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.”

Aftercare

It happened on October 17, across the street from a haunted house, which meant I couldn’t enjoy Halloween anymore. I had screamed and screamed myself hoarse, and later, the police said they had even heard me screaming, but it was October 17, across the street from a haunted house. Screams filled the air.

Then again, I’m still here, so maybe that means I’m lucky?

Bad enough to give up horror movies, the superior thrill of autumn leaves skittering down the street in a gust of wind, the wearing of short skirts. The real tragedy, though, is giving up that youthful sense of invulnerability, the security that comes from knowing terror is something that happens to other people. Terror happened to me.

That was all more than a decade ago, and I can finally watch scary movies again: a Korean ghost tale, an adaptation of an HP Lovecraft story, some stupid modern slasher flick where gore replaces suspense and character development. Took a while to get over it, but I did. Because, seriously, what’s scary is reality. You want to scare me? Give me a Holocaust memoir. Or how about that scene in the Will Smith movie where he’s newly homeless and he and his kid are sleeping in a public bathroom? Or how about the news?

It was a mistake when I stopped loving Halloween because a crazy man did a crazy thing to me. Halloween is the antidote.

Technophobia

David turns the flat black plastic over in his hands, wondering why he stays.

“Davey, are you even listening?” Lance is still sitting across from him, cables snaking from his hands. David hates being called Davey, and he’s afraid he’ll turn to stone if he looks straight on, although Lance is no Medusa. Lance is the most beautiful man he ever met, with blond hair past his ass, and cool blue eyes set in a cherubic pale face.

“It’s a monitor,” David parrots. “I slide the iPod into the dock to watch videos. I plug it into the USB port to recharge it.”

“With this cable, right. But you use this cable if you want to just plug it into a wall socket. And this one goes into your car’s cigarette lighter.”

Why would I be watching videos in the car, David wonders, but he accepts the cables, sets them to the side of his plate, dares to look into Lance’s face. He does not turn to stone. Lance squeezes his hand.

“With all the traveling you’re doing lately, Davey baby, I figured it would be easier than trying to watch on a tiny screen. Do you like it?”

David nods, squeezes Lance’s hand back, blows a kiss for good measure. Lance gave him the iPod, and the laptop, and the cell phone, and he uses them, because when your lover gives you an expensive gift, you can’t let it gather dust in the closet like you do with the ice skates your mom gave you when you turned eighteen, or the waffle iron from your aunt. He uses them, but he doesn’t like them. They are alien rocks, chunks of silicon that betray and befuddle him. Lance never asked him what he did in airports before. David used to enjoy the people watching, the invisible anonymity of airports. It used to be that everyone watched everyone in airports, while pretending to read books. Now everyone is wrapped up in cords and cables, alone in their worlds of music and movies and wifi.

He programs numbers into his cell phone, but speed dial always calls the wrong person. He stores music on his iPod, but when he hits shuffle, it only plays Lance’s techno music. Despite Lance’s best efforts, David fries his hard drive an average of once every nine months. But Lance keeps trying.

Now, Lance smiles his angelic, cupid’s bow smile, brushes the satin hair back from his face, stirs his coffee. David’s cell phone buzzes in his pocket—Lance helped him set it to vibrate—but he’s put on some weight this year, and by the time he drags it out, whoever it is has hung up without leaving a message.

“Who is it?” Lance asks. David shrugs, and Lance reaches, impatient for the device. “Unknown name, unknown number,” he says once he has it, and hands it back again.

David leaves the phone on the table. It’s too embarrassing, trying to get it back into his pocket while sitting down. “You know the theory of resistentialism?” he asks.

“Tell me.” Lance’s blue eyes sparkle, as if he’s actually interested.

“It’s the belief that machines are aware, and they’re hostile to their owners. It’s why copiers always break down when you’re in a hurry. And it’s why everything I touch malfunctions.”

Lance laughs, grabs David’s hand again and kisses his fingertips. David lifts his head, so Lance won’t see his double chin. “That again,” Lance says, laughs. “You’re crazy, Davey baby. Look, machines are machines. They do what we tell them to do. You just have to speak their language.” When he drops David’s hands, he nods at the pile of cables and technology on the table, then glances down at his iPhone, starts tapping on the screen with one hand.

Without looking, he reaches his other hand out for his coffee. David admires the muscles in his forearm, the white skin and golden hair, the manicured fingernails. Lance always smells good, like a baby straight out of the bath, and his clothes don’t wrinkle, no matter how he sits. And Lance never sweats, either, or if he does, it smells like talcum powder.

Lance sputters into his mug, but even that is graceful, like blowing bubbles. “It’s cold,” he mutters, but his mutters are the warm-up scales of an opera singer. His eyes intent on the screen of his phone, he opens the microwave on the counter beside him.

David can’t take his eyes off him, the graceful arc of his arm as it whisks the coffee from the table to the microwave. Light glints off the metal spoon still resting inside the mug. David says nothing as Lance shuts the microwave door, hits the start button without ever looking up from his phone.

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.