To Feel Stuff (15 page)

“I thought that's what you'd tell me.”

 

The rest of the day I was lazy, lying in bed and staring out the window. I didn't feel like doing any work, even though finals were around the corner. The phone started ringing again in the afternoon, and I found out that at least two of the calls on Thanksgiving had come from my parents, wanting to tell me about the gas leak they'd discovered when they tried to cook the turkey. Then I got dressed and went down to meet my ride to the hospital because I had a follow-up.

That night when I came back to the infirmary, Vivian was watching me so closely that I knew something was up. She's one of the people who doesn't normally watch me that way.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“Chess got back this afternoon.”

“Oh,” I said, and I knew I was blinking more than I should, but I couldn't help it. “I'll go say hi.”

“Yeah, you go do that.”

When I opened the door, I saw you sitting at the table for two behind the row of Jesus candles.

“What's this?” I asked.

“I did it for you.” That's what you said, and that's when my heart started pounding. But you couldn't tell that, so I think you got nervous, which must be why you started rambling. “Listen, I know our first kiss was shared under exceptional circumstances, and that we didn't talk about what it meant or how we felt about it afterward,” you said. “And you were passed out when I left to go to the airport. But my head, my head won't leave me alone about you, and I just couldn't wait to get back here. All I want is to have dinner with you.”

“Wait. Like a romantic dinner?” I asked.

“Yes. I want to have a romantic dinner with you.”

“We can do that,” I said. I was so awkward. I know it. I didn't have the sort of composure needed for small talk, so I was only able to say what was in the front of my mind. “I've been thinking about you,” I admitted.

“You have? Really? What have you been thinking?”

“I get this sense that you've lived totally opposite from the way I have. When they rolled you in here you had this look on your face—” I tried to re-create it for you, so you could see—“like they'd just dropped you off in the African bush. It was like you couldn't even imagine that a place like this existed.”

I'm going to get it all down if it's the last thing I do. Although I do hope, for the record, that it's not the last thing I do. We talked about a lot that night, but there are pockets of time that have stayed clearer than others.

Vivian and Sarah entered with our dinners. They rolled them in on a meds cart with dish covers they'd made out of tin foil, and I was touched.

I remember looking at that round breaded thing on my plate and being puzzled. It was the shape of a potato, but obviously not a potato. And it looked like it was sweating. “What is this?” I asked you.

“It's chicken Kiev,” you said. Before you could warn me, I had taken my fork and stabbed into the Kiev because I was curious about its internal consistency. A spurt of butter shot out of the chicken, and I jolted back in my chair to avoid it. I said, “Holy shit!”

“I should have mentioned that you don't want to puncture it too roughly,” you told me. “It's filled with butter. That's what makes it Kiev.”

At some point we talked about my being sick. You asked me, “Listen, that stuff you were saying about how shocked I looked when I got here—is it that you've always been sick? Was ending up in here never unexpected for you?”

“I haven't been sick my whole life. This stuff is new, relatively,” I told you. “But when I first came to the infirmary, I wasn't all that shocked by it. You, though, your astonishment. It was astonishing.”

“I was astonished. You're totally right.” You laughed and said, “This is what I imagine it feels like to go to a psychiatrist.”

“You've never been to one?”

“No. My parents have taught us to believe in positive thinking. They believe that if you go to someone week after to week to dwell on your problems, you're going to get sucked down farther into them. They've always held that human beings are—this is their phrase—resilient creatures, and that they can find practical solutions to any challenge. That they're able to adapt to any situation without professional help.”

“My parents don't believe in psychiatry either,” I said.

“So we have something in common?”

I sensed that this was a turning point. In order to answer truthfully, I'd have to share that my parents talk about ghosts the way other families talk about laundry. So I did, for the sake of being honest.

“Different reason, though,” I said. “My mom—especially my mom—believes that if you're having bad feelings about something that you're receiving a message from your future self or a knowing presence.”

“What does that mean? A knowing presence?” you asked.

“She believes in ghosts. My dad, too, but he came to it later.”

I waited for you to make a face at me or to laugh, but instead you told me, “My parents believe in angels.”

“Religious ones?”

“Secular ones. But they're kind of like ghosts.”

“Barely,” I said, wanting to be on the other side of the table with you.

“Why? What's your difference between angels and ghosts?”

“I think most people accept that angels are figurative. But if you're seeing ghosts, that's literal. A literal sign of being disturbed. I think if you tell people you deal with angels, they just think, at worst, that you're dopey. That you're the rainbow and sunflowers and glass half-full type,” I said.

“My parents say angels are the sunbeams that look down on us. I guess that proves your point.”

“See? When it's a positive feeling, people say an angel has come to see them. When something has scared the shit out of them, that's a ghost.”

“I've never thought about that before,” you said, and I remember smiling. I was like, “Oh yes, my teeth. There they are.”

We also talked about friends.

“What was your life like before you got your knees bashed in?” I asked.

“That's a really big question,” you said. “Can you narrow it down a little?”

“Did you have a lot of friends?” I wanted to know.

“I think I did.”

“What are they like?”

“My best friends are—were—I don't know.” You told me about Marna and David, who I let into the infirmary the day you came. You said that before you came to the infirmary, you guys did almost everything together. I told you that's the way it was with me and the nurse practitioners, if you could count them.

You asked if I'd ever become close with someone who was in here with me, and I could tell that the answer meant a lot to you. I knew that you probably wanted to hear “no,” so you could confirm this was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of connection we were experiencing. But I had my own motives. I wanted to show you that I hadn't been a total outcast That someone else had wanted me. So I told you about Reggie.

I told you that he was a psychology major and that he was in the infirmary because he had a collapsed lung. I told you that we'd gotten kind of close and fooled around. I didn't tell you the whole story.

One night we were playing Operation, which was a good game for Reggie and me because his analness rivaled mine. That made it a solid competition. We treated the Operation man like we could actually hurt him.

While Reggie “operated,” he'd say things like, “Hmmm, wouldn't it be great if you had one doctor for everything? Your physician is your psychiatrist is your gynecologist is your surgeon. Imagine having one person that you trusted to take care of everything having to do with your body and mind. Now that's power. I wonder if Brown would let me create a new concentration to reflect interdisciplinary medical interests.”

Reggie was going for the Adam's apple, and he hit the edge of the cavity with the tweezers. The man's nose lit up and the buzzer went “EHHHHHHHH,” and I said, “Face it, I won,” because I knew I had.

Then, all of a sudden, Reggie was coming at me. It wasn't a very subtle pass. He pushed me back on the bed and spread my legs with his knees. Then he started to grind himself into my underwear, and he whispered into my ear, “Are you angry at the cards you've been dealt?”

I felt like Reggie was going to bust through my underwear, so I wondered if I should just slide them off myself and save us both the trouble. I was thinking about this and so I forgot to answer him. And he said, “Well?”

I asked him, “Should I be angry?” because I genuinely wanted to know the answer. I wanted to know if it was fair to be angry, or if I should be angrier than I was. Because while I wished all the time that I could get better, I was how I was.

Reggie seemed like he wanted to be the one asking the questions. He spread his knees (and my thighs) apart even farther and tried again. “Do you feel like you're being robbed of a vital experience, now that your new beginning at college has been stymied by things out of your control?”

“Well, I don't feel like things are out of my control,” I said.

“You don't have to lie to me.” He almost had me in the middle splits. “I'm here for you.”

“First,” I said, “I'm not lying. Second, what are you doing to my underwear?”

Reggie pressed on. Literally. “Don't you think it strange that modern human beings are fully aware of denial as a primary emotional stage in the face of fear or anger, and yet they still can't keep the door shut when it comes knocking?”

“Well,” I said as I felt fabric being pushed inside of me, “what I would say to that is I don't think of things as being out of control—” Reggie suddenly kissed me. Then I finished—“but instead as happening. They happen. Then I make my decisions from that point onward.”

Reggie released my thighs (which I was half glad about because they were burning) and slid his hands around to my backside. He winced because of his deflated lung, but he still managed to pull himself up and take me with him. I was sitting in his lap then, facing him.

There was a silence as we looked at each other in the moonlight. Because it was moonlight and because I knew that moonlight was an effect that was supposed to fall under the category of “romantic,” I started the process of interpreting it that way. The silence, the moonlight, the smell of skin, the cold of the sheets, us about to have sex. I took all these things in and struggled to make something of them.

Reggie reached out and stroked the lashes above my right eye. “You,” he said, “you must experience some kind of disconnect between body and mind if you truly hold that worldview. If you aren't in denial at how much you're being kept back by your illnesses.”

It was then that I decided to be bad.

“I love you,” I told Reggie. This was the first time I'd said “I love you” to someone in a romantic capacity, but I don't think it counted because it wasn't for real.

Reggie stopped the eyelash playing, and I noticed he even stopped breathing for a second. “Did you just come out and tell me that you love me?”

“Sure.”

“Why did you say that?”

“Does it change things?” I asked him.

“Wait, why do you love me? What do you mean you love me?”

“Does it change things?” I asked again. What I meant was: Does the room look different to you? Has the air temperature changed? Is the bed softer or harder? Is the sky darker? Are my eyes bigger? Is time going faster or slower? Do you feel the confines of your body more or less strongly? Are you breathing faster or slower? Am I having some kind of effect here?

I just wanted to stir shit up.

Reggie tried to lift my hundred and two pounds off him using only his arms, but his busted lung wouldn't give him the leverage he needed do to this without, as they say, “making a scene.”

“I don't know why you're telling me that,” he said, placing his arms behind him so he could lean away from me. “I would say that you're misplacing your emotional needs or exaggerating the situation to distract yourself from your recent pattern of illness, but—”

“Do you feel weird now?” I asked.

“No, I feel fine.” I didn't believe him. “You're the one I'm worried about. I'm just not understanding why you introduced this bizarre element into the night.”

“I didn't mean it”

First Reggie paused. He stared at me for a few seconds. Then he shook his head. “I can tell. That's a very dangerous game you're playing. You had my attention to begin with.”

“I wouldn't call it a game so much as an experiment,” I said. I stood up on the bed and stepped over his shoulder, went back to my bed, and lay down on my stomach. For something like two hours after that I heard Reggie sucking in breaths and getting ready to start sentences. He kept making this “schwooooo” sound, like there was something he wanted to say to me, but he never did.

The next day I was diagnosed with chicken pox, though Reggie hadn't been a carrier since he was five.

Now you know that story.

You also asked me what I was like in elementary school. I told you, “I was smart. And serious.”

“What were your friends like?”

“There were two of them. The teachers called us ‘the three widows' behind our backs, but we knew about it after fourth grade,” I said.

You blinked. “The three widows?”

“We weren't crazy about playing during recess, so we'd sit in this one part of the field in a horizontal line,” I told you. “I found out from my mom after a parent-teacher meeting that the teachers thought when we were sitting on the grass that we looked like we were carrying the weight of the world on our backs. The widows thing came from one of the teachers joking that we looked like we'd survived the deaths of all our other friends and husbands.”