A Match to the Heart (12 page)

Late in the day all that was left was a sliver of light on palm tree trunks and the stems of fronds blunt-cut like hair. For so long I hadn't been able to see; that is, I didn't have the energy to absorb what was around me. Then things began to interest me again. After all, it was spring. I told Blaine I thought my cortex had turned green because it started giving me dreams: I was swimming upstream, leaping up waterfalls to get to a spawning ground. But someone—a huge human figure—was obstructing me. With legs spread, he stood above me, throwing me out of the river as I approached, but I leapt back in again.

Sometimes I walked the hills overlooking the ocean to get away from the drone of surf. I walked slowly and relished the return of migrating and mating songbirds. I wanted to walk when I could and it occurred to me that stillness doesn't mean not moving—seated meditation is only a reminder of a quality of mind in which one is wakeful, lively, spirited, humorous, not acting out of desperation.

 
 
At my new house a green symphony played: clumps of volunteer bamboo clacked so loudly it might have caused whole orchards of lemons to ripen, and woodpeckers drilled into palm trees. Dreaming had loosened the terrible claustrophobia I felt as a result of amnesia and six months of blank nights: it knocked peep-holes into the mind's closed rooms.

Blood orange and bitter lemon trees blossomed, rafts of migrating ducks flew north in ragged, aerodynamic formations half a mile out from shore, their many wings appearing as one, and swallows arrived to build mud nests on sea cliffs with an opening at the front so they could take in the view. Walking was my slow-motion flight from and back into civilization, my meditation in action. When afternoon winds came, clouds that rose above the islands were shaped like the islands—mist imitating lithe-sphere—and hillsides of eucalyptus bent their fragrance down to wild, whitecapped seas.

chapter 17

In April a dead seal washed up in front of my house, and a duck, and a Christmas tree. Where storms had stripped the beach of sand, exposing rough cobblestones, brown waves brought sand back, erasing all evidence of death, and in doing so, provided a fresh canvas on which to etch our comings and goings. Then other storms came, disinterring what had been hidden by sand.

Up and down this small beach, madness had not been a stranger: a house built on the edge of a Chumash burial ground burned; a woman's young lover stabbed her husband to death; a doctor put on his tweed coat to go to work but instead walked into the sea until it closed over his head.

New sand makes the beach a graveyard, sweeping over whatever was there a moment before, and the tides erase even that. And no matter how far a foot presses into the flesh of the earth, it is pulled from it again by water.

A beach is where the rock of the planet is ground down into minutae, where the general is splintered back into particulars only to become one thing again—a collective body of sands. Our human and animal bodies are mostly water, as is the planet, and water eventually takes everything and is everything—the true corpus whose aqueous flesh remains after bones have slipped from the envelope of skin and feathers have separated from wings.

This is the beach where I first touched a boy's penis during a makeout party, listening to Elvis and the Everly Brothers, quickly trying to figure out in the dark and under layers of clothes how it uncoiled and where it went when it stiffened. Now the house where we had those parties is closed up, and near the one that burned down a jacaranda tree blooms in cascading fire-works of red flowers. Beyond, dark creases in the sea opened and I saw the back of a migrating gray whale.

These intimations of spring were accompanied by a deterioration in my health. I had trouble staying conscious even when lying down. Blaine was in the Galapagos for two weeks and I decided to tough it out until he came home. One morning a painful knot in the center of my chest tightened. A dull ache traveled down my arm to the elbow, my heart resting in the elbow's bent L, trying to spell out something, maybe the word love, or maybe lost.

Chest pain has its own particular geography; it is territorial, rising in the center of the upper body; the heart is a taproot laboring to bring minerals to the surface. Sometimes pain wraps all the way around the back in long vinelike lianas pulling tight, and underneath, the heart is an island floating—maybe Greenland, or an aquifer with a tentative land cover like Labrador's, which makes me wonder why the equatorial waters at our centers, the punched hole of the naval or the muscular knot of the solar plexus, aren't thought to be the seat of love.

A voluptuous season of mountain wildflowers came and went, and I missed it. While trying to take Sam down to the beach one night, I passed out on the rock steps in front of my cottage and sprained my ankle. After that, I gave up even the least adventure. For ten days I was the sea's prisoner, a sea that looked swollen and hard, a single oscillating block. Each evening the sun slipped into its hiding place, which the Chumash say is the hole in the top of the sand dollar—and rested in its round, gold room.

The moon was a ghost that rode the ocean at night. Waves were the deformed prodigies of a marriage between moon and shore: they were the pages of an unwritten book. Wind scuttled white foam until it tore—an alphabet coming apart. People asked: “Are you still able to write?”

The aboriginal people of Taiwan thought there were originally two suns, but one was shot down with an arrow and became the moon. It might have been more fitting if the sand dollar had been designated as the resting place of the moon, since they reproduce once a month in summer on nights of the full moon. Such amorous and romantic creatures! Thousands of eggs are released into the sea where they float until they are found by sperm of their own kind: a rendezvous which is accomplished by special “recognition molecules,” -knobs of protein that jut out from the egg's membrane and link only with sand dollar sperm but no other.

I groped in darkness and found I was bound to no one, by no one, and possessed no means of reproducing myself. It was hard to hold my head up, and the air around me seemed dark. The sea was a cauldron of passion and intimacy, which I hated that week. How maddening water's fluency was as I lay transfixed by dead brain cells. Night after night I wondered what would become of me, and hoped that whatever it was, it would come fast. I sat in my dull cocoon and watched waves break into formlessness, then form back into waves again.

In one dream the whole sea turned into human flesh and was divided up among shells. Shells were ears into which salt water sluiced, and out spilled the driving sound of surf onto my pillow, a sound so loud it woke me: I had been crying. A lump in my throat rose, a small planet shaped like my ranch in Wyoming: pastures, meadows, house, barn, sheds, lake, all rimmed by high mountains. I spit the lump out and it floated on a loose ocean, drifting until the horizon took it away. When Blaine returned from the Galapagos, my spirits rose, as did my blood pressure.

At our next Wednesday night “barbecue” Kate, my friend who lives in semi-exile from Australia, broke down in tears. We had been talking about northwestern Australia, where alligators eat illegal Chinese immigrants, and about the high, pristine Snowy River country, and she said, “I'm not all gold jewelry and makeup. I miss my land. I want to go into the bush for a month and walk around.” I cried with her.

The next day we met while walking our dogs. Suddenly Sam started bleeding from his rectum and doubled up on the sand. I ran to him. Kate was already heading for her house and yelled: “I'll call my vet. He's the best in town. He'll be waiting for you.” She explained where his office was as she took off. I carried Sam down the beach as fast as I was able, through my house, into my pickup, and speeded—lights flashing—into town. As we were driving I thought that if he died I would not be able to go on without him, he was my last hope, the thin thread that fastened me to all that I had known and loved and lost in Wyoming.

The vet, tall and quick-minded, examined Sam and immediately started an IV of glucose. He fired questions: What had he eaten, where had he been, what were his habits, had he been sick before? An X-ray showed no intestinal or bowel obstructions, and a blood test eliminated poison. “It's got to be a wild bacterial infection.”

Sam lay motionless. His flank was caved in and his breathing was labored. I held him while the nurse shaved another patch on his leg for a needle, and another IV—of antibiotics-was begun.

Later, after I had done all I could to assist and Sam was sleeping, I went home to rest. How quickly my own health problems had been reduced to nothing. My chest hurt but I didn't care. All I knew was that I could make it to the vet's office from my house in exactly six and a half minutes, and that Ron, the vet, had been instructed to call me if anything happened. All my thinking was for Sam, about Sam. During the evening, I visited him several times. Ron was there because his own dog had also been hurt—hit by a car—and so he attended to our two dogs through the night.

In the morning Sam was better but they kept him another day. It pained me deeply to think about his confusion: What was happening to him, why was he in a strange place, why were people hurting him? When he came home finally, he was very thin. I fixed his prescribed bland diet but he hardly ate. Instead, he curled up on the bed and slept with his head pushed against my stomach. Every few hours during that first night I turned on the light to make sure he was still breathing and that the bleeding had stopped, and held him in my arms until dawn.

Then it was Sam who couldn't walk far down the beach and I adjusted my speed to him. Some days, neither of us could go very far. But even if we did nothing but sit on the rocks, we saw things: pairs of western grebes, with their slightly flattened heads, floated in water on roller coasters of rising waves, and Sam thought they looked like rattlesnakes that could swim.

He was too weak to chase birds, so I taught him the names of species, just as I had taught his father, Rusty, each of our horses' names. Small groups of sanderlings ran on wet sand, chasing retreating waves, eating sand fleas. Godwits, willets, long-billed curlews, sandpipers, and semipalmated plovers strode ahead of us. Beyond the row of houses, where no people lived, pelicans sunned between feeding times, tucking their long gullets against their chests and facing out to sea.

Pelicans nest on two of the four northern channel islands in large, noisy rookeries. From the two or three eggs in each nest, stark-naked hatchlings appear—homely, awkward, and helpless. A medieval legend contends that the male pelican often kills its young but if the mother sits on her dead hatchlings long enough and regurgitates the blood of her dead, the young birds will come to life again. Maybe that's what Sam and I needed.

On days when we did walk, the birds flew up ahead of us. Once almost extinct from DDT, pelicans flew in a chopped-off V, clipping the crests of waves with their wing tips, flapping in a slow progression, each bird taking the communal rhythm from the bird ahead. When fishing, they can drop from a great height, reaching speeds of sixty miles per hour, their wings folded back into an arrow; and when they hit the water, their long bills act as “cutwaters” to reduce the blow. After catching a fish, they bring it to the surface and swallow it whole.

Sam's vitality returned. His brush with death had engendered my own leap in strength. If I was dragging around, how could I expect him to recover? On our morning outings he greeted other beach walkers, whether they wanted to be greeted or not. He'd grown up on a ranch, where every human he saw was a friend; how could he have understood the idea of a world so populous that there could be such a thing as a stranger?

One woman seemed delighted by his attentions. Smiling, she bent down to pet him: “I was just wondering what it would be like to see God when your dog ran up to me.”

“He is a god, but spelled backwards,” I replied.

chapter 18

At the ranch I'd kept my vet kit in a waterproof bag lined in green plastic. In it were bottles of penicillin, Combiotic, vitamins, handfuls of
₁
6-gauge needles and various-sized syringes, a turkey baster to irrigate wounds, salves, creams, mineral oil, pinkeye medicine, Hoof Alive for quarter cracks on horses, and an aspirator to pull out mucus from the lungs of breech calves. The level of medicine we practiced was crude, but, then, our animals weren't sick very often and the survival rate was high, which I at tributed to fresh straw and Mozart in the sun sheds rather than to my veterinary prowess. The animals were talked to, touched, loved. Now I wanted to better understand what makes people—or animals—live or die, the intermix of physiology and psychology, and to chart the dynamics of the patient-healer relationship. I wanted to look under the skin and see how the heart worked, how all the systems of the body—nervous and circulatory—achieved their miraculous harmony.

 
 
At 7:00 A.M. on a May morning I found myself in the Coronary Care Unit at Cottage Hospital—not as a patient this time, but an observer. I'd asked Blaine if I could go on rounds with him. I wore a white coat and carried a stethoscope. “Put on your roller skates,” he said as I followed him from room to room, floor to floor. “Are you doing a rotation with Dr. Braniff?” one of the nurses asked. “No, I'm an imposter.” “Oh, there's probably a lot of those around here,” she said. Blaine scowled at her but he was laughing. We were “on the unit,” in the room where I had been a patient.

When you are suddenly and acutely ill, you temporarily lose your self-image—no vision of the scenario in which you are involved. Everything is present tense: the gap is a place with no reference points—you float from one breath, one heartbeat to another. Looking at that patient hooked up to monitors, I couldn't believe it had once been me.