My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (36 page)

“Great,” I said, “thank you,” and for the first time in a long while I felt like maybe I had someplace to go, someplace to feel safe and protected from the anxiety, the craziness, the pain and agony swirling in hurricane formation around me, settling on me like a season.

Junebug vs. hurricane.

I e-mailed the priest three times and never received a response. I visited the cathedral, and each time I went, it was locked, and I was left outside in the rain to look onto the baroque and Gothic spires, the worn faces of saints in the nooks overlooking the doors, and I had to keep my pain and anguish to myself, carry it back to my car because I couldn't leave it at their door as had been our deal, and I took another Xanax and went home to find a moment of quiet in a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin and another Netflix series.

Many days ended with something like, “Oh, no! The doctors have overlooked something and it looks like she'll never speak again,” so I'd go home that night and try to incorporate that new idea into my tapestry of fears. Or they would say, “We just had these new results! She's developed a new hypothalamus and she'll be ready to go home in a week!” and I'd drive home that night higher than happiness, listening to Burt Bacharach and yelling out the window with joy: “It's over, it's over, and she's going to be all right!”

At this point, Steph had been removed from the harness and she was lying in her bed, braces and medieval medical devices forcing her limbs and feet to heal back into their proper shape after being crushed.

Much earlier, it had been revealed that she had very little of her anti-seizure medication in her bloodwork, and everyone had been puzzled and cautious about saying anything that might have led to some sense of responsibility or litigation, I could tell, but I was able to say it quite clearly: Steph had stopped taking her full script because she felt the Lamictal made her thinking fuzzy, and she was more than three weeks behind on her work, so she was working long, late days and playing a dangerous game of chance, which she wound up losing that night.

A photo of the wreck appeared in the local news blogs, and it was deeply painful to see, astonishing as to how she had survived such a catastrophic impact. Her Jeep had plummeted nearly twenty feet, onto its rooftop. Our camping equipment littered I-5, as flares lit up the site and cars drove cautiously around our detritus, my favorite pillow, out on the icy interstate. It was horrible to imagine, horrible to think what she'd endured that night, under there, awaiting rescue.

Meanwhile, both her parents were still going through their own medical procedures, recovering from their accidents, in which they'd each lost an eye. Steph's mother needed some preparation for her ocular cavity before she flew back east to see her optometrist, who was supplying her with a false eye, and in the meantime she still walked around like Yoko Ono, wearing sunglasses indoors. Her dad still had his own physical therapy to cope with his healing ribs, and some other procedures to do with the eye in which he lost vision. So it was a family in a number of stressful situations, and they weren't easy to navigate, and still, I didn't understand my role, why I remained by her side, an intruder into their family's pain.

As the days wore on and our better natures began to crumble under the stress, I came to feel like a reprobate, or a scoundrel, around them, not a scoundrel like Rhett Butler or Han Solo, but more like Peter Lorre in
Casablanca
. And after spending all that time with them, I realized that this had been a part of Steph's plan all along: I represented further discomfort for her parents, making them squirm at the Mexican, whom they now had to depend upon. She'd put them through the lesbian relationships, now it was time for the nonwhites, and Catholics, male though they might be, subverting a deep prejudice with a lighter one.

It took about a month but I finally had to call Sarah once more, one afternoon, when I could no longer endure their bickering, exclusion, and target for attack, and feeling like I still had to be “the good guy.” I dialed Sarah around 2:00 p.m., as I knew her to be the only person with a schedule as open as mine was usually, and said, “Can I please just come over and climb into your bed to sleep? I can't go home and be alone anymore. I need Jack County. I need to be around dogs and listen to people,” and she said, “Absolutely. Come right over.”

She didn't have to say a word when I arrived, just led me up to her bedroom and pulled the shades, and I stripped to my underclothes and climbed into bed. Then some moments later she climbed in as well and we made love in the most manic, silent way possible in that afternoon daylight. When it was over, she slipped away and locked the door after the dog came in and lay down next to me, curled up like a croissant at my legs, and slept with his large head on my knees and his big bear paw on my hip, reassuring both of us that the other was there. I finally slept, slept like a pack member—and the wolf, for the first time in weeks, was left outside the door.

That was what it took for me to realize that Sarah was not someone to defend against, that there was safety in our pack of two. Sarah's own situation had been in fast dissolution after her husband had asked her for a divorce, and in my condition and general state, there was really no way a woman of Sarah's estimation would ever look my way as a potential mate, unless she wanted a tawdry affair to get her girlfriends talking or rouse her ex-husband's ire, which was what I was accustomed to. But in her own current typhoon of her life's deconstruction and how I was walking the earth now, looking haunted and broken, it triggered something in her, and we were actually a viable commodity, began seeing each other almost every day after this. I would come over after my shift at the hospital and bring wine, and she'd make dinner and feed us these wonderful home-cooked meals, while I sat at the counter in that kitchen and recounted the day's events, explained how matters were now dire, or were now looking up, and she'd tell me what she could about her divorce, and how it was profoundly affecting her life, her kid, her family.

I'd slump on a stool at her counter and try to reconnect to humanity.

I'd bring a bottle or two and she'd make pork chops or salmon or something nourishing, and we'd talk and eat, listen to music, and take care of one another as best we could.

Sometimes, when she cooked, it was something as simple as toast, twelve-grain bread from the Essential Bakery with a slab of butter. I couldn't remember toast being so goddamned delicious and fulfilling. It made me stop one afternoon, as I sat there and marveled at the simple transformation.

“Sarah,” I asked her as she was getting out our favorite goblets for the ten-dollar bottle of red grocery store wine.

“Yeah?” she responded.

“Darling, don't make fun of me for asking this, but what's the difference between bread and toast? I mean, it's just heat, right?”

She thought about this for a moment, understood what I was really asking.

“It's the caramelization of sugars,” she said, and we were both quiet for a moment, taken by the kitchen metaphor. “It's like the William James philosophy of the ‘once born' and the ‘twice born.' ”

It also reminded me of the myth of Martin Luther, when he visited Rome and was astonished at the corruption, the wholesale consumption of indulgences. When he took too long doing his transfiguration ceremony, some cynical, veteran Roman priest whispered in his ear, “Bread thou art, bread thou shalt remain.” Hence the splintering.

Somehow, it all fell into place for me, that simplicity.

What it takes to transform a person into actualization.

Those recondite nights are my only fond memories of this time, how we'd stretch out on her bed, in the dark, after making love, and she'd nod off right away, from the exhaustion of the sex, the life we were living, and the red wine, perhaps, and I'd stay awake, sitting up in her bed, watching movies on her laptop and taking Benadryl after Benadryl so that I could sleep, but they would never work, not even with the red wine.

She'd come awake sometimes, rest her hand on my back.

“Have you slept?” she'd ask.

“I can't,” I'd say.

“Why don't you take a shower?” she'd suggest, and at first I'd disagree, demure and pass, but then eventually I would nod my head and follow through, stand under the burning water, my hand resting against the black-and-white tile in her shower, and just allow the water to change the feeling of my skin.

I'd come back to bed and she'd be awake, yawning.

“I feel better,” I'd report, and she would say, “I wonder if any other animal has learned to stand under water for reassurance,” as she yawned and fell back asleep, leaving me there to wonder at that thought, and at her, and I would maybe then be able to sleep.

We were like two POWs, holding one another up during a death march,knowing we were smack-dab in the middle of the march and uncertain as to exactly how long it was going to be or whether it was ever going to end,but at the very least, in the immediate future, we had to hold each other up: That was the first principle. And the sex began to reflect that: We'd close down for the night and lock ourselves up in her guest bedroom with very little light coming through the shutters on the closet door, and we would go at each other like karate students, in the dark, these shapeless shadows,legs and arms and borderless lands, perspiration and fingers and hair, with all the ferocity of fear and animal mind. That was the only place throughout all this insanity, in that dark bedroom and in the velocity of our lovemaking, where we would entirely lose sight of one another and leave our bodies to become these patterns of sensations and images of sensuality and exertion bordering on physical threat, would lose each other and ourselves in something so primitive and, really, the only resource left to us, which was this trigger of desperation and passion, could finally lose identity and all that marked us, all that defined us in that obscurity, and the wolf would finally know that there was one boundary it couldn't breach, would have to instead cross its paws and sleep that moment while Sarah and I blended into one another with physicality, until we each woke up the next morning and dressed and returned to our duties in keeping the wolf sated, keeping our lives from really breaking apart. I would put my other mask back on and drive downtown to see what Steph's parents needed that next day, then pull out my last emotional equities so that I could get it for them.