I Totally Meant to Do That (24 page)

Car horns were louder. The wind felt like needles. I smelled cigarettes on nonsmokers. I could see light breaking into crystals in mirrors. Colors were crisper and somehow more primary. And the sun, my goodness, I had to wear both shades and a visor. I tried not to go outside between ten and two.

This lasted for days, maybe two weeks. I could eat only bland
foods. I was particularly sensitive to salt and sugar, the latter of which not only assaulted my tongue, but gave me an instant dizzy high. A cup of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt made me ill. High-fructose corn syrup was like crack.

Then, slowly, I dulled again to my surroundings, returned to normal, or what I now refer to as generally accepted abnormal. But for a couple of weeks, I experienced the world as babies do, without a protective sensory filter. No wonder they love shiny objects; a wristwatch is the equivalent of a whirring, glowing UFO.

I know this sounds like hyperbole. All I have as a nonfiction writer is my word. And believe me when I say that I found it stranger while it was happening than you are finding it now. It straight up freaked me out.

I was moving through the world in slow motion, unable to ignore anything. Every tiny stimulus competed for my attention. And New York is a city of stimuli. I experienced the city unbridled; and I couldn’t handle it.
Every
child born here must be a crack baby.

That cliché about becoming “numb” to something? It’s backward. The image it invokes is of a wearing down, suggesting that contact with the incessant, horrific stimulus—war, animal euthanization, ice-cream-truck music—scrapes away at your nerve endings until they no longer function. But that’s not how it works at all. The stimulus doesn’t take a part of you with it; it leaves a part of itself behind, like the stinger of a bee. Over time, all of these little parts build up, until you’re completely covered in a sweater of bee butts. They act as a shield. Et voilà: you feel nothing.

After living in New York for eight years, I was wearing one of those sweaters, and also long johns underneath, as well as a ski romper on top and, for good measure, a hazmat suit. Then, suddenly, I was naked. On the bathroom floor.

The effect was that of a rebooting, which, in addition to real pain, gave me a paranormal anxiety. The collapse mirrored too neatly my concurrent emotional state: a waxing inability to feel. It fit together a little too perfectly. I mean, come on, a psychological crisis manifests itself in a physical breakdown? A fifth-grader could have written that. It’s unoriginal and trite. But I can’t help that; it’s just how it happened. So seriously, am I calling the shots or am I the main character in some eleven-year-old’s creative-writing assignment?

My musical obsession during that time was the album
Universal Audio
by the Delgados: “See us. Watch how the city consumes us. Watch how the city destroys us.” Also, right around the time I crashed, so did my computer. I can’t make this up. I’d be crap if I did.

Of course, these are merely coincidences. They shouldn’t mean anything. But, as Paul Auster wrote on the first page of
City of Glass
, “The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.” That responsibility falls to the listener. Deriving meaning from fiction is a reader’s most basic instinct. We even see allusions and draw conclusions where a writer didn’t intend them to be.

And I posit that the fiction reader and the nonfiction writer employ the same process: We search for patterns and meaning in stories that have already been written. Therefore, instead of discounting
my
story’s hackneyed climax as eerie coincidence, I am compelled to make assumptions about authorial intent. And since I don’t believe in predetermination or the Fates, I am left to guess that a pockmark-faced prepubescent chubbo has created me for his final project in English class.

Well, unh-uh, sorry, out of the way, kid. If anyone will get creative with this tale, it will be me. And the first thing I’ll do is throw in a dash of magical realism. If we’ve determined that coincidences
carry as much weight as facts, then I have failed to divulge the key plot point: Around the time of my collapse, I received a cursed stone.

Did I believe that the gem was magic when I accepted it? Of course not. Do I believe now? No. Does this story give a flying flip what I do or do not believe? Not at all. The question is the story itself. And it starts in 1956.

the door of 496 Hawthorne Drive in Danville, Virginia. It was dusk. He carried a wedding dress and a small box, and he was distressed.

My grandmother opened the door. She was expecting him, as he’d called ahead to ask if he could bring a couple of things to my aunt Jane, who was sixteen at the time. His wife, Patty, had recently died.

The Dickersons were close friends of my grandparents, and my aunt was touched by the gesture. Although she declined the gown—Mrs. Dickerson had been quite petite—my aunt wanted the box. It held a five-carat, rectangular topaz, yellow-brown and clear. With my grandmother’s permission, she accepted it.

They thanked Mr. Dickerson kindly, reasserted their condolences, and closed the door, at which point my grandmother announced that the stone could not stay in the house. Patty may have been tiny, but her problem with alcohol had been huge; it’s what killed her. Furthermore, the Dickersons had no children. The combination of these circumstances led my grandmother to believe that her neighbors had bad luck, the kind you can catch. She then deduced—by some voodoo bastardization of the first law of thermodynamics—that the stone now carried the Dickersons’
misfortune inherent, and that because they had given the stone to my aunt, the bad luck would be transferred to our own family.

Cursed or not, though, it was a nice rock. Aunt Jane didn’t want to throw it out. So Nana suggested a compromise: They’d bury it in their neighbor’s yard.

That afternoon, she had my aunt wrap the topaz in tissue paper and place it in a mason jar. Then, Nana rang the front bell of the Hermans’ house next door. While she distracted Elise Herman with neighborhood gossip, my aunt crept behind the house, dug a hole in the side garden with a spade, put the jar in the ground, covered it with earth, and snuck back to 496 Hawthorne Drive.

There the stone remained for twenty-one years. When Elise died, long after her husband had, nearby Averette College purchased their house for its president. My grandmother, full of worry, called my aunt to come dig. Jane, now married and living in Raleigh, drove to Danville, exhumed the jar—she remembered exactly where she’d put it—and took the topaz back with her, where it sat in a chest for another twenty-eight years. Apparently my aunt Jane isn’t as superstitious as her mother was. Then again, that would be difficult to achieve.

If I forgot something from Nana’s house, and went back in to retrieve it, she’d make me sit down before leaving again, even if just for a second, because she believed it was bad luck to enter a home if you didn’t plan to stay. The sitting down was some kind of supernatural con.

And we always walked into a house or store through the same door from which we’d left … or was it that we had to exit through the same door we entered? This one was particularly confusing for me, as I’d always lived in the same home: How could I follow a pattern if I didn’t remember the way it had begun?

There were also the standbys: spilled salt, shattered mirrors. When a black cat crossed the street in front of Nana’s Buick LeSabre, which happened frequently since one lived in her neighborhood, she’d slam on the brakes and put the car in park. Then we’d both get out, turn around three times, and get back in.

If you pass a truck on the street with a load of hay, don’t look back at it. If you see a white horse, you must (1) make a fist with your right hand, (2) lick your right thumb, (3) swipe your wet thumb against your left palm, (4) smack your wet palm with the bottom of your right fist, and (5) repeat steps one through four twice more. Failure to execute any of these rules led to bad luck.

My first impression of superstition: kind of laborious.

But my father feared that I’d find it attractive. One night, instead of telling me stories before bedtime, he said he wanted to have a talk. I was maybe eight or nine—old enough to reason but young enough to be impressionable, not so young that I don’t recall the conversation but definitely too young to remember the dialogue.

He wanted me to understand that superstition was false. It went against reason, he argued. How could returning home to grab an umbrella cause bad luck? And if it did, what would sitting momentarily on an ottoman possibly do to stop it?

Here, here, I responded. It all seemed silly to me.

More important, he added, superstition was sacrilegious. It was the equivalent of worshiping a golden calf. Unsurprisingly, he’d never made this argument to Nana, who was a devout Presbyterian and, more important, his mother-in-law, which is likely why he suggested we not tell her about our little talk. I nodded that I understood. He kissed me on the forehead and turned out the light.

Like a kid who snoops precisely where you tell her not to, I started going out of my way to walk under ladders. I still do. It is my tiny and meaningless, yet somehow satisfying revenge for every
time I had to get out of that Buick and spin around. I open umbrellas inside. My soccer jersey in high school was number 13. Yes, I recognize that there is little difference between avoiding black cats and chasing them, but like I said, it
all
seemed pretty silly.

Still, silly is fun, and I was obsessed with the Tale of the Dead Alcoholic’s Topaz. I simply couldn’t believe they’d dug a hole in someone’s garden to bury a rock—and that my grandmother had played the red herring! It was straight out of the Hardy boys. It was completely absurd.

The first and most obvious question pertaining to its burial: “If it was such bad luck, why not throw it away?” I recently interrogated my aunt.

“She figured as long as it wasn’t in our home, we wouldn’t get the bad luck.”

“Then why not bury it in your own backyard?” I asked. “Did Nana have something against the Hermans? Was this retribution for stealing Dit?”

“Heavens no! We loved Elise and Milton. But the stone couldn’t hurt them because it hadn’t been
given
to them.”

“But then you took it to Raleigh! Weren’t you worried?”

“Well,” she said with a sigh. “I figured, it was always mine. After all those years, it’d already done whatever it was going to do.”

As I got older, my fascination grew. I thought about it frequently, envisioning the stone sitting in my aunt’s chest, where, in my mind, it radiated light and generally stewed. Then, one Christmas morning, a few months before my Vegas experience, I no longer had to imagine. It became clear that she was giving me the topaz as soon as she started unwrapping it—regular jewelry doesn’t come in a Ziploc baggie.

I was overjoyed: much cooler than a pair of socks. The rock was smaller than I’d imagined it to be; magical things typically are.
Bereft of a setting or chain, it looked lonely. Still, it felt special in my hand, strange in its lightness. Even though I knew
—I know
—that there is nothing supernatural living inside that crystal, I drew a certain power from closing it within my palm.

Later, back in Brooklyn, during a party in my apartment, the saga came up in conversation. Standing by my refrigerator and keeping an eye on a frying pan, I launched into the story, fielding furrowed-brow questions to the best of my ability.

One of my friends: “Wait.” [
Eyes squint; head bows momentarily
.] “What?”

Me:
“I know!”

A crowd began to gather. “Kate, you watch the sausage,” I said. “I’ll get the stone.”

I scuttled downstairs, fetched the suede drawstring sack from my underwear drawer, and ran back up. The topaz was still in its plastic bag. I took it out and passed it around, like it was nothing more than silicate mineral of aluminum and fluorine. We exchanged a couple more “Wow”s and “Huh”s, and then turned our attention to my friend Brian who had pulled out a card game he’d brought called Set.

The stone must have been furious! What was it, a toy or a trophy? We were so disrespectful. I paraded it around like a monkey in diapers. But I didn’t know! I didn’t think it was charmed. I mean, I
don’t
think it is. I don’t … I don’t
know
anymore. Maybe it is. Who am I to say? Here’s something else my aunt told me when I interrogated her just before starting the chapter you’re reading. I asked why she’d never put the gem in a setting and she said, “I only wear a few pieces of jewelry, my favorite things.” Then she paused, and added, “Or maybe I was always saving it to give to you.”

What?! So, all along, the stone was meant for me? And—oh no—she gave it to me. Gave. That means, by whatever Gremlins-rules
logic we’re following here, the focus of the gem’s power was then transferred onto me, which is clearly exactly what it wanted.

What was she thinking? “After all those years, it’d already done whatever it was going to do”? All what years? Forty-eight is nothing to a rock. Those things live for millennia. It takes thousands of years just for the crystals to form. That means it was in labor for longer than Christians and Muslims have hated each other. If one dog-year equals seven human-years, then one rock-year equals … whoops, you missed it. Here comes anoth—ohp too late again.