Somebody Somewhere (23 page)

We were studying buildings. I considered the match between the foundations of a building and the foundations of my own ways. I had been like a house of cards, without support beams or solid grounding. I had had a roof falling in on me all the time and walls that needed constant rebuilding and strengthening in the absence of support structures. I thought about all the things that could not enter my house because the foundations were not built to support them. I thought of the lack of windows in my card house, and my door, which was forever either opened or closed but lacked the hinges to allow the free, unstructured comings and goings a proper house would allow. I had no chimney so my house was full of smoke, my ability to make sense and connections obscured. I thought of the way “the world” came in through the cracks between the cards.

This new strategy was one I named “parallel systems” and became the basis for a new way of understanding one thing after another until I could hardly keep up. It was as though I had been starved for oxygen and could suddenly breathe. My mind exploded into new awareness and ever new corridors within my mind emerged as years of stored-up, unused knowledge found the structures to slot into.

My supervisor for this teaching round was a dream. Right from the start she could sense me rather than observe me. Eventually I explained things to her and she understood and treated me in no way differently except that she encouraged me all the more to face my difficulties head on.

As part of my training I had to participate in classes other than those I taught. Some of them involved dancing, and the dancing involved holding hands.

I had previously worked in child care. Picking the children up and clothing or feeding them involved what I called “instrumental touching.” I handled it as I did when I resigned myself to letting a doctor or dentist examine me. It was a category of touch that was dealt with by the part of my mind that was purely clinical, purely logical, purely responsible: Willie. There was nothing social or emotional about this form of touch; we were both objects. There was no stomping upon my difficulty balancing self and other. There was nothing intuitive needed. Practical touch was yet another repertoire in a file titled “theory self.”

But social touch was somehow communal and communicative. I was meant to touch these people as human beings and not as animate, human-form, speaking, walking, blah-blah-blah objects that happened to need assistance. “It'll be fun,” said my supervisor, smiling. I felt ill.

I stood on the outside of a gathering circle of five-year-olds. My arms hung limply by my sides.

“Take their hands,” said the supervisor in German and I felt glad the children didn't understand. The supervisor and I were separated from “the world” by being the only two in the room fluently speaking a shared language.

I looked at her desperately. I felt like Brer Rabbit pleading with the fox. I could take a child's hand to cross a road or to stop him or her from getting hurt. I could pick a child up if needed. I could even passively accept or overlook a child's casually touching me. And while this was not so hard with people smaller than me as it was with adults, I found it just too close to home that I was meant to make
physical contact and smile and dance and sing all at the same time. Carol, come on down! came a thought. She was nowhere to be found.

Vomit sat in my throat waiting for the appropriate moment to introduce itself. My eyes screamed out at this supervisor to let me off the hook. My heart raced and my mind shouted, run…run.

The supervisor looked over at me with a sort of mocking though reassuring smile, as if to say, grin and bear it, it will be over soon enough. I had had enough of “it will be over soon enough” to last me a lifetime. Wake me up when it's over, I thought, as my dead, wooden legs skipped around the circle coincidentally attached to the body they took with them. My own clay hands sat emptily in a pair of small, cupped hands full of humanness, which kept squeezing them as though to put some life into them. I felt buried alive.

A
t home I was in a state of overload. Some kind of emotion had come over me and left me an uncomprehending mess. The meaning of everything before me had dropped out and I was surrounded by color and pattern and shape, with my sense of hearing heightened, my sensitivity to light increased, and my own nameless emotions washing over me.

Alone, I walked about, touching the things around my apartment and waiting for the lost friend of “meaning” to come back. I saw me in the mirror and put my hands against her hands. I turned my cheek against her cheek and cried. Cold, I said inside my head, looking at my hands against the flat glass surface of the mirror.

The word-thought struck me sharply, full of meaning in this meaningless state. Nothing came out. Something was on the verge. Something horrible or nice—I was unsure—but it was just around the corner.

I stood back, my hands still against her hands on the other side of the glass. Looking at her face, I took my hands away, silent for a moment. All my life she had been my security, and those cold, flat, glass hands had been my form of personal comfort. It was the only
real touch I still equated with closeness, the only thing still uncorrupted.

I took my hands away and looked at them out in front of me. Then I looked at her as she put her own hands together. “Warm hands!” I burst out, having finally found the answer to the difference between me and her.

I looked from her hands to my hands. They were touching. From her to her hands to my hands and back, I looked and the meaninglessness around me didn't matter. “Warm hands,” I said, “warm hands!”

My face against the mirror and my hands still touching, I smiled at her and she smiled back. “Warm hands,” I explained, my face lighting up with understanding, an explorer discovering an ancient lost tomb.

I turned with my back against the mirror. Back to back with her I looked, alone, at my warm touching hands. I had the answer. I knew where I was going.

I had never had time to build a bridge from the nothing of empty performed touch to the acceptance of touch and real feelings that was supposed to come from closeness or to know why I should want to.

Inside I knew that to touch me was to negate and destroy all possibility of closeness. “The world” touch was death but it also gave me a perverse sense of security in knowing I could then no longer be affected. You can only be killed off once, and after that you are blissfully dead.

It was coming back to life that hurt. It was the vulnerability of feeling alive that was to be fought off. Control had been more important to me than anything else. To touch me was to make yourself ineffectual and that was to give me total control. You could kill me but inside I would secretly kill you in the process. You would die in “my world” and be forever unable to enter again.

As others had watched me become a willing victim, I had watched them ignorantly and willingly give up an even greater weapon than even touch could be—the ability to affect me through closeness. They could be physically close to my body but it meant nothing when I did not experience, acknowledge, or want the thing as my
own. The more they touched it, the further I could dissociate from it. In a perverse “my world” way, I was winning. They were helping me “disappear.”

In twenty-seven years, I had touched my own hands many times. They were just lumps of flesh, blood, and bones delineated by type, location, function, and image as something we call “hands.” There was no emotional attachment to them, no personal belonging with them, no significance to the act of touching hands. It was merely a collision of two such objects in space.

They may have belonged to the bastard body that trapped me inside, but as long as there were two of them and they were patterned and fitted together as a pair, I was aesthetically pleased to have them. I liked their symmetry and the life maps sketched upon them by genetics.

Hands seemed functionally useful when it came to facilitating self-abuse or when I applied myself to the usefulness and principles of eating and taking care of health. They had a sensory role in touching hair and velvet but for many textures I preferred to use my feet or my cheeks. Hands had an expressive function when it came to anger and the protrusion of one or more fingers in gestures such as “go to hell.” They were functionally effective as nose pickers or to fetch a handkerchief when I was moved to be a little more sophisticated and less absorbed in the texture of snot or in the rolling or flicking or smearing of it. Hands were good at making noises when it came to making things go
ping
, playing piano, or adding life's punctuation—clapping. They were useful body tappers when I got scared at “disappearing” too well and asked, where is me? The tapping let me know that despite being cut off, I was actually still there. Hands made interesting shadows upon the wall and could be turned in front of me to make interesting patterns. They were essential for clean toilet habits and a clean house. But they had nothing at all to do with closeness.

There were two weeks to go until I saw Dr. Marek again. I thought about touching his hand. I felt like I had failed an exam, and lived in
dread of having to take it again. Either I was going to go to the next exam well-prepared or I was going to drop out.

I made a puppet in the drama class of my teaching course. He was a furry black cat named Moggin, with a pink nose, whiskers, white cat's eyes, and vinyl ears. On my hand he moved just like a real cat. He hid away from the people I did not want to look at even if I continued to look. He could be touched and greeted by people I liked in a way I could not. He could put his cat's paws around my neck and hug me, as I could neither ask nor tolerate to be hugged. Moggin was my bridge to touch and closeness as Travel Dog had been my bridge to maintaining self in company.

I took Moggin to Kerry's place. Moggin touched her tentatively with one of his paws. Kerry didn't touch back. Kerry was safe. Every time I went to Kerry's, Moggin came with me. Moggin was beginning to replace the mirror.

Kerry and I sat on the floor in her room reading aloud from various books. “Will you do something?” I asked suddenly, looking over at her mirror. “That depends on what it is,” said Kerry. I asked her to come and sit in front of the mirror with me.

“Touch the mirror,” I said to Kerry. She did. I laughed and shook with a combination of anxiety and excitement. I reached out and tentatively touched myself in the mirror. “Touch yourself in the mirror when I do,” I ordered. She did. There we sat in front of the mirror, side by side, with our hands touching Donna and Kerry in the mirror world.

“Go away,” I ordered Kerry's reflection suddenly. “Get out of there.” I no longer wanted her in the mirror with me. I looked at Kerry, not quite sure why I disliked her doing this even though I had asked her to. I moved away from the mirror and left her in there on her own.

I came back again and reached out quickly and touched her in the mirror. “Touch yourself in the mirror again,” I asked, and as she did I touched myself, too. I looked from her to me, then from me in the mirror to her in the mirror and back again. I did a visual circuit of the connection between this side of the mirror and the other. “Now
touch your own hands over here,” I ordered, and copied her as she did it. Kerry and I and “her in the mirror” and “me in the mirror” all had our hands held together. We were a group. “Again,” I ordered, and watched and began to understand.

Kerry looked away from herself in the mirror. I burst out laughing. “What's so funny?” she asked. “You looked away in there,” I said. “What did you expect?” she asked. “Well, ‘yourself in there' is not the same as ‘myself in there,' ” I said.

“Of course not,” she said, “you look like you and I look like me.” “It has nothing to do with what we look like. It's to do with what she did when you looked away,” I said, referring to the Kerry in the mirror. “She looked away.” “Your reflection looks away, too,” she said. I laughed to myself a bit, knowing she was wrong. I had never seen it look away. When I looked back she had been staring at me as always.