My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  Nasir had been my printer when I was a freelancer, and I’d never have met him if I hadn’t moved to that shit part of town with Steph. He certainly stuck out, in post-9/11 America and Seattle, because you didn’t see many people in town who proudly dressed in traditional halal Islamic garb, wore the beard and the beanie cap. He was my age, spoke unaccented English, and seemed earnest in his proposal, saying I could do with something back in my regular vocation.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked me one afternoon at the pizza place, made it sound like it was a spiritual question.

  I was reminded of a movie I’d seen some years previous, some remake of a Victorian novel called The Four Feathers, and I remembered a particular scene where the hero is bereft, left out to die, and a wandering warrior finds him, confers with his conscience, then decides to save our hero.

  Asked later why he’d reached this choice, the warrior responds, “God put you in my way.”

  I studied Nasir and wondered, briefly, if God had put him in my way, or me in his, but either way, I took his offer.

  Besides everything else, I had grown weary of searching for house numbers while delivering pizzas in the impenetrable Seattle night. Bastards don’t make any sense.

  So I accepted.

  The drive north and south every day to and from Snohomish took me right by Steph’s accident site, and every time I drove past it, my stomach would knot and I’d get a real sense of sadness and gloom, and I’d try to keep from looking at the bent, unrepaired railing where the Jeep went over, but I had to, every single time, and then one day it suddenly occurred to me to wonder, What if I had been with her? What if I’d been in her passenger seat? Would I have had time to stop the Jeep from going over? I shivered at the possibility that I could have been there to stop the wreck.

  The print shop was more of a failed sitcom than a business, as it turned out that Nasir and his business partner, Zahid, had taken on what they were told was a “turnkey” print shop in Snohomish, Washington, which, if you look at a map—and I had to—is about two hours north of Seattle in a forested, economically depressed stretch of mountain towns that now specialize mostly in antiquing.

  There was no reason for the community to need a print shop there.

  Even worse, the shop came with a pair of married, retired printers who, in their spare time, ran a magazine for hot-rod enthusiasts, actually watched NASCAR like it meant something, and asked me if I had “caught the races” by way of small talk. They had sold their lifelong business—whose technology, I should add, ended roughly, and badly, around 1980. They simply stopped keeping up with the technology and printing software back then and cruised their way into the millennium, not caring or understanding that while they charged hundreds of dollars for a set of business cards, other print shops were doing them for under twenty bucks.

  And they’d sold their shop to a pair of Muslim businessmen, one of whom dressed like Osama bin Laden.

  I couldn’t pitch this story to CBS, because they’d tell me it was too outlandish.

  Moreover, as their “manager,” I was put in the position of having to diplomatically handle this xenophobic couple with these Arab businessmen, who, it turned out, were entirely Machiavellian, if you don’t mind the cultural contradictions. Nasir and Zahid had told the old guy, a crusty, mean little man named Phil, that he’d have a place in the new business, and then they asked me to take as much knowledge from the old man as possible and push him and his wife out. There was little enough to take, since all the technology and equipment were outdated, and the place was wired badly because Phil had done most of it himself, and absolutely no business ever walked in that door.

  Graphic designers are not printers, and there’s really no personal takeaway from learning the obsolete trade anymore. Still, I taught myself how to network that shitty place, I taught myself the old-world printing, and I taught myself how to buy and quote paper, for fuck’s sake, and I was asked always to do more, and then more than that, and then never a word of appreciation. I didn’t understand this. I’d never had bosses like this.

  After a while, I realized that they’d never acknowledge or credit me for the work I’d been doing because it would mean, at some point, they’d have to reward it in a wage, and no matter how much I gave or tried, or went above my earnings, it would all go unanswered, and they’d only ask for more. Conversely, if I said I didn’t know something, they were not disappointed.

  It was the first time in my life that I thought I would never understand another culture. When you’re a kid, when you’re younger, your window of acceptance and appreciation is laid wide open, and you crave to absorb all sorts of things, listen to all sorts of music—both country and western—and you want to know more about things that you’re unfamiliar with: You want to try different foods, watch foreign movies, appreciate different things. I’m sure there’s a biological imperative for it. But as you grow older, that window gradually begins to narrow, until you’re a crusty older person set in your ways, like Phil.

  Twenty years ago, I would have entirely “grokked” Nasir and Zahid, would have forgiven their disregard, their bad management, the low wage. At forty, I was looking at them and thinking, We really have no way of understanding each other. Our aims are entirely different. My upbringing on the Texas-Mexico border was primarily honor based, and honor represented itself primarily in my work, in being the fastest, the smartest, and the most creative, which corresponded perfectly with publishing: If you weren’t the most effective and efficient, ten more people were willing to take your place. Nasir and Zahid’s sense of accomplishment came from getting more for less, and coming out on top in any negotiation.

  There was no way I could last in this relationship.

  I listened to their verbal exchanges in Urdu with interest and curiosity; they’d infuse the term inshallah, or “if God wills it,” after anything that they hoped would happen. My father and grandmother uttered similar incantations, only in Spanish: si Diosito quiere, or “if Jesus wants it.” (Actually, it literally translates to “if Little God wants it,” but let’s stick with “Jesus.”)

  Anyway, after a while, I decided I’d just start enjoying the spectacle when an errant local logging redneck would wander in and ask to fax something to his probation officer or make copies. Then I’d watch as he’d stammer and sweat when he saw Nasir in his traditional dress, who then spoke to him in good, unaccented English, and they’d both look at me like it was my job to advocate, but I wouldn’t. I’d just smile at both of them like, “Go on; let’s bridge this divide,” and the redneck would sputter about having forgotten something in his truck, and then you’d see his truck spill out of the gravel parking lot, and I’d look at Nasir, who’d then pretend it hadn’t happened. Like a Lutheran.

  Once, Nasir surprised me by coming in the back way when I was busy setting up an e-mail account on one production machine, with my back turned to him, and he yelled, “Hey!”

  And I shot right up in my chair and yelled, “Jesus fucking Christ!”

  Then I turned and looked at him, and we were both caught in the moment of cross-cultural blasphemy, and then again, we both pretended it hadn’t happened. Like Lutherans.

  The commute north was devastating, the low wage and disregard for my worth was humiliating, and I was beginning to rethink my commitment to this job daily. Since my previous job was executed from my apartment, my wardrobe was entirely lacking, and what clothes I did have were terribly old. I would come back exhausted every day and complain to Sarah, who had grown weary of my weariness.

  I tried to convey to her how deeply interesting and horrific this scenario was—“I mean, one of the presses that Phil still uses was in an episode of Deadwood!” I would tell her, to illustrate how byzantine the place was—and about trying to talk to these people, I said, “I have more in common with Nasir and asking about his mother’s hajj than I do with the rednecks asking me about carburetors!” This wasn’t supposed to happen, I kept saying.

  “Fu
ck me, I’m done. I think I’m headed back to Texas.”

  Then one day, as I was asking Phil and his huge-breasted wife, Dee, to please remove yet another piece of machinery or carburetor parts from the front office, I watched my Gmail account light up as I received word from Epiphany, a literary journal out of New York, that they’d received my manuscript, picked it out of their slush pile, and they wanted to publish three of the chapters from my book, and I thought, Hunh. Maybe there is an end to this absurdity and personal inferno.

  CHAPTER 35 Dining with Cannibals

  I found it far easier to break up with Steph’s family than I ever had with Steph, and after her mother hung up on me, I took to seeing Steph in the evenings, after they’d gone home, so now Steph could have double the care and advocacy. I hadn’t really planned it that way, but it turned out better for everyone, and I never spoke to them again.

  After that incident with my car breaking down, I let them navigate the city on their own and never looked back. They had worn me through, finally. But I still felt Steph was far from ready to be on her own, so I would stop by and sit with her for a couple hours fairly often after work. At first, her cognitive abilities fluctuated, and some days she’d be as quiet as she was in the first stages of the coma, but then suddenly she’d open up in a running monologue that made little sense but was oddly poetic in a medical science sort of way. Other days she’d see me and have a fit, try to kick me with her crushed foot and throw things at me if she could get her hands on a projectile.

  Still, every day, her recovery surged forward, and at some point I realized I was watching the day-to-day advancement of a brain healing itself on fast-forward, like watching a baby’s life documented on film and played continuously at four or five times regular speed. This was Steph 3.0, and she had that in common with my mother: When my mother was divorced, she picked up right at age sixteen and began her maturity as a single person, then a divorcee, and finally, a woman remarried, all in fast-forward. Steph, with her accident, did an entire reboot of her brain, right from the firmware, and watching her recover on a day-to-day basis was the same as watching a child grow up in hyperreality.

  I’d spend some nights at the hospital with her, pulled two chairs together and created a bed of sorts, and I’d listen to my iPod while she slept. When the nurses would come in every three hours for her medications, Steph would insist on logging her pills and dosage in a notebook written in made-up hieroglyphs that only she understood, and I’d help her document every pill and liquid she took while the nurses patiently looked on, before Steph agreed to take anything. This was because, she eventually told me, the other time she was in the hospital, a nurse back on the East Coast very nearly gave her an injection intended for a cancer patient, and so now she was acutely vigilant.

  “Very well,” I said. “This one is Oxycodone, for pain, fifteen milligrams,” and she would make a series of squiggles with her pen and we’d pretend she was in control, as I indicated the next pill: “This one is Tramadol, fifty milligrams,” and the next, and the next.

  One afternoon, she asked me to take her down to the imaging area, wait with her while she endured another CAT scan of her head to see how the recovery was progressing. We sat and talked in low voices while she waited to be called in, and when she was next, she made herself comfortable on the scanner and the tech invited me into the control room, asked me to sit next to him in a safe, less radioactive place.

  “Thanks,” I said. “By the way, she has a plate in her head, from a previous accident. Won’t that interfere with the imaging?” I asked, curious as to how they were able to see around or through it. It suddenly occurred to me that in all her previous scans and X-rays, I hadn’t seen it before.

  The scan continued and the fillings in her teeth lit up like a constellation, and her small, proper silver cross lit up like the neon crosses we had seen while camping in the mountains over Twisp the last time, but no plate, no large metallic glow came from her forehead, where she always pointed when she mentioned it to me.

  “There’s no plate in her head,” the tech said, uncomfortably. “

  Must be my mistake,” I said.

  Eventually, she was cognizant enough to carry on conversations and explain to me what she had experienced during those days when she’d stay awake and look at things around her, how her mind would process it. She said she remained in a constant dream logic, that she was wide awake but her mind was making random associations and deep emotional leaps, and I agreed with her because for a very long time there, it was like watching exhalations and fissures of personalities past come to the surface, have their moment, and then make way for the next emanation of buried Stephanie. So inside one hour, you’d see Steph at seven years old calling out for Daddy, then Steph at twenty-two feeling embarrassed for her vulnerability and condition, then Steph at thirty-nine looking at me and hating me for us not working out the way she wanted, and then the cycle would repeat itself, at different ages. As trying as it was for the bedside sitter, I can imagine how exhausting and frightening it was for her, the homunculus inside trying to steer her mind in a manner like it was once capable.

  When she was in this state, she said she sometimes saw me as the bastard who left her at the altar and married someone else and had children and a family now. So she hated me and wanted to throw things at me.

  She said she even imagined her best friend, Jake, was there, for a month.

  “No, that actually happened,” I told her.

  “You mean Jake was here?” she asked. Jake was her boyfriend in college, before she jumped buses and started dating women. They were able to make better friends than they had been lovers, and Jake, by far, was the best friend Steph ever had. He had flown out after he heard about the accident and was able to get some time off from his work as a physical therapist.

  “Yeah, he was here by your bedside for a couple of weeks. He was really helpful. He made charts,” I said.

  “Charts of what?” she asked.

  “Charts of what your recovery might look like. Charts of a brain and its synaptic reconfiguration, which is what the neurologist said was happening to you.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “He also told me about the time you punched him, too,” I said.

  “I punched him?” she asked, genuinely curious.

  “Yeah, when he tried to break up with you back in college,” I told her. “He said you brought a rock into the library and set it next to him while he was studying, as a threat.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah, then later, you punched him in the eye. We actually high-fived, since we were both the victims of your right cross.” I giggled, but she looked confused. This had actually happened in front of Steph’s mother, who, I think, managed a glimpse of who her daughter really was at that point, and looked stricken.

  Now, by recounting these conversations, it might seem that Steph was nearly back to her usual self, but this is far from accurate. Steph believed herself to be at 100 percent recovery when she was really just starting out at about 25 to 30 percent, and it was painful to watch because she felt she was back in command of all her faculties, and she was making decisions where it was clear that she was still very much suffering from a traumatic brain injury.

  One afternoon, back at Harborview, where Steph was doing rehabilitative treatment, her parents thought it would be a good idea if they helped her down to the canteen for a coffee or a juice. Steph insisted on using her crutches, and when they were down in the basement level and in the queue, her mother upset her with something and Steph let out a scream with the C-word, aimed at her mother, who flushed and ran out of the room.

  I felt a number of things, not least among them a sadness for her mother, but also a bit of responsibility because it had been me and my predilection for British gangster movies that taught Steph how to unleash that particular word, and so I felt guilty, on top of everything. I was exhausted from guilt by this time, but I could still muster it on a moment’s notice.
r />   By this point, I had pretty much made it past my resentment of her family, understood the high-stress situation they’d been put in, moving to a foreign city and having only me to depend upon, so of course they’d eventually aim their frustration at the bastard who’d left their daughter. Even further, I had an overwhelming realization that I was standing between a daughter and a mother who had a second chance at rebuilding their relationship, and that my standing guard and defending a person who was not happy with herself and indeed wanted nothing more—at her very core—than to be with her family, and have her mother’s approval, wasn’t helping. It made so much more sense now to step away and let these things unfold, rather than try to be some sort of bedside hero for a woman that I had no claim to, who had no claim to me.

  That final realization was incredibly liberating, and I was able to visit Steph without the crushing sense of guilt or trauma or responsibility, but instead as a friend, and someone who cared for her, but up to a limit. It gave me boundaries. And it also helped when she started doing really crazy things and I saw that there was nothing I could do anymore to keep her safe, that she would have to navigate the world as she was, and I couldn’t stop her from making terrible choices.

  She had been moved back to the hospital for a rehab treatment, on a different floor, as a part of her ongoing therapy and was now sharing a room with other patients, and one afternoon I came down to the hospital to see her and she was dressed, sitting upright on her bed and flipping through a magazine. She moved in slow motion, her eyes unfocused and glazed from the medication, and she limped and winced from the pain of all her fractures, so watching her perform simple tasks was like watching her move underwater.

  I knocked and walked in, sat down in the chair beside her. I noticed a family in the other part of the room, around the other bed. They were Mexican, and an old man was in the hospital bed, and I caught from their conversation in Spanish that he’d had a heart attack but was recovering. They kept giving Steph dirty looks, I noticed. She said she wanted to walk a little, so we wandered slowly down the hallway to a little nook with couches. She told me the family was mad at her because she complained that the man dribbled on their shared toilet when he relieved himself.