The unibrow.
Crisis.
An odd smudge across his face that caused people to peer into his mien then pull back, startled.
But it had kept the sweat from his eyes at the bar, and in the dark heat of his walk home he rubbed it with gratitude while my own eyes stung (for I pluck and pluck still to this day!).
His body took care to keep his self from experiencing pain.
But the self did not shield his body from pain.
Strange!
The self worried sores and wished, as it did now, for his physical head to split open like a melon and the demon to rise out of the orbital nougat and spend ammunition on the whole stupid town.
Was he gay?
No.
He stuck his arms out straight, fingers flexed, and let out a burred howl, throat burning and buzzing from the night’s cigarettes.
A few lights came on in the dark houses, but, despite my own fear of discovery, Rico took no notice.
Grinning, he pulled his fuzzy face into his hands and kept walking blindly down the sleepy streets.
Surely now his mind plunged toward failure, negative thoughts clinging to one another, gathering mass and hurtling toward some disastrous center.
Who was he?
He shook his head and tried to stop his mind with grunts.
I had noticed this happening occasionally, a shame spiral, and when it did happen, when the shame spirals fully sucked him in, he wouldn’t emerge from the church for days, no matter the phone calls, the classes, or the job schedules, the hectoring from the window.
We know how it is, don’t we, dear readers?
He felt his cells shrivel to tiny currants and blood would wash over everything he saw.
As a child, we would also throw incredible tantrums, holding our breath until we passed out, stomping our army men and kicking anyone hoping to restrain us, would we not?
And, of course, bellowing at the top of our lungs, ragged rage coming through in bleats and sobs.
The tantrums wouldn’t erupt when we simply did not get our way; no, they would erupt when we reached the limit of our ability and could go no further.
In my child mind, for example, I could draw Mother’s boyfriend with crayon in a perfect likeness—I could see it clearly, the shading on the nose, the eyelashes, the handsome canine-tooth smile beneath the mustache.
It would be perfect.
But then I would begin and each line would be too thick, the sticky crayon smudging the precise marking and then, at last, it would just be a kid’s drawing of a man.
Silly.
And little me would erupt wildly when told as much!
Mother would cast my potential stepfather a chilly look and then say to me, “Honey, I’m not going to let you play with the crayons if you’re going to get so upset.”
A cascade of blocks flung.
A door slammed.
Fat shoes kicked against the wall.
Surely Rico didn’t like being this way either, and the shame was what would often keep him in his room.
But the deepest secret of this secret night is not that Rico had been experimenting with the same sex (for we are not so ignorant to the reality of the world as to condemn such experimentation), but that this night of deepest and strangest experimentation is also the night when I took it upon myself to take a more direct role in the proceedings.
I stepped out from the shadows.
“Rico,” I said, “you must get that eyebrow under control.”
For a large boy, he moved surprisingly quickly into a kind of feral crouch, eyes wide and darting.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a friend. I want to help.”
I offered him a piece of Clark Bar I had been keeping in my pocket.
He pondered it.
“Listen,” I said. “I need to tell you about Rachil.”
His crouch uncoiled, but he remained silent.
The street was a moonscape, asphalt and seedpods.
“Follow me,” I said, and, after a light hesitation, he did.
I clapped him on the shoulder (so tense!) and we made our way slowly back to the church, through the early-morning heat.
Along side streets, while I explained, as delicately as I could, that his best friend was raping his ex-girlfriend repeatedly, he slowly grew comfortable in my presence.
It was like we were old friends!
Of course, I couldn’t offer proof, per se, of the acts I was revealing to him, and I realize now having some documentation would have made my job a bit easier (we seemed to walk for hours), but I eventually convinced Rico through careful and thorough descriptions of the acts I had observed (I admit some embellishments, but the end justified the means).
The poor fool was a blubbering mess by the time we reached his block.
It took even more convincing on my part to keep him from going to the authorities (he had such blind faith in the authorities! Why?), but I eventually pumped him up, got him on his feet, and practically frog-marched him the rest of the way to the church.
We emerged from my well-worn secret path through the neighbor’s backyard, and there was Tater, lounging in his army jacket, smoking a tea stick.
He waved to me (not Rico).
Yes, yes, I nodded, waving him off.
The leaves and branches cleared, and we saw through the lighted kitchen window Rachil, on her feet, gesturing wildly with a cigarette in hand, and Corn, seated at the small “dining” table, doubled over in laughter.
Rico paused.
He looked at me with those sad eyes as if to say, “Could it really be true? Look how happy they seem!”
I whispered another choice detail or two from my observations and lo, I’m surprised the privet and scrub didn’t swirl into a cyclone behind him, he moved so fast!
I scurried with delight in his wake.
The nervous system!
“I know what you did that night,” Rico said, trembling with rage, hulking in the doorway.
Corn and Rachil returned his gaze with ashen faces that went comically agog when I peered over his shoulder.
“Who the **** is that?” Corn said, pointing a twiggy finger.
“I know you,” Rachil said, in a kind of shock, “You’re . . .”
I smiled as I made my entrance.
“You’re that guy from the movie theater!”
I admit that stung a bit.
Yes.
That is all I was to her.
You see, dear readers, it was not yet time for me to reveal my real identity, though, true, I had considered it on the walk over, but it became clear in my mind that I should wait.
She was not ready.
And it’s true, I didn’t have any reason to believe she would ever be ready, so my plan was to ingratiate myself with her this way and reveal the truth to her some bright afternoon as we walked along the campus, the north side, where the lilacs bloom.
Here at the church, I merely smiled my Matthew Broderick smile.
“At your service,” I said and gave a little bow.
As I rose, I saw Rico’s right foot upending the table as he lunged for Corn, sending cigarette butts and a (curious) glass of milk to crash and splatter against the wood paneling.
Rico, grown much larger than his effete friend, easily pinned his opponent under his ample belly on the carpet in front of the “stage.”
Rico’s fighting technique amused me.
I sidled up to Rachil and gave her a dig in the ribs with my elbow and a couple of eyebrow jumps, but she shrank from me, continuing to shriek.
I was a bit put out.
We watched Rico push Corn’s face into the carpet, mashing the nose until blood poured forth.
This I liked.
But then, while I yelled “Rapiste!” and clapped my hands together, Rico rotated himself on top of Corn and ripped open the crotch of Corn’s khaki shorts with both hands.
Rachil’s shrieking achieved a remarkable pitch.
Corn kept up an incessant, b
reathy mutter: “Get the **** off me; get the **** off me; get the **** off me.”
Rico pulled Corn’s business out of the hole he had torn in the shorts, reared back, and gave Corn’s genitalia one (quite accurate!) punch.
It sounded like a stone dropped into a bowl of pudding from a great height.
I could hardly contain my delight and began emitting my noises, but when I turned to Rachil with a smile, I saw that she was sobbing uncontrollably.
I then aimed my smile at Rico, but he was also in tears, as he reared back once again and thrust his fist forward into Corn’s face, which, upon impact, snapped back at an odd angle, then fell with a wet smack against the edge of the stage.
I couldn’t have cared less about Corn, but I saw that Rico now turned toward me with rage in his eyes.
The realization crept upon me that I had once again been misunderstood.
I had overestimated humanity.
I had been let down.
Amidst their wailing for me to “Call an ambulance!” I found myself possessed by a force seemingly outside of myself.
A curious glossolalia overcame me as I grabbed Rachil by the arm and spun her toward me (to touch her was divine!).
I gazed into her clear green eyes but felt that some other presence was behind me, gazing through my own (also green!) eyes into hers.
A voice spoke within me.
Was it mine?
No.
I opened my mouth to speak, to let this voice out, but I felt suddenly ill.
I could taste the bottom of my stomach (a cold, milky secretion puddled there), and every pore began filling with heat as a vile flapping belch escaped me, washing over Rachil’s closely held face.
She slumped to the floor in a convulsion, and a stabbing pain doubled me over.
I made it only a few steps into the yard before I (shamefacedly) wretched.
Through the spittle and bile I yelled to the imbeciles, “Don’t look at me!” to no avail.
There are times when vomiting is the end of a journey, when it signals the end of a long episode of internal roiling; afterwards, relief engulfs one’s body like a cool bath on a sweltering day.
This was not one of those times.
This upheaval signaled, rather, a journey’s beginning, the first step on the rest of my life’s path.
I stumbled into the street and vomited once more, this time a curiously red mixture, tangy and sour, with tickly lumps.
I tried to catch the expulsion in my hands, but the gesture proved futile and most of the vomit splashed onto my right leg, hot at first, but quickly cool, a tepid caking.
I looked back at my confreres, but it was as if I were trying to read a street sign from behind an aquarium (I’ve thought long and hard about what exactly this blurring resembled, and I believe this aquarium analogy is remarkably astute), yet despite it all I could still just make out two watery figures standing in the doorway of the church, silhouetted once again by the kitchen light.
I reached out my hand, knowing I wouldn’t of course be able to touch them but wanting some acknowledgment that they were and would be watching over me should unconsciousness overtake me, as seemed imminent.
I saw the dull blade of Rico’s outline lean into sloping Rachil’s before ushering her back inside to, no doubt, care for the bleeding Corn.
I attempted to speak but out came a flood of other matter.
I collapsed.
From the warm, now-wet concrete I could see the door to the church shutting me out forever.
There was a profound sadness all around, dripping from the trees.
I could hear it, and the sound was nearly death itself.
I again tried to catch the matter pouring from my mouth but I found my hands had gone numb.
I sprang up with the last of my energy and ran for what felt like hours but was surely only a few blocks until the numbness spread to my legs, then my face.
All was a fuzzed blank, but it proved only a temporary respite from the pain, for within seconds my muscles began to seize within my skin—every bit of meat, from my quadriceps to my dorsals, became rigid, my face became a rictus of pain, and I found I could no longer open my eyes.
I felt more matter violently leaving my face by way of my flared nostrils, but I couldn’t move my hands to stop the expulsion.
It’s a curious sensation to finally understand how you will die.
Not the manner in which you will die—which becomes suddenly irrelevant, FYI—but rather how you will feel and what you will think at the instant when life ceases, whenever that time might occur.
In this case, while my external circumstances were quite dramatic—as I assume they will be when the true moment of my death arrives—internally, I was taking a rather calm accounting of my situation; I was able to assess my physical status and conclude that the whole episode was inane.
The fuzzing and blurring of my vision, the rigid calcifying of my musculature, the sudden inside-out nature of my digestion—it was all just stupid.
This is the height of idiocy, I thought. A muddled and inappropriate procedure.
Now, looking back, I understand that this is how it feels to die, how Corn surely must have felt there in the church, bleeding on the stage.
In an idiotic fit of dimness and confusion, while one’s attention is elsewhere, life will leave through an unseen exit.
You too, dear readers, will die this way.
The body fails and the mind registers its disappointment, its disapproval, and then . . . well, that is the more interesting question, isn’t it?
What happens after the dull slip of life from one’s body?
Do you believe in an afterlife, dear readers?
In heaven?
In hell?
You might stop to consider the possibilities.
I believe in a long gray corridor where time does not exist.
Whether this is heaven or hell I do not know, nor did I, at this moment, when the disorder reached its moronic climax, get a chance to find out, for I was spared.
I soon heard sirens, tires squealing, the crunch of boots on concrete, and then I was jostled.
Gruff voices asked me obvious questions (“Are you okay?” “Can you hear me?” “Can you move your arms?”).
My facial muscles remained locked, so I merely tried to exhale loudly from my nose to signal my exasperation (and that I was, in fact, alive).
More matter squished from me instead, and I noted the gruff voices register disapproval at the mess I had apparently made.
I made a mental note to let the departments responsible know that I didn’t appreciate their minions’ haughtiness and inattention at that moment (fear not, I let them know!).
I also did not appreciate the minions’ response to the next moment when further matter exited my person through my stinging and tender rear end.
Loaded into the ambulance, IVS were administered and further questions asked.
I must have lost consciousness at some point, because the next moment I remember, my eyes did finally open to reveal watery shapes, blobs of color floating above me like fleshy balloons.
Feeling had returned to my limbs, but just barely, so I found that despite all my efforts, my arms would only strike out spasmodically at seemingly random intervals, my legs jerk up to my chest, etc. I tried to speak but could only cry out in gasping rhythms.
What did I want to say?
I am only somewhat ashamed to admit that I wanted to say I had once again soiled myself and at that moment I felt the soilage seeping to unsavory places, stinging in my crevices. The thinner blog (Dear me! Blog! I meant to type “blob”! Paging Dr. Freud!!!) above me murmured at my screams while the fatter one cooed, but neither solved the equation.
My hand.
I could point, couldn’t I? I tried but nothing of note occurred. Perhaps this was simply my lot, to lie in filth. I began to sob quietly to myself, warm tears in rivulets down my temples.
There’s an odd comfort to cry
ing, a loosening of the strictures around one’s heart; I’ve never been ashamed of it, and in this case I felt it calming me.
Someone would eventually clean me; I was in a hospital after all, and that is what members of the hospital staff do (though suddenly I couldn’t detect any hospital staff about).
The lights had dimmed but for the soft glow of the TV my “roommate” (heretofore undetected) had on.
I felt a sigh escape me, and my head began to sit heavily on my neck. My legs began to relax, and a calm lightness suffused my person. Sleep would soon come.
Peace.
No, alas—my arm swung up in a massive twitch, sending my hand directly into my (apparently) open mouth. The meat just below my thumb and forefinger landed flush between my teeth, and I bit down furiously.
The pain was a cartoon police siren, all red and wailing, the sharp pierce of skin, the dull crunch and pop of the gristly corpuscles as I chomped and chomped, muffling my cries with hand-flesh.
The lights came up in a rush and the blobs came back loud and direct.
My entire face felt wet when they pulled my hand away, and I felt my legs kick out, my back arch rigid.
The pain was exquisite, so I shut my eyes tight and tried to concentrate on its intricacies, to detail them in my cries.
The More You Ignore Me Page 14