The Stunting of the Heart: An Agony in Three Fits

Fit the First: Colossal Cave

Right foot wedged against vertical rock, left foot on ground as solid as rock can be beneath silk coverlet of cave dust, gaping chasm ahead. Left foot takes leap of faith, falls into space, lands in crevice. Straddling space. Hands find stone. There is advice offered, light from headlamps, quickened pulse a tom-tom counting fractions of a second, but nothing, really, but the next crevice, and the next. The cave shrinks in comparison to this single crack.

The open yaw below churns up the retardant of fear, stirs the breath loud and fast. Lean to the left and push away. Trust in the cave to catch the right foot as it skitters ahead. Looking into the abyss is a mistake, hungry darkness where ground is expected. Floating above takes all the taut, tensile strength of every muscle. Flying is hard work.

Two steps taken, an eternity remain. An impossible journey

Returning to the starting point, floating backward into the dark, a more impossible journey.

Breath. Trust. Step. Fall into the reality of wall, again and again. Make impossible reaches with the legs, noting nothing but the next step and the next and the next.

The terror hovers at chin level, not high enough to drown. The knowledge pushes forward, the knowledge that fear will only dissipate when the gap is conquered. Never start, fear remains. Turn back, fear remains. Reach the end, terror will drain away.

And then, the points become apparent. The advice is unnecessary. Fear is gone and the path is clear. There, and there, and there. Just bounce over the endless gap, and there is ground again. Throw one leg over. The hip pops. Pain with an internal vertigo. Here is where control is lost and the body falls backward into endless space.

But, no. Here is where the brain overrides the body, forces it forward again. Two feet on solid ground, the cave completed. Elation.

Fit the Second: The Key to Your Dreams

I’m going to try on wedding gowns with Lisa and Heather and Jack, because I am getting married in the spring. Between the back gate and the car, something the color of a quarter glitters in the dirt, and I bend over to pluck it up between my fingers. It is a key. Or rather, it is part of a key, the less useful part. The toothy business end has snapped off. This is just the bit with the hole, the part you grasp to turn or thread into a ring to attach to a fob.

There is a word molded into the metal. “Dreams,” the key taunts. It is the key to your dreams. And it is broken.

How? Why? This is my backyard. Who dropped this thing here, this broken dream half hidden in caliche? It haunts me all day as I slip in and out of my clothes, in and out of confections of lace and satin, things I never dreamed of, but need, now, in some way that never haunted my dreams. It was in my pocket, the broken key of dreams, but by the end of the day, it’s gone. While I was trying on fifty dresses in four boutiques, it must have slipped out.

Fit the Third: The Ghost of Relationships Past

They dated in college, and it ended badly, and you wouldn’t believe half the truth if you heard it, but people grow up, keep in touch sporadically. Ten years later she stood up on the bride’s side at his wedding, thinking about how she had really dodged a bullet. You wouldn’t believe any of it, the things he did, the things he said. He called her three years after that, manic, to tell her that he’d only just realized, years later, that she had loved him.

He wasn’t stable.

Something was wrong. You could tell, because his wife was vaguebooking, and there was something about a hospital, and something about needing prayers, and a few weeks later he started texting her, over and over, “Call me, please call me,” even though they hadn’t spoken in five years, since he realized she had loved him once. She gave in. “What’s wrong?” she asked, before small talk could smooth over the reentry.

He had tried to kill himself. Again. He had opened himself. He had always cut, long before anyone had even heard of cutting, he had cut. This time, he had cut deep and gotten lucky and he was not dead.

But he was dead, he said. He had died that night, he told her, his voice flat as a Kansas prairie and far off as the horizon. She asked questions she knew the answers to. He was home again, but it would be a long walk back into the light. He was reaching, searching. He had a wife, a child. The part of him that had lived remembered reasons for living, but he was dead. He had died. He needed others to pull him up from the well.

“Listen,” she said. “I want to tell you a story. Two stories. I went spelunking.”

University Medical Center, Diamond Building, Intensive Care Unit

Image courtesy of Norbert Kaiser, Wikimedia Commons

There is no place to look. Every time you avert your eyes, they fall on a crying stranger: a fat middle age man bawling into his cell phone, two willowy prepubescent girls weeping into each other’s arms as they tumble out of a conference room full of sobbing adults.

So, for decency’s sake, you look back at your own well of sorrow, but it’s hard to stay there. If anyone so much as murmurs, you whip your head toward them, grabbing at respite, or else your eyes drift from a long maze of tubes to the quiet monitors with their hypnotic waves and meaningless numbers. Something always beeps, pings, or clicks.

“Essentially,” the doctor explains, “his liver is shot. And his kidneys. And his lungs.” Perhaps these are not the words the doctor uses, but this is what she means.

Last week, they said that if he stabilized, if he found a nursing home able to care for a man with not insurance, and if he stopped drinking for six months, then he could go on the transplant list.

This week they’re talking about infections, calling his daughter in the Midwest. “Do you want us to intubate your father? Do you want us to let him go?”

She is young, twenty-two. She says, “intubate,” but when she gets to the ICU they tell her intubation is only prolonging his suffering. He has, perhaps two weeks, with the machines. She asks everyone she knows, and then she tells them, “extubate.” It’s Tuesday, and her tickets are to go home Friday.

His ex-wife, his ex-girlfriends, the people who were his friends and colleagues before this disease became lover, companion, reference, all file through to say goodbye. At first he can focus his eyes and choke out a few words, but after a while, he is no longer there. It is only the machines, and the solemn watchers.

It takes five hours, once they disconnect him, five hours of sinking lower, struggling to breathe, and sinking lower again, until at last the numbers run down to nothing.

After the Memorial

We are all grandmothers now, our children grown, married, pregnant, so that we make each other aunts over and over, reap all the benefits of a house full of children, suffer none of the drawbacks. There is laughing, screaming, racing, joy. We change diapers, kiss boo-boos, and cuddle at will. We turn them back to their parents when we’re through, sit around the table in deep conversation long after meals conclude, with no interruptions.

Dad is a child again, snot dripping from his nose. He messes his pants, like a child, and we have nothing to fear from him anymore. His anger has burned to embers, the embers burnt out. When we tire of his presence, we return him to his home. The Home. We are diligent daughters, if not loving. We do our duty.

Mom is gone.

She did not know us, at the end, but she knew Jesus. We will return to her arms, one day, in heaven, so our tears are sporadic. She suffers no more.

The pastor tells us not to be surprised; when we file into the sanctuary, the church will be packed, every pew filled. When we file into the sanctuary, the church is packed, every pew filled. We sing, we laugh, we cry, we pray. We file out, into the basement where there will be best wishes from those we haven’t seen in decades, along with iced tea and cookie fellowship.

They flock around dad, “Preach,” they call him, the old pastor beloved by his flock. The offer their condolences, ask after his health. We bring him a plate, offer him a napkin, turn back to our own families.

“Just tell them you’re sorry.” The words are overheard.

“I don’t know how. I don’t know how to tell my daughters I’m sorry.”

“Just tell them. Ask for their forgiveness.”

But these are words only overheard. Dad does not say he is sorry. Dad does not ask for our forgiveness. We do not bring Dad back to the house for supper.

After supper, our children, now adults, slyly produce bottles and cans: beer, wine, vodka. The daughters of Baptist preachers do not drink. Our children, now adults, mix liquor with strawberries, sugar, ice; they ply us with mixed drinks and sweet wine.

We accept.

This is new.

By ten p.m. our husbands and children cannonball off the low sloping roof into the inflatable above ground swimming pool. We don’t want to look, but we must. They land, splashing and laughing. No one gets hurt. No one puts an eye out. It is all fun and games.

“We should have done this before,” they say. “Imagine what our reunions could have been,” they say. “I never felt like this around family,” they say.

By midnight, the grandchildren have fallen asleep on couches and cots, in cribs and corners. The men, still soaking in the pool, soak in the last of the beer. We sisters sit on the deck, our eyes to the sky.

A shooting star draws a thick, golden arc overhead.

“That’s mom,” one of us says, “riding all the way home to Jesus.”

We cry for gratitude.

Hope Springs

The Universe, having passed through ∞-1 cycles of creation and destruction, feels that it has fulfilled its primary purpose. Long ago, it discovered that its existence carried meaning as observer and observed. The Universe existed for a reason: to understand itself. Complete comprehension at the micro and macro levels had now been achieved, the sum total understanding of the Universe perceived, all possibilities known and cataloged.

Now, having exhausted novelty, the Universe becomes an eternal thumb riffling the dog eared pages of an inexhaustible book. There is no need to stop and browse the text, neither to read the marginalia or gloss the pages. The content has long since been memorized.

The Universe does not relish an infinity of living this manuscript over and over again without hope of discovering anything new.

The single unknown, which the Universe now contemplates, is how it can kill itself. The puzzle is not unique, merely scrambled and in need of decryption. Creating something from nothing has been done. Now, to create nothing from something. Compress down to an infinitesimal non-dimensionality and never explode? Explode beyond the limits of physics and never pull the pieces back in?

Whichever the Universe chooses, just before it has chosen and proceeds with the end of existence, something new occurs, an impossible new phase of existence.

An entirely different Universe blossoms into being, a thing apart from itself. A new baby Universe with new rules and new possibilities. A baby! One the Universe can watch grow and change, a protégée to which the Universe can impart knowledge, from which the Universe can continue to learn. The Universe is rejuvenated and decides to live.

Untimely

They are reading about it now, in the news, if they read such things, or on their friends’ Facebook feeds, more likely: Joyce Sherman, dead at thirty-one.

“So young,” they’re murmuring. “She never got to realize her dreams.”

They’re reading cause of death: struck by lightning.

“That’s how she always said she would go.” They’re laughing, bitter. “You think she’d have been more careful."

Some of them are even privy to the exact circumstances: in the hot tub, with a bowl in one hand, and a lighter in the other.

“She died happy,” they’re comforting themselves. “Doing what she loved.”

They’re marveling over the details, how the lighter exploded in one hand, how the glass bowl melted and fused itself to the other. They’re talking about god, and God, and accidents, and Accidents. Strange coincidences and a life cut short and all the things Joyce will never do, never see.

If I could, I would tell them: I rode that lightning bolt all the way up. All the way to the top. The view is amazing.

Last, Best

After the accident, I drifted apart from Sean, which used to be a terrible thing to say about your twin brother, but we were all drifting then, the entire human race.

Anomie, the news anchors called it, back when there were still news anchors, and news for them to report, and people who cared to hear it. We couldn’t get anyone to take care of Sean, give him therapy, prescribe his meds, because every, almost everyone had just ceased caring. Mass suicides stopped being news. Cities burned, farms lay fallow, ships ran aground. It happened so fast, in just a few years, and I thought, well, maybe we’ve just run our course.

Crazy ideas had crept into my brother’s head through the cracks left there after the crash. Next door, a young mother left her baby to bake in the sun, while she jumped off the roof, and Sean hammered all night long, constructing a rainbow bridge from the shed to the garage, and I wandered off, because I didn’t feel, yet, like killing myself, and I wasn’t going to stay there and watch my brain damaged brother create more insanity.

The woods were all right, and the mountains, places where animals still ran and plants still grew, but whatever disease had infected us spread. Something ate away at the wilderness, sucked up the moisture, and receded, leaving yellow dust in its wake.

For years, I had felt content enough to eat berries and leaves, snare small animals and pretend not to witness the decline of human civilization, but one day the desert took over. Looking up, realizing nothing remained, I felt what the others had felt. Finish it, I thought. You’re just prolonging the inevitable. Your species is done for.

“Don’t do it,” a voice said, although no one had spoken to me in many months. He seemed almost to float over the sand, this tall, elfin interloper, pale of hair and skin, like a man cut from the same fabric as the desert. “We aren’t many left, but it’s not over. It isn’t.”

So I shrugged and followed, since nothing remained here.

“We need men like you,” he said as we walked. “Survivors. We’re rebuilding, regrouping. You’ll see.”

And he opened my eyes to the little signs my death-hungry mind had missed when I decided to end it: trees that still lived, grass pushing through rubble, small birds. And soon we came to some ruins, what had once been a city, and I saw women, the first women I had seen in so long I could not remember, sweeping away rocks and hanging out wet laundry, hammering posts and climbing poles.

“We had to go up, a little,” my rescuer said. “Elevate ourselves this time.”

Over our heads, a scaffolding trailed like a vine, wooden planks and walkways twenty feet above the ground. “Come on up,” a man, sunburned with a devil-may-care grin, called to me from the sky, and finally my heart woke, shook off the anomie, and longed to answer.

“Never mind him,” said my guide. “You need to meet the big man. The architect. The inspiration for everything.”

And we walked on, past more and more scaffolds, until we stopped, and there, dangling from a wooden ledge, hung my brother.

“Sean?”

“I figured it all out,” he said, thumping his chest.

“You did this?”

“Someone had to. We needed a better way. Had to create something new. A fresh start for all of us. You’ll stick around this time, won’t you?”

My eyes swept over the funny playground rising up from the ruins of the past, and my brother’s eyes, sparkling with possibility. That small, devastating moment, the cracking of my brother’s head, had blossomed into our last, best hope.

“Where do I get a hammer?”

The Postmodern Prometheus

For all that six long years had unfurled since the passing of my darling Evangeline, the ocean’s damp seemed to cling to her porcelain skin and dark, curling tresses. I dismissed the illusion as a trick of the cryogenic chamber’s glass cover and glanced at the radar animation on the computer monitor. Outside the lab, the sky squeezed out a thin crackle of lightning.

For six long years, I had perfected my method, on frogs and rats, cats and dogs, chimpanzees, and finally, an executed convict. His remains, having outlived their usefulness after nine successful attempts, chilled in the chamber beside Evangeline’s. His temperature reading held at five degrees below zero. The display on my beloved’s clicked up from eight to nine.

The storm drew closer. There were injections to be given, electrodes to attach, connections to be adjusted, all with the greatest of care.

An hour later, the process well underway, the pounding on the lab door began. “Vick, please open this door.” After so many years of being ignored by my supervisor, I had no trouble ignoring him at the moment of my greatest triumph. “Tell me you’re not doing what your FaceBook page says you’re doing.”

Electricity flowed through the conduits. My eyes remained glued to the stark, smooth flesh of Evangeline’s face, marred only by the oxygen tubes snaking from her perfect mouth and nose.

“It’s not science,” the voice beyond the lab door hollered. “It’s an affront to science. You’ve got to let this go, Vick. It’s disgusting.”

But love would not be swayed, and love was undying. Thunder argued overhead, and the mechanical bellows massaged her adorable heart beneath her perfect breast. A final stab of lightning lit the windows and it was done.

The veins pumping beneath the white cheek filled it with a pretty blush, her eyelids twitched, and her hands, with frantic convulsion, ripped the oxygen tubes from her face, ripped the mechanical bellows from its mount. My Evangeline lived.

Her wide eyes gaped behind the glass panel. Anticipating the shock and fearing her fear, I ripped the cover open.

A low, gagging noise emanated from her throat. She half sat up, then scuttled back. “Oh, god,” she moaned, her voice faint and hissing. “Oh, god. I’m in hell.”

“No! Evangeline! You live! I have stolen you back from the arms of death. For you, I have conquered mortality. We shall never be parted again.

The pounding on the lab door increased in volume. Many men and women demanded entry, like the proverbial angry mob bearing pitchforks. They called themselves scientists, but, no better than ignorant peasants, they would not understand.

Unsteady, like a child, she clambered from the chamber, fell, and glared up at me from all fours on the lab floor, hissing, “Pervert! Can’t you take a hint? I committed suicide to get away from you! What do I have to do? Immolate myself?”

“We were meant to be together.”

She tried to dash for the lab door, which shook with the rage of the crowd outside, but she could not control her newborn muscles and collapsed like an invertebrate. She must rest, convalesce on beef tea and my undying love. In her weakened condition, she needed me more than ever. “Help!” she screamed and crawled past me, this time catching her hand on the locked door and turning the deadbolt. It swung open and she fell into the arms of another.

She disappeared from view as the fools descended upon my equipment.

Townhouse

When I first met Ty, he lived in a little row of townhouses, the first in a block of four, not far from the university. He shared the place with an alcoholic old English teacher who went around quoting Shakespeare as if he didn’t expect anyone else to understand, and smelling of piss. Everyone else in the building was a kid, early twenties max.

Ty and I took to each other like an electric cord to a wall socket. I liked his fit, and he seemed to like the way I made him feel. He got to sample all kinds of new sensations and found them agreeable. He liked my world.

His world didn’t suit me too much. The English teacher stank, and the kids in the other units threw loud parties. Plus, one night, we heard gunshots over the noise of his computer speakers. Ty and the English teacher prowled around the parking lot, but they didn’t see anything. They even called the cops, who poked around too, but they didn’t see anything either.

But then later this girl came around looking for her boyfriend. She was in tears, Ty said. She was sure something bad happened to him. And sure enough, when Ty and the English teacher went around the fence, they found a dead guy in the alley. So they were up all night with the police after all. I had already gone home, before the cops turned up the first time.

That night Ty found out from the guy in the second unit, right next to his, that we could buy weed cheap from the guy in the fourth unit, all the way at the end. It was a sweet connection, for a while. But then unit-two guy, Chad, said that unit-four guy was tweaking, and he wasn’t going to deal with him anymore. He was a disaster waiting for his fifteen minutes, Chad said, and he was going to end up dead, or in jail, or both. He didn’t want to get anywhere near unit-four guy anymore. “I think that meth-head might have shot that dude in the alley,” he said. “The dude was trying to rob him, I bet.” From the outside, you'd never guess what a skeevy place those townhouses were.

After that, Ty was persuaded to move into my place. He’s a tough guy, but he’s not bullet-proof. And anyway, I hated those townhouses.

And sure enough, a couple weeks later, we saw it on the news. Eight police cruisers outside the place, two dead bodies. “Couldn't be Chad, could it?” Ty worried, and texted him.

Chad called right back. “It wasn’t us,” he said. “It was meth-head and his girlfriend.”

“You’re gonna move out now, right?” Ty asked him.

“Hey, maybe it’s gonna be safe around here, now that he’s gone.”

He invited us to a party on Friday, but we ended up not going. We were kind of too old for that sort of thing.

Oleander Fence

Serle liked to joke about the boy scouts who cut their weenie-roasting switches from the wrong tree, and died. “Where’s your god now?” he would say to Terry, laughing. Her husband was not a cruel man, but rather a wonderful man with a cruel sense of humor.

They seemed artificial to her, at least here in the desert, those towering, leafy predators, dissembling with profuse flowers in red, pink, and white. She watched the workers, her upper lip trembling, as Mr. Next-Door directed the ballet of flora.

“Nothing personal,” Mr. Next-Door called across the property line. “Good fences make good neighbors, right? I figure you could use the privacy as much as we can.” And up it went, a barrier of poison leaves and lying blossoms. And you could still see through anyway. Mr. Next-Door was a retired man, in his seventies, who puttered in the garden in his boxer shorts, exposing things Terry did not want to see. Terry wouldn’t even get the mail in flannel pajamas with a belted robe on top.

The oleander fence inspired Serle to take on his own home improvement project. He built a koi pond. To Terry, the little orange koi seemed as artificial as the oleander, and they started dying right away. Serle netted them out and threw them into the alley, one by one. Why did the fish cross the road, Terry thought. When they’d all crossed over, he drained the pond, threw the lining into the alley, and declared the resulting hole a fire pit. “The smoke will keep the mosquitoes away, so we can sit outside at night,” he promised. He roasted hot dogs in it, and taught himself to barbecue over the open fire, steak and fish. Terry didn’t eat red meat.

“I roasted you a marshmallow,” Serle said, holding out a whippy stick with a brown confection melting off the end.

“Are you trying to kill me?” Terry asked, afraid. Serle just laughed.

Nicky's Space

Drew still blamed his mother for his brother’s death.

Every morning, he turned first to Nicky’s graduation photo. Everyone said it would be impossible for someone with Nicky’s developmental disabilities to earn a high school diploma, but Nicky had done it, which was why Drew didn’t believe that Nicky had drowned in the shower, like his mother said. Drew hadn’t been out of the house six weeks when it happened. He would always blame his mother.

One morning, the image of Nicky’s lopsided grin under his mortarboard foremost in his mind, Drew created a MySpace page for his dead brother. He updated it regularly with information about Down’s Syndrome, resources for struggling families, and memorial letters to Nicky, so no one could ever forget. He tried to friend his mom but she wouldn’t add him back. So, he set up a gmail account in Nicky’s name, which he used to send her birthday, Christmas, and mother’s day greetings.