Every day, I write a letter to my husband.
I want you to know how much I love you. I miss you so much . . . it feels like the privations and the scarcity in this place sometimes open something up, an expansiveness, like I’m looking down on all the goodness in you, every beautiful aspect of you, a kind of surprise and awe . . .
Or:
Fuck this place. I fucking hate this place. What fucked-up God would put the idea of jail in the hearts of men? Especially for the many in here who are nonviolent, who need help, not incarceration.
Or:
We’ve been mercilessly yelled at, punished, locked down, called bitches, humiliated by that deputy . . . How I detest her. If anything jail has taught me how to hate.
I write every detail of my experience. I lament the way society has thrown so many people away. I note with horror that most of them are black and brown. I make sure every detail of the abuse by deputies is listed. And I ask Greg to keep the letters. I want them as a witness to the depravity of power, but also as a narrative of my endurance.
When the books arrive, it’s better than anything I have ever known. Better than sex. Better than drugs or alcohol. Better than recovery. Better than daytime. Better than the moon. It is better than free samples at the mall. Better than the sound of an owl when morning is barely an idea and the stars still carpet the sky. When I open these books, I imagine my entire cell filling up with the words inside. The books are brand-new so I take a deep whiff of the paper and glue. I bury my nose in the spine.
I know that I have a lot of time on my hands. One jail day is the equivalent to three really shitty normal life days. So when I start a book, I read every word very slowly. It is the first time I feel cursed by my ability to read fast, though perhaps not thoroughly. The books will teach me, then, how to slow down. I feel the sentences stretch along the space-time continuum. Each word fills my mouth. A vowel is confection: flan or frosting. Consonants are piquant and crunchy: sauerkraut. Sometimes the words crawl up my spine.
Other times, I see the words encircling the toilet, the sink, the piece of warped steel they call a mirror. One by one, the words march off the page and get cozy with my bunkie. They block out the noise, the constant sound of toilets flushing, the incessant crinkle of plastic unfurling from the commissary candy, the click of the locks, the doors slamming, the deputies shrieking. Their never-ending insults. And the sad, overmuch laughter of the inmates penetrating through the cinder block walls.
I have time to think about these things. To think about the way a book feels in my hand, or tastes, or sounds. I have never loved so hard and with such fidelity and reciprocation. Books can break your heart, but they never leave you.
* * *
I read Mary Oliver in desultory, languid fashion, the way I might if I were home in bed and it were raining outside. I imagine it: I am pleasantly bored. I pick the book up from the stack on the floor by my bed. I flip through it, and then it happens; I am lifted up out of malaise and find inspiration in the loveliness of gray cleansing skies, the comfort of home, and the words that seem to fall out of the pages like snow.
I pretend I am there, but this is hard and it doesn’t last long. To think of home is a magician’s trick that I haven’t quite mastered. One day, while Duckie is downstairs in class, I pick the book of Oliver’s poems up and off my stack. I am aware that I am just putting off the inevitable, which is finishing this one and cracking open the next book that lies in its stack of three beneath my bunk. I am hung up on reducing the stack to one down, two to go. I am so afraid of finishing all the books before the next ones arrive that I agonize over the disturbance of my stack each time I absent one from it. But I know, too, with some solace, that poetry is never finished. Should I run out of books, I tell myself, as I listen to the blue-clad students downstairs shouting out answers to remedial math problems, I can always return to a poem and always find something new about it.
The one I fall into now is called “One or Two Things.” Oliver begins with a command to be left alone because her birth has just occurred. The three lines of this edict in the opening stanza of the poem are simple and bold; being born is private and arduous, so go away.
It would have been impossible at that moment in medical to see the comma that Melissa and I made of our bodies as my birth. I could not have seen that first cell as my womb. In the darkness of betrayal, you cannot see beyond the feeling that the world has abandoned you, that you have abandoned yourself as surely as you have deserted those you love. It is too tricky to contemplate this when the sore is festering and you live in the wounds. But maybe that moment, its sacredness was the sacredness of birth.
The poem continues on for seven stanzas that she enumerates as chapters. My favorites fall toward the end. In the poem, Oliver professes that we require very little for survival, much less for happiness. Eternity doesn’t exist, so stop thinking you’re never going to die. It is a poem that points its finger at me. Don’t be greedy; use only what you need. I am reminded as I read it that without adversity and misfortune I would not know abundance. When Oliver steps into the poem, and invites us into her truth—that she labored to love and cherish her life—I feel myself gaining strength. An infinitesimally small light wavers in the dark.
I enjoy a lingering thought—it repeats itself in my mind: Poetry is alive. But sometimes in the moment, when you read it, a poem makes no sense. You don’t recognize yourself in it. The words are suspended in ridiculousness and disbelief. This is what faith is: waiting to believe. Maybe poetry is simply there to comfort and anoint, rather than explain and define our lives. With poetry, you may find yourself in it more fully, more completely the second, third, tenth time you read. You will understand now what you didn’t understand then. As I read Oliver I come to see that poetry is like evolution. It changes with new conditions; it is something that continuously branches into new directions and diversifies in meaning. It has arms that will wrap themselves around you when you are in need of such love. But as with all true love, a poem will also let you rest in its language without forcing meaning on you until you are ready for it.
Mary Oliver shows me the things that matter: love and our essential connection to the natural world. Her poems make it clear that our gods and our gurus aren’t human, that, in fact, maybe they shouldn’t be. “One or Two Things” is a warning poem. Don’t try so hard to love your life because, like the butterfly that lifts off on such light and insubstantial wings, all life is ephemeral, all life vanishes.
I can learn from the butterfly about my ego and my grasping attachments to my life in a far more profound way than I can ever learn from another human being, or from the brick and mortar of religion. That she chooses a butterfly, not the caterpillar, not the chrysalis, tells me as I read it in lockup that metamorphosis does not come without suffering, patience, and wisdom. The caterpillar/chrysalis trope might be cliché, especially in midlife. But I am grateful for the reminder the poem provides. And with that gratitude comes a startling thought: I have wasted a lot of time being a literary snob. It occurs to me that I don’t have to be the cynic I normally am and say things like, “Mary Oliver is a little too popular for my tastes.” I realize that my intellectualism has made my world small. That even in reading, my ego has diminished possibility. I feel like I’ve stumbled on a secret.
When I read the poems that evoke the outdoors—most of Oliver’s poems do—I am pained beyond belief. In my real life, I am a camper, a hiker. I have slept under the moon, swum with sea turtles the size of my dining room table. I once backpacked in the Denali Wilderness and slumbered in a tent while grizzlies roamed through the brush nearby. One winter, I hiked Arches in Utah, in the snow, at dusk, and watched the stars pop into the sky one by one, like a Van Gogh painting.
That I cannot go outside now makes the reality a formidable one. There are no trees to put pencils in. There are no stars, there is no moon. Ever. The air we breathe is fetid with bodies and ra
ge. I long for the butterfly that has already been freed of its cocoon, for the scent of rainy woods, salty oceans, the delicious sting of fresh, cold snow. I remember one morning before jail, when my daughter found a nattily striped caterpillar in our garden inching along the milkweed I’d planted. I hear her voice now in my cell. “Whoa, Mom. Look!” Few things impress my adolescent daughter, and I was happy for a moment in that long, anxiety-fueled buildup to jail that she saw the beauty in that critter. We looked it up to try to identify it, our heads touching as we angled for position over the Google search on her phone. We were charmed to see that the caterpillar would one day morph into a monarch. I remember promising to take her to Natural Bridges State Beach in the winter, where the monarchs gather during their migration. I say to her, “Each monarch weighs less than a gram, but they migrate eighteen hundred miles round-trip every year.”
Whoa, Mom.
The joy of this memory is destroyed when Duckie returns and I hear the deputy shout, “Hurry up and shut the door, Rodriguez.” It slams. The lock clicks. I revisit this idea, that I do not get to see the sky for weeks. What I will see daily is a locked steel door. And Melissa on that grim, bleak night in medical. It felt like years ago that she lay down beside me. I remember then that I did not feel powerful. I felt depleted, annihilated. Destroyed. I did not see evolution or renewal, not then. I wonder; when the baby bursts into the world from that oceanic safety of the womb, does she feel similarly disempowered? Is not our life the constant struggle for authenticity, for compassion, for love? Who says we are only born once? Or that birth is anything but the desire for transformation?
CHAPTER THREE
Pregnant Module
Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives. That’s what it means to be a time being.
—Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
After I have read all of Oliver, I must move forward. I am not even two full weeks in, and, like every other thing in jail, the date when my next three books will arrive remains unknown. Inmates live in a constant state of unknowing. It is one of their tricks—keeping us guessing, always on edge. I am told I am in permanent housing now. So I comfort myself: Your books will arrive regularly now that you aren’t wandering anymore in that no-man’s-land of receiving. I attempt to convince myself that there is stability.
I put Oliver down and I pick up A Tale for the Time Being. As I have done with every book since my childhood, I examine the cover. I read every single word on it. I look at the cover image, the jacket design. The author photo and bio. After I published my first novel, I began also looking at the acknowledgments to see who’d been thanked. There was a time when my name began to appear in the acknowledgments of other writers’ books, a small thrill to see.
I had no idea what Ozeki’s book was about, only that it had received rave reviews when it came out—something about a lunchbox washing up onshore in Canada after the tsunami in Japan. So imagine my surprise when I read the first page: “A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”
Did Ruth Ozeki know me? Was she writing to me? Did she know I was living in suspended time, real time, unreal time? Did she know I was in jail? Of course not, and yet . . .
A Tale for the Time Being is many stories in one book. It is about Japanese manga culture, it is about Buddhism, it is about global warming, the Japanese earthquake, and the subsequent horror of the tsunami and the nuclear meltdown. Sometimes it is about bullying. Also, culture and identity. Female empowerment. If you want to, you could say it is about island manners or human encroachment on the environment. It could be simply about barnacles and black crows, if that is where your mind is headed. And no one would mistake its passionate antiwar theme.
But, for me, this book was about love and loss, and a friendship transacted through time. Floating to my lips as I read, the narrative of love and isolation, loneliness and connection, gave me my breath. I saw that I was being given instructions about how to work with pain. Impermanence, change, time: these were the concepts I grasped for and held onto from Ozeki’s work.
The story begins when a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes ashore on a remote Canadian island. One of the main characters, Ruth, finds the lunchbox and discovers within it a journal hidden inside the cover of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, letters, and a wristwatch. Ruth believes, as she reads the tragic journal of sixteen-year-old Nao, that it has washed ashore after the tsunami.
In alternating points of view, we learn about Nao’s highly pressurized life in Tokyo, of her father’s failure to provide for his family and his subsequent suicide attempts, of the violent bullying Nao sustains at school (and even the bullying she passes on to another), and about her great-grandmother, Jiko, a Buddhist nun who changes her life.
Ruth is living on an island in Canada with her husband, an eccentric brilliant environmentalist and artist. Her mother has just died after her battle with Alzheimer’s, and Ruth, a New York City transplant, is becoming increasingly critical of small-town life as she falls deeper and deeper into Nao’s narrative. Ruth, a writer, is also stuck in time—with writer’s block. She writes:
Time interacts with attention in funny ways. At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day. At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water.
When I read that, I put the book down. I looked out the teeny-tiny window of my cell into the module at the stopped clock and laughed. How true: granular, diffused, suspended, not for me in water, but cement. I am struck also, while reading the alternating points of view, by the circuitous nature of narrative, how story is never linear. This is true for my own life, where 414 days are interrupted by a glitch in the chronology, a world newly inhabited by ghosts and demons. I suspect grief does this, too, but also joy, our contemporary lives interrupted and changed by circumstances; in my case, seemingly halted by what I don’t remember.
Where did that time go? If I don’t remember it, does that mean it doesn’t exist? And how could I locate myself in a narrative that did not exist in my memory? After I began to recover, I decided to find out what I had done during that time, who I had hurt, and how. I literally had no idea. I spent nearly two years collecting the information of those 414 days; information that came in the form of police reports, ER medical records, rehab notes, and even interviews that I conducted with the dozens of people who attempted to save my life during that time (including my husband, my best friend Anadel, my daughter, the paramedics who revived me after overdoses, doctors, cops, and neighbors). The documents, thirteen pounds of them, take up an entire drawer of a large filing cabinet. That patchwork of information, and the stories other people told me, helped me re-create a story in my mind of what had happened and how, drunk and hooked on drugs, I had managed to fall into such a state of mental illness that I did the terrible things I did.
But it isn’t really my story. It is their story of my story.
“You weren’t here for any of it,” Greg said. “We were the ones who had to live through it.”
And given the trauma they experienced, clearly their version of events is tinged with anger and sadness. I can never reclaim those lost chapters of my life. To understand what I did, so that I could make real amends to the people I hurt, was both a devastating and a life-altering experience. I have no regrets about taking such drastic measures in order to uncover at least some version of what happened during that relapse, even if that version was someone else’s of what transpired. But, as Ozeki’s book shows me, memory and experience are skewered by time. The experience of my life her
e is not the same as the way it would have been lived out there.
* * *
As I read, amid my loneliness and my disbelief—how could this be my life?—I worried that I would never make sense of myself, of the time I had lost, of the past recovery that I had thrown away, of the future that appeared bleak, inscrutable, and impossible to imagine. It seemed to me that like Nao, who could not comprehend the cruelty and unfairness of her circumstances, I was wide-awake in a world I could never have imagined.
When the subject of bullying arose in Nao’s life, I couldn’t put the book down. My fellow inmates and I were constantly bullied, name-called, and in some cases physically abused by our captors, the youngest and most inexperienced members of the LA County Sheriff’s Department. These were ambitious people striving for position in the department, wishing to do anything but jail time themselves. Which just made it worse for us.
At school, Nao is bullied by her classmates. They call her the “transfer student.” Essentially raised in America, she doesn’t conform to Japanese custom, she doesn’t feel innately, culturally Japanese. And her otherness, painful, ironic (it makes no sense to her, confuses her; she is, after all, of Japanese parentage), eggs on her classmates, even her teacher. But in Japan, when a man can’t provide for his family, the entire family is shamed. Nao is poor. She lives in a one-room apartment in Tokyo. Her bullies are merciless. She is taunted and physically tortured. The others pinch and burn and hit her. She is covered in bruises. The cruelty, as detailed by Ozeki, was piercing to read, unflinchingly written and scary. I loved Ozeki for her refusal to write small.
The bullying by the deputies—inmates called them “po-lice”—was unfathomable. We were called “bitches,” “idiots,” “stupid,” and once we were called “insects.” I watched guards drag women from their cells for unknown reasons and bring them to the Dayroom, where everyone could see them strip-searched, patted down, handcuffed, and then thrown out into the recreation area and chained to chairs. One day, a young woman was escorted by two stone-faced deputies back from somewhere, beaten to a pulp. She hadn’t looked like that in the morning when they’d taken her away.
The Lost Chapters Page 5