The Grip of It

by Jac Jemc

  The blankness of her eyes has filled her entire face. The Julie I know is nowhere to be found. A fire is lit inside her. I try to take her hand again. She rips it back. She shoves my shoulder. I stand and step away from her. Her strength startles me.

  The chant has risen in pitch, still monotone, but earsplitting now. She screeches, the pace picking up at the end of her sentences, like an accelerating bouncing ball, until she’s razed all the air from her lungs and fills the vacuum again. “The Lord has grabbed you and he has you in his sights and you must understand that he will not let you go and you must understand that you are belonged now and you must understand that you are not owned by yourself and that you have been filled up with a growth of spirit that is spread through words and images and I will provide you your new rule.”

  I keep hoping she might snap out of it. I keep hoping I might flip her switch. I speak more quietly. I aim to draw her out. “Julie. Please stop. You’re really scaring me.”

  She tells me I don’t know what scary is. If this is scary, I should see what the devil has in store. I should see what evil lurks in the unknown. She proclaims herself full of truth. She will not talk to an impostor. “Produce James,” she howls. “I can see through your paltry imitation.”

  “It’s me. I am James.” I move toward her again. She flinches. She tells me that I can touch her when the Lord shows up in my eyes. I pretend. I tell her I can feel him in my sight. I tell her that every bit of my being is filling with a new vision.

  She calls me a liar. She says that when I feel it truly, she will know. We will spread this newfound honesty together. We will create our own language, like twins. Until then, she will beat me. Until the god in me comes out. Until she can trust that I will not corrupt her. She tells me to jump off the roof. If I am full of the dove of the holy spirit, then I will know how to fly my body to the ground.

  I can’t keep up the charade. “I am not ready for flight,” I admit. I try to match her tone. I hope this might bring her closer to me. She brims with satisfaction. “But you, too, cannot fly,” I say, eager to break her logic. She flees for the attic. Regret forms immediately, tight like a belt around my chest.

  77

  I SHOULD RACE after her. Instead I go to the backyard. I go to the dead lawn. Its blades loosen their fingers from the earth. The days of neglect compound beneath my feet. We have not watered the lawn. Or the tainted water of that wave Julie says besieged the house has suffocated the grass. I go outside to wait for a flight I don’t believe will happen. Such radical instinct cannot be born so immediately.

  Above me, she struggles to open the window. The layers of paint on paint stick until she squeezes through. I see the thick rope around her waist: a contingency plan, a strategy filled with harmful error. In this action I register a glimmer of hope. Her overzealous faith is an act. “Julie!”

  She bares her teeth like a sick animal. “Your appreciation is a lie! I keep guns in my brain! I barge through reason to get to truth! I flush the cough syrup down the drain to be sure your voice runs out quicker. You are a minor flaw! I will descend on you and you will be erased!” She loses her footing for a moment on the sill. Even if she doesn’t intend to jump, she might fall. I wake up. I grasp that only I can stop her. I run into the house cursing. I hear the bawl of her shouting. I don’t hear the words. I climb the stairs in threes, racing. I reach the second floor. I see the parachute of her nightgown tumble past the hall window. I reverse. I sprint down the stairs to the yard. I have never moved so slowly.

  I reemerge. It’s like I’m staring through smudged glass. The rope hangs her a couple of feet above the ground. Her rag-doll fingertips and knees and toes dust the tips of the grass.

  “Julie.”

  She groans.

  I fear her spine has snapped. I think about not moving her. I move to call paramedics. I will let them make the decisions. On the stairs, though, I invert my instincts. I dart for the gardening shears. I am willing to take the blame if this is the wrong thing to do. It must be better to get her solidly on the ground instead of suspended like livestock being bled. It takes me several well-muscled attempts to cut through the rope. I catch her as she crumples. “Can you move?” She twists a little, whimpering. I see the farthest parts of her crimp and uncoil. Faith and confidence hide behind my fret.

  Her hand travels to her abdomen. I peel the cloth up carefully. Already, the dark purple is forming in a thick band around her belly. The rope calls out of her more of what is lurking inside. The bruise ripples with proof.

  78

  I UNDERSTAND WHAT I’m doing and I have good reasons and it’s not difficult to salvage beauty from the debacle, but I can’t breathe so I can’t explain this to James.

  Each of my organs cinched, my pulse running ragged within me, I feel hammered out. That leap and fall flashing at the speed of hocus-pocus, Hoc est corpus meum, a prayer. My lungs well up like a soggy ashtray and my bladder sparks a fistful of anatomical tinsel. My bowels blistered, my womb bombed out.

  Not-James holds me, staring in my eyes, willing me to swan out of the depth of myself again, but he leaves me and returns with a wheelbarrow and a mouth so pursed I swear it must be toothless and I am no longer my own.

  “You will be safer in this.” He lifts me, me without the will to balk, and he settles me into the cart, but my edges are too delicate for the broad metal and I try to trap the pain and arrest the scratch against my skin and focus instead on the blood snuffing through my eardrums. I can tell how concerned not-James is, but I wonder what it will take to get him to call an ambulance, and I wish the blood would show through, because all this bruising, the skin stretched to breaking, hides the truth. I moan and not-James tells me this is a good sign, that at least I’m alive, but I feel choked, and I want the flushing release of my throat’s opening to let in everything I need. I feel the route of my injuries banging through my cranium and the deficiencies hiding deep in the center of my spine when not-James hoists me over his shoulder at the front steps. “Almost inside,” he says at the top, but the pressure on my belly forces the sick out of my mouth and it runs down not-James’s back. He gets me in the door and sets me on the couch and sees a deep red rim around my mouth, the blood having found a way out, and he goes for the phone and I feel pale time pass so deliberately as he demands urgency from the operator. I want to be clean and I want to beat off anyone who might help, but while I’m distracting my mind with these desires, I lose myself and fall away and grunt as if I were shot. I’m gone.

  79

  LIFE, EVEN AT its most dangerous, pushes through mundane details. Its procedural pace infuriates me. I am eager for development and answers. I am shocked by the profound dullness. Julie lies in a hospital bed. I immediately answer questions the doctors pose. Every request I make, however, takes hours to fulfill. In the ICU, the nurses and social workers and aides and doctors hear every bell and beep and respond with a measured hurry. I learn quickly to tune them out. I grow to assume nothing new is wrong.

  I find it difficult to stay engaged. This alarms me. Surely, in these moments, I am concerned with nothing else aside from Julie’s well-being. I operate at the height of myself. Yet, I find myself distracted. I get lost in what will come next and what I could have done differently. The doctors emerge with updates. I ask them to repeat themselves. It is hard to understand the simplest things. I can’t stay trained on the present moment. I tune in and out like listening to a sermon. I keep saying things that make little sense. I notice my eyes scuffling around pages, unable to read them. I commit my signature to the line anyway. My breath lurches. I haul Julie’s chances of surviving through my mind. I squat in my own belly. My viscera form teethfuls of nervous heat. I stare at a lightbulb until I’m blind. Sight knuckles the edges of the burning cataract.

  Family visit in waves. Julie’s parents show up. The adaptation of their daughter they find in her hospital bed disturbs them. My parents blow through. They make recommendations. They insist they’ll return to see the hou
se soon. Connie comes to the hospital. She has instructed Julie’s other coworkers to leave us our privacy. My hope is that Julie can recover quickly. I hope people won’t see this alternative version of her. I hope they won’t hold it up as a comparison every day moving forward.

  I avoid accepting Julie’s condition. I disappear. I ask myself, What is better? To accept the horror presented before you or search for a way out? To hunt in yourself for a comparable defect or to pull yourself tall and strong to support the correction of someone else’s faults?

  There is no acceptable, untainted name for a wilderness of the mind. People will always wonder what to believe. They expect the stray inaccuracies to be looted out and abandoned. They expect the mind’s voice to unstitch only when alone. When the seams rip, they look away.

  80

  IN THE HOSPITAL, I see not-James rattle and rummage for thousands of dollars to pay for the decision to help me live, the cost of health care an abstract inconvenience until it becomes real and necessary and he realizes how expensive the machines are that scour my system for threats, that empty every bit of me out, making a wire frame of my body, ignoring the years it took to make all of those cells. They flush in other people’s versions of my blood and pull out my spoiled organs and replace them with flesh convinced from other persons. They find the filthy irregulars and kill them with chemicals and upriver energies, with no one coaxing the small of my back or giving me tempting eyes. They unscrew my beefy truths and find fires to put out and leave me in disarray. They mutter aloud and shine warm lights on parts of me that have never before seen their way out of the dark and blow warm air to stir my withered innards to dilation.

  I wade through an unknown number of days—silent only in voice—in that hospital before I’m able to talk back, and by then, I know the doctors’ questions, how they grease my palms with promises of survival and early release.

  Where have I been living and working? My lungs are inflamed, full of a moldy growth.

  What have I been doing and eating? A welter of iron paces my blood, but holes are opening in my veins allowing the deep red to seep and slam toward the surface, forming those bruises.

  At first they think my mouth is full of meat scraps, but find it’s my tongue and cheeks where my teeth wobbled through in the fall.

  I’m unsure if I’m here because of my injuries or because of the impulse I had to throw myself off the roof, but either way, the doctors and nurses tell me stories of survivors with faith and determination as bright and shiny as new chrome, and they thunder their version of the kingdom of heaven into me, with absolute confidence, and I panic occasionally when I’m alone, and then I remember that someone is never far and fluster at that as well. When I’m made to walk through the halls, I think of carrying a ball of yarn to trace my way back. They wheel cots by the door like ponies storming. Bells constantly chime, enough to make my sleep shabby and my ability to wake nimble. I wonder at all the fingerprints in this place, the sly traces of blood no one will admit to, the dust waiting to edge into a wound despite custodial diligence.

  When not-James is here, he spares no sigh, lets them all breathe into the room, his shoulders hanging, and I watch his instincts plume across his face as he ignores every one of them, and every night he leaves only when darkness has chanted itself onto the earth.

  He develops a cough that I notice first, interrupting his conversations with the doctor to expel the wet air into his inner elbow, and he asks the doctor when I might be allowed to go home, and the doctor says they can’t recommend release yet, and they don’t want to create false hope.

  The sunrises start to feel like failures and not-James tells me he’s been going to the chapel and I want to beat my chest and refuse his prayers because the man I married would not believe that simply placing his body into such a structure could make a difference. Not-James tells me he feels less alone there, his ears cocked to the silent prayers of the hospital, and I tell him that I am his god, and I watch his chin start to twitch, but he doesn’t deny it.

  When he leaves, I let the starlight wash my eyes and watch as the world outside contracts into darkness, and I rub the lizard face of my elbow skin and listen to the old woman down the hall cackle and chuck anything within reach out the door of her room and hear a nurse drag a chair to set up camp until the woman is quiet and the nurse can loosen her clenched fists.

  Hospitals, I realize, fill themselves full of accusations, of people believing certain truths about their blood and their hunger and their minds, and when another tries to force guidance on any of these topics, the impulse can be to travel as far away from these assumptions as possible.

  Not-James’s cough becomes a clay-packed wheeze unhitching itself from his lungs only to bind itself again and again. He talks the doctors into allergy tests. Mold comes back as a singular cause of his trouble, matching one of my many. They continue diving into the fungi spectrum and return with ergot as the answer, rye mold. I imagine the house furred with it now that we’ve been gone for days, a thin fuzz coating the walls and floor and furniture like on raspberries forgotten in the back of the refrigerator.

  My body remains a slab in a loosening husk of skin and the sheets of my bed fill with black smears and the nurses want to know where they come from. I remind them of the mold that stuffs me, too. I worry aloud to them that I could infect the whole hospital. It is difficult to convince or remind or inform anyone of anything in my state.

  James tries to convince me away, telling me to focus on getting better so I can come home. “But to what filth?” I ask, and his eyes clank over me, plundering me and trying to fill those gaps at once, and I recognize that our awe has tattered, as we buck and shatter against the tedium.

  81

  I SEE THAT the doctors are trying to diagnose Julie with internal battery. They’re convinced her systems are attacking her from the inside. I know that these same shy symptoms hide within me, too. I experience the guilt of being only slightly more or less. I walk through my faults with open eyes. I say, Yes, yes, yes. I feel electric with self-wisdom. I suffer the sticky bile of jealousy and the magnetic pull of avoidance at once. I become beautiful with admiration for the diagnosed. I ignore all the other clues. I have been delivered an answer that satisfies.

  Still my mind says, Show them. Make appear what you know is within you.

  They don’t at first know what they’ve found in Julie. I insist they check me for the same unnamed disease. The doctor says I look fine. He says that if it were meant to happen to me, I’d already be farther down in this chain reaction. I’d be whipping around at the end. I shake my head no. There is a spectrum that mustn’t be ignored.

  “Uncountable diseases might conceal themselves deep inside each and every one of us. Let us be thankful when they are not summoned to the surface.” He speaks as if he were calling me to worship. He gives me a leaden smile. I want to resist and test him. I have always preferred knowing to wondering, When?

  Julie is not restrained anymore. I can see her mentally chewing through the implied straps, though. She weaves her teeth together. She clamps down. She clads herself with that same involuntary grin. This time it alleges violation. Priests come by to offer simple blessings. Children parade through with balloon strings tucked in palms.

  She seems improved. She is no longer the same eerie confluence of reactions she appeared to be on the roof. I ask her if she feels ready to go home. I ask her if she feels drained of that spirit. “Nothing’s worth a burst of emptiness,” she replies.

  I wander the main thoroughfares of the hospital. I think of the back passages we were allowed through when we arrived. I think of the hidden hallways used to transport patients behind the scenes. I watch orderlies pull supplies from closets and cabinets. I stride through the idea of a place that never empties itself of people. Before a nurse can leave, he or she must be replaced by another. Air huffs through the heating ducts. Blood tunnels through my veins. It all calls our home to mind.

  I go to the chapel to fo
rmally concern myself for a while. I drop my shoulders. I knit my hands loosely in my lap. I feel like a fugitive. The right thing to do is to stay with her in that room. Maybe, though, her recovery relies on me letting her be. Everyone keeps telling me to take care of myself. They inquire about my cough. They tell me to rest. I keep wondering when Julie will feel that her whole mind has returned. I wonder if she ever felt it was gone.

  82

  THE DETECTIVES COME to the hospital, lending credence to the idea that even grave bouts of ill health can’t save me from a bit of trouble. While James is off drifting through the halls and channeling the petitions of the other patients and visitors, I hear O’Neill and Poremski asking the nurse if it’s all right to ask a few questions, and the nurse wishes them luck getting any sense out of me, and I snort, and the detectives appear, their eyes landing on me and taking off, trying to navigate their impressions of my reliability.