A Match to the Heart (7 page)

In the morning, a driver took me to the airport and I had to lie flat in the back seat to stay conscious. The plane was like a drug that lifted me out of the human world with its sorrows and entanglements. I stretched out with pillows and blankets. In the past I had preferred sleeping on hard ground, gravel walkways, granite ledges in high mountains. Now the simple comfort of a soft seat was an unexpected gift. To surrender and sink and still be carried forward all night across the sea was trancelike, as if I had stumbled upon life beyond death that magically becomes life again. The Atlantic was a great river running north and south under me, a channel through which lightning sometimes pulsed, but I was shooting across it at right angles, far above, where lightning could not touch me.

London cheered me as nothing else had for a long time. During the summer months of June and July, I had collaborated with a British choreographer, Siobhan Davies, on an evening-length ballet and had only gone home to the ranch in early August, to rest up, ride my colts, and help neighbors move cattle before returning to work with the company again—and that was when I was struck by lightning. Now opening night at Queen Elizabeth Hall in the South Bank Theatre complex was a day away. The dance, the music, and my text had been put together without me.

I felt safe staying with my friends, Siobhan (“Sue”) Davies and David Buckland—who designs her sets—because he had a heart problem too. When an infection from an abcessed tooth traveled to his heart, David suffered from endocarditis—a fast-moving infection that caused nine cardiac arrests. He is now alive, thanks to a pacemaker and a mechanical mitral valve, whose ticking could be heard in the quiet theater when I stood next to him. His cardiologist lived nearby, and I knew David would understand when and if I needed help and how urgent that need can be.

The next twenty-four hours were spent in the theater. I lounged in velvet-covered seats, legs propped up, amazed at the spectacle of our dance. All summer we had rehearsed in a crowded and unglamorous hall in a Soho synagogue. Now, for the first time, I saw the spectacle of our creation.

 
 
The dance—choreographed from a poem cycle I wrote after being in the Canadian high Arctic—was both stark and sensual, fluid and athletic, graceful and erotic, with impossible contortions of male and female bodies that resolved into gestures of solitude or ardent embraces. Above them a single revolving light stood for the Arctic's circling sun. The stage was blue: a blue backdrop with David's sixty-foot-long painting of Sue's body floating over the stage and a blue ground cloth nailed tight to the stage—the floor of the Arctic—from which dancers rose and into whose shadows they walked.

The day of the performance was also the day of the company's one and only technical rehearsal at Queen Elizabeth Hall. The two sixty-foot painted cloths were stretched and fastened, lighting cues were dictated, music was heard for the first time, and dancers struggled to get their timing just right. Peter Mumford, the lighting designer, had just flown in from St. Petersburg, where he had been working with the Kirov Ballet. When he saw the stage during the first run-through he decided the lights were all wrong and with five hours to go before the performance began he redesigned every cue.

The ground cloth tore the dancers' feet, and when they bled the canvas had to be retouched to cover the stains. There were blips and extra words no one had heard before in the music-and-text tape. I had recorded my poems in a studio and these had been cut into the electronic score. While the composer recut parts of the tape, we fiddled with sound levels, and it was the dancers who readjusted their timing—a process that wasn't completed until a few moments before they went onstage.

Soon enough ushers appeared holding programs, doors were opened, the stage lights dimmed. The last lighting cue had just been given moments before. Slowly the thousand-seat theater filled. I went to the lobby to greet two American friends. Outside on the terrace overlooking the Thames, the usual gray London sky had darkened with storm clouds. As the chimes rang, announcing the beginning of the performance, thunder clapped and lightning, rare in London, crackled over the river. David ran outside and grabbed me: “For God's sake, get inside!” Just as I found my seat, the lights dimmed and the dance began.

 
 
Seeing our collaborative work unfold on a large open stage—no proscenium, no rules by which we can declare what in our lives is fiction and what is “reality”—as if the two were different, as if it did not all come from the same imaginative source—was a gift, a new life, canceling out for a moment the huge and ungainly blank that lightning-induced amnesia had deposited in my private narrative of how things had been and, therefore, how things are now. The lines I had written for the dance seemed an echo: “You walk inside yourself on roads and ropes of blood vessels and tendons, you walk inside yourself and eat weather ...”

Gladly I made for the shoreless shore of an open stage that stands for life with no boundaries, for the “bardo” of uncertainty and for whatever transpires inside the synaptic gap. I watched the line of my grappling hook play out, loose and shimmering in the dark until it came tight, fastening me to those elastic dancers, to David's blue stage of shadow and memory ticking with his pacemaker's time, and the moving planes of light that Peter had made, and together we jigged into the night.

It was time to go home. I was desperately tired. The last leg of my journey began to feel Odyssean. Overestimating my resilience, I had planned, on my return home, to go on a sixteen-city book tour for my publisher to promote a new book. Ten minutes into the first of these readings I had to excuse myself and sit down before I fell. The next day I flew across the country. Just as my plane landed in San Francisco the flames of a fire that would blacken much of Oakland broke into view and while driving to Sausalito, white ash thickened on the windshield—some of which, I found out later, was the burning pages of other writers' manuscripts.

Flying from Portland to Seattle, I experienced what felt like a heart attack: deep anginal chest pain. When I got off the plane I was gray, sweating, breathless, and my left arm felt numb. My heart was trying to pump enough blood and oxygen to raise my blood pressure but couldn't keep up with the demand. I rested for five days in a posh suite that previously had been inhabited, the maid informed me gushingly, by Jeff Bridges, a movie star. She seemed dismayed now that she'd have to bring coffee to an ordinary mortal with chest pains.

The president of my publishing company faxed this message: “Stop the tour now. Go home immediately. A dead author does us no good.” But I had to rest another few days before I could travel.

I finally boarded the plane that would take me to California. It was an airbus, large and completely full. Just before liftoff there was a loud explosion. The plane lurched, then the pilots slammed on the brakes so hard, people were thrown about. My forehead hit the seat in front of me and my heart seized up—pure stress—until I had trouble breathing.

The plane came to a stop, then turned and taxied back to the terminal. No soothing words from the captain; no words from anyone. Just a stunned silence. I asked the young man next to me to press the buzzer. When the flight attendant came, I told her I thought I might be having a heart attack. She brought oxygen-though she looked as pale as I did. I popped nitroglycerin, and offered her some. She didn't know if I was making a joke. The pain stopped, then after ten or fifteen minutes started again. I breathed in and tried to relax. This was beginning to get funny, except I was too tired to laugh. If only I could get home and lie down and not have to get up again.

Hours later we were on a new plane bound for Los Angeles. The friends who met me said it was too late to drive to Santa Barbara; they had reserved a hotel room for me, and though I was frightened to stay alone, I didn't say so but went obediently to bed. Not knowing where I was when I woke each morning was no longer a surprise. The surprise was that I was alive.

chapter 10

Water puts out fire. The restoration of my health depended on it. If I stopped following fire, simply stopped, perhaps fire would stop erupting all around me. In the morning I was driven to my new abode, an airy, spare beach house rented from a friend. Though I had been born in Santa Barbara, I had never known how the city was named or who Saint Barbara was. Now the coincidence seemed uncanny.

In the 1700s, after being caught in a fierce thunderstorm, the secretary to the Portuguese explorer, Juan Cabrillo, who was passing through the channel, gave the Chumash village the name Santa Barbara in thanks to the saint for keeping him alive during the storm. He had chosen Saint Barbara for a reason. Born Barbara Dioscorus, she was the daughter of a wealthy man who became enraged when she converted to Christianity. In revenge, he had her beheaded, but immediately he was struck by lightning and killed. After, Barbara was made a saint who protected those threatened by thunder, lightning, and fire. Perhaps I had come to the right place at the right time.

In my airy living room, I lit a candle for Saint Barbara and read about amulets, household protectors, good luck charms such as the leaves of elder and bay trees, holly, ivy, and mistletoe, houseleek grown on a roof, mugwort, orpine, Saint-John's wort, or rosemary, all of which are said to protect a house from lightning.

For so many years the ranch in Wyoming had felt like the center of the world. In its wild solitude, communities of plants and animals came into existence and died; the seasons battered us; friends came and went; hard work engraved itself in our skins. Now I was someplace else and alone. No dogs greeted me, and there were no chores to be done in the morning.

Simple and spare, the beach house shook on its pilings each time a wave broke against sand. Floor-to-ceiling windows faced the ocean on one side, and mountains and a salt marsh studded with egrets and blue herons on the other. From my parents' house a mile away, one could see right through my living room as though through an X-ray in which I had been caught trespassing.

In my coming-back-to-life dream I had been crucified and suspended in the ocean. That's why, now, I wanted to live at water's edge. Here, I would surrender to whatever swam through me: death nailed to life. Here, I would be restored.

The cruciate form is an arbor vitae, a tree of life, a human with arms outstretched in surrender. The horizontal bar is the road we travel, the linear direction of a life, and the vertical stave is the spiritual elevator that lifts and drops us from the realm of the gods to the underworld, passing through the middle where the human heart is pinned, representing the necessity of blending sacred with secular.

During my first night in the house, the sky cleared and the Big Dipper's handle dropped down behind a chaparral-covered peak as if to say that Wyoming, where I had spent many winters, was buried deep inside the mountain and was no longer accessible to me.

At dawn, a white rainbow—a fogbow—arched out of turbulent channel waters and touched the roof. I called Blaine and told him I had not expected to still be alive. He laughed and said, “Of course you're not dead.” After, I sat on granite boulders piled in front of the long string of houses as protection against storms. The tides were a form of breathing and the waves were big. In one I saw a single leaf of seaweed suspended in green bubbles, pointing upward, rising as the wave crested, pointing toward light.

 
 
My dry eyes filled with tears—not grief exactly, but bewilderment. I was in exile, not in a foreign country, but my own home-town. The wind off the ocean was cold but my tears were heated by subcutaneous fires following the path lightning had taken inside my body, the way ground fires follow tree roots. With binoculars, I glassed the coast north in the direction of Blaine's house, and beyond to Point Conception, the Chumash charnel ground. The stepladder of electricity out of which a lightning stroke is made is the ladder I climbed, fell from, and climbed again.

The bottoms of my feet and the palms of my hands were hot. Everything liquid in me boiled. Now the open window to the outside world from which I had withdrawn sucked in cool fog, viscous as flesh, while my own body was ash riding marine air.

Under a full moon, one western grebe paddled the up and down swing of incoming swells. The sea was charcoal. Its deep creases surged into waves that knocked the storm wall. During Dickens's time it was thought that coastal people died during ebb tide. “ ‘People can't die, along the coast,' ” said Mr. Peggotty in David
Copperfield,
“ ‘except when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh in—not properly born 'til flood. He's a-going out with the tide.... If he lives 'til it turns, he'll hold his own ‘til past the flood, and go out with the next tide.' ”

I was in luck for a few hours, the tide was coming in. At sunset pink light channeled upward in bright stalks like the aurora. A lone pelican skimmed by as the red globe of sun dropped below the horizon. How could it disappear like that? Would it return? Far out on a western point, three surfers rose and fell as if doing prostrations, as if their devotion could bring the sun back again.

 
 
High tide. The stairs to the sand, carved into granite boulders, were wet, and in moonlight the boulders themselves looked like the storms against which they gave protection. I lay in bed with the windows wide open. Where was the grebe? Was she still floating, or had she gone to some safe haven for the night? Perhaps high tide would carry her into my house of glass, glass being nothing but heated sand. I was afraid to sleep because my body felt heavy, like an injured horse who can no longer get to his feet but lifts his head from time to time and begs for mercy. I lay quietly, but each time a wave crashed, the tremor of the house stirred all my thinking.