Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  Although the mushrooms hadn’t hit me yet, that summer I was twenty-two years old. Driving on drugs was one of my few skills. Kari was more innocent.

  She and I first met in high school in Phoenix, dated for a couple weeks, then she left me unexpectedly to return to her previous boyfriend. She came from a wealthy family. They lived in a historic neighborhood in the shadow of a large mountain my friends and I frequently hiked. When she and I later ran into each other during college in Tucson, we set a time to meet for coffee. Soon we were an item, and I could barely contain my excitement.

  I fell for her this time as quickly as I had the first. She was smart, intuitive, joyful, and compassionate, and she was loyal to her friends. Short with light brown hair, she had a set of pink lips that arched in the shape of a heart when she smiled, and she smiled all the time. Her buoyant personality was so uplifting that my close friend Chris had once also developed an immediate crush. In high school he kept saying, “She’s so cute, like, adorable, huggable, unbearable cute.” In terms of mischievous experiences, she was also unseasoned.

  Unlike me and the guys I hung out with, Kari had never taken acid and she rarely smoked weed. She drank beer on weekends but hardly to excess. This was college. Everyone drank beer to excess. Although she smoked cigarettes socially, she never woke up as I did and immediately reached for her pack. She’d cook breakfast, watch some TV, maybe have a smoke later just to socialize outside. She was stable that way, and normal. When I discovered the first signs of her profound maternal streak, I knew that eventually she was going to leave me. Though she never said it outright, the situation was clear: she planned to have children with someone in the not-too-distant future; did I feel the same?

  She wanted it all: kids, a house, good job, a family, normal human goals that back then, with the exception of the house, I didn’t share. She worked at a daycare, later a Montessori school. She studied Sociology with a special interest in child psych. With pride that stemmed from her innate feminism, her stated life goal was to be a mother. I found that enviable and attractive—an outwardly focused life and a tight family bond. I went so far as to consider her wholesome, the kind of woman my dad might have fallen for growing up in the fifties in small-town Arizona. Kari and I shared little besides our age, address, and interest in each other, but at least she had interests. I’d met so many people whose sole hobbies were sex, booze, and TV. Kari did watch lots of TV. She liked staying at home on weeknights and weekends watching talk shows and sitcoms and movies, but her passion for her college classes and her career goals were inspiring and unnerving. After her interest in child development led her to a job at Montessori, she’d return home from work and describe the accomplishments of her young students: this one drew a cool, complicated picture; that one cut-and-pasted a collage without eating the paste; the lessons she taught in vocabulary and art. Sitting together on the couch, I listened and asked questions. She loved her work with children in ways I couldn’t understand. I tried, but I related more to Edward Abbey’s memoir Desert Solitaire than to activities that involved nurturing anyone younger than myself. Kari was more advanced than me, and I wasn’t ready to learn how to be.

  This summer I’d driven up from Tucson alone, hiking and camping new parts of the Northwest. In Bellingham, Washington I parked my truck and took the B.C. ferry to Juneau where my mom met me and we explored southeast Alaska together. Two weeks later, after tons of hiking and sightseeing, Mom flew home, and I boated back to Bellingham. Innocent as it seemed, I recognized it then as clearly as I did now: I was trying to recreate the magic of that previous summer trip, that sense of newness, invincibility and freedom that Dean and I experienced while exploring the wild West Coast. But you only get one first hit. After that, you’re always chasing something that you can’t catch.

  Kari had flown to Seattle to meet me. Now we were driving down the Coast together, hiking, sightseeing, and roadtripping for a week. I was excited. I was confused. I’d been sober for months but had started dabbling. Nothing daily, but my usual ritualistic consumption seemed inevitable. Against my better judgment, I’d brought a quarter ounce of mushrooms on this trip along with a tiny bit of weed that, after all the hard work in my drug recovery group, I knew I should not have been smoking. It was a bad sign. Anyone could see that, even through the haze of smoke and shrooms.

  Racing down Highway 101 that July, I kept checking Kari’s breathing: does your throat itch? Feel tight? Feel okay? Averting a sense of urgency with my hushed tone, I stroked her hair and kept calmly saying, “We’re getting close to that soda sweetie. Almost there.” She said the mushrooms made her body “feel all buzzy,” a thought which I encouraged lest she think, as I did, that she might soon die in my truck among the dairy farms and redwoods. When we finally reached Eureka, I followed the hospital signs through unfamiliar neighborhoods and told her I’d spotted a convenience store.

  Now she was sitting up shrieking, “What are we doing here?”

  “Just dropping in for a visit,” I said while lifting her from the cab. “We’re visiting really quickly, to get cream for your stings. Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. You’re fine.” I carried her featherweight in my arms through the parking lot. Her feet hurt too much to walk. They were as puffed as rotting walruses. She stared at me with those pig’s blood eyes. Then by the door I stopped, lowered my voice and said, “Just remember, we cannot let them know we’re tripping. Okay? Don’t say anything about drugs or how things look or sound weird or anything. Just keep it between us.” She nodded. “Let me do the talking, and we’ll get in and out of here and back on the road in a hurry. Okay?” She nodded. I kissed her lips.

  The nurses hustled her down the hall, leaving me standing with a short man in a white lab coat and an out-of-date-looking pair of prescription glasses. He introduced himself as the doctor. He said, “So tell me what happened.” I did my best.

  We were in Redwood National Park. Kari and I had been seeing each other for over three months, and after weeks of gentle nudging, she finally agreed to try hiking off-trail—‘bushwhacking,’ it’s called. While traipsing atop an enormous, downed redwood log—the thing must have been thirty-feet around—she stepped on a bee’s nest—which we later found out were yellow-jackets—and they attacked. I didn’t even see the nest; insects must have built it beneath a slab of peeling bark. They got inside her jeans, her shirt, her shoes. They tagged her arms, face, ankles, scalp and chest.

  He nodded as I talked, scribbled notes. When he looked up he stared into my eyes in a way I considered suspicious.

  I didn’t mention how I had sustained an equally aggressive attack—fifty-one stings, we later counted. I didn’t say how I’d been hiking, like an idiot, with no shirt or socks on, only black Converse All-Stars, shorts and a baseball cap. I didn’t—I don’t think—offer my hiking pedigree in order to show that, despite the current situation, I was more than some brazen, irresponsible John Muir wannabe who lured his girlfriend into danger to impress her, and that, in addition to and despite that, I had hiked, camped and traveled all over western North America, from Baja California to central Alaska, exploring parks and the rugged backcountry, and that in all my years of off-trail hiking—innumerable hours of it in my native Arizona’s rattlesnake-rich deserts—I had never once been stung by a bee.

  He might have been impressed, too. Lots of people I told the stories to were. In fact, if I thought about it, as unique experiences go, this bee sting incident was pretty interesting. It would fit nicely alongside my other memorable travel stories. Like the time I drank a beer with a Navajo man in Flagstaff who called me “Pee Wee” because of my beach cruiser, and who talked candidly with me about the daily effects of racism and white colonization on his people and his life. And the time a scorpion stung my foot inside a Texas state park shower. And of course the snarling Dalmatian in the boarded-up motel. Same with the drive down here: ninety miles an hour after eating mushrooms? Exciting stuff. Except that Kari was now suffering because of me.

&n
bsp; To my knowledge I said none of this. I just stood there stiff and sweating, watching the pastel hallway glow more and more brightly and if I was making any sense. The whole place felt so blindingly bright and sterile that my stomach turned. Usually hospitals unnerved me. This one made me feel like a pollutant. My forearms were dusted with what I thought was fern pollen. Dark forest soil lined my fingernails. Brown bits of twig clung to my shoelaces. I pictured my body as a neon green virus molecule, part-cartoon, part electron microscope image, with all the bumpy, angry surfaces they display at 250,000 magnification. I saw my viral self drifting through the hospital, then into the cartoon mouth of a woman in one of those human body medical cross-section diagrams for asthma inhalers, me binding like a steroid to clean lung tissue. Whoa. Did that mean I was a toxin or medicine? Death or temporary relief for Kari’s innocent, focused existence? Part of me wished I was a steroid. Then she wouldn’t be sick among strangers in an unfamiliar town.

  Either I spoke or the Doc read my mind. “She’s going to be fine,” he said and handed me paperwork. Great, I thought. Fantastic. But what about the two of us? This incident might reveal an unbridgeable rift, weakening or breaking our new bond. I tried not to think about that. Instead, I filled out the paperwork, repeatedly wiping my sweaty palms so the pen wouldn’t slide out. I tried to be cool, sort of relaxed and jokey like, “Slow day at the office?” Checked my handwriting’s legibility, trying to keep it free of weird squiggles and Dali-esque marginalia. All the dates seemed correct. Her name. Insurance. I’d dotted all the eyes, I mean I’s. I was proud of my drugged-up composure, then immediately ashamed of my pride. No one should be skilled at feigning sobriety.

  I handed him the clipboard and thought, He knows. Everyone knows. When you’re messed up, bystanders always seem to recognize it. You become overly aware of your mannerisms but can’t conceal your condition. You think, If I wasn’t high, would I dangle my hands at my side like this? If I wasn’t high, would I normally lean against a wall with one hand in my back pants pocket, nodding yes this aggressively? And am I walking weird? I feel like I’m walking weird. I barely feel my feet. They are touching the ground, aren’t they? You look down, confirming gravity’s hold, then think, Well, I definitely seem to be hunching over, and that’s a giveaway. Better straighten up. But instead, you overcompensate. Then when people look at you, you think it’s because they’re privy to all this tortured interior monologue, as if a transcript were printed on your forehead like a weather report: “Dark skies inside Aaron today. Storm system moving in, perfect conditions for tornados. Chance of disintegration: 100 percent.” Yep, you conclude, they know.

  Or not.

  My performance with that nurse was spectacular: articulated words, concise sentences, no bulging eyes. I hadn’t said anything suspicious like, “That coat is friggin’ whi-i-ite.” Or, “Dang, love the retro glasses.” I was just cruising through this doctor-patient interaction with the swiftness of whatever popular basketball stars regular people talked about whose names I didn’t know because sports completely bored me, especially when compared to reading John Muir’s journals.

  Besides, I’d eaten these things tens of times before. Eaten them in the city and desert and forest. Eaten them with my best friends and alone, camping and at peoples’ homes. Then I had motored through the sober world relying on the last turning gears of my gummed-up mind. In years past, my friends and I would eat shrooms and somehow manage to order burritos at twenty-four-hour Mexican food joints while hallucinating. Or buy sodas at convenience stores—counting out bills, chatting with clerks—when minutes before we’d been laughing uncontrollably at trimmed oleanders. Once I even picked up my paycheck at Subway sandwiches as the psilocybin giggles started to overtake me. Having to make sense when nothing made sense—that was my business. I needed that printed on a business card.

  I looked through the front window at my truck—parked between the lines, all proper-like. I scanned the ER. An empty rolling bed sat against the wall far down the hall, which seemed to grow longer the longer I stared down it. A metal rolling table sat nearby too, close enough to see that some implements covered it. Shiny metal things, what I imagined were scissors and stitchers and folders and such, tools you’d use in reconstructive surgery. Or skin origami. And look at those crazy ass forceps or whatever those are, I thought. Wow. My mom used to pull her famous fried beef tacos out of a vat of boiling Crisco with tongs like that. These health care providers should go into the taco business. They could pull, like, ten tacos out of the grease at once.

  Ahahahahaha, hahahahaha, hahahaha!

  Ha.

  Kari reappeared. The nurses seemed to eyeball me as they passed. I wondered if Kari had broken our agreement of psychedelic secrecy, blurting something like, “Your faces are melting!” They led her past me and into an adjacent room.

  Doc said something like, “You can go in there now.”

  The nurses helped Kari onto a bed in the tiny room, which sat beside the front door and front desk, and then they left. We were alone. Alone with our thoughts and secrets.

  The room fell silent. I stood by the bed, staring at Kari, wondering if my hands normally hung by my side this way. A single chair sat against the wall. Would it be weird to sit in that chair on the other side of the room? Would that make me seem callous or disinterested? I wasn’t disinterested, I just wanted to sit. My feet hurt and whole body itched. But things looked so lonesome over there.

  I slid my hands into my pockets. The nurses probably wouldn’t mind if I dragged the chair closer. Or I could lift and carry it over. I stood by the bed thinking, staring at Kari and her pursed lips and the trouble I’d caused. Then I pulled the sheet up over her swollen, shoe-less feet, over the weak rise-and-fall of her familiar narrow chest, on up to her neck so just her face stuck out from the sheet. She looked like a puppet in a Jim Henson bit. She looked Muppetish. She smiled.

  “Is that comfortable?” I said.

  She whispered, “Yes.”

  Beside the chair ran a short counter lined with jars of bandages, Q-tips and tongue depressors. Above that hung a pastel cabinet filled, I assumed, with smocks and cotton balls and rubber gloves. “Look,” I pictured myself saying to Kari while pulling on a pair. “Cow condoms.”

  “Why are the walls breathing?” Kari said.

  “Ssshhhh!” I said, leaning close, my finger pressed to my lips. “Don’t say that too loud, honey. We don’t want the doctors to hear.” Not that they’d throw us in jail. I just didn’t want to be detained longer than her recovery required. These were the last days of our journey, the ones you wish would last forever, like melting ice cream and libidinous sunny weather, and we’d intended to drive three-hundred-twenty miles to Sacramento that afternoon. We’d only made it seventy.

  Kari looked petrified then laughed. “Oh yeah.”

  We smirked at each other. The silence enclosed us.

  Cold air moved across my skin. Her brown hair spread across the pillow like seaweed in the tide pools we’d visited in coastal Oregon. The filaments still shone in the harsh hospital light, but they seemed less healthy and luminous somehow, unnaturally limp, as if I had sucked the spirit from them.

  I’d only wanted her to see the outdoors. Maybe she would come to love it the way I did, or at least see what I saw in it and understand my attraction. With such different visions for our respective futures, Kari and I needed a bond of some kind, a couple of strong common interests to solidify our union. Otherwise, what did we have? A relationship based on shared air space and a mutual need for emotional companionship. I’d hoped that we would find our bond in nature.

  The room did seem to be breathing, the walls swelling and contracting, swelling and contracting—a giant lung. Ha, I thought, magic mushrooms, is that all you’ve got? I stood and considered it. Was the room actually breathing, or was it shrinking instead? Squeezing us together or pushing us apart? What if this was a new technology: rooms that changed dimensions to help treat the emotional connection of the
people in it. If there was any town whose hospitals would have spatially adaptive rooms like that, it’d be Eureka. This was is a hippie-college-logging town. It had once been a major galaxy in the Dead Head universe. It was still loaded with fellow co-op-shopping tofu-eaters driving art cars and VW Things, the kind of longhairs who kept decomposing yellow school buses in overgrown backyards for parts and guest rooms, or in case Ken Kesey’s ghost reunited the Merry Pranksters. Northern California was also home to an enormous network of backwoods marijuana-growing operations. Millions of dollars’ worth of potent herb sprouted under the protection of the tall redwood forest canopy.

  These were dinosaur forests, straight out of the Carboniferous. That’s why I wanted Kari to hike off-trail here. “To truly experience the Redwoods,” I kept saying, “you have to bushwhack in an old-growth forest. Tromp through the undergrowth, bushes up to your armpits, sword ferns over your head. Then walk along the mossy top of a downed tree, staring into the dark woods.”

  The idea unnerved her. “Aren’t there bears and snakes out there?” she’d ask. “What if we get lost?” This had become the running theme of our relationship: off-trail versus on-trail; playing it safe versus playing it bold; the novel versus the familiar; how worn paths separate the rote from what’s interesting. Maybe that’s why she had always liked cats more than dogs: cats are content at home; dogs have to leave the house to run. No, that wasn’t accurate either, just like my motives weren’t so benevolent. I wanted her to experience the redwoods, yes, and I also wanted her to be more like me so I didn’t have to think about my own wildness and deficiencies.

  “We won’t get lost,” I told her over and over.

  “Maybe at some point,” she would say. I knew that meant never if I didn’t facilitate it.

  I might have pushed too far. “In the Redwoods,” I’d said, “you expect a brontosaurus to peer out from behind a tree. It’s that surreal.” Mushrooms would “enhance” this quality.