Riverine

by Angela Palm

  Meditation, I would discover in time, brought its practitioner to the halfway point—creating a bubble between silence and noise, consciousness and unconsciousness, that lent itself to the quality of noiselessness if not the thing itself. Frequent meditators found the stone in the sand more easily. They didn’t even have to look for it. They had stones for eyes.

  Break down a subjective feeling into constituent parts: language fails, and you resort to cause and effect, relational equations that help make sense of things by putting words to them. Eventually, it can feel like blame—all this connecting of who did what and why and to what outcome. I felt sad because; I was happy because. One thing acted on another, and a third thing resulted. My heart had stopped and I was certain there was a cause for that sensation, but what was it? No one could pinpoint it with a machine. Did that mean it wasn’t real? Then, I never gave the kitten milk. I never held her. I never said, “Here, see how I hold your hand. Feel this. Know this.” I would have done it for another person. This one, I couldn’t explain.

  Why I failed Dawn, I don’t know. She looked at me with those eyes. I looked away. I climbed a tree instead, and the tree made me feel better. I was busy breathing my way through heart failure and could not help her. We could neither of us save each other from this place, and no one knew we were in need of saving. When I began to wonder if I was even real, whether my feet were planted on Earth and my blood was pumping, I opened the door of meditation, of altered consciousness, and I walked through to keep myself from going insane, from falling over, exhausted from the limitations of my tiny world and tinier existence. At points in my life, I would keep choosing trees over people. I would keep escaping through the boughs of pines, sap-handed and daydreaming. Higher and higher, as if some kind of answer lay waiting at the upper limit of the world. Meditation would become a way out, a quicker exit to the sky, a way to soften a seized heart, a way of remembering what the mind can do.

  Ten years later, the kitten became a cat. Dawn stole my graduation money. She stole my underwear. She packed a bag full of my things, whatever was around, as though she were me leaving in the middle of the night. Where was she going with all that? It was a better idea than climbing trees, so what could I say? When she was caught, she had no explanation. We sat with our mothers, all four of us aghast. Startled, wet eyes and small mouth sounds. But I was already long gone in my mind. I let her keep the clothes. They meant nothing to me.

  III

  A recent Time magazine fold-out diagram of the big bang shows the expansion of the universe alongside the trajectory of time. Wider and wider it grows along the x-axis. I cannot look at it too closely, for it shocks the body to consider the brevity of a life in the context of the endless universe. Max Tegmark, a quantum physicist at MIT, is working on a hypothesis about consciousness as a state of matter that can process information. His theory asserts that consciousness might have emerged alongside time. The scientific community generally accepts that consciousness, like all matter, cannot be broken down into smaller pieces. Perhaps this is why language fails. It alone could never do the accounting for thought or for the choices we make. Perhaps consciousness is the supportive tissue upon which language is constructed. Blame is a scaffolding. Fault is another. Time heals both, moving along at the same pace as thought.

  Tegmark’s hypothesis says that consciousness, the state of matter termed “perceptronium,” requires “a certain amount of independence in which the information dynamics is determined from within rather than externally.” Meditation requires even more than using one’s own awareness to recognize internally the pretense of external surroundings. It requires training one’s mind, its perceptronium, to dismantle the reality contained within the pretense and to make it into something useful and enjoyable by peeling back the layers of perceived reality. That takes practice. It would seem that, if Tegmark is correct, meditation could be tangible proof of consciousness. The fourth state of matter manifest.

  IV

  After my aunt and uncle moved out of the trailer, another family moved in. Two parents, a daughter. There were more dogs. There was more yelling from this set; I’d hear them in the mornings from our house. The woman screamed, a door slammed, the man screamed. Sometimes I heard crying, loud sobs. A need that no one within earshot could fulfill and so no one even tried. It would go on that way for hours. Breakfast through lunch. Sometimes I wanted to live that loudly.

  The new family had big black guns and knives with handles wrapped in leather. The father was only five feet tall, covered in tattoos. Smaller than me at age eleven. I tried to see his eyes once. I wanted them to be kind. They were not. Even a girl looked to him like the enemy. He mowed the lawn shirtless, weapons strapped to his bare body. He was ready for a war that never came, his capacity for violence stitched onto his skin. Waiting.

  The mother towered over the small man, at least a foot taller. She was massive and fleshy. The daughter looked like her mother. Over tight stretch pants, she wore large T-shirts featuring gigantic faces of kittens and puppies and Tweety Bird, a false sense of softness atop her body. On the school bus she held her friends like dolls. She offered overt acts of care: one hundred hair brushes, licks from her own Blow Pop, long back rubs to anyone who would endure them. I curled into a ball in the green seats, counting telephone poles until they let me off, fingers checking my own pulse. Still alive.

  V

  In a truly meditative state, the cousin of dreams, the mind lingers in a pleasing purgatory between consciousness and unconsciousness in a space that might be visually represented by the intersection of a Venn diagram. Outside the crosspatch are the tools we use to manipulate the sensation of feeling and understand the dreams. Language, experience. Whatever happened in a day. We move the matter around, sand in a sandbox. Children at play. Families rotating through the same house over time. Wisdom, a sieve. Sometimes, a glimpse of stone.

  I have wondered which part is most real—the conscious or the unconscious. Whether the place itself is the thing that stays, or its effects on a person. One is concrete and one is embedded in the brain, in memory. Does the dog fit into its new family, molding itself to its ways, or does the dog’s life before that dictate the new family? Fido brought her old home with her. She ordered us to abide by its rules and we obeyed. That she was in a new place, a new home, changed nothing about her previous experience. What she had known as a pup stuck, though we could not see it in the air.

  Dawn’s abandonment as a toddler had stuck. It affected her development for years, though it was not palpable. Speaking would come slowly for her. I would not be the last woman she stole from, her subconscious need to reinstate loss stronger than her control over right and wrong. I have taken meditation everywhere and sprinkled its soft gray middle across the land like salt. The place stays, and the people go. They take the experience of the place with them in their perceptronium. Thought could be a state of matter, resilient as water or Stardust, moving in parallel with the passing of time.

  VI

  When I walked by the trailer twenty years later, on a visit back to the road I grew up on, I tried not to look too closely at what it had become. The home had outlived the manufacturer’s guarantee. A smattering of litter covered the ground around it like a light rain that would not soak in, caught by twigs and corners and sharp edges, arranged almost artfully. Exposed cinder blocks propped up the trailer, its aluminum stairs shakily supporting the daily comings and goings of a family of three and plenty of neighborhood kids.

  Other families had come and gone. A TV tray was climbing the stairs. Eyes on the road, I tried not to look inside the windows. I walked on, stopping to look up at Corey’s old window. In my pocket, I carried my stone, which had long since been removed from the jar. Curiosity will kill this cat. I could nearly feel the sap beneath my fingernails, transferred from tree bark to skin long ago. Matter cannot be created or destroyed: the sap was somewhere, the families were somewhere, Corey was somewhere. The memories still existed. Though I discovered
meditation here, my first way out of that riverbed, I could not knock on the door of any of these houses. I would not be let inside. I could only return in my mind. If I thought of Corey long enough, meditated on the day he’d carried me home that first time my heart failed, my body would follow and leave a gap in the present.

  DIY FOR THE FAITHLESS

  When Magic Precedes Belief

  Early memory: It is dark. My father, a welder at Merit Steel, walks into our trailer and sits down on a bench near the shiny aluminum door. Our carpeting is brown and the floor in this room slopes when I crawl toward the window, beneath which brightly colored balls collect during daytime play, as though one end of the home tilts toward the center of the earth. Sometimes I dream of falling through this floor into a cracked-open world exposing a belly full of snakes. My father looks very tired, and his face is reddened and rugged. White strips of tape secure two white patches of gauze over his eyes: never look directly at the flame, unprotected. He wears a navy blue T-shirt and stained, faded blue jeans. He smells like oil and scorched metal. He bends to remove his work boots, which are made of brown leather and tied with yellow industrial-grade laces. I comfort him. I make sure he knows he will be all right. I don’t know how I accomplish this, but I do. I don’t know how I know that his work is difficult and dangerous, but I know. What I don’t know is that my father is only twenty-three years old, trying to avoid falling into a snake pit of his own. He has come so far already. The home he grew up in did not have running water or a bathroom.

  Early memory: I have my own bedroom in a real house, and the walls are painted a soft peach color. There are no pictures on the wall, only the paint. I have a small bed and a pink blanket beneath a high canopy, the shabby quarters of a poor princess. My window is trimmed in white. Outside my white square of window stands a large sycamore tree that sways in the nighttime wind. When I’m scared, I watch the boy in the window across from mine to help me fall asleep. He is my bedtime story, and he keeps the monsters away. I watch him laugh and jump off his bed when he is alone. I watch his brothers beat up on him. I watch his mother scold him. We are both so powerless. I believe that someday he’ll save me and we’ll disappear, wriggling free from this place like little Houdinis. It takes me forever to fall asleep when my boy in the window is gone. One night, a shadow approaches and then comes close to my window screen. A man’s head, looking in. I wake my mother and she calls our neighbor, Wild Bill, our street’s self-appointed patrolman, but they never find a man to go with the shadow.

  Early memory: My imagination reigns for a time and books become reality. When I am seven, our crabgrass yard is my Secret Garden, or I am Matilda, smarter than her parents already, or I am the Little Princess, secret heir to another life, or I walk through mirrors into upside-down lands. I push a glass of milk across the table without touching it. I bend a spoon with my blue eyes. During a tour of an antique jail, I see a stuffed white dog stand up and walk across the small cell. “Is that so?” my grandmother says, looking at the dog, then at me. Then his friend the stuffed raccoon follows him. “I see what you mean,” she says. I recall a favorite line from Macbeth, though I’ve never read Shakespeare, and quote it out loud: “My dull brain … wrought with things forgotten.” I have someone else’s memories in my head. A blue jay lands on my hand and talks to me in blue jay, and my papa says, “Don’t talk to blue jays. They’re mean.” I wear Indian beads on my fingers. I point my toes and float above my house, above the river, so high. Everything is possible.

  Blood, 11

  Heaven would be something different for everyone. It would be each person’s unique earthly happiness, manifesting in different ways. My heaven had wide sidewalks made of pure gold and castles made of milk chocolate with gold-plated widows that stretched toward another sky, another heaven, another layer in the great beyond. All day, and it was always daytime, God played a chocolate piano that had no white keys, and the music fell onto white-clad angels moved to monastic silence, like chocolate rain.

  Over spring break of fifth grade, I started my period. I was the only girl in my class who had gotten it, and I was both ashamed and prideful. It did not go the way of the pancake ovaries and uterus with a smiling mother, sensitive and informative and helpful, helming the spatula, like we saw in the video at school. Instead, I was camping near the swamp with Corey and Marcus when it happened. A canoe’s ride away from home, I was surrounded by birds that we’d maimed with overcocked BB guns. Instead, my mother was nowhere to be found and I had to sneak the cordless phone from the living room, leaves still nestled in my matted hair, while my father watched television after work. I was not allowed to use the telephone unless I stayed in the room with my father and he approved the person I was calling. When I told him I wanted to call my mom, he demanded to know why. “Because,” I told him, which wasn’t enough. We went around and around like that until I was sobbing, pressed into a corner, and I finally told him the reason: blood. With that, we were both defeated, and I was permitted to leave the room. After I called my mom at work, hiding in the bathroom, she bought me a new denim dress that buttoned to the neck and still screamed “girl,” and my father looked awkward and angry. He would stay that way for years.

  A few weeks later, when I still believed in my chocolate heaven, my parents decided I would take a bus to the Baptist church in the next town over every Sunday. While my father mowed the lawn with his shirt off and my mother napped or washed the dishes, I would go to church. My brother got to stay home, presumably because he was a boy. It could have been that they knew I’d been looking at the Playboy magazines in our bathroom, wedged beneath the stack of mismatched towels at my eye level. But no one mentioned that, and in any case, no one removed the magazines.

  Once I was unloaded from the creaking bus and brought inside the aluminum-sided structure that was the church, strangers asked me if I was ready to be saved. This preceded the asking of my name and the shaking of hands, which was bad manners. From what I needed to be saved, I wasn’t sure. I wondered if my mother knew about that, but I said, “I am.”

  A teary-eyed woman ushered me into a semicircle of souls volunteered for saving, all adolescent girls like me. Together, we formed an arc around another woman with curly hair and thick thighs. There were plenty of fat girls in church, I noticed. My father had told me that if I got fat, no one would marry me. The width of my hips concerned a shocking number of people, and I sensed that I was growing too quickly for their liking. In fifth grade, I was five feet, five inches tall and 103 pounds and already a B-cup. The other girls my age still looked like children; the boys snapped my bra and called me names. I was an island of growth and hormones.

  “Do you accept Jesus as your savior?” the woman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you let Him into your heart?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you live your life for Him and sing His praises?”

  The singing was the only thing I enjoyed about the church—that and the fact that it gave me something to do, another place that permitted me to leave the compound of our home. I loved school but found the work boring, always done with tests well before my classmates. Church was more fun than school—it offered music and stories. I could get behind the energy of their music if I closed my eyes. I could make myself believe any story they told me if it meant someone, even an invisible someone, would love me back. I knew this because singing to Jesus, a total stranger professing love to me and anyone else who would take it, made me cry.

  I wondered whether anyone ever said no, no. I cannot carry a tune, in fact. I will have to take a pass on the singing of praises; save that for so-and-so. I wished that my cousin Mandi were with me, but she was four towns away at another church because her parents were getting a divorce. And four towns in the country was something of a drive. Mandi would have made it all seem fun by drawing fancy hats on the Apostles in the workbook pages that followed the saving of souls.

  At home, I looked at myself in the mirror. I was on
Satan surveillance. The Baptists warned me that this lower-case “he” would uppercase “Get Inside” any way he could. Their fear followed me home. I breathed through my nose sparingly and squeezed my legs together at the crotch, plugging up all the openings I could think of as often as I could remember. Can he shape-change and slither up into my heart through my vagina? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t trust him.

  I opened one of the Playboy issues in our bathroom. Across a two-page spread, a man bent a woman over the hood of a red Corvette. The woman had platinum blond hair and wore a bandanna around her neck. She looked slightly frightened and slightly excited, as if it wasn’t what she wanted exactly but she was beginning to enjoy it anyway. The man had a small Afro and a huge, erect penis that was aimed at the woman’s rear end. This was how I imagined the devil would take me.

  I stayed on guard all day and later that night. I looked for Satan in my fingertips and in my underwear, I looked for him in the grocery store, I looked for him in my closet while the others slept. I knew that he could make an offer on my soul at any moment. There was one thing I would trade it for: Corey to love me back.

  That following night, Corey babysat me and my brother. I did not understand how, although I could bleed and bear children, I could not be left unattended while my parents went to a party. The three of us played truth or dare. We ate ketchup and peanut butter sandwiches and mouthfuls of toothpaste to prove we weren’t chicken. We admitted our fears and confessed our lies. It was me who left Marcus’s bike in the rain. Corey was afraid of spiders. Marcus had broken our walkie-talkies. Later, Marcus and I pretended to have gone to bed, but we were still playing the game. My next dare was to kiss Corey. I crept down the hallway and into the living room, where he sat on the floor in front of the fireplace. His legs were bent, one arm wrapped around them, the other holding the fire poker. He didn’t look up, though he must have heard me. I leaned in quick, my white nightgown swishing around my legs, and pecked him gently on the jaw. He reached forward and stirred the fire. It crackled and hissed. I ran away and climbed into bed, jittery, tearful, and feeling completely invisible.