My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (31 page)

But at this age, and with Steph, I was extremely worried. I would have normally been uncomfortable addressing the issue directly with someone who could, on a good day, have been described as level-headed and reasonable, but Steph would never have been accused of that, not even on her best day, so I was summoning the courage to have “that talk” and kept finding myself lacking. I was once drawn to the “Sinead O'Connor and Wolverine” fantasy combination of epic femininity, but I had seen what a genuine, self-assured, and self-actualized adult woman was really like, and I had grown tired of explosive confrontation disguised as passion and caring.

But the situation pressed itself finally, after three days of tension and awkwardly parried invitations from her to lock into sex again, hide in the penumbra of something that was clearly long dead, and I had to ultimately say what I was avoiding.

She was sulking in the front seat while Cleo was shedding in the back.

I was driving my car through the rain and the traffic of Portland and had been muttering and cursing under my breath at the inconsideration of other drivers, particularly this one individual speeding in a late-model pickup while pulling a Bayliner, and she was becoming more agitated by the grumble. They weren't well versed, I kept pointing out to Steph, in driving “Texas Friendly.”

“What's ‘Texas Friendly' driving?” she asked, taking the bait.

“Common fucking awareness,” I responded, and it annoyed her, so she stayed quiet and wrapped herself in her own arms, locked down tight and staring out the window for the last two hours as I drove us into the chalky parking lot of a roadside restaurant with bad, idyllic paintings of a Southwestern theme, saguaro cactus next to abstractions of donkeys and female forms making an ideal tortilla. Desert socialism, permutations of Diego Rivera.

We were alone in the restaurant, which was between shifts, and the waitstaff seemed mid-siesta while Steph sat in her red vinyl booth and stared moodily out the window on the grayness of south Washington. I took the moment.

“You've been pissed at me since Portland,” I said.

She didn't respond to this.

“We agitate the shit out of each other,” I said, thinking that her icy silence and defensive body language were in their own way a manner of encouragement.

“My normal, regular states of being upset you. And I have to say, most of the time, yours frustrate me. We're not good together anymore, Steph,” I said. “Why do you want to salvage this relationship?”

She went quiet, her stare stricken, as if I'd spoken something verboten.

“We must not look at goblin men,” she finally said in a whisper, and surprised me. “We must not buy their fruits.” She was quoting from a Victorian poem that had been written into the dialogue of a
Doctor Who
episode, an episode that had been particularly frightening and I had asked her to watch with me and hold my hand while doing so because I'd actually been that frightened, quite some time before. She had obviously paid it much attention.

“I'm not a goblin,” I said, weakly. “Or maybe I am. But I'm certainly no longer selling my fruits. I want to try to remain on good terms, but this is obviously done, don't you agree? We don't get along anymore, we don't have sex, and . . .” I stopped short of bringing up my feelings for Sarah.

“I don't know what to do,” she said, verging on tears. Her pride couldn't take that I was the one giving her the go-bye. We'd always talked about it being her that would be doing the leaving.

“Neither do I,” I replied. “It's like one of us has to die in order to get out of this.”

“Don't do me any favors,” she said, and then stepped outside for a smoke, while I ordered a pint of Dos Equis and something vaguely resembling Mexican food, then sat and watched her through the window as she stared off at the big, brooding snow-covered volcano to our east.

The week after that miserable Thanksgiving was the first expanse of days when we tried separating, and I think I fared worse than she did. Steph had a good poker face when it came to hiding her hurt, until she didn't. I wore mine on my sleeve, and it had grown difficult for me to accept that I was putting down yet another relationship at this age, had to realize that as much as I wanted it, I couldn't move past a certain level of intimacy with another human being, and the fear of this being the truth nearly propelled me back into Steph's orbit for yet another chance.

Instead, I threw myself back into therapy with renewed vigor and talked for unending hours with my therapist about trust and sex, why it had felt so open and monumental when Sarah and I had finally shifted our relationship into intimacy.

But I did call Steph once a day at least, I think for the reassurance that she was still there, somehow. I knew at some level that I should cauterize that particular compulsion and felt like what I was doing—the slow, agonizing separation—was the wrong way to go about it. Somehow. Or so I convinced myself.

Meanwhile, my relationship with Sarah mollified into a weird stagnation until we both decided what to do with each other. This had been incredibly painful and frightening, as I thought I was losing that friendship now, as well, and I could hardly bring myself to leave my apartment. My compass readings were all wrong.

Since I was working from home, producing that wretched bilingual publication from my laptop at my desk, I could go for unending days without leaving my apartment, let my mental and physical health draw down to dangerous levels before I would come back swinging and struggling and gasping for air, and then I would repeat that same cycle.

I had always been able to come back from this pattern, but as I grew older, it was becoming more difficult to break the surface, and I felt I was losing this particular fight now, felt that the draw of the hole was growing more powerful, and the darkness inside was getting blacker, thicker, like a sludge of obsidian.

One morning in early December, I'd been harassed by an illiterate teenage web designer working on a website for one of my freelance clients, an incredibly seedy hot yoga studio owned by a secular Pakistani businessman, introduced to me by our shared printer, Nasir, whom he knew from their mosque. I woke up to a flurry of impassioned, unpunctuated five- or six-word e-mails from this vulgarity of a child running some sham business creating uninspired websites for other, dreadful small businesses, and who had previously offered to sell me a suite of pirated software for $200. Irritated beyond measure at the illiteracy and the fact that he had mistaken me for another Latin-named designer, I let the little fucker have it and was feeling pretty good about myself after he responded with a redfaced, but still illiterate, apology.

I called Steph around 11:00 a.m. and told her about it.

She sounded sad, deflated. I didn't have to ask why, and I instantly regretted having made that call.

She told me instead how she'd had a similar experience, but in less “dude” terms, with a Japanese exchange student who Steph felt was attempting to undermine her position by questioning a few of Steph's concrete assertions.

She told me her own story in flat, unemotional terms, but I could sense that she was roiling with anger: Nothing bothered her more at work than when her word wasn't taken as gospel, but she'd never mention it to anyone other than me. She'd instead smother it down and let it fester into rage and anxiety or ulcers, perhaps bake a number of complicated dishes simultaneously to channel her anger.

It felt out of place to talk about such personal things now; the distance between us was really showing itself, and I felt that it was a good start, amplifying the individuation finally.

I hung up feeling optimistic.

That was the last time I ever spoke to her.

Steph's father phoned me at 2:30 that next morning. She had driven her Jeep over the side of an overpass at 11:30 that night. By the time I spoke to Harold, Steph had been unconscious for three hours, hypothermic and crushed.

I was dressed and down to my car in the garage in less than ten minutes, driving through the dark, empty streets of Seattle toward Harbor-view Hospital at top speed with the radio off, feeling an innate, profound sense of things changing in that densely packed silence as I drove to a part of the city that I had had very little reason to visit previously. After I made it through the receiving station on the ground floor, I was directed to the ninth floor, which would be my new “third place” for the next year, though I had no way of knowing that at this time.

It was past 3:00 a.m., and people were stretched out in the waiting room like refugees, covered in matching hospital blankets. They were sleeping on expanded couches and sitting up in chairs, the family of trauma patients awaiting news or miracles. An older black man was sitting up awake, wrapped in a similar blanket, and he watched me as soon as I exited the elevator and looked around in bewilderment at the hospital floor. I paced the length of the hallway twice then decided I needed to sit down; my knees were feeling a bit liquefied, so I found a chair sitting opposite the grizzled older black man, who had not stopped looking at me. An arcade of grief blanketed that waiting room.

I waited roughly ten minutes, rocking in my chair.
What if Steph's dead? What if she doesn't survive this? What just happened here? I just spoke to her around noon and she said she was working. She was headed home, she said, soon. How could this have happened?

A nurse walked through the doors and I immediately stood up and began asking questions, and she first tried to calm me. I asked her to stop calming me and start talking about Steph. She said the injuries were survivable. Steph had lost control of her car and went down an embankment, the nurse said, but she would be able to survive this. I started to calm down, but I still felt terrified. I was scared, like nothing ever before in my life.

“You need to breathe,” she said to me. “You need to calm down. We're stabilizing her, and you can come see her in a minute.”

I was nearing a panic attack but tried to remain calm because I knew I was the only channel that Steph's parents had for communicating with the trauma unit, so I asked the nurse to speak directly with Steph's father and explain to him what she'd just said to me. The place positively hummed with the psychic energy of trauma. Or maybe that was just me.

I lingered nearby and overheard him as they spoke. He sounded relieved. She handed the phone back to me and smiled. Ten minutes later he called back and told me he'd just received a call from a neurosurgeon who said that Steph was in a coma, and that the prognosis was grim, and the neurosurgeon recommended that her family get out to Seattle to make decisions about her care.

This did not jibe with what the nurse had just said. Right about here, the world went white with light. I felt the blood in the back of my head grow colder and colder, and I thought this was what the start of a stroke must feel like.

I grabbed my coat and charged through the doors that read “Authorized Personnel Only” and I found that same nurse who'd just spoken to Harold and reassured both of us, and I asked her what the fuck was going on; how could her father get that call?