The More You Ignore Me (20 page)

I then aimed my smile at Rico, but he was also in tears, as he reared back once again and thrust his fist forward into Corn's face, which, upon impact, snapped back at an odd angle, then fell with a wet smack against the edge of the stage.

I couldn't have cared less about Corn, but I saw that Rico now turned toward me with rage in his eyes.

The realization crept upon me that I had once again been misunderstood.

I had overestimated humanity.

I had been let down.

Amidst their wailing for me to “Call an ambulance!” I found myself possessed by a force seemingly outside of myself.

A curious glossolalia overcame me as I grabbed Rachil by the arm and spun her toward me (to touch her was divine!).

I gazed into her clear green eyes but felt that some other presence was behind me, gazing through my own (also green!) eyes into hers.

A voice spoke within me.

Was it mine?

No.

I opened my mouth to speak, to let this voice out, but I felt suddenly ill.

I could taste the bottom of my stomach (a cold, milky secretion puddled there), and every pore began filling with heat as a vile flapping belch escaped me, washing over Rachil's closely held face.

She slumped to the floor in a convulsion, and a stabbing pain doubled me over.

I made it only a few steps into the yard before I (shamefacedly) wretched.

Through the spittle and bile I yelled to the imbeciles, “Don't look at me!” to no avail.

There are times when vomiting is the end of a journey, when it signals the end of a long episode of internal roiling; afterwards, relief engulfs one's body like a cool bath on a sweltering day.

This was not one of those times.

This upheaval signaled, rather, a journey's beginning, the first step on the rest of my life's path.

I stumbled into the street and vomited once more, this time a curiously red mixture, tangy and sour, with tickly lumps.

I tried to catch the expulsion in my hands, but the gesture proved futile and most of the vomit splashed onto my right leg, hot at first, but quickly cool, a tepid caking.

I looked back at my confreres, but it was as if I were trying to read a street sign from behind an aquarium (I've thought long and hard about what exactly this blurring resembled, and I believe this aquarium analogy is remarkably astute), yet despite it all I could still just make out two watery figures standing in the doorway of the church, silhouetted once again by the kitchen light.

I reached out my hand, knowing I wouldn't of course be able to touch them but wanting some acknowledgment that they were and would be watching over me should unconsciousness overtake me, as seemed imminent.

I saw the dull blade of Rico's outline lean into sloping Rachil's before ushering her back inside to, no doubt, care for the bleeding Corn.

I attempted to speak but out came a flood of other matter.

I collapsed.

From the warm, now-wet concrete I could see the door to the church shutting me out forever.

There was a profound sadness all around, dripping from the trees.

I could hear it, and the sound was nearly death itself.

I again tried to catch the matter pouring from my mouth but I found my hands had gone numb.

I sprang up with the last of my energy and ran for what felt like hours but was surely only a few blocks until the numbness spread to my legs, then my face.

All was a fuzzed blank, but it proved only a temporary respite from the pain, for within seconds my muscles began to seize within my skin—every bit of meat, from my quadriceps to my dorsals, became rigid, my face became a rictus of pain, and I found I could no longer open my eyes.

I felt more matter violently leaving my face by way of my flared nostrils, but I couldn't move my hands to stop the expulsion.

It's a curious sensation to finally understand how you will die.

Not the manner in which you will die—which becomes suddenly irrelevant,
FYI
—but rather how you will feel and what you will think at the instant when life ceases, whenever that time might occur.

In this case, while my external circumstances were quite dramatic—as I assume they will be when the true moment of my death arrives—internally, I was taking a rather calm accounting of my situation; I was able to assess my physical status and conclude that the whole episode was inane.

The fuzzing and blurring of my vision, the rigid calcifying of my musculature, the sudden inside-out nature of my digestion—it was all just stupid.

This is the height of idiocy, I thought. A muddled and inappropriate procedure.

Now, looking back, I understand that this is how it feels to die, how Corn surely must have felt there in the church, bleeding on the stage.

In an idiotic fit of dimness and confusion, while one's attention is elsewhere, life will leave through an unseen exit.

You too, dear readers, will die this way.

The body fails and the mind registers its disappointment, its disapproval, and then . . . well, that is the more interesting question, isn't it?

What happens after the dull slip of life from one's body?

Do you believe in an afterlife, dear readers?

In heaven?

In hell?

You might stop to consider the possibilities.

I believe in a long gray corridor where time does not exist.

Whether this is heaven or hell I do not know, nor did I, at this moment, when the disorder reached its moronic climax, get a chance to find out, for I was spared.

I soon heard sirens, tires squealing, the crunch of boots on concrete, and then I was jostled.

Gruff voices asked me obvious questions (“Are you okay?” “Can you hear me?” “Can you move your arms?”).

My facial muscles remained locked, so I merely tried to exhale loudly from my nose to signal my exasperation (and that I was, in fact, alive).

More matter squished from me instead, and I noted the gruff voices register disapproval at the mess I had apparently made.

I made a mental note to let the departments responsible know that I didn't appreciate their minions' haughtiness and inattention at that moment (fear not, I let them know!).

I also did not appreciate the minions' response to the next moment when further matter exited my person through my stinging and tender rear end.

Loaded into the ambulance,
IVS
were administered and further questions asked.

I must have lost consciousness at some point, because the next moment I remember, my eyes did finally open to reveal watery shapes, blobs of color floating above me like fleshy balloons.

Feeling had returned to my limbs, but just barely, so I found that despite all my efforts, my arms would only strike out spasmodically at seemingly random intervals, my legs jerk up to my chest, etc. I tried to speak but could only cry out in gasping rhythms.

What did I want to say?

I am only somewhat ashamed to admit that I wanted to say I had once again soiled myself and at that moment I felt the soilage seeping to unsavory places, stinging in my crevices. The thinner blog (Dear me! Blog! I meant to type “blob”! Paging Dr. Freud!!!) above me murmured at my screams while the fatter one cooed, but neither solved the equation.

My hand.

I could point, couldn't I? I tried but nothing of note occurred. Perhaps this was simply my lot, to lie in filth. I began to sob quietly to myself, warm tears in rivulets down my temples.

There's an odd comfort to crying, a loosening of the strictures around one's heart; I've never been ashamed of it, and in this case I felt it calming me.

Someone would eventually clean me; I was in a hospital after all, and that is what members of the hospital staff do (though suddenly I couldn't detect any hospital staff about).

The lights had dimmed but for the soft glow of the
TV
my “roommate” (heretofore undetected) had on.

I felt a sigh escape me, and my head began to sit heavily on my neck. My legs began to relax, and a calm lightness suffused my person. Sleep would soon come.

Peace.

No, alas—my arm swung up in a massive twitch, sending my hand directly into my (apparently) open mouth. The
meat just below my thumb and forefinger landed flush between my teeth, and I bit down furiously.

The pain was a cartoon police siren, all red and wailing, the sharp pierce of skin, the dull crunch and pop of the gristly corpuscles as I chomped and chomped, muffling my cries with hand-flesh.

The lights came up in a rush and the blobs came back loud and direct.

My entire face felt wet when they pulled my hand away, and I felt my legs kick out, my back arch rigid.

The pain was exquisite, so I shut my eyes tight and tried to concentrate on its intricacies, to detail them in my cries.

No one understood . . .

Enough.

ENOUGH
!

Stop pulling at me, readers, stop tugging with your phantom fingers my very bones.

I won't let you jerk them out of my body to suck the marrow dry!

Do you think I can't feel it?

You can't have me!

Some things remain private.

What else do you want me to divulge?

Don't you have enough by this point to satisfy your wretched needs?

Stop reading, why don't you?

Go away!

Leave me alone!

Ah, but why worry?

You don't know a thing.

Read on if you must.

Take it!

It's nothing.

The real me escapes every time.

I can't stop your pursuit, I know.

You will continue to press yourselves into me in a vain attempt to understand this real me, but you will only find wisps of smoke and embers at the end of your journey, just like my mother.

Thirty years ago, she read the “hurtful” things I had written about her in my private journal, and our relationship was ruined forever after.

What did I write?

Was it my fault, after all?

Wouldn't you like to know, hateful reader, but I'll never tell, for some things, I've learned, must remain private, for their revelation destroys, such as was the case when I put too much trust in my mother's virtue.

I had such a journal then—leather bound with a black binding, gold-embossed lettering on the front declaring it to be “My Personal Journal” in cursive lettering—and I filled it with every transmission, every thought, every argument that caromed down the colonnades of my mind.

Some days I would simply look back over the pages and marvel at my erudition and wit, just as you surely do here, but then one morning—a wet Saturday in drab November—I absentmindedly left this journal on the shabby afghan atop my twin bed in my room while I went out for my weekly trip to the record store to—I remember it so well!—see what new arrivals the doughy clerk had chucked in the bins.

When I returned, I knew what hell was.

For years afterwards, dread and paranoia lurked behind my writing hand, for any word or combination of words might be exposed, misunderstood once again, inviting my mother's wrath, streaking sobs and pleading, tearing fingernails and lipsticked teeth upon me like a briney fisherman's net, suffocating me ever more despite my thrashing.

In fact, my behavior toward Corn and Rachil can be partially explained by this dread, if one cared to explain it.

My mother said I had “ruined everything” and that she was “horrified” by what I had written, though surely no
adolescent boy had
NOT
had similar thoughts, though I do know now that not every adolescent boy has the mind or courage to explore them.

Think of the safety I must have felt that I
COULD
explore such thoughts!

Isn't that worth anything?

Well, that safety was exploded by prying eyes.

Once my words had been wrenched from their private world, I no longer felt in control of the narrative of my life, and for someone who had long considered himself a master of narrative, this was a crushing blow; I spent the rest of my time in that house shuffling along in a stupor, the two of us, my mother and I, avoiding each other at all costs until the day I moved out with only a JanSport backpack, a Walkman, and a sense of integrity to my name.

My “story” by that time had become not the one I told myself privately, but rather some misbegotten version dimly perceived by an overemotional harpy.

I felt for years I was doomed to be misunderstood, and, the worst tragedy was further writing and “expression” only seemed to make it worse.

Since all I had ever done was write in an attempt to give shape to what felt like the lurching chaos of my time, without writing I was only an empty shell of myself, pasted down by depression and lethargy.