To Feel Stuff (22 page)

Luckily, E wandered out of the infirmary, looking for soda, within the hour. She appeared confused to see me sitting at the desk.

“We need to talk,” I said.

Vivian gave me a suspicious look. Since none of the nurse practitioners knew the true nature of my relationship with E, I suppose that they assumed the worst. Those women were very protective of E, having known her for so long and having seen her through so much.

The rest of the students were still on winter vacation, so the hallways were deserted. E and I convened in a corner near the lab. I retrieved the prints from my briefcase and presented them to E with the images face down.

“Take as long as you need with these,” I instructed.

E flipped over the first photograph in the pile and -without pause, said, “It's not him.”

“Give yourself a moment,” I said, even though she had only confirmed what I already feared.

“Sorry. It's not him.”

Although I am the scientist, accustomed to the repetitive pattern of trial and error, I seemed to take the disappointment harder than E. My excitement about this new field had created in me a heightened desire for discovery. I wanted to take strides, not steps. It was E, strangely enough, who had to remind me that although our first lead had been a disappointment, we should not be discouraged. As with everything, she told me, “it's all just a matter of time.”

From The Desk of Chester Hunter III

 

My parents didn't say anything while they were visiting, but after they got home they called me. I'm not trying to hurt you, El. Sometimes it's like I'm sitting in this chair with my hands on either side of the keyboard, and I've got these invisible things sitting in my palms: cushioning and hurt. I bounce them around to see how they feel, to see which one feels worse, and as I'm writing this letter I'm constantly reevaluating. But I keep returning to the feeling that hurt is the way to go, because while cushioning will remain cushioning, at least the hurt can turn itself into something new. For both of us, I mean.

They called on one of the days that you were having a checkup at the hospital. Right away, I was saying, “She's really special, isn't she?”

And my mom said, “I'm glad you brought Elodie up because we wanted to talk to you about that.” My dad was also on the line.

“What do you mean?”

My dad just came out with it. “She struck us as an odd bird.”

I told them that they had no idea who you really were.

My mom said, “I want to be fair. Perhaps there's a lot to her we haven't seen yet.”

“I also think it's important to remember that one partner in a relationship doesn't have to weigh directly upon the other,” my dad said, and I knew he was talking about his own situation. That made me furious, that he could even attempt to correlate our lives. “They aren't one reflection in the mirror.”

“I've got to get off the phone,” I told them. “I've got a lot of homework to do.”

“Chess, wait,” my mom said. “I'm going to hold off on passing judgment on Elodie.” But I could hear the lie in her voice. She has a habit of denying her judgment of people the way that hippies deny the variety in humans, the fact that there are just some who are impossible to love.

My dad added, “We didn't place this phone call to insult your girlfriend. We simply want to let you know that you'll be fine, whether it's with or without her.”

After that, I didn't talk to them for a few weeks. But when I finally got the green light from my doctor to start physical therapy, I began to see that while they were misguided in dragging you into it, they were right about me. For the first time in months, I started to feel sure that I would be fine.

Before I went to my first session, I fully expected to come back and give you all the details. When I was in the middle of it, though, this realization started to build and build and build that my recuperation wasn't something that I should bring home to you. Like I said, for the first time since the accident, I could actually see that I was going to be better one day, that there was a light at the end of this particular tunnel. I mean, I could see that I was literally going to get up and walk out of this injury at some point in the near future. And then my thoughts went to you, and I was wrecked by how there wasn't any doctor or clinic or place that you could go to to get better. That was when I decided that I would be an asshole to tell you all about my day, rubbing it in your face.

I think the extent of my report to you went something like “It went really well. I like my doctor.” Now I'll give you the rest.

The morning I met my doctor—Dr. Daly—he was sitting in his office looking at a row of fishbowls. He had six tiny ones that had betta fish in them, but all of the fish were dead and floating upside down. I was the first appointment of the day and he'd just come in and found them like that. Initially, I took the dead fish as a profoundly bad sign, thinking that they were an omen directed toward me by some power in the universe. I'm not saying God or a conscious higher power, but more along the lines of impersonal, unavoidable forces, like fate or karma.

But I started to feel better and better as Dr. Daly gave me his take on the dead fish.

“One of the new night-shift cleaning ladies must have gotten overexcited and fed them, unaware that I give them four pellets every night before I leave,” he said. I was totally surprised when he put his bare hand into one of the fishbowls and scooped out the green betta. “I would never harm any of these little guys while they were living, but I've always been curious. I've always believed that when opportunity presents itself, we shouldn't waste it. Do you mind?”

“No,” I said, but I wasn't even entirely sure what I was agreeing to. “Go ahead.”

Dr. Daly opened the drawer on his desk and took out a scalpel. He put the fish down on his month-at-a-glance calendar, and then he dragged the knife along the fish's stomach and split it open. After that, he held the fish so that his right forefinger was on its head and his right thumb was pressing down on its tail stub, and he squeezed it. The way the fish looked when it opened up reminded me of those free plastic coin carriers that the bank gives you when you sign up for a new savings account.

Dr. Daly looked inside the fish for a few seconds, then asked me, “Do you want to see?”

“I guess. Sure,” I said. I looked into the fish. And, El, that's the moment when my day snapped into place. Because looking into that fish, I could see the simplicity of its insides. There wasn't so much going on in there. And then, kaboom. It came unexpectedly rushing back, the feeding that I had instant access to everything in the world, including fish guts, and that I didn't even have to get permission to look where I wanted, go where I wanted. Reading that sentence back to myself, I acknowledge that it makes me seem like an intense prick. But I know you of all people understand how these mysterious flicks of the switches in our brain work. I'll always remember that you described your pain to me like that in your letter—there one instant, gone the next, and you could never see either state coming. All our lives we're taught that personal growth is this process that takes time, but there in that doctor's office, I think I realized that this isn't the case. There's a point where you cross over to a new side. Maybe people count all the time it takes you to get there, but I don't think that's right. All that matters is that little piece of time when something actually clicks.

After looking into the fish, I decided to smell the guts as well. They didn't smell bad like I thought they would, and I told Dr. Daly that. So he also smelled the fish, waving it under his nose like he was sniffing the bouquet of a good wine. “It doesn't smell like much,” he said. I nodded.

Dr. Daly told me, “The Indians—I'm referring to the Native American ones—advocate using every part of a dead animal. I'll save the bodies until I think of something to do with them.” So he took out each of the fish and put them into a glass bowl that was holding his change. We both looked at those fish lying there for a few seconds, and when we looked back up at each other it was like there was an understanding between us, like we were on the same page and we knew it.

“Let's talk about your legs,” Dr. Daly said. “According to your latest x-rays, your knees are mending tremendously. The fractures are almost invisible. Everything's in place for you to regain full mobility.”

It wasn't like I thought I would never walk again, but I guess that I hadn't considered that it was something I could be striving for so soon. “You're serious? Really? I can't tell you how great that is to hear,” I said, which was a lot less than I had in my heart.

Then everything was being set into motion. “When you start working with Sascha—she'll be your trainer; we call them trainers here—this afternoon, I don't want you to push yourself too hard. She'll tell you this too. It's better to start out slow and work up to your maximum ability than it is to overextend yourself on the first try, and wake up tomorrow feeling like the Tin Man. Your knees will heal. I assure you. They will. So let them. A lot of patients don't feel the results while they're training. Sometimes bodies can be on a delay of sorts. Keep that in mind.”

When he was reassuring me that my knees would heal, it was almost like God telling me that. Okay, not God, but someone who knew a lot more than me. “Thanks,” I told him. “I will.”

Then I met Sascha, and my first thought was that her thighs were like cannons. Huge and thick, and that made me confident about what she could do for my own legs. I mean, just the sight of her made me feel like an Olympian, to receive the personal attention of that caliber of thighs. They were disproportionate to the rest of her. She was like a satyr who'd shaved her legs.

I thought she was going to say something like “You ready to get pumped?” but instead she was surprisingly normal and calm. She asked me, “Have you tried walking at all since the incident?”

“No,” I said. I looked down at my knees, like they were going to tell me why I hadn't even tried. I was amazed that the thought hadn't even occurred to me before she suggested it. “I don't know why I haven't, though, now that you ask. I think I assumed that I wasn't supposed to.”

“You'll walk,” Sascha told me.

We spent hours slowly bending and unbending my knees with different machines and weights, and at the very end of the session, I got on a treadmill with handrails. Sascha put it on a low, low speed, and before I could even grasp the importance of what I was doing, I was walking. I was holding onto the rails and going about ten inches an hour, but still, I was walking. How many things in our lives we take for granted! I looked at Sascha with awe, like I had reached, I don't know, the top of Mount Everest and was viewing the world from a startling height, and I said, “I'm going to be fine.”

When I got back to the infirmary, you were sitting in bed, reading a book for class. I thought you looked pale. You heard the door and glanced up.

“Oh my god!” you shouted, because I was on crutches.

Robin, that dehydrated/food-poisoned sophomore who was staying in the infirmary, even said, “Wow!” and she barely knew me.

I hopped into the room, seeing it from my new level, and the first thing I noticed was that the view out the windows was different. Before, from across the room, I'd been looking at branches. Now I could see down to the sidewalk on the other side of the street. I remember on that day there was a group of Brown kids, and I even recognized one of the guys. I'd met him at a party freshman year and we'd gone to Johnny Rockets afterward.

“You look tall to me,” you said, and I suddenly realized that you'd never seen me at my full height. And I realized that in a weird way, that meant you, in the physical sense, had never seen me for real.

You asked me what the doctor said, and I basically told you that my right knee was almost completely healed, so I could put pressure on it, and that the left one was coming along. And then I disguised the physical therapy experience in something like one or two casual sentences.

Suddenly, you stood up on your bed because you were actually that excited for me. I was so touched, El. You yelled, “I'm unbelievably happy for you!” and I remember looking over at Robin, and seeing that she was staring at you like you were a freak.

“Thanks, El,” I said. “Your support means the world to me.”

“This makes me happy,” you told me. “And I'm so happy to feel happy right now. That sounded simple, but I mean it.”

“Believe me, baby. I'm also happy,” I said.

We had some fun on the crutches that afternoon, and when you told me that you'd never been on crutches before, I was taken aback. I didn't say anything, but I had sort of assumed that throughout your childhood, you had broken or sprained a lot of parts.

But you told me, “I've never broken or sprained anything in my life.”

And I said, “That's funny.”

And you said, “Well, not funny in a laugh-out-loud way.”

While you were messing around on my crutches, Robin tugged on my arm as I was passing by her bed. “I wanted to give you my congratulations, too. So, congratulations.”

“Thanks,” I replied. “You know, that's really decent of you to say.” I felt this instant kinship with her, and over the new few weeks, that feeling spread to the rest of the community around me. I had the sense that everybody was rooting for me. I'd honestly forgotten how good and unpredictably kind people could be.

You suggested that we celebrate, that we should mark the occasion, and you told me that we could do anything I wanted. You even suggested bribing Vivian to go get us some alcohol, when I knew you couldn't have any because of your medication.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do, though. It had been so long
—so long
—since I'd sung.