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And while Tommy joined the Alaskan National Ski Patrol and became a bush pilot for Alaskan Mountain Air, Dad chose instead the path of least resistance and low reward closer to home. I remember even as a teenager being aware of the limitations of Dad's emotional genes, and while not wishing Tommy Baker was my father—I adored Dad, and suspect Tommy was not the first one home at 4:00
P.M.
to greet his children every day—I did occasionally wish Tommy Baker had secretly slept with Mom and gotten her pregnant with a dashing, reckless version of me.

*   *   *

The ride home from the breakfast I failed to keep down is made in complete silence, a reminder of how effective at shaming me mute Dad could be over scolding Dad or especially shouting Dad, which tended to make me laugh and therefore threatened to unleash red-faced super-angry Dad. We coast past “Crawlywood,” hilariously named by preteen boys in mocking homage to distant Hollywood. Its furtive acreage dense with trees and underbrush provided a welcome sanctuary for boys to set off fireworks, smoke stolen cigarettes, or set recreational fires (all flammable acts perhaps better performed at a place without “wood” in its name).

Rolling through the neighborhood I'm struck by how irregular everything is: no two houses alike, fenced and open, treed and bare, front yards or dirt driveways, winding roads that twist and curve arbitrarily, some dead-ending and picking up half a mile away, and dotted with the occasional clothesline dangling wash flapping under the sun. Paris, Illinois, is the opposite of the planned community where I once made a home outside of Chicago—built on a grid and every house the same from the outside (some flipped in the minor variety of a mirror image)—an entirely
un
planned community.

The haphazard growth that took place here makes more sense to me now. It's hubris to think one could plan anything, much less the needs of a community, against an unknowable future with infinite possible outcomes. Ours is a universe in chaos, not order; if there are patterns to be found in nature, they are patterns only of repeated anarchy.

Upon arriving home I declare my intention to lie down, and if Dad considers this, as the doctors at ITCH have cautioned, a warning sign of depression he betrays no alarm; if he finds it merely annoying, as he did when my teenage self spent an inordinate amount of time in a slumbered tangle of sheets, he keeps it arrested behind the blankness of his expression. If his intention is to wait until I fall asleep and then creep into the attic and kill me with his marksman's rifle before turning it on himself, that too is completely unknowable, although entirely understandable in the face of looming days, weeks, months of this. Me. This me.

 

PHANTOMS

A pain in the neck can be a real … well, pain in the neck! This is Sunny Lee with
The Sunny Side.

Since prehistoric times, man has suffered two kinds of pain: acute and chronic. Acute pain is triggered by a harmful external event, like when you touch a hot surface, or are gored by a mastodon. Pain receptors chemically send an impulse from the nerves of the affected area into the spinal cord, and all the way up to your brain—all within fractions of a second! It's like the world's fastest messenger telling you to pull away from the hot surface or run like heck from that prehistoric pachyderm! So, pain is actually a
good
thing—if you didn't feel it, you couldn't do what was necessary to make it stop.

Chronic pain is different, in that those pain signals remain active in the nervous system for months—or even years. Yikes! And there's nothing your brain can tell your body to do about it—no hot surface to pull away from or mastodon to flee. There's nothing “cute” about acute pain—imagine a goring that lasts for years! That might make you a little cranky … and a real
pain
to be around. I'm Sunny Lee, for
The Sunny Side.

*   *   *

I awaken in the darkness knowing that Sunny Lee understands my pain. (Another reason to love her.) I sit up rubbing my shoulder, slow to remember where I am. My left arm burns with tiny hot jolts of electricity. Except I don't have a left arm.

As cruel jokes go, “phantom pain” is brilliantly engineered, proof that the same God that hurls heavy metal at you without warning also enjoys a good practical joke. The only possible upside of
not
having an arm is that it's the one part of you that cannot be hurt; yet one's nerves, blind to the havoc outside the body, continue to seek out the extremity via signal sending and when those signals don't get where they're going—smacking instead into a fleshy cauterized stump—the nerves respond with the hot jolt of a live wire, a cosmic hand buzzer.

On a small table in front of me on a breakfast tray is Dad's signature dish, tuna casserole. It's his signature because besides scrambling eggs and burning meat over an outdoor grill, it's the only real dish he's got. Its real asset—that it can be served hot or cold—is evident here, as it is well past lukewarm and dropping. Dad's also left a bottle of beer, which means either he doesn't know how much Vicodin I'm taking or has forgotten everything he ever knew about raising teens who once mixed pills and alcohol like partners at a square dance. I pluck two caplets from the small stash tucked into the tiny key pocket of my jeans, washing back 1,500 milligrams of Vicodin with a long, grateful swallow of beer, and then I shovel greedy forkfuls of tuna casserole into my mouth until it's gone.

The introduction of beer into my system reminds me that there's no toilet here in the attic, and now I remember having to descend to one of the upstairs bathrooms in the middle of last night (another in a series of tiny annoyances that threaten to nibble away at me like flesh-eating bacteria). In my sleepy, sedated state, it had taken me a while to notice a live alligator staring at me from the bathtub. I recall entertaining the strong likelihood that this wasn't an alligator at all but the result of too many painkillers, until it opened its mouth wide and hissed at me. Curious now though scarcely more clearheaded, I scramble to the bottom of the folding attic stairs where I can see into the bathroom, the gator's tail twitching above the tub, periscope-like.

A dim memory stirs from a decade past of Mom telling me she'd bought Dad a tiny alligator for an anniversary present. (I can't find it on any of the lists of traditional anniversary gifts, not even wedged somewhere between
wood
and
bone china,
but apparently, Mom thought it was appropriate to commemorate their years together with a reptile.) They called him Muhammad Ali Gator (Ali for short), and while it seems impossible this four-foot lizard could be him, I go for confirmation to Dad, sprawled on the living room couch pulled close enough to the television to bathe him in its glow.

“There's an alligator in your bathtub.”

“I thought you knew.”

“If I did, I'd forgotten.”

“Now you know how I feel about everything.”

“Is that legal? Keeping a full-sized alligator, I mean.”

Dad shrugs. “It's my house.”

“The fact that you bought a house doesn't necessarily make it okay to own an alligator, keep a bear, harbor a fugitive, or imprison a Girl Scout in your basement,” I argue. “If it did, real estate ads would be a lot more entertaining.”

When I plop on the couch next to Dad, he leans away from me as if we were in a roller coaster that just made a sharp turn. I'm still feeling mentally logy and don't know how long I've slept. The dim gray hue outside makes it hard to determine if it's dusk or just before dawn.

“What time is it?”

“I don't know. Used to be you could tell by what's on TV. Guys yammering on a couch, it was after 11:30. Older guys praying and asking for money, even later. Now goddamn
SportsCenter
is on so many times, it could be midnight or seven in the morning.”

“The cable box says it's 6:22.”

“What makes you think I can make out the little floating numbers on the cable box?”

(Dad's right: the numbers float.)

“It's tonight,” Dad clarifies, adding, “Sleep as much as you need. Your body will tell you when you've had enough.”

We sit in silence for a while and watch highlights of baseball players doing incredible things: hitting a ball over a wall, spearing a line drive and turning a double play—all things, I can't help but notice
that require two hands
. Even the pitcher, after firing a fastball, has to get his glove hand up to snag a ball hit right back at him, and a runner stealing second uses both hands to gather up the base. The final indignity is the umpire calling a play at the plate by signaling “safe,” both arms spread wide like a fat airplane.

As if realizing again what I'm thinking, Dad changes the channel and soon we're watching cable news, six pundits shouting at each other in a six-pointed attack, a Hebrew star
shuriken
of bluster flung into the neck of reason. My head, and non-arm, begin to throb in unison.

“Brokaw never yelled,” Dad grunts. “Neither did Koppel. Or Rather, for that matter, but you wouldn't expect a guy in a sweater vest to get all that excited. And six of them? Why do we need six people talking at once? Look at that: I got a big-screen TV—why do I have to watch six faces in little windows? They look like baseball cards. Only of guys nobody wants and you couldn't trade. Like opening up a pack and seeing six Marv Throneberrys looking back at you.”

Even when Dad was right, I'd forgotten how hard it was to listen to him complain.

“And what's all the writing on the screen? Thing in the corner, title in the other corner, type running across the bottom like a ticker tape.”

That rifle-blast murder-suicide I pondered earlier remains a possibility, although not in the order I was thinking. It occurs to me that the best way to survive our forced proximity is if there's less of it. “I think I'll go upstairs and read a little.”

“Good,” Dad nods sharply.
For God's sake, go back to the attic so I can forget you're here and stop pretending this isn't agony for both of us.

As I proceed up the attic stairs I can hear Dad change the channel back to
SportsCenter,
the anchors describing another breathless play as the crowd cheers. I pull up the steps, the sharp
thunk
silencing the celebration of physical perfection below.

 

RESISTANCE

Crouching low under the slanted attic ceiling, I shuffle over to the low, squat bookshelf, on top of which the sports trophies of my youth mock me: seventeen testaments to the athletic achievement of an able-bodied youth with four fully functioning limbs. These are mostly second- and third-place awards, only one true winner (for swimming), evidence that I was a good-not-great athlete. And, looking closely at the representative figures atop the trophies, I understand why: too many disciplines, impossible to master them all. The small, tarnished figures frozen midaction tell the story of a boy whose desire to experience many different things precluded greatness in any one; sprints and long distance, swimming, diving, basketball, lacrosse, even a tiny silver boy hurling a javelin. (What in the world ever compelled me to throw a javelin?) I snap his arm off, and one by one I snap the left arm off each of them, leaving them in a tiny pile of seventeen discarded limbs that mirror the medical waste heap in some hospital after a busy day of amputations, bundled and bound for off-site biohazard incineration.

I slide a book from the shelf—something easy to skim in my semi-stupor, a thin volume from a Time Life series from the early eighties on World War II, this one called
Resistance
. I seem to recall we had a bunch of these, if not the whole series, with one-word titles like
Besieged
and
Aftermath, Juggernaut
and
Blitzkrieg
. Bought by Mom to help me muddle through grade-school history, they arrived by mail every few weeks until history was replaced by social studies and Mom tried to cancel the series. (I also remember Mom shouting into the phone at the perpetrators of this serialized negative option to
Stop sending these goddamn books—we're not paying you another goddamn dollar!
)

The book consists mostly of photos and captions and, much as I did in the fifth grade, I skip completely any pages filled with dense copy. It strikes me that all these people in the photos are now certainly dead, even the ones who were not dead when these were taken (there are several lurid photos of executed Resistance fighters, German soldiers, and villagers discovered to be traitors). I'm especially taken by a chapter on “Subversive Gadgetry,” a mind-blowing photo essay of
fuck you
ingenuity: tiny homemade radios hidden in matchboxes, shortwave transceivers disguised as birdhouses; safety razors that hid printed messages, pens that carried poison, hollow shoe heels for smuggling. False bottoms, secret compartments, hollowed-out books to hide guns, explosives, bombs. I'm amazed at what people are capable of in the face of the worst circumstances imaginable—

Wait a minute.

I get down on a knee and take a closer look at the books on the shelf: an endless line of titles extolling hope, triumph, the virtue of struggle, and the struggle of the virtuous, including
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
and
Soul Surfer,
both autobiographies by newly armless authors, and numerous self-help titles, including
Turning Obstacles into Opportunities: The Jujitsu of Positive Thinking, Adversity Is Not Your Adversary,
and
Beggars
CAN
Be Choosers!
I don't need to see
Overcoming Amputation for Dummies
to figure out what's going on here. I pluck two books at random and skim twin stories about heralded arms and the people who once bore them: