We Are All Perfectly Fine

by Dr. Jillian Horton

  I ease onto a circular cushion. Jodie is on the sidelines this time, back in her straitjacket. She looks deep in meditation.

  Roy is sitting on a cushion near the back. His arms are crossed. The blanket over his shoulders only makes him look more bat-like.

  After a long silence, Mick says, “Notice what arises.”

  My sister.

  She arises, her face, her slack jaw, her scratched-raw, lolling eye. A current passes through me. A damp, private rush of emotion, involuntary, like a bodily function.

  This morning when I brushed my teeth in the bathroom without a mirror, I turned towards the windowpane and raised the blinds, needing to see a trace of myself, even if nothing but shapes and light were reflected in the glass. And there she was, or rather, there I was, my aging face hiding in the shadows of my memory of her.

  “Notice where the mind goes, and then gently bring it back to this moment. The present moment, unfolding.”

  Unfolding. Better than unravelling.

  Am I unravelling?

  Ravelling?

  Must involve a lot of listening to Ravel.

  Oh, that one G major concerto! A memory of the first few bars zings through me like an arrow. That summer at music camp, that one good July in Vermont when I was fourteen, lingering on the border between childhood and adulthood. Every corner seeping music. Hanna playing that concerto, Hanna who, like me, really believed she’d be a concert pianist, who had a breakdown a few years later and is now a “Reiki Master” with her own Wikipedia page that is very light on details.

  Greg sneaks in. Late for Zendo! Weakling! Creeping in front of me, shifting his weight on the balls of his feet, cartoonish, as if that will make him less visible.

  Feet have balls.

  Feet don’t have balls.

  Jingle balls.

  “Notice what arises. Come back to the breath.”

  Come back, breath.

  What’s wrong with me? How bloody hard can it be to centre?

  Why am I always trying to escape?

  What would I be trying to escape?

  Vestiges of the self.

  The inadequate self. The self that will inevitably make egregious errors, the self that will be like every other doctor. The self that is like every other doctor.

  The self that watched that car go over the edge, everybody else still trapped inside.

  Damnit. I notice my mind has wandered—not just into the backyard but through several lanes of traffic and to an airport, where it appears to have boarded a transatlantic flight.

  Mick is talking, but it might as well be Sanskrit. He lost me. Or I lost him. He’s saying something about a book. A book about healing yourself. What does he mean, healing? Crystals and stuff? Is this the come-to-Jesus moment?

  He reads a short story about a sculptor who had an amputation. The sculptor made a sphere out of stone. Then he smashed it and put it back together with bolts and cement. It’s in a gallery somewhere. It’s called “Shattered But Still Whole.”*

  Mick, I’m getting annoyed with the mixed messages. That just confused me more. I’m holding contradictory truths, all right—like a jewel-encrusted stick of dynamite. Am I shattered, or am I still whole?

  Or possibly I’m an asshole?

  Ron’s voice. Time for a body scan.

  CT? That’s a lot of radiation.

  “Starting with the right foot.”

  What’s this? Why are we starting with the foot, a vehicle?

  “Noticing the sensations in the foot.”

  My foot has a bigger repertoire of sensation than some men I’ve dated, Ron.

  “Then turning our attention towards the ankle.”

  Ankle. I’ve taken you for granted all these years, except when you were the weak link after that bike accident. Strong work these last forty-four years, ankle. Seriously. I’m proud of you.

  “If you notice your mind wandering, bring it back to your ankle.”

  If? Ron, my mind is a fucking sheep with dementia. My mind is a stray dog in a city of a thousand Dumpsters.

  I look normal, though. I look the same as anyone else here, except for the blue hair. Maybe I am the same as anyone else here.

  Maybe this is normal. Maybe this is most brains. Maybe everyone is here for the exact same reason.

  What is that reason?

  What is my way?

  “. . . noticing your right thigh.”

  Oh, please. Ron. Are you kidding me? That’s the difference between me and you. My whole life I’ve noticed that thigh. Unlike the right ankle, which has thrived under my reign of neglect, the right thigh has managed to survive despite my constant scrutiny. Why are you shaped like that? What’s your problem? You’re pretty smart, thigh, just lose some weight.

  This is exhausting.

  Not sitting here on the cushion, but spending all this silent time with myself. With this shattered still-hole in my head. Listening to this relentless stand-up comedy audition. It isn’t funny anymore. I’m kind of tired of it. No wonder I’ve dabbled in high-level escapism.

  Light’s breaking in the strip of windows that run around the edge of the Zendo. The gentle brush of dawn, the mildest, barely-there yellow.

  Morning has broken.

  Who sings that?

  “Noticing the left foot.”

  The tingly, sleepy, buzzing left foot. The foot suddenly disembodied. Floating on the cushion. Weightless, like a water lily. Held up by everything and nothing. Motionless.

  I notice my foot. I just noticed it.

  Mine is the something.

  Cat Stevens.

  Cat’s in the cradle. Blue boy. Blue hair. Blue whale.

  When am I going home?

  Saturday, actually.

  Home. That word. Like in The Wind in the Willows: Mole, with Rat, walking past his abandoned burrow, catching a sudden, unmistakable whiff of his forgotten life, overcome by that most primal of memories, tears clogging his throat as he tries to explain it. Dulce Domum. Sweet Home. It’s my home.

  But it’s not home that lands the winning punch today. It’s “Little Boy Blue.” How many years ago did Wendy write that poem, one finger at a time, commandeering her old Underwood typewriter, the one with the ribbon that always did something maddening just when you thought you had it in place, the tiny silver letters momentarily pinning it to the paper. That unbelievably painstaking staccato coming out of her room until the early hours of the morning, Wendy hunched in the half-light, her face only a few inches away from the keys. How long did it take her to write

  Little Boy Blue, come blow your whistle

  The sheep’s in the corn, the cow’s on a thistle

  Where’s the old man to break up the fight?

  He’s under the haystack, flying his kite.

  How could I ever make a person who never knew her understand what a triumph it was for her, in that shattered body, on that old typewriter, to write those words? What would I give right now for one more glimpse of her in that chair, at that old desk, bathed in incandescent light? My little big sister.

  Shattered but still whole.

  I’m not noticing my face or my foot or my thigh anymore. I’m just struggling to breathe, to keep my composure, to not burst into tears in the middle of this Zendo.

  What if.

  What if Wendy never had a brain tumour.

  What if I just keep noticing my breath. If I didn’t unload a machine gun at every metaphorical duck that passed overhead.

  What if I just strung those breaths together, one after another, each breath a unit of being alive? Would my life get better if I could do that?

  If I stopped raging against suffering?

  Or stopped bargaining with suffering? For it to end?

  Ron just asked me to notice the face. This means I missed my pelvis and abdomen, my right and left arm, my back, assorted other bits. I’m like a game of hangman. Parts of me may never get filled in, depending on how this all turns out.

  But I notice my face. The way it’
s lifted up, as if straining towards the light could bring me closer to her, my big little sister.

  I’m sorry, Mick, but this is bringing me too close to that step, the one you said I didn’t want to take. And it isn’t just about whether I want to take it. You can’t just walk on air because you want to. If you’re going somewhere, especially somewhere difficult, there has to be something beneath you.

  Tell me how to take that step, genius. Tell me how I make it across that river in one piece. Tell me how you could possibly know there’s enough time for me to start close in.

  I ran out of time, Mick. I took too long. I didn’t help her. I couldn’t help her. It didn’t matter that I swam across the river, because it was all for nothing. My sister is dead. She died last year. She was fifty-two. She died in her sleep. The Gambler was right: it was the best she could hope for. When I say I notice her here, what I’m really noticing is her absence. No blankets in a threadbare room. An unlit fire in the chimney. A home without children. Noticing is ripping my guts out and painting Guernica with them, if you absolutely must know. But do tell me how noticing my damn ankle is going to make that any better.

  Although it does occur to me, just as he rings a very large bell, as that gong quivers like a cartoon assailant’s frying pan: he never said it would make anything better.

  18

  Failure to Cope

  Roy comes and sits across from me at breakfast. I’m happy to see him, middle-school-cafeteria-happy. His bowl is ridiculously overfilled with oatmeal. He’s topped it with dried cranberries, a deluge of milk. Red cranberries, little dehydrated rubies.

  “Good morning, Blue,” he says as he pushes his chair in.

  What did he say he was, a radiologist? He has a psychiatrist’s gaze.

  “How was your morning?”

  “Uneventful.”

  “Ha.” He takes a fast drink of coffee, leaning forward and puffing out his lips when it goes down either too quickly or into the wrong passageway. I hand him a glass of water. He reaches for it brusquely, taking a long, emphatic drink. He wipes the back of his hand on his sleeve.

  “Well, now you’ve saved me twice.” He tucks his chin down, looks at me over the top of his eyeglasses. “Thanks for that.”

  I have a tray full of runny scrambled egg, toast I’ve cut into rectangles and layered with something from a Mason jar that looked like rhubarb or stewed reeds. Coffee in a white mug, where cream is settling into layers.

  “Tell me about the first time I saved you.”

  He uses his spoon to make a crater in the top of his oatmeal. Then he fixes me with his gaze, dribbling some of the milk and berries on the table in front of him, because he isn’t paying enough attention to his bowl.

  “I think you know it had to be yesterday.”

  “I thought maybe it was in a past life.”

  “Yesterday’s past too.” Roy spills some milk down the front of his pullover. “Dang,” he says, but makes no move to blot off the milk.

  “So how did I save you yesterday?”

  As soon as I’ve asked, something ugly occurs to me. What was he going to do? Hold his breath and walk into a duck pond?

  Roy is still watching me intently. A few seconds pass, seconds of the sustained eye contact I’m only used to from M*A*S*H, where people look at each other for longer than ever actually occurs in real life.

  “I was thinking of going home.”

  Home! Not planning on walking into a duck pond or putting a gun in his mouth.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Dead serious.”

  “Why would you have left early?”

  “Listen, Blue.” He pushes his tray to the side. “I’m a radiologist.” He puts his elbows on the table, folds his arms and leans in towards me. “I’m the one who holds people up to the light.”

  “What light?”

  “The lightbox.”

  “We don’t use those anymore.”

  “It’s a metaphor.” He grunts. “You said you were a writer.”

  “I don’t know if I said that.”

  “You did. And you have to know that absolutely everything is metaphor.” He leans in and takes off his glasses. Again, that light brush of the fingers across the back of my hand. The tapping of his finger pads on my knuckles, as if he is percussing for an organ that accidentally ended up there.

  “Metaphor is transfer,” he says quietly. “We’re always transferring.”

  Does he really mean transference? Love, displaced, unexpressed, longed for, moved from one shareholder to another. Or negative transference: all the things you could never give to the people you love, because they weren’t capable of holding those things. So you passed them to somebody else. Even if it meant you would never be able to look at that person again without wincing, without recoiling at the memory of the exchange. Maybe even coming to hate that person, because it’s safe to give them your hatred too.

  “Metaphor is transferring meaning,” he says, but he sounds less certain than he did a second ago.

  My meaning, the one I inferred, feels more apropos. Because, in a funny way, I’m having transference towards him right now. It’s amorphous, difficult to pin down or localize. But I feel it. An ache in my chest, a desire to play a role, to mime a part for him. To make a cryptic diagram of my wounds, to make him guess where they are. So he would look at me with the same undivided attention as a film on the lightbox.

  That’s all I wanted. That kind of attention.

  All I ever wanted.

  Roy raises an eyebrow. “You know we don’t start silence until later?”

  “I’m just thinking about what you said.”

  “I thought it might be a seizure.”

  “I barely slept last night.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is that normal for you?”

  “What are you, taking my history?”

  “Fine, I’ll go right to scanning your head.”

  “Yeah, because I really need to get a brain tumour from your radiation.”

  “They’re rare.”

  “Not that rare.”

  “Rare enough.”

  “My sister had one.”

  “Oh,” he says. “I’m so sorry.” He puts his spoon down. “Did she . . . survive?”

  “She did.”

  “So what does she do now?”

  There is a long pause. How is it possible that Dr. Queen of Zendo one-liners has nothing on standby for the most predictable script?

  “She’s dead,” I tell him. The word splits open the space between us, a meat cleaver emoji.

  “Oh, wow,” he says.

  Now I’m on his lightbox. Held up, scrutinized. Is that what I wanted? No, I don’t want it anymore. I want him to finish his stupid oatmeal and leave me alone. I want to go back to the emotional rock I’ve been living under. All this trying to figure out why I’m here is so much work. No wonder I put it off for twenty years.

  He pours still water into his hot coffee. I watch him testing it gingerly with a finger before he takes another sip.

  “Do you think we’d talk to each other like this if we worked together?” I ask him.

  He looks surprised by my question. He pulls his bottom lip out with his thumb and index finger, like he wants me to inspect his gums.

  “I don’t think our worlds would collide.” He takes another sip of coffee. “Which is really too bad.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I like colliding with you.”

  An involuntary giggle rises from me. He’s ridiculous, like those commercials of kids slurping cereal wearing Dad’s suit. But then I have that vision of him eating ramen noodles and Costco profiteroles out of a bucket while he watches PBS, his face mottled by the TV’s blue light, and I feel sad and sorry and kindly disposed towards him. I’ve met a lot of men like Roy. At work, everybody knows who they are, but at home, they’re strangers. Fathers who don’t know their sons and daughters. Men who are irrelevant to
their wives. Tourists in their own lives.

  “Your jokes are like from another century.”

  “I was born in one. I believe you were too.”

  I push my plate away. Roy is studying me, an unreadable look on his face. There’s a strange absence of pretense.

  “Were you really going to leave yesterday?”

  “Yes,” he says solemnly. “Because I hadn’t connected with anyone.”

  “There are a lot of people here to connect with.”

  He pauses. He waits a long time to speak. At first, I think it’s because he’s being a drama queen. But then I see the emotion on his face.

  “You know why I’m really here?” Another long pause. Now I’m holding him up on the lightbox, waiting for the diagnosis to reveal itself. “I think I have failure to cope, Jill.”

  I let out a big sigh. We sit at the table, eyes locked, people coming and going around us.

  Roy looks at his hands in his lap.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Someone else who had it,” he says quietly. “Someone who didn’t survive.”

  A Time Roy Was Sure He Killed Someone, but Didn’t

  BY ROY S., AS TOLD TO JILL H.

  Roy was a resident in a radiology program at a big American Hospital. He was just starting his third year. Morale was very low. By low I mean subterranean. Third year was when the radiology residents ended their pure clinical rotations and only did radiology. It was very competitive. There were ten residents in Roy’s year, and they were starting to turn on one another like the kids in Lord of the Flies.

  The radiology service at the hospital was absolutely massive. If you were assigned to the chest X-ray reading desk, you might look at one every ten minutes on a bad day, and then you had to report them. It often worked out to well over fifty chest X-rays a day. On the days when he was allowed to go home to his own bed, Roy would close his eyes and see the outlines of rib cages, illuminated, like thick white prison bars. On the rare occasions when he walked out of the building and it was still daytime, the real light from the sun would blind him. He took to wearing sunglasses and covering his arms just before he left, as if he were afraid of the light, or as if his skin were too fragile to withstand it.

  The residents in his program mostly kept to themselves. Of the other nine, Roy only really knew two of them well. Sally was a tall, round-faced girl with a bowl haircut, from New York City. The staff radiologists tended to give her a hard time, because they didn’t think as a woman she was up to the job, even though Sally knew more than any of the others. The other resident was Brian Yue. Roy didn’t know anything about him, except he was from California and had scored the highest marks in his graduating class. Roy forgets how he knew that; it might have been from Sally.