Everything Solid has a Shadow

by Michael Antman

  “Well, you said you thought there’d be plenty of time to get into stuff from my childhood…”

  “But you said you just found out recently that you were lied to for all these years…”

  “And also because it’s the opposite of finding out I was responsible for someone’s death, you know, so it wasn’t ultimately that big of a deal.”

  “Oh, clearly not,” he said dryly.

  “OK, I think I got your point.”

  “Do you, Charlie? Do you understand the reason you’re not eating is that you’re too full of shit? Charlie. Look at me. Look at me, Charlie! Explain just this one thing to me. OK? Why are you not angry?”

  “Who said I’m not?”

  “I take that back. Of course you are angry. It’s just that you’re pretending that you’re not. You’ve got quite a lot of things swirling around in your mental cesspool, young man.”

  “I suppose. The little girl, Elizabeth, was left alone by her mother, and she nearly suffocated. She survived, but she was brain-damaged, and the mother blamed me and said I was crazy.”

  “Is the mother still living?”

  “No, both parents passed away.”

  “How about your parents? Are they still with us in this vale of tears?”

  “Yeah, both. I talk to my mother fairly regularly. It’s harder with my father, they both drink a lot, but he’s driving his taxi all the time or at his kiln or out gambling, and she’s a bit more in touch with reality, you know?”

  “Okay, Charlie. We’ll get into what happened with your parents and your childhood friend a little later. But I’m a man of action.” He actually flexed his left bicep when he said this, and one sleeve of his partially unsnapped overalls flopped down. “I’m going to do two things with you today, give you two assignments that’ll have you feeling much better and eating your Wheaties again. Are you with me? Okay, first, girlfriends, eh, not that important. People break up all of the time, although I think we should get into more detail about why you would choose as a girlfriend a childhood friend who lied to you about a supposed death in your past. That’s a little bit odd, young man. But let’s put that aside, alright? The number one thing that’s plaguing you, I think, is that, quite understandably, it’s upsetting that someone is entering into your head without your permission. And why is this plaguing you? Because you don’t know whether this is your doing or hers, and why it’s happening at all. So talk to her in your next dream. Ask her what she wants. Ask her, Charlie. See what she has to say.”

  “And how am I supposed to strike up a conversation in my dreams if my dreams are out of my control?”

  “Partially out of your control. But—and listen to me carefully, Charlie, because this is very important—the whole problem with you is that you’re too much in control. The state of semi-consciousness that we experience when we dream is the only time when you’re unable to engage in active acts of suppression. It’s true that while asleep you have a predominant lack of awareness of your environment, but you clearly have some level of consciousness. Have you ever heard a police siren, out on the street in the real world, while you were asleep, and managed to incorporate that into your dreams? I’m sure you’ve done something like this, everyone has. And have you ever had a terribly upsetting dream where you’ve forced yourself to wake up? These are examples of volition. So just do as I say, and don’t ask how. In your next dream, just ask her.”

  “I’ll try my best. But I don’t know if that’s gonna work.”

  He sighed heavily. “Alright, before we get to your objections, I want to make a couple of observations. We are never so alone as when we sleep. Would you agree?”

  “Yes. I mean, sure.”

  He took a last bite of licorice, reached into another pocket, pulled out a thin black cigar, and lit it. “To state the obvious, we are unconscious and thus unaware of our surroundings and of those we love. Except to the very minor degree that we are perhaps entangled with someone, cuddling them, and the tactile sensations exist somewhere at a very low level of awareness. But you are not sleeping with anyone now, since your breakups with your girlfriends, plural, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Okay. So to take it one step further, what strikes me about you is that you are not only alone when you sleep, but alone, and indeed asleep, when you are awake. You seem to be in a sleepwalking state, where the isolation and unconsciousness you experience when actually asleep is being replicated in your waking existence. Okay?”

  “I can accept that.”

  “Of course you can. Which leads me to my second observation. You accept everything. I won’t say that you are suggestible, in so many words, but you are very open to the feelings and opinions and moods of others, which may be why you’re not eating and wasting away at the very same time MariAngela is. Now how do we reconcile this empathetic capability and your easygoing willingness to engage with a psychiatrist like me with the paradoxical fact that you are sleepwalking through your existence and seemingly oblivious?”

  ”I don’t know.”

  “Of course you don’t. But I do. That’s why I’m me and you’re you!” He laughed at this. “It is because you have developed these sympathies in lieu of normal, everyday ones, in the same way that, when one portion of the brain is damaged in an accident, another portion adapts itself and takes over. This is why you have the dreams where you are visited. This is why the mealy worms—which are in my opinion another way for you to think about what is happening to MariAngela’s nervous system. But this is unusual for you, for you to have waking disturbances like this, right? Because we have agreed that you are a very rigid person, most of your ‘worms’ arrive from underneath, from the black soil of your sleep. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “So. In our dreams, we have exceptionally low standards, wouldn’t you agree? Very low. We’ll believe any kind of bullshit we make up. We’ll believe that we can pump our legs like we’re on a bicycle and suddenly we’re walking in the air. And so on. So these low standards, so to speak, and I don’t mean this in a pejorative way, have seeped into your waking life as well. You are a rigid person, but like a weed that is covered up with a heavy layer of concrete….”

  “If I’m following all of this…”

  “Then I’m merely suggesting that your emotions are no different than anyone else’s, but because you have suppressed them in order to work in advertising and have pretty girlfriends and live a seemingly normal life, these emotions have had to find softer soil from which to sprout, and that would mean your dreaming, unconscious self.”

  “Don’t weeds eventually just grow through the concrete?”

  “Of course they do, eventually. That’s precisely why you feel as if you’re cracking up. That’s why the worms are coming to the surface.”

  “And if I ask MariAngela if it’s her inside my brain or me and she answers that it’s her, how will I know for sure if it’s her and not me being ‘her’?”

  “I’m not sure that it’s even a question of ‘know’ or ‘don’t know.’ It’s not like a switch you flick on or off, where it’s either one thing or the other, in other words that it’s either something that is clairvoyant in nature or merely a form of intuition. Your connection with MariAngela may be at a level so deep that you don’t recognize, that it would be impossible, either in your waking self or your dreaming self, to separate whether she is speaking to you or you are taking on her persona to speak to yourself, or if indeed there is really that much difference between the two. What I’m telling you is, you may never know. ”

  “It’s funny you should say there’s no simple on or off switch. I tried an experiment with my girlfriend where I tried to dream whether a light switch in her basement was flicked on or off.”

  “And it failed, I would assume, because the experiment was purely mechanical. No, the point is not definitive answers.
The point is just that you gain greater insight. Ask her. Do what you want with her. Have sex with her if you want, temporarily ‘cure’ her of her illness, fly with her to a resort—it’s your dream.”

  “Okay, so that’s my first assignment. Talk to her. What’s my second?”

  “Eat a goddamn sandwich.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, Charlie, seriously. But no, that’s not the second assignment. The second assignment is to call her. Confront her.”

  “MariAngela?”

  “Oh, please, Charlie, of course you should call MariAngela. That would be the decent thing to do, how could you even ask? But no, I deliberately didn’t make clear who the ‘her’ was to evaluate just how dense you possibly could be. I’m talking, in this case, about your mother.”

  “I don’t understand. It was Elizabeth’s mother who said those things to me.”

  “Yeah, but she’s gone. She’s dead. Out of your life. No, your mother. And your father, too, if he’s sober enough. Call her, call them, and find out why they fled the country with you. And now we have to wrap up. Call your mother tomorrow. Then you can report back to me with something interesting, and hopefully with a few BLTs under your belt.”

  I frittered away my Monday night juggling bills, watching TV, and learning how to play Skyrim. It seemed like the perfect pastime for an unemployed, depressed, and confused person like me. I couldn’t bring myself to call my mother, nor to acknowledge that the reason I couldn’t call was because I was afraid. By the end of the evening, I’d decided to visit MariAngela the following night. It had been too long, and possibly too late as well.

  Three: Everything Solid has a Shadow (MariAngela)

  1

  The very next day, I called MariAngela’s cell.

  After MariAngela answered, I said, “Hey. How are you?”

  There was a short silence at the other end of the line, but it was long enough that it made me contort my face into a horrible grimace of anxiety and embarrassment as I waited.

  Finally, I heard, “Long time no see, Charlie.”

  “Listen, I was wondering if I could stop by your apartment this afternoon and say hi, see how you’re doing and catch up and stuff.”

  “You could stop by my apartment, but I wouldn’t be there.”

  “Oh, where did I catch you?”

  “I’m at a place called the Rehabilitation Institute of Illinois. They stuck me here temporarily until they can figure out where to put me, even though there’s no ‘re’ to ‘hab,’ or no ‘hab’ to ‘re.’ Well, you know what I mean. Most of the people here are recovering from something or other, and I’m kind of declining a bit at this point and was having a little trouble cooking for myself and stuff, but I don’t have what you’d really call a ‘hospital’ type illness right now, so I was sort of caught in the middle. But you’re welcome to visit me here. You know where it is, right? On Pearson. Near that tourist-trap, deep-dish pizza place with the lines out front.”

  “Yeah, I know where it is. Are you doing okay?”

  “I’m okay. Yeah. Maybe a little bit of a headache. So I can expect you this afternoon?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I look forward to seeing you.”

  She met me in one of the family waiting rooms. I don’t know what I was expecting—nothing much at all, I suppose—but I was surprised to see her, as I entered the sunny and odorless waiting room, waiting for me while leaning on one of those three-pronged canes and wearing a big pair of dark sunglasses. Surprised? Maybe that’s not quite the right term—horrified would be better.

  Did ALS cause blindness?

  I hugged her, gingerly, on her left side, the side that wasn’t leaning on the three-pronged cane.

  “MariAngela. I’m sorry it’s been a while.”

  “A while.”

  She was a bit upset, clearly, but the way in which she’d repeated ‘a while’ got me thinking about Elizabeth, or Bitty, whom I’d never again meet, and how in her own permanently reduced state she’d repeat the last few words of things that people would say to her.

  But MariAngela wasn’t Bitty.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t visited you or called or anything. Things have been kind of complicated lately, but that’s no excuse, and I’m so sorry, but MariAngela, your vision? I mean, can you see?”

  “The cane and glasses? I know, looks like I’m blind!”

  “But…?”

  “I can see just fine, it’s just a migraine. Can we go to my room? It’s starting to get worse, and I have this like insane over-sensitivity to light.”

  “So what are you doing out here?” I indicated the windows, with the late-winter sun streaming in.

  “I know, I don’t know, I wanted to greet you and make sure you found me.” She hobbled toward the corridor, and I saw for the first time, as I walked behind her, that the parenthetical posture was now reversed, and instead of that sexy little swayback she now walked with a slight, forward-leaning hunch, not like that of an old lady, but like someone hobbling determinedly in that direction.

  Her room—semiprivate, though the other bed was unoccupied—was completely dark, the lights off and the curtains drawn, and I realized the sacrifice she’d made by heading out into the lighted reception area to greet me or to ensure that I’d actually show up. She propped her cane against the wall, took off her sunglasses and tossed them carelessly on the floor as if lacking the last strength to place them on a table, and rolled under the comforter on her bed, whereupon she placed a pillow over her eyes and pressed it down with her raised forearms.

  “Is it bad? The migraine?”

  “It wasn’t really bad at all this morning, but it’s taken a turn for the worse.”

  “Is migraine one of the side effects of ALS?”

  “Not to my knowledge. It’s on my list of questions for mister doctor-man. He’s the expert, though I keep telling him that a few months from now, I’ll know a hell of a lot more than he ever will.”

  “How’ve the doctors been treating you?”

  “Pretty good. They mostly tell me the truth, which is there really isn’t much they can do for me, and that itself is doing something for me. Anyway, I’d rather die without a bunch of bullshit that I have to hack through first. They told me there’s one drug that sorta works for like three months for some patients, but then, eh, you’re just back where you started, delaying the inevitable a bit. They’ll send me back to my apartment at some point with around-the-clock nurses so I can die at home, and that’s fine.”

  The room was so dark that all I could see of MariAngela, in the bit of light leaking through the heavy curtains, were her pale forearms and the white pillow she was pressing over her eyes.

  “Did you have migraines before?”

  “Not really, headaches around my period, tension headaches, stuff like that, but no real migraines. I think God just thought it’d be fucking hilarious to throw something else in the hopper, you know, ALS is about your body dying around you while your brain functions perfectly, so why not give you pain in the one part you have left that’s healthy?”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “And I’m so bitter. Though why the fuck should I apologize for that? You know, if you read the New York Times or something, and they’ve got a feature on bad diseases like ALS or whatever, it’s always like, ‘I refuse to become a victim’ and ‘I’m not going to feel sorry for myself’ and shit like that. And this guide to ‘caregivers’ I read was all about, ‘always be positive,’ but I always wondered, what the hell is the matter with being bitter when the time comes? Isn’t bitter an emotion like any other? Didn’t God give us bitter just like he gave us joy or forgiveness or compassion and all the other official, culturally approved emotions? If I wanna to feel bitter, if I’m gonna feel sorry for myself, and then society
is telling me, ‘oh, feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to help anything,’ well fuck ’em, you know? If I get pleasure out of self-pity, with all the other things I’ve got to deal with I’ll be damned if someone tells me I can’t.”

  “Do you want me to get a nurse or something? Do you need some painkillers?”

  “No, I’ve already taken something. Don’t listen to me, Charlie, I’m just ranting a little ’cause it feels good and you’re so great to rant to, the way your eyes get all wide like you’re scared or something.”

  “How can you see my eyes now?”

  “Oh, they were always that way, any time you’d get chastised. But I mean, if I can’t rant in front of a friend, who can I rant in front of?”

  “I know.”

  “We’re still friends, aren’t we, Charlie?”

  “Of course. I mean, I know you’re mad that I haven’t visited before now.”

  She made a dismissive waving motion with her hand that looked like a flickering flame in the darkened room. I interpreted it to mean not “don’t worry about it,” but rather, “I don’t have the energy to be angry right now.” And that must have been how she meant it, because she placed her hand back over the pillow and said, in a changing-the-subject kind of tone, “So how was Hawaii?”

  But I still wasn’t sure how she felt, so I said, “Are you sure you want to talk about that right now?”

  “Given the choice between Hawaii or death as the topic of conversation, which one would you choose?”

  I laughed a little at that. “OK, I got you. So Hawaii was weird. Definitely weird. I broke up with Alisa, and she punched me in the eye, and then I got together with this old childhood friend who sort of stalked me there and we sort of broke up too, and I got fired, and I figured out something from my past that had kinda wrecked me for years, and oh my God, you remember my boss Gilbert? He’s in trouble, so I guess I’m glad I got fired, but now I’m testifying in this lawsuit…”