I did finally meet you, it was almost instantaneous, that change in me, so you never understood where I pushed off from. But it only just dawned on me that you have to know what happened. It's the reason for all of this paper, El.

You were up in the infirmary and I was singing with the group. I remember sweat, how sweaty I was because of my thick sweater and because of the fleece scarf that George's mom had embroidered with bears for each of us. I smelled fire and it seemed like it was coming from us guys because it was like we were burning in our sweaters. I thought that there wasn't anything in the world that didn't come back around to me, is what I guess I should be explaining here.

We'd made a half circle underneath Wayland Arch, choosing it because we liked the acoustics, and, even more than that, we liked that there was a certain gravity to those surroundings. We faced the statue of Augustus in Wriston Quadrangle, who, rising above a nice blanket of white snow, seemed very, very proud. He approved, is what it seemed like to us. We sang toward the Ratty and welcomed the symbolic connection between food for the stomach and food for the soul; we'd considered titling our latest CD
Food For the Soul,
by the way. How unbelievably lame that seems now! Behind us, through the arch, freshmen in Keeney opened their windows to listen. It never occurred to me that you were somewhere in back of us, too, and that you were listening to me singing, and that, even more to the point, you weren't enjoying it.

I remember I was in the middle of exhaling between verses, my breath going white into the night, and I saw that this girl in the front row looked like she was gasping it in. She was staring at me while she was doing this. For the sake of honesty I'll admit that I rotated my body, so she'd have to take in my better side. I never told you this because I thought you'd think I was a fucking idiot, but seeing as I have nothing to lose now, I think I look more mysterious from the left. My eyebrow arches upward to a greater degree.

Then the girl began to mouth the words to the song. She was moving her lips like
“Oh-ay-oh-ay-oh
.”

This really surprised me. I know that you never attended any of our performances, or any of any other a cappella group's performances, but these shows were definitely not sing-alongs. If you wanted to sing yourself, then you could go to a karaoke bar or you could go in the shower and amuse yourself there. The point being, you didn't show up to hear people who'd been practicing arrangements together all semester sing if you weren't there to watch and listen. When I looked at the girl's throat, I thought I could see her vocal cords working. I remember thinking to myself something like “Wait, is she singing? She's singing with us?”

The young woman smiled at me because she must have thought I was staring because I liked her. My next verse had started and we were singing in tandem now.

While I was puzzling over that girl, a white Honda Civic peeled up to the curb in front of the arch. The ice on the street shrieked, and that's when I first became aware of the car. When it cut through our performance. The passenger-side door opened.

People in the crowd turned around, wanting to see whose car it was. I remember that some of the older members in the crowd, the earmuffed neighbors in glasses who actually came out of their houses for a show, didn't want to grant the careless driver undeserved attention. They kept their gazes forward and concentrated on listening.

Me, though, I really had no choice but to face the car, couldn't help but look, and this was the moment my sense of myself suddenly unraveled.

My whole life had been effortless up until that night. I hope I'm not being patronizing here, but I need to explain that when your life is effortless like mine used to be, you don't realize that there are other ways. It's like when you're lying in bed at night, the rain is coming down, you're comfortable and warm, and all you really think about is how secure you feel. You forget that everyone doesn't have that, and that for some people, it's possible not to feel taken care of.

It was like I'd always been so tied into the world that I didn't really feel it all around me. All the seams were invisible, and so I never realized I was actually sewn to something, if you can understand that.

Yes, I'd read the
Daily Herald
every day in the Ratty while buttering my Texas toast bread, and I'd seen those headlines and taken in those stories. The police theorized gang initiations: “Maim a Brown student. If you can't find one of them, then you can go for a RISD student, but you'll have to give up sleep for three days if you puss out like this.” Everyone was talking about how the Johnson and Wales students had been left alone so far, probably because they majored in things like hotel management and culinary arts.

But none of it ever even seemed close to home. Never once, before that night, did I see some presence in the corner of my eye and then whip around as my heart broke itself against my chest because I thought something was coming for me.

So when I was standing underneath Wayland Arch, looking straight ahead, for the first time I understood that the guy springing out of the Civic with the crowbar in his hand had a specific relationship with me. He was sprinting in a straight line, and what's bizarre is that I felt chosen. I'd been chosen for many things in my life, but always being the automatic selection, I'd never really realized that there were other options. Like I was chosen class president during all eight years that I ran, but there was literally never a second when I even considered someone else might win. Everything in my world was like that. Everything was
obvious.
I just didn't process any of it, El.

This guy, though, he was coming at me like a girlfriend who'd been waiting hours for my flight, so happy to see me, and I know it's idiotic, but I remember opening my arms to catch him.

And then the guy fulfilled that contract of togetherness he'd initiated. He lifted the crowbar over his left shoulder and brought the metal down on my kneecaps, I think as hard as he could. I passed out for the first time in my life. It had never even happened while drinking.

Paxil CR: Get back to being you

 

In the dark I was lying on my bed, looking at the five other beds in the room, all empty. Police and ambulance lights slid across the ceiling, pink and aqua, and in the window, I remember the tree branches pulsing like neon.

Sarah threw open the door and I craned my neck from the pillow to see her better. She looked like a sexless Eskimo, because she had her puffy winter coat on and her fur-lined hood up.

“I'm going to go talk to the paramedics. I've got to start networking, getting myself out there. They know all the doctors and staff at every hospital,” she said.

I know she never told you this, but in the beginning, Sarah had only wanted to work with babies. That's why she was the way she was with us. The Women's and Infants' Hospital especially taunted her since she could see it from her house. Every day there were hundreds of babies on dim monitors, not even technically babies yet. There were babies being spanked and crying for the first time, and babies in incubators like dioramas. And the reason for her baby fever was that Sarah really believed that humans are born innocent. She told me once that this wasn't to be confused with being born clueless. Which babies are. But she believed in a natural innocence with a moral component. For a while she used to talk about wanting to publish papers on this.

I'd heard a lot about this from her. If you were to put a bomb in a baby's arms, Sarah thought, it would instinctively know what the weapon was and the harm it could do. Babies were adamantly opposed to cruelty and pain. Inside of their heads.

When Sarah had first told me about her theory, I'd wanted to know how motor skills fit into this philosophy. Sarah argued, “Babies are pure goodness, and pure goodness is not something that is physical. As a baby starts to move, it transitions into the adult world and its innocence decreases exponentially.”

“But the bomb,” I'd said. “The baby simply couldn't do anything with it.”

Sarah had gulped, excited by the proof in her pocket. “Get this. I put a gun, unloaded, in my nephew's crib one day and he averted his eyes from it. No interest. None.”

I'd tucked my chin into my chest and stared at her while opening and closing my jaw.

Every time a nursing position opened up in the maternity or preemie ward at one of the local hospitals, she'd apply. She was always weeded out. After the last rejection, in September, she collapsed onto a bed across the room from me. Half asleep (I think), she started muttering, “Little star, stay still. Don't move. Trust me, I've been working at Brown Health Services for four years and all that's ahead is mono, herpes, and the day you'll puke up the macaroni and cheese I've brought you because your stomach doesn't recognize anything that isn't malt liquor.” I think the baby thing was an attempt to freeze a moment in time and put her faith there. She seems to have given up on it since.

By the time you met her, she had become much quieter about this stuff. I guess I also spent less time with her once you came, so I heard less about the babies.

“Networking is a wise decision,” I told her, and then I lowered myself back onto my pillow, thinking of myself as Dracula disappearing into his coffin.

“You don't think it's transparent? That they'll know I'm using them?”

I considered this. I gave it serious thought. I saw the answer appear behind my eyelids, typed out. “Don't behave transparently, and then it won't be.”

“Oh, come on. There isn't a switch in the middle of my back,” Sarah said as she started down the hallway.

To the room I whispered, “Don't ask if you don't want the solution.” A minute later, I heard the front door open and close. I was the only one left in the whole building. I got out of bed, went to the top of the stairs, and looked down at the Health Services lobby. I imagined that I wasn't me, but a dead person watching over me.