Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  “Aaron!”

  I run around to his side of the ground. He is lying there, unmoving. For a couple of seconds, I think he’s dead. The car is still running. I try to pick him up, but he’s dead weight.

  “You okay, ma’am?”

  A man approaches in a backhoe and leans out of it. The power plant is not totally abandoned, I guess.

  “I’m okay,” I say.

  He does not ask if Aaron is okay. Maybe he knows better than I do what is happening here.

  Aaron stirs, stands with my help, and gets back into the car. I pick up Henry from school. In the teacher parking lot, Aaron has a little more to throw up.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbles, half-asleep, head weaving the whole way home. “I’m so sorry.”

  * * *

  It is a confusing time to be a woman who loves a troubled man.

  In Al-Anon, the serenity prayer tells you to accept the things you cannot change. To stop trying to control, cure, resolve, outthink, outfox another’s pain. To take responsibility for your own actions while also taking care of yourself.

  At the Women’s March in D.C.—a march you attended while your husband cared for your children six hours away, worried about him, always worried—the hand-drawn posters were everywhere, the prayer reconceived by Angela Davis: “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” It becomes a godless refrain, a sigh, an anti-prayer; Angela Davis, fist in the air, her afro Sharpie’d in sharp relief, is not asking anyone to grant her anything. Who has time for serenity when there’s a patriarchy to topple?

  Lift your poster in the air with your right arm. Hold it there until it hurts. It’s hard work with two hands, but you must use only one. With your left, rub the back of your husband. Do his dishes, do his laundry, feed his children. Hang the bookshelf, mow the lawn, eat the leftover crust of the peanut-butter sandwich. It is hard to clean a toilet with one hand. Every cell of your body wants to fight it. To resist. I’d be happy just to spend my life / waiting at your beck and call. You hadn’t really listened to that part of the Billie Holiday song. Everything I have is yours / My life, my all.

  “I am so tired of cleaning your shit,” you apparently said to your husband. You don’t remember it, but it hurt his feelings. It sounds like something you might say.

  You are a smart person. You understand the difference between the personal and the political. You understand the wisdom of the serenity prayer. The serenity prayer was written for people like you—women who give everything to their men in the hope of rebirthing them. Who believe they might push them back through the birth canal and get it right this time. Alcoholism is a chaos, and the serenity prayer is your ticket out of it. The serenity prayer permits you to live outside the chaos, across the street from it. Fight the fight on the Capitol steps, but accept the limitations of the humans we live with.

  But you also understand that the personal is the political. You want serenity and justice. When you’ve been taught that a woman can, must, do anything, that her place is in the resistance, you must believe that you are powerful enough to heal your husband. Curing the mental illness of your husband seems no more likely than curing the mental illness of the system—of patriarchy, poverty, racism, hate—and yet you try to do that, too. They are both devils—the devil that lives in your husband’s brain, the devil that lives in your country’s.

  And after all, isn’t the devil in your husband’s brain because of the devil in his father, and wasn’t the devil in his father because of the devil of the system, because of, in fact, the government, because of the country that sent him to war when he was barely a man (but haven’t men been blowing each other up since the beginning of time, and didn’t he help to liberate the camps?), the country that sent him to kill men and dogs in the snowy forest, because of the mine that sent his body into a tree, because of the broken body that was sent back home, his broken body begetting Aaron’s broken body, then breaking it further?

  This is where your mind goes when it seeks an open pathway for the blame. Like blood against a blockage, it finds another artery of logic. Your house is sick because the planet is sick, war-ravaged, warming, too much fire.

  * * *

  At the bookstore, I spot the book on the top shelf of the Science section. The Matisse paper cut-out catches my eye first, the black figure falling through yellow-starry space, the red oval of its heart. Then the title: The Body Keeps the Score. I can feel the title in my body. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

  What is happening to Aaron except this? His body is keeping the score.

  I buy the book and read it, over breakfast, at the gym, in the bath. I carry it from room to room. I mark my place with a pencil. I underline every third sentence. “One in five Americans was sexually molested as a child.” I draw stars. “Trauma affects not only those who are directly exposed to it, but also those around them.” In the margins I write “Yes!”

  But I tread lightly with Aaron. He is the kind of person who hates overhyped movies as a matter of principle.

  “This is really interesting,” I say casually, turning the pages in bed. “These people’s stories … they sound a lot like you.”

  I flip back to the part about Bill. One of the first Vietnam vets Dr. van der Kolk worked with in the seventies. After the war, he returned to normal life in Boston. Everything was fine until his wife gave birth to a son. Whenever the baby cried, he heard the crying children of Vietnam.

  I look to Aaron, who’s drawing in bed beside me, spirals and shadows, fingers and freaks. I draw what I see, he has said. The boy on Stranger Things who sketches the monster that has hold of him? Hard not to think of that.

  “Mm-hmm,” he says, agreeing.

  Aaron isn’t a veteran of any combat war. But sometimes, when our children cry in a certain way, he is flooded with fear and panic. When they are inconsolable, lost in their own little traumas, he seems to be reliving his own torture.

  “But listen to this.” Dr. van der Kolk’s colleagues diagnosed Bill with paranoid schizophrenia. PTSD wasn’t really a thing yet. “Something about the diagnosis didn’t sound right,” Dr. van der Kolk writes. “I unwittingly paraphrased something Sigmund Freud had said about trauma in 1895: ‘I think this man is suffering from memories.’”

  “Wow,” Aaron says.

  My students already speak the language of trauma, of triggers. I accommodate them, as we do, with trigger warnings, alternative assignments, protecting them from their own memories. Some of my colleagues roll their eyes. “These kids and their trigger warnings. Life is a trigger!”

  And yet I’ve seen it with my own eyes, the things a brain can do. How it corrupts itself. How it preserves itself. How it both preserves and corrupts by lying to itself. How it contains multitudes. How it is actually a piece of gray matter. How it is wired, like a car battery or a bomb. The red wire or the blue? How the wires can get swollen, denuded, jammed. How it can recalculate, like a GPS. This is what Dr. van der Kolk promises us: we can rebuild the brain. Broken as it is, it is plastic. It is pliable.

  Last year, we got a babysitter and went to see the movie Lion. For an hour, we watched a boy Henry’s age wander the Indian countryside. Lost, hungry, scared, alone, he fights off predators of all kinds. We had not yet reached the part where the boy, now a man in Australia, eats the jalebi that makes his mind travel back to his forgotten childhood. It was the part of the story I had been waiting for, that I needed. I had been crying for an hour and gripping Aaron’s hand. I needed to see the story through to its catharsis.

  Like the man in the movie, Aaron was encountering his own memory trigger. It wasn’t as specific or as sweet as Saroo Brierley’s jalebi or Marcel Proust’s madeleine, but it was powerful enough to make him leave the theater. “Stay,” he whispered. “I’ll be fine.” But ten minutes later I found him sitting outside in the hall, sweating, panting, his hands swollen in a new red rash.

  “I’m sorry,”
he said. “I couldn’t take it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It had been my idea to see the movie.

  We left and went home early, startling the sitter.

  * * *

  A few weeks after I finish The Body Keeps the Score and hand it over to Aaron, he’s making slow progress through it. It’s interesting, he says. He sees himself in it. But most days it’s hard for him to concentrate on reading for an extended time. “Maybe just skip to the part about the experimental treatments?” I suggest. “EMDR? Neurofeedback?” He’s already agreed to it. To any kind of therapy. I’ll go to any therapist you want he told me the night I drove him back from the ER, after he’d narrowly escaped the psych ward.

  One day he brings the book to Starbucks and we sit there reading together. Yesterday we spent the whole day together, eating lunch from the farmer’s market in the park, renting bikes and riding them around town. It’s May. He’s just turned forty-six. Maybe this is the year he’ll get well? The trees are in bloom. The sun is out. We’re pushing our luck, I know. Today we want to squeeze a little more out of this good period.

  But while he sits there reading in Starbucks, I can see something come over him. His body grows restless. He keeps pressing his pen into the seam of the book, closing it, opening it again. “I can’t read this,” he finally says. “It’s making me too upset,” and I drive him home, where he takes an Ativan and goes to bed and tries to ward off the breakout, but before long it returns, as it always does.

  Reading about triggers: it’s triggering. Should have seen that one coming.

  * * *

  That night I have a dream that I am in a room with a boy with lesions on his legs. He is a college-aged boy, and I have ridden a bike to his house. He is young and vague and lovely and in his underwear. I go fetch Aaron—he is in a room somewhere in this house—and bring him to the boy. “Look,” I say.

  How pathetically loyal. Even in my dreams, I can’t be in a room with a man without inviting Aaron to witness.

  “Take off your pants,” I say to my husband. He takes off his pants and then his underwear. No, I think, embarrassed, irritated. Only your pants. He stands there in nothing but a T-shirt. But then I notice something. The boy has removed his underwear, too. Their legs are twinned, scaled, their penises hanging between them, innocent, dumb. The two men look at each other, as if into a mirror, but say nothing. Perhaps there is some recognition between them. Perhaps they are performing some recognition for their dreamer.

  * * *

  What am I doing, waiting for him to read the damn book? I find a trauma therapist who does neurofeedback, make an appointment: easy. He’s been sleeping for most of five days—I might second-guess this, if I hadn’t started keeping a journal five days ago—when he rouses himself from bed and dresses himself for the appointment. “I’m not really here,” he apologizes to the therapist, a woman with long white hair and a boxy frame. But I can see him in there, behind the weeks-long beard. He’s wearing athletic shorts, his sores healing to a fine crust, a Band-Aid the size of a small envelope on his lovely inner thigh. There is a gameness in his face. In the therapist’s narrow office are orchids, paper lanterns, a lumpy couch, a tortoiseshell puppy who sleeps in a tiny bed on the floor, and an office chair, where after looking over his intake papers, she asks Aaron to sit. While she tells us about neurofeedback, she’s dipping what look like Q-tips into what looks like Vaseline. She’s wasting no time! A little wick of hope lights in my chest. Some action! “The first thing that neurofeedback does is help us calm down,” she says, swiping Aaron’s temples with alcohol. “Now this is electromagnetic paste,” she says. “Just a little zinc.” Electromagnetic paste! Zinc! She pauses. “Do you have bipolar disorder?” We don’t know for sure, we say. We rescheduled his appointment with his GP, who prescribed the lithium, but he’s just started taking it. She says, “It affects where I put the sensors.” Then she reconsiders. “Well, what we know is that childhood trauma trumps everything.” She positions two of the sensors—they look like earbuds—at his temples, and two on what is apparently the region of the brain where childhood trauma lives, a few inches behind and below, in his dark curls. Thin white wires connect the sensors to an amplifier on the desk. “It sounds like, when you were a child, you didn’t get good enough care for you to learn to calm down on your own. Not nearly good enough,” she adds. Yes, I think, yes. “We can strengthen the connection between here and here”—she points to a rear sensor and a front one—“to teach the brain to do that.” She flips on the computer monitor on the desk, and the screen fills with the graphic of a spaceship flying through a trippy tunnel, a series of shifting pink and purple parallelograms that makes me a little sick even from across the room. It looks like a video game Aaron might have enjoyed in the nineties. Global pop music thrums from the tiny computer speakers. Aaron’s job is to keep the spaceship moving by using 0.1 millihertz of his brain. When the right amount of brainpower is used—almost none—he is rewarded with a speedier spaceship, and a billow of smoke out of its ass. “It’s difficult,” she acknowledges. “It’s like asking a professional athlete to just flex his pinky for an hour. We naturally want to use more of our brains. This slows us down.”

  Whatever Aaron is doing with his brain, or whatever his brain is doing to him, the spaceship is moving steadily, devouring translucent diamonds like Pac-Man pellets. The inside is talking to the outside. The sensors are telling the monitor, We have located the brain. It is wounded but it is working. It is brave. It is operating at .01 millihertz. One sensor says, Here is the place—yes—where his father wounded him. The other says, Here is the place where his mother didn’t save him. Here is the virtual proof of his survival, the spaceship finding the opening at the end of the psychedelic tunnel, rising now into the blank blue sky—

  “It’s making me a little dizzy,” Aaron says. It’s time to leave anyway.

  * * *

  At Stu’s, he’s restless, rocking, rubbing the sores on his shins and his calves.

  “Let’s try something,” Stu says. “Can you count to ten for me?”

  He starts counting slowly, still rocking. When did he start this rocking? He was up all night, feeling worms under his skin, collecting things from his body and looking at them under Henry’s toy microscope.

  When he gets to six, he speeds up, races to ten.

  Stu takes notes on the sheets of yellow paper tucked into a clipboard. Where do all these notes go? How many file cabinets has he filled with our seven years of delusions and promises and medication updates?

  300 mg Seroquel, 750 mg lithium, 5 mg Prozac, .5 mg of Ativan, as needed.

  We talk about adjustments. Maybe more Prozac. Is the lithium doing any good? In two days, he has a sleep study scheduled, to see if he has sleep apnea. Stu asks me to imitate how Aaron snores, and I try, snorting and choking like an old man. Stu tries to convince him to try a C-Pap. It’s not that bad, he says. But Aaron is skeptical. Of all the drugs, of the mask with its tubes and tentacles, of the sleep lab lady, who wants to sell him something.

  “It’s the latest thing,” he says. “Get a C-Pap! Everyone’s getting a C-Pap! It’s like a rumpus room in the fifties. Oh, you gotta have a rumpus room!”

  He’s still rocking, rubbing his hands together. “I don’t want to end up like Captain Pike,” he says. “Remember him? He was before Kirk. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk. He was just a head coming out of this space-age wheelchair.” He imitates him, lifeless, staring into space. Stu and I don’t know who Captain Pike is, but we laugh. Aaron is in there! In some safe vault of his embattled brain, all the obscure TV trivia is preserved.

  Stu tells him, “I want you to go home and take your Seroquel and try to sleep.”

  At home, I help him to sleep. Some days, when he lets me, I can fuck the devil out of him. Or maybe I’m just fucking it back inside.

  When he’s finally snoring his apneic snore, I Google “Captain Pike.” The wheelchair is more like an iron lung. Captain Pike is like a b
ust of a man, and on the entire right side of his withered face is a purple scar shaped like Italy. He was paralyzed by delta ray radiation.

  I imagine a doctor noting those words on a yellow legal pad. The satisfaction, at least, of the diagnosis. Delta ray radiation.

  * * *

  When they were first married, my father used to photograph my mother. In hundreds of photos, black-and-white 8 x 10s he developed in his darkroom, there she is: on a balcony, on a rooftop, in a director’s chair in their studio. She wears a black turtleneck or a denim shirt or a corduroy dress. Her thick dark hair is parted down the middle. Silver hoops hang from her ears.

  Did she know, as she sat for those photos, at twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six—what a gift they’d be to her daughter after her death? Or was she thinking only of her beloved behind the camera, posing for him alone?

  It wasn’t posing, exactly. It was more like not-posing. It was more like appearing not to be posing, as she watered a plant, painted a picture, smoked a cigarette. It was musing. As in the archaic definition: “to gaze meditatively or wonderingly.” And in the classical one: she was the goddess inspiring the artist. In the gentle set of her mouth, her over-there eyes, there was a stillness, a consent to being seen, to being captured.

  When Aaron gave me his blessing to write this book, we were sitting at a vegan restaurant in Seattle, on tour for my second book, in front of fat goblets of red wine and plates of food so good we didn’t know what we were eating. He was wearing a navy blazer and white T-shirt and the black glasses I loved. He wasn’t in pain. We were happy.