Will & I

by Clay Byars

  “You okay?” she said breathlessly when we could stand up. The soaked sleeves of her sweatshirt were draped over her hands.

  I nodded and coughed some more. “Jesus,” I said. “I would’ve been fine.” At the time I may have believed this, though it’s obvious in hindsight I would have drowned.

  That morning Candy had told me she wanted us to drink a beer together before she left. I knew she no longer wanted to, but we ceremonially sat at the kitchen table and toasted anyway. Her clothes weren’t dripping any longer—she hadn’t wanted to put them in the dryer for some reason—but she was still shivering. She tried to be serious and say that, no kidding, I really was a hero. She could never have imagined this day. I thanked her, and she left before she finished her beer. I drank the rest of mine in silence. Then I went to the bathroom and threw it back up.

  A day came, a few months later, when my parents said it was time to let Candy go. I was finished with outpatient therapy, so I no longer needed the rides. And at home I needed less and less caretaking. Not that I was fully recovered, but I could do things for myself. I had progressed, or adapted, enough to bathe and dress myself at least. I was ready for her to go, too. As much as she helped me, she was in the way of my independence.

  On the afternoon before what was supposed to be her last day, she said she’d see me tomorrow, but even in the moment something told me that I wouldn’t see her. Neither of us needed a “last day.” She wanted to end on a good note. Before me, everyone she’d worked with had been elderly and was not going to get any better. When the person either moved into a nursing home or died, Candy moved on. She’d said before that she might give up being a sitter after me. As strange as it sounded, she really couldn’t stand hospitals. She didn’t know what she would do next.

  Candy had grown up in Birmingham during the height of the civil rights struggle. She remembered riding through downtown as a little girl and having to lie on the floor of the car. She’d given birth to a son at eighteen, out of wedlock, and moved to Alaska, where the boy’s father left her. She went through a string of relationships before meeting the man she was married to when I met her, an old high school boyfriend who’d adopted her son. She saw all things as temporary, the way I’d come to see them. Both of us viewed an emotional, stock-taking goodbye as unnecessary and insincere. We said we’d keep in touch.

  19

  Dewin tells me that when I first came to him, I used to “snort” when I tried to sing. That was the word he used. My voice would catch, and a sort of snorting would come out. I can’t remember the sound, but I trust his memory. If I thought I could stand listening to it, I’d go back through the years of CDs of our lessons until I heard it. He remembers that when we started working together and needed to communicate between lessons, I’d get someone else to call for me, because my voice wasn’t intelligible. I’d forgotten that, too. He says he knew I was making progress when he called my phone one day and could understand my words on the greeting. He says he notices that when I make the right sound with my mouth, my body straightens. Untwists. The tongue is a “rudder,” he says. Set it right, and the body will fall into line. He says he can actually watch this happen with me, watch the shoulder I tend to hitch start settling into place, and the one I tend to let drop rise, until they’re level. The vowels I was making had more symmetry than my damaged body.

  “I know that the voice will find a way, if you can get a sound out, to be as symmetrical as possible. I don’t know the extent to which you lost the muscles to control what happens in that process. I’m not sure how much the vowels have taught other parts of your brain to hold that part of your throat open, and how much we just reanimated what was already there. I think there’s probably a combination of things going on, that you’re learning new neuronal pathways to get to what you need.”

  I said that the lack of control was why the speech person I eventually saw dismissed me as a lost cause.

  “Well, he was wrong,” he said. “Or maybe what he was right about was that you had lost the control, but what he was wrong about was your ability to work around the problem. I think the body’s ability to grow toward solving its problems, the brain’s problems, and the physics of those vowel sounds, and the acoustics, were kind of reaching toward each other to figure it out. It’s been slow, but hey, it’s been a steady ascent.”

  One of the things that makes Dewin a good teacher for someone like me is all the work he’s done with boys’ choirs, helping adolescents whose voices were changing. He explained to me that the reason teenage boys’ voices crack like that has to do with the change in their body mass. They’re getting heavier, and as a result their body is becoming a different instrument. It’s changing from a viola to a cello, or from a cello to a bass, but there’s a period where they’re in between, and all that new muscle mass is untrained, it’s soft. That’s when you get the cracking between octaves. During that period, Dewin said, these boys would do a lot of the same things with their bodies I was doing, trying to build a “leverage device.” Only I was starting from much farther back. They were trying to strengthen their voices. I was trying “to relearn, as an adult, this elegant relationship of physics that we learn as infants.”

  Still, all that experience made him a good empathizer. He can look at a certain outward gesture and know immediately what inner phenomenon, what contortion of invisible muscles, has produced it. Sometimes he’ll have me sing while holding a plastic knife in my teeth, to keep me from trying to help the sound with my lips. He told me this is akin to how Demosthenes, the Greek statesman and orator, taught his students 2,400 years ago. He’d have them put pebbles in their mouths to speak around. There are moments, in Dewin’s studio, when I feel like a human sculpture he’s working on, slowly, without ever laying a hand or a hammer on me. He’s telepathically changing the configuration of the musculature in my body. He does this for all his students, but with me it’s more visible. Seven years in, people understand me at dinner parties (not that I go to many). I have developed a falsetto.

  20

  Looking back, the path to now, to sitting at this desk and writing, seems so unarbitrary that it’s almost impossible to deny the work of an outside hand. This is a comfort at times, enough to keep me grounded. But it also requires a perspective that lies outside of the action. Fate, so called, only works in retrospect. You can’t experience it and understand it at the same time. The notion of fate appears only when we consider ourselves as unified consciousnesses moving through time, but such an identity is merely a role—or at least that’s how I’ve come to see it.

  Before the wreck, I’d never done much writing. I liked reading, and occasionally I would jot down some thoughts, but nothing continuous, just isolated impressions. I do remember, even in those moments, feeling the pleasure that could come from playing with language and finding the right words. After the wreck and stroke, it was one of the few pleasures available to me, so I began to seek it out. As a way to validate my time, at first, and then gradually, as a way to survive. For me it has been a healing obsession.

  The rest of college—when I finally went back, a year and a half after the stroke—was eye-opening and miserable. In all my planning and hard physical work to return, in all my wondering about how I would be received, I’d forgotten to consider that everyone else on campus would have moved on. No one was waiting for me like I’d expected. Nor had I imagined that my former friends might be apprehensive about my return. I have a journal entry from my first months that sums up what I felt fairly well.

  12/2/94

  When I first started writing after the stroke (when I could remember what “normal” felt like), a friend said, “At least you know you’ve been through the toughest part of your life.” Well that was wrong; not being included in my friends’ activities, for whatever the reason, is just as hard or harder than the issue of survival. I guess I’d envisioned some sort of praise, but instead, people tend to make me feel like I’ve done something wrong. I shouldn’t expect everyone to be
so “shit happens” philosophical about this as me. Nonetheless, I’m still human, so if I can get past this (and it’s happening to me), why is it so hard for other people? It’s trying, being inundated with people who don’t think for themselves, and not having anyone to identify with. The only reason this hell is bearable is because of my ability to laugh. I still (with no logical basis) can’t help but think something good has got to come out of this. It’s still as unbelievable as ever.

  One day, the dean of students invited me to lunch, at a place right across the street from my dorm. It was a humid, sunny day, and I almost felt good. I tried to be as casual as I could walking in with the dean. He was a sharp, laid-back, relatively young guy who taught some classes and interacted with the students all the time, but he was still an authority figure. After the wreck he’d driven my parents and my sister, who threw up in his car, down the back way to the hospital in Chattanooga.

  “How about your classes?” he asked after we’d ordered. “Everything going okay there?”

  I told him it was. “I’m gonna like Ethics, I think.”

  He carried our tray to a table in the window.

  “Let me know if I can do anything,” he said.

  In the early part of the century a girl from Sewanee had drowned while swimming in Lake Cheston. Since then her parents had made it one of the college’s traditions that you had to swim across the lake to graduate. I’d been fretting about this ever since discovering I could no longer swim. I didn’t want to be excluded, though, and I was ready to die not to be. Maybe I could float on my back. Was there a time limit?

  Once he’d figured out what I was talking about, he started smiling. “You don’t have to worry about that,” he said. “We quit that a couple of years ago.”

  A group of guys with black streaks on their faces and chests came running in, chanting something I couldn’t understand. Their shirts were stuffed in their back pockets, and each held close to the person in front of him. They tried to hide their faces as they shuffled around a table where a guy and two girls were sitting. Their chanting changed. The guy at the table smiled bashfully and stood up. They picked him up over their heads and carried him out just as they’d come in. It was fraternity rush week.

  The dean shook his head and laughed. “Y’all don’t do that, do you?”

  “Y’all?”

  “The Phis.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “I’m not having any part in that shi … in that, anymore.”

  “No?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “It could be good for you. You know, a way to get back into campus life.”

  “Maybe.” I pretended to think about it. “I don’t know.” But I did know. I wasn’t about to associate myself with a bunch of predominantly unknown party guys for whom I would likely become something like a mascot.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “I wish all of my brain had been affected. So I wouldn’t know. Most of the things I’ve learned from what I’ve been through, I’d rather not know.”

  The dean smiled apologetically. He then put both of his elbows on the table like he was going to lean forward and tell me a secret. “But you know,” he said. “You do.”

  * * *

  Will and I quickly began to get on each other’s nerves. I had been given the role of his silent sidekick—and by extension, his little brother. He had been relegated to the role of my interpreter. Neither of us liked it. He had a girlfriend, so his presence was never as constant as I would have liked, though when he was there, we fought. I wanted a girlfriend, too. But I wasn’t about to ask anyone out. I started pointing out Will’s faults instead: he drank too much, he smoked too much, his impatience was going to kill him. He began calling me the Critic. “What do you do?” he said. “Not shit. You sit around here feeling sorry for yourself and you take it out on me.”

  I got out and started taking walks. I began walking to the Cross, a sixty-foot memorial out on a bluff with a dramatic view of the valley below, which was down the street from our dorm. It was dedicated to Sewanee students who’d fought in World War I. The distance there and back was only a little more than a mile. I got to know every tilt of the road and imperfection in the pavement, but on one of the first mornings, I’d gotten to where the woods began, right after the soccer field, when I heard footsteps coming up behind me. The frost on the lawns hadn’t begun to evaporate and the trees still hid the sun. I turned around to see a girl jogging in gray sweatpants and new turquoise running shoes.

  “Hi,” she said breathlessly as she slowed her arms to a stop. She leaned forward and put her hands on her knees. “My name’s Anna.” She extended her hand. “I’ve seen you around but I haven’t had a chance to introduce myself.”

  I told her I was Will Byars’s brother.

  She had long, wispy blond hair, dark, partially closed eyes, and porcelain skin with veins pulsating in her temples. She nodded and smiled, then looked confused. She didn’t know Will. Then she said she was a sophomore, and I told her that technically I was, too. This led into my history, which I tried to downplay as much as I could, emphasizing “brain stem” stroke, as if anyone would know this was the kind that didn’t affect cognition.

  Three or four days later, I walked to the Cross again. This time I didn’t get started until the late afternoon. As I started down the sidewalk, I saw a group of four or five girls headed my way. They saw me, too, and turned in toward each other as we passed, to avoid noticing me. I tensed up and tried to look as harmless as possible. I saw Anna in the back of the group. We made eye contact, and I smiled. Then she dropped her eyes and moved up beside the girl in front of her, causing a rush of disbelief and shame that made me replay the incident for weeks.

  I did make a new friend, though, a Chinese woman named Nai-Chian. She was running a restaurant in town, the City Café, one of the few local places not owned by the school. It was a quiet, sit-down place that didn’t serve alcohol and had flower arrangements on the tables. It was the type of place you’d take your grandmother if she came to visit you. I used to go in the mornings for the blueberry-and-banana pancakes, and sometimes for the spicy chicken and rice at lunch. Nai-Chian would quietly pick up the chopsticks from my table and set down a spoon for me to eat the rice with. She and I started talking one day when business was slow. She didn’t say it, but I could tell she felt like an outsider as much as I did. This became our unspoken bond, and the basis of our friendship—but that was all it was. Her husband, a burly local who worked for the school’s physical plant, silently eyed me with suspicion.

  I couldn’t tell how old she was. She had close-cropped, pageboy black hair, was short and in good shape. She taught a tai chi class every morning that met in the park. She didn’t look any older than thirty-five, but may have been fifty-five. She was an accomplished seamstress, too. Later, for my birthday, she knitted me a pillow with my Chinese zodiac sign on it. The ox.

  Writing absorbed my attention more and more. A well-known poet who taught at the school, Wyatt Prunty, was offering an independent study in short fiction. He agreed to let me in even though I’d recently declared philosophy as my major—a small act of kindness that’s had a major effect on my life. I spent days holed up, trying out stories, but I couldn’t get one to work at first. When I finally did, in an admittedly short amount of time, I felt something akin to security. I was able to escape myself and trust myself at the same time. Every word felt both inevitable and full of potential. When that story was later accepted for publication in the school literary magazine, I remember I felt almost as good seeing it in print as when I’d finished it and knew I had something. No longer was I simply that guy who left and came back; I was a writer. The looks of confusion I got down at the bar from a group of girls I didn’t know, as if they now had to recalibrate their knowledge about me, were exhilarating. Everything would continue to flow from now on.

  Then I tried to write another story. It didn’t happen. Then another. And another. I was distraught. The more I learned about the mechanics of writing, the
more my stories seemed lifeless. There wasn’t any depth to them, no risk involved. They were just clever cuts into the surface, and sometimes not even that. Reason told me, “Why mess around and possibly fuck up your underlying sense of well-being? Go somewhere less personally relevant, less sincere.” Looking for any shortcut to hard work and serious consideration, I tried to locate the problem everywhere but within me. And that “me” seemed to be getting more and more contained as time went by. At times, frustrated, I experienced feelings reminiscent of when I’d been locked in, when I hadn’t been able to move or speak. But then I’d had only one option, whereas with stories, multiple options always seemed to exist.

  * * *

  One night I woke up at two o’clock and couldn’t go back to sleep. I threw off the covers. It was cold but I didn’t care. I marched to the study and wrote—not typed but wrote longhand—a letter to Eleanor, saying we needed to get together. I told her it was my fault we hadn’t before, I was just scared. But I wasn’t going to sit and watch our relationship dwindle to insignificance, which I could tell was already starting. I included my phone number and asked her to call me when she got the letter. A sense of determination and happiness kept me up the rest of the night. I mailed it as soon as the campus post office opened the following morning. But after two weeks went by without a response, my hope sank into ambivalence. What had I been thinking? I was oddly relieved when eventually the letter came back, Return to Sender: Change of Address Unknown.