Willnot (6 page)

Despite serial EEGs, scans, spinal taps, consultations and conjecture, the doctors never diagnosed the origins of the coma. What we can tell you is just to live, they said. Embrace your life. Don’t look back.

Once you’ve experienced that kind of siege illness, you’re forever expecting its return at the first signs of disturbance—indigestion, dizziness, swelling, pain. For years I went to bed anticipating that I might wake up a year later, or never. The thought still drops into my mind late at night sometimes. But
such an experience can recut the patterns of your life. Definitely it set me on the path to med school.

What the doctors didn’t know, what no one knew, was that I hadn’t been alone. The visitors, the others, came to me as I lay there. I don’t know when they arrived, the first day, further along, but they were there for most of it. The only world and time I had was theirs.

Before them, there was no blackness, no awareness. Nothing. Then thoughts that seemed fully my own slid into my mind, the memory of walking with an older man along train tracks in woods, and I was opening my eyes, looking around. But my eyes met only blur out there, and I shut them again. As unbearable pain from the burns swept over me.

It could be that my mind, recoiling from the pain, fled that first visitation, but I can’t honestly accept that I possessed even so minute a degree of control.

We sat outside a coffee shop, the woman and I, her name was Judith, and I knew, knew without precedent or indication, that she was about to dump me. Many years had passed since them. But as the waiter approached, a great tide of loss swelled within me, as I ordered, as I waited. Her hand reached across the table for mine.

Above me, somewhere near the room’s ridged green wall coverings and the silent TV’s scrambling cars, words were being mouthed. They were telling me again what happened, how they came home and found me facedown on the floor, that I would be okay. Spanish. And while I don’t speak Spanish, I understood every word.

No, not I: the man on the bed.

Again, my eyes opened. I looked up at the light-blue ceiling. Blue, was that the right word? And through the window at a darkening sky. No sense of where I was. Sounds past the door. People talking, phones ringing, heavy objects being moved about. Lifted
my hand into light from the hallway. Tube, needle, tape. Thick, ropy blue veins. Faded white line on the third finger where some time ago a ring had been. Hospital armband with a name I, we, don’t recognize.

Hundreds of them moved through me as I lay there. First those nearby, other patients, nurses, visitors, staff. Then, gradually, people beyond the hospital walls, out on the street, at the bus stop, across town.

When I woke at the end of that dormant year and my sister, realizing that I was back among the living, stood, I saw myself there on the bed as she drew toward me, I walked with her (right leg stiff and painful from a bike accident) across the floor, I felt the tug of carpet at her shoes, felt the explosion of joy within—felt everything she felt.

And so it would be for some time after. I’d be pouring milk into my coffee mug and with no warning find myself sitting on a riverbank. As I walked by an office high-rise the all-but-unbearable emotional pain of someone within would crash down into me. I lived with double vision: here and not here, I and not-I, I and other. I lived, walked, slept and dreamed in multiple worlds.

Over time it faded, so slowly at first that I took little notice. I was busy, with school, with chores, books, friends. Fishing with my sister. (We called what we did fishing, but mostly this amounted to sitting side by side with poles and tackle box talking.) Till one day—I was in college by then, eighteen or so—I found myself reaching for what was no longer there, understood that I had been doing so, thoughtlessly, for months.

Sometimes even then, in flashes, in stabs, the visitors would come to me, a face, a keen of sadness, shadows. Blades of light sweeping through darkness and quickly gone.

Before the doors shut (I thought) for good.

“The bodies weren’t alone in there,” Seb Daiche said, eyes veering to the coffeemaker against the back wall as it began loudly burping. He’d arrived from the site looking like an extra in a safari movie: khaki pants, brown shirt with sleeves rolled above the elbows, brown vest-jacket with multiple pockets. All of it well-worn and well kept. “There was something else under them. Roots, or an ancient cellar, we thought when we first hit. Old wood.”

Marcie dealt the plate with my bagel onto the counter and stepped back. Waiting for me to check my cards.

“Anything else?” she said.

Seb asked if tea was possible. Hot? She glanced at him, shook her head, and went to get it.

“Wooden trunks. Two of them, set side by side. Pretty much rotted away, naturally.”

“Put there at the same time as the bodies?”

“From all evidence, yes. Almost like a platform. A floor.”

“Or Egyptians burying possessions the dead would need in the afterlife,” Richard said, and went back to his oatmeal.

“What was in the trunks?”

“Chances are good we’ll never know.” Seb stopped as Marcie brought a mug of steaming water and a caddy with a dozen or so tea packets. He shuffled through them, pulled out one that smelled faintly of oranges. When he dropped it in to steep, the smell grew strong. Clove in there too.

“The trunks were filled with papers,” Seb said.

Richard didn’t look up this time, only said, “Not Confederate money as in old movies.”

“Just paper. All of it far gone. Whatever the groundwater, worms and insects didn’t bleach out or eat away, the chemicals took care of. Our forensics people back in Arizona may find something to latch onto. But if they do, it won’t be much.”

Having told us what he came for, Seb Daiche knocked back his tea in a single draw and strode out against the incoming wave of breakfast diners.

“Things to do, people to see.”

Richard smiled. “Evidently. And I need to be seen at school. But what he said—”

“Which was very little.”

“—takes me back. Years and years ago, once when things got really,
really
bad, on the advice of a friend I went to see a Zen master. I tried to talk, to tell him what was going on, out in the world, up in my head, and he stopped me. Sit perfectly still in a room, he said. Do nothing. Think nothing. Sit still in that room for a long time and all possible versions of your self will arise. Realizing they have no reason to stay around, they will depart, leaving behind peace. Peace and your one true self.”

“You stood up and walked out.”

“Hey … that was going to be a good story.”

“I may know you too well for stories.”

“Stories are all we have, Lamar.”

Briefly he touched my hand there on the counter. Our eyes met. My heart paced in its cage.

And one of my possible selves got up off its butt and went to work. Fearlessly into the quotidian.

Specifically a midmorning exploratory laparotomy that turned into a bowel resection, a messy procedure more akin to plumbing or sausage-making than to heroic surgery. Mr. Mayson would be, as Gordie Blythe so eloquently put it, “bagging his goodies for a while,” but he’d also be making a full recovery, back to work at his mom-and-pop in three to four weeks.

As I stood there for three-plus hours cutting, stitching, and shooting the bull with fellow sailors, baroque music pumping away in the background, a part of my mind wandered off to Richard’s Zen story, and from there to all the years I had wondered why it was that I lived among the broken. My father, mother, their friends, other families of which I caught glimpses—most everyone, it seemed. Till with age it occurred to me that we’re all broken, just in different ways. And that the brokenness makes us interesting, makes us who we are.

Ollie Rice was my first patient when I came to Willnot. Huge man who looked as though he could tuck a cow under each arm then go for a leisurely stroll. Along in years but with a full head of hair, albeit it of such a shade of red as to be almost pink, and eyes dark as river stone. He came in, took the chair across my desk. I said something along the lines of what can I help you with and, waiting for response, realized that he was staring past me, over my shoulder.

“The sky is not right. The blue,” he said.

I turned to look. Clouds, sketchy trees. Sky.

“Wallpaper,” he went on. “I know, I know. Only wallpaper. But still, the blue is wrong.”

So I’m thinking Oh dear. But it turns out that Ollie’s here not for depression, paranoia, or any of the
DSM
’s three hundred–plus officially diagnosable mental disorders, he’s here for gout. Something I can actually help with.

Mentally ill? Who in tarnation (as Richard the schoolmarm would say, were we indeed in the old West) knows? It’s a bottomless bag, that term, all kinds of squirmy stuff in there. And Ollie, the town’s top mechanic, had worked it out. He’d found purchase and balance. Not really much of a problem that the frame was off plumb.

And a large part of the charm of Willnot.

The place you grow up, the places you live as a kid, you don’t give them much thought. Everyone drives a ten-year-old pickup or VW van, well then, that’s what people drive. Your house has big honking cattle horns on the front door, you figure everybody does or should or wants to. I’m not sure that as a kid I’d have recognized weird if it walked up and spit in my face. People in Willnot tend to dwell at the thin edge of maps, more than a few of them staring tygers in the eye. Something in their nature that draws them here, keeps them here? Or that seeps in over time from contact? Stand them up against a straight line, they’ll lean.

There are no churches in Willnot. A string of them outside the town limits but none within, by ordinance. No Walmart, no chain grocery or pharmacy, discount or big-box stores. No billboards, no street advertising, plain storefronts. “I got on the bus in 2002 and got off it in 1970,” Richard says of when he came here.

Over the years as I bounced from place to place, friends complaining that single-handedly I had made a mess of their
address books, gradually it occurred to me that no place I’d been came close to Willnot’s tolerance for its inhabitants. Not that anyone patently encouraged transgressive or aberrant behavior, but the town refused to isolate exhibitioners thereof, or to hold them in disesteem. With a social equivalent of the Gallic shrug, the town stood back and went on about its business.

Towards noon we got Mr. Mayson squared away in ICU and I defaulted to the office, where Maryanne had five patients corralled. When I mentioned to her that one of the fish was belly-up in the tank, everyone walked over to look.

Routine afternoon. A follow-up for Mrs. Aber who’d broken her hip climbing on a chair to get down a box of mason jars. A teenager with flulike symptoms and, with auscultation, mild rales. What would most likely be just a severely sprained ankle but could be a fracture, so off for X-rays. A newlywed just
sure
she was pregnant. She wasn’t. A man brought in by family from Palm Shadows, a retirement home next town over, with what amounted to diaper rash. Last one on the boards was a new patient. I don’t get them all that often around here, so they’re a pleasure. I love taking H&Ps. It’s like reading a biography with all the dull stuff, the dinners and visits from relatives, the bootleg revelations, excised. Kevin Sohl was in his late forties, unmarried, and after living his whole life within a six-mile radius in a “balls-to-the-wall” East Coast city, had picked up of a sudden and put down here. When I asked how it was working out for him so far he said he’d get back to me on that. He didn’t have insurance, would pay cash, and wanted to know if that was a problem. Not with anyone I know, I told him.

Time then for Richard’s annual nonbirthday party. We had everything set up by seven—hors d’oeuvres on the dining table out front, freshly cut bread, cheese and raw vegetables scattered about,
warm food in the oven, wine open and wheezing its slow prime breaths on the kitchen island—with minutes to spare before the first guests arrived. Predictably, Gordie was one of those. Besides a bottle of Scotch that deserved a long gray beard to befit its stature and time on earth, he brought with him a friend visiting from Portland, a physicist who as the evening drew on drank a bit much and began to speak a language no one else understood, English yes, but studded with strange nouns and what seemed a rogue use of verbs, the latter often followed by
of course
.

At one point he and Len Bittner, who teaches philosophy at the state college, stood in a corner of the kitchen together, each speaking his own professional language as the other nodded in wild agreement. Portions I overheard brought home how long it had been since I was in school. How much of what was taught me, how many certainties and core assumptions, now were in question—or discredited?

Richard and I kept ourselves occupied setting out skewers of meat, cutting fresh bread, refilling glasses and trays, wiping spills, scooping up cast-off plates and food. From time to time as feasible, one or the other of us would touch down at some coordinate, a couch, a doorway, a table’s edge, to engage in fitful conversation before the tides again took us away.

Around ten, when most of the longhaulers had sunk onto chairs, windowsills or other improvised seats, I went outside. There’s an alleyway out back, shored by a stand of oleander across, by thick hedges on our side.

“You could come in, you know.”

Bobby Lowndes stepped from behind the garage. “Never much for social situations.”

“You’ve been here a while now. I saw you better than an hour ago.”

“I know.”

“I could bring you some food. A drink.”

Lights went on behind the oleanders. Bobby turned his head that way. “You didn’t tell me your sister died in Afghanistan,” he said.

“It’s not something I talk about.”

Bobby looked up. “Getting crisp. Winds about six mph now, but there’s a push behind. Those clouds’ll have heavy bellies come morning.”

He looked down the alley. In the dark, this isolated path could be the whole world.