One More Theory About Happiness

by Paul Guest

Her arms swept slowly over us all. Her wrists were supported by splints. Around me, eyes began to shine with tears.

  When the moment had passed, and her song was over, she spoke a short while. God allowed to happen what he hated, she said, so that what he loved might be accomplished.

  I wanted to leave, to run from the room and everything so simple and palliative, but I couldn’t.

  Tada sang a lilting benediction before thanking us all and turning to sign books at a table. I refused to go up, to meet her, and moved to the dimly lit back of the room where I could watch the broken parade. My mother never quite joined the line, talking instead to the woman who had pushed Tada onto the stage.

  When my mother waved me forward, she introduced me to the woman, a friend of Tada and co-host of the daily radio show syndicated around the world. The woman smiled sweetly and walked over to Tada, whispering in her ear, and pointing to me. Tada smiled and waved to me from where she sat signing her books. I smiled back but felt false, repulsed: this was not what I ever wanted to be, not for anyone, an example, a symbol.

  At school, I continued to work with Jenny, though I spent much of it avoiding her. In the quiet spaces of the day, she hinted at the sadness of her marriage. I stared off, into whatever distance was available, while she morosely leaked. All I wanted was to complete my work with minimal disruption. If I said nothing in reply to her, she returned to writing, or doodling, making small hash marks on the page, like she had been taught by experience to be ignored.

  On the year’s final day, while students darted everywhere, manic to be done, we sat in the hallway chatting. Weeks ago she had informed me she wouldn’t be back to work with me again and I had almost swooned with relief, though I feigned a dim regret.

  “I want to tell you something,” she said while looking downward. “I said there were things I needed to better focus on in my life.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “You said that.”

  “That’s not exactly true,” she almost choked out. “This is hard for me to say. Very hard. Please don’t think I’m strange. I couldn’t stand that.”

  I didn’t say anything. She went on.

  “I—I’ve—The best way to put it is—” She broke off. “I have developed feelings for you. Serious feelings.”

  I still said nothing. My mind had lit out for a sane place in the world.

  “Emotions,” she said. She imagined, I think, that her voice in that crucial moment was italicized. I just blinked. She stumbled on.

  “I’m seeing my pastor.” She blushed. “I mean, he’s guiding me. I told him a few weeks ago. He told me I had to quit. Please don’t be angry with me.”

  She was close to sobbing now. She vibrated pitifully.

  “I’m—uh—not,” I said. “Not angry.”

  “I’m so happy,” she cooed. “I’m so happy—”

  “I’m leaving,” I interrupted, already in motion. “I have to go. Good-bye.”

  At the sidewalk’s far end, behind the long snout of a cargo van, I hid, even though the June sun stabbed and I soon felt ill in the heat. Students pulled away from the school in their shitty cars, stereos pounding the air, tires smoking expertly as they accelerated, while all around me an emptiness grew.

  I think now of my first kiss. Not the ordinal kiss of childhood, planted on my lips like a solemn playground dare. No, I was fifteen, a high school freshman, on the yearbook staff, working with a partner, a girl named Kelly, after school in the yearbook room, a small closet that was mostly drawers and shelves stocked with layout pages and red wax pencils. I didn’t care for it, and when the year was done, I wouldn’t stay. Nearing a deadline, we were forced to stay late, to finish our assigned pages. All the school was emptied out and no one cared that we listened to a radio. That we accomplished mostly nothing.

  She was tall, red-haired, denim-draped, always. I hardly knew her, except that she was kind to me, watchful. She was the type of girl to come to school with a bruised eye, the mottled flesh seemingly so ordinary, so daily, she took little effort to conceal it. It would come and go, a chronic mark.

  I didn’t notice when she drew close, not until I felt on my face the heat of her neck. I turned to face her, dropping the mouth stick I type and turn pages with.

  You, she said. And nothing more. She touched my face with her hand, black polish on her nails chipped away in places, white-pink beneath. There was the tang of bad cigarettes.

  She kissed me, sweet and chaste, rubbing the back of my neck. I returned her kiss, half in terror, half in confusion. Then it was time for us to leave.

  I watched her climb into an old lime Ford Torino. Her boyfriend peered into the distance, unaware she had opened the door, sat down, until she touched his face and they began to sign, making words with their hands because he was deaf.

  The sky was huge, almost spring, surrendering to the night. They kissed lightly and he eased from the curb. Kelly turned to look out the passenger side window. She saw me, a long and lengthening distance away, and mouthed what I thought was a silent no. Her hands were still.

  The first poem I ever wrote came to me like an accident of the mind. A blip, noise that had no apparent cause. Bored in class, watching classmates perform group activities near the end of the school year, when teachers were as desperate for escape as we were, I was thinking of nothing particularly literary, watching the sky and the visible world happen outside the window, when I began to hear in my head the rhythms of language, the propulsive patterns of a poem, and though I had no idea why, it was suddenly imperative that I write it down. Typewriters still populated the world in relative numbers back then, and it was easy to find one in the library, and blank paper beside it, ready to be covered. I began typing with my mouth stick what I heard, as well as I could render it, and when I finished it, a part of my brain had lit up, or switched on. Sitting there, that’s how I explained the sensation to myself as it galvanized me. There was no doubt, none, that I had stumbled on to something essential about myself, who I was and who I might become, and all around me the future seemed to crackle like a storm.

  This is what I’m supposed to do, I thought. After that moment, I never doubted it.

  On an early summer evening beneath a dusk-marbled sky I broke a promise I never believed I could keep: I did not walk across my graduation stage, did not take diploma in hand, in stride, and walk off into an imagined future where the sway of the past wasn’t so crushing, so absolute. I sat with the rest of my graduating class, some of whom had been with me the day of my injury six years before and had watched the ambulance approach the long weeds which had swallowed me up and the paramedics who had gone down into the ditch where I lay, broken and numb, staring up at the sky. That night we gathered in the middle of a football field, seated in folding chairs, listening to tepid bromides about the future, and our place in it, and what we should do and how we should live in order to shape that future. I wanted it to be over.

  In the bleachers on both sides of the fields, family members fired cameras in the expanding darkness and hooted stupidly to fill up any pause or silence or moment in which we were not actively assured we would never be forgotten. That time held for us special affection and the sense that we’d never grow old, or at least no older than that night, or the bright morning after, or maybe the end of that Last Summer, When Real Life Begins.

  From where I sat at the end of a row, tented in red regalia with a mortarboard clipped into my hair with barrettes, though I could feel it slipping back, I could see a young man in a wheelchair, older than me, seated by a fence. In his lap sat his girlfriend, and the whole ceremony they had kissed, their faces turned to give best access to their hunger.

  Until my name was called and I had to roll over the uneven sod towards the twenty-foot-long ramp to the stage, they held my interest, and then I forgot their queasy sideshow and went forward to receive my diploma. Bob Burnes waited there with it, and when I reached the taped X on the stage where we had been instructed to pause for a photograph I stopped, hearin
g applause stir in the crowd, but thought of his promise and whether he’d mention it.

  The photographer’s cue and then his camera’s starburst froze us in tableau.

  Bob Burnes said nothing but congratulations and my name though beneath them both I sensed the pull of years and a guilt that couldn’t quite be assuaged.

  chapter ELEVEN

  Early in my freshman year of college, I was mugged by a man who had followed me all morning long. Early to campus, I had time to waste, to blithely wander around in the autumn air, missing obvious clues he was tracking me, in and out of buildings, through parking lots and up ramps. He had even circled around me two times, passing by me on a sidewalk and then, later, waiting for me by a door, calling out to ask if I needed his help with it, even though I had been twenty feet from him and moving farther away each second. I thought nothing much of it, accustomed to the near-constant entreaties of strangers, though I should have known better.

  We lived a few miles from a small state school; its presence forestalled any thoughts of leaving home for college, at least then, and the costs of living alone, paying out of pocket for health care attendants to bathe and dress me and at night return me to bed, were too great for the idea to take much root. Six years after breaking my neck, I was too accustomed to a compromised life, in which the usual choices were often out of reach, to feel any true regret. In truth, anyplace removed from the tedium of high school was an oasis.

  I now had no one to write for me in the classes I took: Introduction to Music, Composition, and an algebra course so remedial I was unsure if I was attending by mistake. At first, this solitude felt strange, after six years of someone at my side. I fretted over notes: a college lecture was nothing like the rote recitations of high school, I was sure, and how could I retain it without notes? The thought of asking to borrow notes bothered me, as if it were borrowed money, a kind of debt I would be forced into. I waited, though, listening closely, reading carefully, and began to wonder if I had ever really required an assistant all those years. The freedom to be only myself, to engage with learning without any mediation, was a revelation. This place, and these pursuits, were my own, and would be in the future, I felt, and it was exhilarating.

  But that morning, having arrived early, I went from the parking lot where my mother had dropped me off in our family’s van, now equipped with a lift, to the campus student center. The cafeteria was empty and the frayed couches lining the hallways and lobby held nobody I knew. TVs mounted to the wall burbled faint streams of noise. I roamed the first floor, bored, hoping to see a classmate or even a professor.

  There were two elevators in the building: one which rose to offices on the top floor, the other, located behind several heavy doors, which I had to push open with my wheelchair. The second elevator lowered into the building’s basement. From the basement, untrafficked and dim except for a red emergency light, one could enter the campus game room where students played pool and Ping-Pong and fed quarters to a jukebox.

  I knew a few students who would go down there, skipping classes, flirting with the girl behind the counter, who made change and rented the pool tables and hated her life, or her fate, whatever had landed her there, where it smelled like old cigarettes and burning tube socks. When I found no one I knew on the ground floor, I decided to take the elevator down to the game room. If nothing else, I could listen to the jukebox pouring out bad music or watch desultory bouts of Ping-Pong. Game, set, match.

  The labyrinth of hallways leading to the elevator was empty but damp, like a sauna the world forgot. I pushed through the heavy doors and traveled down a long hallway, past steaming kitchens and carts burdened by pastries and boxed lunches and carafes of coffee and tea. I wanted more than anything to see someone who would in return be glad to see me.

  At the elevator, I jabbed the down button with the mouth stick I always carried with me and waited for its doors to open. A tinny bell rang after a moment, and inside the rarely used car I went. The buttons were hard to reach, and I had to lean forward to reach them as the doors began to slide shut. But then the elevator car lurched, and the doors slid open again.

  Someone else had entered. I pushed the down button again, after stretching out to reach it. The car began to descend after its doors sealed us in.

  Over my right shoulder, behind me I could see a young man. When I recognized him, I froze. His hand was already deep inside my backpack, where the furious rustle of his hands was plain. I didn’t want to antagonize him or escalate the situation. So far removed from the rest of the building, no one would hear if I called out for help and no one would come.

  I pretended not to notice what was happening—I sat there as we descended, eyes pressed shut.

  He found my wallet, a cheap green Mickey Mouse wallet given to me one Christmas by my twin brothers. In the elevator’s brushed steel, through one half-opened eye, I could see his blurry hand hide my wallet in his jacket.

  The doors opened and I backed my wheelchair out of the car, so scared I crashed against the side of it. I just wanted out.

  He was holding the doors open for me.

  “You OK, buddy?” he asked. “You sure you’ve got it?”

  Scared, addled, surprised by his speaking, I had no idea what to say.

  “No, no, I’ve got it,” I said. “I’m OK.”

  chapter TWELVE

  His front teeth were missing, and livid, alluvial bruises spread down from his eyes, and he sat behind a table stacked with new copies of the undergraduate student literary journal. I assumed he had been beaten up, viciously battered to the point it hurt me to look at him, but I wanted to know his other secret: how I might be admitted into a poetry workshop, or help with production of the journal. I wanted to belong to a group I was still learning how to define. I wanted to know what that belonging meant. At the dim horizon of what seemed to me like my future, I could see what a writer’s life was like, and more than anything that life was what I wanted.

  Looking over the copies, covers in black and white, the lithe figure of a woman’s back curving back into shadow, I tried to formulate something cogent. I waited around a long time while he sketched absently on notebook paper, less interested in art than in passing the time. Whorls of ink bloomed and divagated from margin to margin. Finally, I was ready to say something, all nerves and sweaty twitch.

  “Are these free?” I asked, the best I could manage. He looked up at me, his face punched in, bloody.

  “Yeah, take as many as you want,” he mumbled.

  I had expected to pay something for the copies, a few bucks at most, a dollar at least. Most of the poems inside had seemed fake, echoes of echoes, and hadn’t interested me. But a few poems, weird and surreal, felt like they carried inside of them the spark of something true.

  “Really?” I asked, taken aback. I wanted to befriend him, or at least introduce myself in some way. “I’ve wanted to get a copy since I saw the cover on a flyer.”

  He nodded, kind, but not especially interested.

  “How do you get into the poetry workshop?” I blurted. “How do you do that? What do I need to do? Or who do I talk to to get permission?”

  “Uh, you just sign up.” He blinked. “Like any other class. When it’s time to enroll. You sign up. That’s all.”

  That it was no more complicated than that felt like a bit of a letdown. In my mind, I had been certain it would be difficult, a trial of signatures and permissions. Meetings in dank, book-strewn offices with professors who had no idea who I was and didn’t care very much and chances to prove to them how much poetry meant to me and what I hoped to find within it, and, most importantly, within myself.

  I had been writing poems in satisfying furies: the carriage of the typewriter I used for homework at home shuttled back and forth across the page with every line. Tactile, immediate, typing introduced me to the pleasure of creating, of making. I had no idea what a poet might be, or do, but I knew I wanted to be one, and would do whatever it took.

  That first
workshop was filled with recognizable types: the gothic, draped in black; the ingénue; and the affably oafish fraternity brother, looking for an easy A, at least at first, until stirred by something unexpected (in this case, he would disappear just before semester’s end, only to reappear in the police blotter, accused of rape); others who dabbled, who wrote in journals, who had been encouraged by family members to follow their smatter of talent; and me, the true believer, the one mad for it all, borrowing Whitman and Ginsberg and Denis Johnson like I had been starved, the one who shadowed professors with new poems and the crazy belief that it all mattered, that it was important, that it was transformative, that this was romantic and true. I couldn’t escape the notion that I was alone, in a broken body, stuck in the places between that body and everyone else, and that maybe each word and every line and all the poems I wrote were a tether, a rope by which I could hang on to the world, and not be left behind entirely, which I feared more than anything.

  In a Viking history class I met a girl named Mona, her voice the twirl and lilt of some rural, unknown place. She was short and dark-haired and solicitous in a kind way; she was always early to class, the first to arrive, sitting in a desk beside the door. Every day when I entered class she spoke, bright eyes and syrupy twang. It was no time before a crush on her had gripped me, though I said nothing of it when we began to chat before class. Music, movies, the Vinland Sagas we were parsing our way through—whatever I could think of to continue the tenuous strand of conversation between strangers. I would arrive at class as early as I could, even as I derided myself for being so obvious, so pathetic. Still, two days a week I hurried through crowds of students, who barely could be bothered to part, to one side or the other. Once, racing through rain, I slid from the sidewalk, into mud, and my tires shed red clay all that miserable day.