by Clay Byars
* * *
When we were out on the road, less than a mile from the gate, a car coming the other way veered into our lane. It was right after a bend in the road. The other driver, a girl in her twenties, had apparently been reaching down for something on the floor of the passenger side. As soon as Drayton saw her, he swerved into her lane to avoid her. At the last second she swerved back as well.
I used to try to connect the dots to see if I could pinpoint exactly where my life took what was the beginning of this detour—earlier that day, I’d felt the dreamy detachment that usually signaled I was getting sick, I shouldn’t have gone to the party; or further back, I could have gone to a different college than Will (we’d talked about it and in fact never told each other where we’d applied yet wound up applying to the same school).
The impact of the cars colliding caused me to be shot forward from the middle of the backseat into the dashboard. A piece of my lower jaw broke off and became lodged down my throat. I was instantly knocked unconscious.
One of the first people to drive up on the scene was the father of a student, not someone I saw regularly, a freshman that year. The man wasn’t a doctor but he’d apparently had some medical training, in the army, I think. Amid the growing noise and chaos, he somehow realized what had happened to me and pulled out the piece that was obstructing my airway, allowing me to breathe. I used to have to try not to think about this much. The seeming randomness of it, of my having been saved, made me shudderingly uncomfortable. I’m okay with it now. But I know that if the order of cars on the highway had been slightly different that night, I would have lain there and silently suffocated.
We were on the only road that led from campus to the interstate, and cars quickly began to pile up in both directions. My parents, who’d decided to join us, got stopped by the blocked traffic. A guy I’d gone to high school with ran back to their car and told them (mistakenly) that my sister and I had been in a wreck, but that he thought we were okay. Before my mother had time to become hysterical, she and my father were out of their car and running.
My sister and Peter had saved a table and were waiting for us at the bar. It had just begun to get crowded. She barely heard the phone ringing above the noise. When the bartender yelled her name, she thought the guy was joking, and that Peter must somehow be involved. But it was the dean of students. At first, she said, she thought he was joking, too. He told her I’d been in a serious wreck and was at the hospital with our parents, waiting to be flown to the closest city. My mother got on the phone and sobbingly told her to hurry.
When my sister and Peter reached the hospital, the paramedics were wheeling me and the girl who’d been driving the other car out to the helicopter. I was still gagging and coughing up blood. In a panic, my father grabbed my mother’s arm as I went by and, so he told me, shouted, “We’re gonna lose him!”
Will was asleep in Birmingham at the time. He’d planned on getting up early to study. But just before midnight, he threw back the covers and jumped out of bed with a throbbing pain in his jaw. He said it felt as if he’d just been punched. He doesn’t know why but he then called up my room at school. When there was no answer, he took some aspirin and tried to go back to sleep. Not long after, my father called him with the news. This will sound made up to non–identical twins, but he and I have had incidents like that throughout our lives, and other identicals we’ve known have corroborated the phenomenon—when his first daughter was born I felt an unexpected, biological euphoria beyond any kind of happiness, that was like waking up stoned but fully alert. When we were children and physically fighting, if someone tried to break us up, we would both turn on that person, like a symbiotic organism.
By the time he got to Chattanooga, the city I’d been flown to, they had stabilized me somewhat. I have a fuzzy image of my father standing beside me holding my arm and telling me I’d been in a car accident. I remember being scared because I knew time had passed that I couldn’t account for. But that may be the result of stories I heard later. After studying me for a minute—I probably reacted somehow—Will told the rest of the family not to worry, I was going to be fine. (I don’t know whether anyone believed him, but I know he didn’t care.)
Amanda’s femur and ankle on one side had been crushed by the station wagon’s engine, which was pushed back into the car. Several of her toes were broken on the other foot. Nothing permanent. Drayton’s injuries were minor.
The other driver, a local girl, died on the flight with me. I know her name but I don’t want to write it, I didn’t know her. She was the daughter or niece of local mechanics. I was told she wasn’t wearing a shirt when the wreck occurred. That may have been what she was reaching for. She was alone in the car. She must have been changing.
Implausible as it may seem, my voice was not affected by the impact. And over the next few weeks and months, all of my injuries—broken jaw, concussion, fistula (tear) in my carotid artery, optic nerve damage—healed on their own or were healed with surgery, with the exception of an injury to my brachial plexus, the bundle of nerves inside my right shoulder. This happened when my body, en route to the dashboard, got bashed by the passenger seat. I could no longer bend my elbow. The doctors said there wasn’t any way to know for sure the extent of the damage, short of going in and having a look. But they wanted to give the nerve a chance to heal on its own. Nine months, they told my parents, was the cutoff time. If it hadn’t recuperated by then, they’d do surgery.
I remember very little from that first hospitalization. A dream of safari hunting in Africa. And certain images. A male nurse, with hairy forearms, standing beside my gurney waiting for elevator doors to open. Sucking mashed green peas through a straw. But I can’t place the flow of any one moment vis-à-vis the others.
The test they’d done to pinpoint the fistula involves the injection of a contrast dye, and some of it had leaked into my brain. The headaches I started having rose to the top of the list of what hurt the most. They seemed to be taking place in the core of my person. In addition to a diverse low-intensity ache, every once in a while a sharp splash of pain would hit and just linger, like a brain freeze that kept on freezing. These sensations were of a strength I’d never experienced. The only things that seemed to soothe them were morphine and sleep, and morphine required the least participation on my part. I wouldn’t have guessed it could be pleasurable to feel absolutely nothing, but it was as if every feeling of pleasure and relief I’d ever experienced had been distilled to its essence, an undifferentiated spectrum, so that it seemed I’d both expanded and disappeared.
The discovery of my allergy to Demerol is probably my most vivid memory. This was nobody’s fault, since I’d never taken Demerol before and there wasn’t a history of reaction with anyone in the family. In fact, when my father had his first knee replacement surgery, he practically lived off it. But I knew something was wrong immediately after it was given to me. I was still in Chattanooga then. I remember my body going from feeling like every part of it was being dipped in lava to having the most extreme chills in a matter of seconds. I gritted to my mother through my wired-shut jaw that I thought I was going to explode.
When I came home from the hospital, with my arm in a sling and a patch over my eye, I walked into my old room, and the first thing I saw was a sign my high school girlfriend’s little sister had made for me on her computer. “WELCOME HOME CLAY, GET WELL SOON,” it read. “From Ginny” was written in small but visible letters in the corner. My mother had hung it on the wall over my bed. I saw it and broke down.
She came rushing into my room when she heard me crying. “What is it, baby? Are you okay?” I sobbed that I was. “Bill,” she screamed to my father. Beee-ulll. I heard my father’s foot-pounding run down the hall.
Despite the excruciating physical pain I was in, I felt like a kid on Christmas Eve. I couldn’t explain it. Everything was happening so fast I hadn’t even begun to reflect on what had taken place. All I knew was that I was alive. I’d never felt more aliv
e. I’d always known that I could handle something like this—had privately thought that this set me apart—and now I was proving it. I didn’t want to attach some reason to why I was still alive and ruin the play.
3
My parents eventually divulged the news they’d been dreading telling me since the wreck. They both came into my room and sat down on my bed. I was sitting at my desk overlooking the kudzu-sloped front yard. They never came into my room together, so of course I wondered what was up.
“I’ve got some bad news,” my father said. My mother sat on my bed and stared down at the carpet.
“Oh God, what?” I said, as if watching from above.
“Well,” he sighed, “there’s this relatively new surgery where they take a nerve out of the back of your leg, your sural nerve, and piece it into your shoulder, into your brachial plexus.” (Right after I left Chattanooga, he bought a Ciba-Geigy medical book on the nervous system, and I can still hear the precise way he pronounced sural and brachial plexus.) “And the only places that do it are in New Orleans and San Francisco. Lucky for us, the man who invented the procedure is down in New Orleans.” But, he said, the doctors first wanted to give my nerve time to regenerate itself. Intensive physical therapy was how we’d avoid another surgery.
“So?” I said on the verge of tears.
“So you’re not going to be going back to Sewanee this next semester.”
There wasn’t anywhere in Chattanooga that provided the kind of aquatic therapy I needed. I could have made the daily commute to Nashville, but it was over an hour away and, with the addition of classes, wasn’t very practical. Besides, Riverside rehab in Birmingham was one of the few other places in the Southeast that had what I needed.
In the back of my mind I’d already assumed that something like this would happen, that something else would go wrong, but hearing it in this well-prepared manner was devastating. My chest rose and my stomach sank simultaneously.
“What about my classes?” I said. Sewanee didn’t accept credits from a lot of places. I knew they didn’t from UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham)—they were on the quarter system.
My mother said they’d already spoken with Birmingham Southern and classes from there would transfer to Sewanee.
“I’m not going to live out there,” I said.
“That’s good,” my father said, “because I’m not paying for you to live out there.”
“It’s only for one semester, baby,” my mother added. “You don’t want to have another surgery, especially one like this that’s new and eight hours long—yeah, eight owahs.”
Even then I knew this was in my best interest, but it seemed like I’d just moved away from home. I’d only had one full year of independence, but what a year it was. I already felt like a grown-up. I thought I was my own unattached man who could take care of himself. Will also being at Sewanee didn’t count. I hardly wanted to move back in with my parents, back to the adolescent lifestyle that I used to lead. It would bring what I considered was an old and outgrown past far too close to the present.
“What choice do I have?”
“Exactly,” my father said, and sighed. Then he smiled. My mother came over and hugged me before they both walked out.
When Will eventually found out, he was giddy with anger, he was so relieved. Another surgery likely wasn’t going to be needed. When he discovered that he was no longer going to have a car, he acted as if that was a given—well yeah, sure. Everything was in walking distance at Sewanee anyway, and most of our friends had cars. He didn’t care at all that I wasn’t going to be there with them or that I might be lonely all by myself. “Boo-hoo,” he said. “Suck it up, you pussy.”
* * *
Months passed, and the progress wasn’t what we’d hoped. My right hand was fine, but from the shoulder to the wrist, the arm was just a dangling extremity. I remember the nightly lightning storms that seemed to be taking place in it when the nerves would try to connect with each other. I would take the sling off my right arm prior to driving. Because the hand was fine, I could turn the key and grip the wheel, but I couldn’t steer with it, because the arm wouldn’t work, so I learned to drive with my left. Only on the open highway, when there was less turning to be done, could I use the right, anchoring the wheel with it.
I’d stopped wearing my eye patch right after the New Year. My damaged optic nerve had healed enough to allow my eyeball to track back and forth. I no longer had double vision everywhere I looked.
If I dwelled on the negative aspects of my situation—living back at home, having endless amounts of time, having the threat of surgery constantly hanging over me—I’d get lonely and depressed. I tried to concentrate on other things. This proved harder than I thought. Not submerging myself at all in my new college life at Birmingham Southern, I didn’t make any new friends. And I didn’t have any high school friends around I went to the trouble of becoming reacquainted with. I’d signed up for only two classes because I assumed my therapy sessions would go the full two hours every time, and they didn’t. I went up to Sewanee most every weekend, but I still had more time to myself than I’d ever had before.
In the middle of March, my father and I went to the hospital downtown to have something called an EMG nerve-conduction test, meant to give us a more accurate picture of how my therapy was going. An attendant repeatedly stuck a long, acupuncture-thin needle down into my nerves, asking me to move my arm. It didn’t hurt. Later, the Japanese doctor who deciphered the results presented the news to us with a big smile. The test had shown that my nerves were indeed regenerating. My father chuckled, as if to say, “See, I told you therapy would work.” I was happy and relieved, too, but on some level remained skeptical. Just because my nerves had regenerated a little didn’t mean they would regenerate all the way, not a small distinction when you can’t move your elbow. The nine-month mark, at which we’d need to decide about whether to operate, was approaching. Nevertheless, I smiled along with them.
4
A girl I’d known, whom I’d met on an outdoor hiking-and-camping course after high school, came to visit a couple of weekends after that test. Her trip had been marked on my calendar for a while. It had done more than anything to keep me from getting completely depressed during the previous few months.
Eleanor was from Illinois. I hadn’t seen her since Alaska, almost two years before. We kept in touch for a while afterward, then lost touch, then started communicating again after the wreck. Eleanor was two years younger, and had been the only girl in the instructorless “small group” we had broken off into for the last week of the course. It was five guys and her. We’d all become good friends by then, which is undoubtedly why the instructors put us together. You get to know someone pretty well when you spend twenty-four hours a day with them without any distractions for an entire month—things friends normally don’t know, or want to know, about each other. Bathroom things. Still, her boyfriend was reluctant about her coming to visit another guy. But she didn’t tell me this until after she was in Birmingham.
My first thought when I went to pick her up at the airport was how much lighter and fluffier her hair was when it was clean. Otherwise it seemed no time had passed since that summer. We hugged over my sling.
“Hi, there,” she shyly said. I don’t think either of us could have stopped smiling if we’d wanted.
We both agreed it had been too long.
We hugged again. Her perfume made me a little dizzy, but I didn’t care. She patted my sling as we rode down the escalator to the baggage claim. “I can’t believe all you’ve been through, Clay. I wish there was something I could have done.”
Eleanor had long legs and a mixture of shyness and self-confidence you see in girls who discover only after puberty that they are attractive. She’d told us she was a tomboy when she was little, and she still had an assertive manner. The night we’d hiked out of the woods, after the course, just as I’d fallen asleep in the hayloft where we were sleeping, she had leaned over a
nd kissed me, something no one had ever done out of the blue like that before. Her sleeping bag was next to mine, but it took a second before I realized whose hair hung in my face. I instinctively flinched and then gladly went with it.
The first night of her visit, after we’d watched a movie in the playroom and tried to call the other guys from our camping group, I told her that I was going to bed. I noticed, or thought I did anyway, that my statement had upset her. So as if I had no choice, I turned and walked over to where she was sitting on the red leather couch. I said, “Do you mind if I kiss you good night?” She smiled and said she didn’t.
“What took you so long?” she said, after I sat down beside her.
I was instantly relieved but defensively replied, “I thought you had a boyfriend.”
“I know.” She frowned. “It’s just so good to see you.”
After kissing some more, I said, “I don’t have a problem with it if you don’t.”
“Let’s go upstairs,” she said.
In retrospect, I get a certain pleasure from thinking that we walked hand in hand right past my parents’ bedroom door, on the way up. At the time, I forgot that I had parents. My heartbeat didn’t slow down until she walked out of the bathroom and into my sister’s bedroom. I was already in the bed, naked and I’m sure with a hard-on. It was only when she laughed at her attempt to cover her breasts as she crossed the room that I calmed down and shifted to autopilot. Nothing felt illicit about this. And there wasn’t that moment of hesitation that can come when you’re initially confronted with a separate body. Because we knew each other as well as we did, my guiding principle had become forgiveness. We were in this together and whatever was okay. Her laugh echoed that. There was definitely desire—my hormones were raging—but it was secondary to a feeling of unity. I knew she felt the same way, even if she did have a boyfriend. So when I asked if she wanted to have sex and she said, “I don’t know, do you?” I couldn’t help but look down and laugh. We quickly went over our brief sexual pasts. Then she said, “Pull out before.”