To Feel Stuff (23 page)

“A singing night?” you asked.

“A singing night,” I confirmed. It occurred to me that just like I hadn't tried to walk in ages, I hadn't tried to sing in ages either. The last time I'd attempted a song was the night of the accident. “I feel like singing, what can I say? I feel even more like watching
you
sing. I want to hear what you sound like.”

You weren't thrilled with the idea, but in the end you figured that the day I got the use of my knees back was at least equivalent to a birthday in terms of momentousness, and if it had actually been my birthday, you would have humored me. “I can sing anything I want?” you asked.

“That's part of the beauty of a capella. You can sing anything you want because you don't need accompaniment.”

But you said that you'd rather sing with music, which took me aback. You said that you liked the way it filled the space. I didn't want to spend the rest of the night trying to educate you about the superiority of the solo voice, so I was like fine, okay, whatever, but maybe I should have tried to stop you because then I might not have had to see what I did.

When you walked out of the infirmary I had no idea what you were doing, but you came back with a mini boom box from the storage closet. Then you got down on your knees and pulled your suitcase out from under the bed to get your CD.

I practically had to tear myself away from the window because the night looked so alive and the snow so bright it made me want to go sprint into it. I sat down on our bed and told you I couldn't wait to hear your voice. I was probably more excited than you realized, because I think that singing can be more personal than sex. It's like a person's true voice is hidden in everyday speech, and you only hear what's really underneath when they're performing a song.

I thought you were going to start then, but first you unplugged the lamp from our bedside table and moved it over near the fireplace. I said, “What's that for?” and I don't know if you heard me or not, but you didn't answer. When you went and asked Robin if you could borrow the metal IV stand she'd been using, she shot me a glance like I was supposed to know what was going on. I just shrugged, figuring that you knew what you were doing.

You rolled that stand over to the fireplace and said, “Okay. I'm ready,” and I think I said something like “Hey, I'm intrigued.”

After you pressed “play” on the boom box and turned up the volume, you walked over to the door and turned off all the lights. I sort of recognized the song's bouncy opening chords, since I had heard them somewhere before, but I couldn't place a tide or artist. It definitely wasn't a song in my group's repertoire.

Then the lamp on the floor clicked on at the exact same time as the first word of the first verse:

“Girlfriend in a coma.”

You were lying on the floor illuminated from below, the light throwing shadows on your features. You looked like you were at a campfire holding a flashlight under your chin. Like you were going to tell us a scary story, and you were trying to look as creepy as possible.

You'd pulled the IV stand down on a diagonal, and you sang into it, your “microphone,” like a strung-out junkie collapsed on the floor. I swear, that's the image I thought of when I saw you like that. I guess it was a coincidence that you were wearing your white long johns that night, but that outfit made you look even skinnier than usual. You looked like you were all one piece except for your hair. In that light the edges of your long johns blended into your skin, which was a really bizarre effect.

And your singing voice was also a big shock to me. You know, your speaking voice is pretty muted, and although I know that part of the softness is because of everything that's happened to your lungs, I kind of suspected that it had always been that way. But your singing voice was so sharp and concise, it seemed like someone else was singing out from inside your body. Robin and I talked about it later and she said that she thought you sounded like you were possessed.

I had also never seen you “pretend” before, or perform, or whatever I should call what it was you were doing. I was the most bewildered when you flipped yourself over onto all fours and acted like you were the boyfriend in the song. You pretended that you were watching over a comatose girlfriend on the ground. This was especially fucked up because the invisible person you were tending to was “lying” where you'd just been lying, so it was like you were trying to take care of your self from five seconds ago. It was really hard to watch. You were making these motions like you were trying to care for the invisible patient

I never want to hear that song again. You started crawling along the length of the IV stand, singing to a doctor who wasn't there, wanting to know if his patient would pull through.

Then you put the IV stand into a vertical position and you grasped onto it, climbing it with your hands until you were standing up, too. Do you even remember doing any of this? It was like you were in another world. You kept the top end of your “mic” really close to your lips, and you placed the lower end of it between your thighs. And you sang straight to me.

I wanted to get up and press “stop” on the boom box and flick on the lights, but I felt paralyzed.

Toward the end of the song, you began to fold backward like you were breaking first from your neck, then your shoulders, then your spine, then your knees. Your legs started shaking from the exertion—even the shadow that you threw on the wall was shaking.

What a horrible song! Who would write lyrics like that, and why? Not “who” like “who's the artist,” but what kind of person, I mean?

With your head tilted back toward the floor, all I could see was an abstract profile of your chin and moving mouth, and from that angle you looked nothing like yourself.

You sang,
“I know
—
It's serious.”

Finally done, you crumpled onto the floor, your hair pooled in the circle of light under the lamp. You reached out and hit the power button. I remember that the heater was the only thing left making a sound.

I think it took me at least a minute to speak. I had to wait for all these awful thoughts to pass so that I wouldn't say something I'd regret later.

“That wasn't funny” is what I ultimately said.

You propped yourself up on your elbows. The light behind your head made the top of your hair look like it was catching on fire. “Oh, come on,” you said. “Yes it was.”

“No.” I was wringing my hands underneath the covers, where you couldn't see. “It wasn't.”

“I know,” you said, and I thought you were agreeing with me, apologizing to me. But then you laughed, singing, “I know—it's serious,” and I realized you were just quoting the song. That night was either the beginning or end of something—whichever way you want to look at it—but it was definitely something.

Paxil CR: Get back to being you

 

Here we are. I've reached the present. First I'll say, Happy Valentine's Day. I thought about what I wanted to get you for at least a month because I didn't want it to be something dumb. Everything I thought of seemed too small. I kept getting frustrated by how impossible it is to ever make another person understand how you see him. For example, maybe there was a day when we were just lying in bed, reading, and that's how you remember it. You don't know that right then I was falling in love with you. When I think about all the moments like that, it makes me sad to grasp how separate people will always be, no matter how hard they try to be close. Every second a million things get lost. They flash through my head, but they don't get out to you. All these things that I've ever thought about you or us are stuck inside me, and I keep thinking that maybe you've really got no idea. I believe that you know I love you. You just don't know the specifics. That's not your fault or my fault. I think that if we have to place blame somewhere, it's on our bodies. They're not equipped to project thoughts outside themselves. They're not equipped to absorb outside thoughts either. This gets me down.

I think that even though it's an insurmountable job to put those thoughts on the table, I have to try. Telling stories is exhausting, and sometimes I get scared that I'll be telling the same stories for the rest of my life, trying to acquaint new people with my past until I become this factory of repetition. Sometimes I think that if I have to fill in those holes one more time, I'll never say anything worthwhile again. That's part of why this overwhelming collection of thoughts about you has been so important for me. Finally, I have something to tell you, or at least to try to tell you, that hasn't been hashed out before. I've wanted to tell you everything from the inside out. The overriding problem is that there's just too much of it.

Then last week I thought of writing you this letter. I would start at the beginning, from the very first time that I knew you existed. I would go through every moment that I could remember thinking something major, and it wouldn't even matter if you had been in the room because you hadn't been in my brain.

I remember watching this segment on the news the summer before I came here. A psychologist ran a test where he asked a group of people to watch a tape of students passing balls to each other. He asked the people to count the number of times that the balls had been passed. Even when focused on the task, they came back with a lot of different numbers. There was more, though.

The doctor had dressed up a man in a big bear suit and instructed him to walk through the middle of the game. Not a single person remembered having seeing a bear. I think he waved, too. They were shocked when the doctor played back the tape for them and told them simply to watch it without trying to count the number of passes. There was the bear, clear as day. They were horrified that they'd missed him. Their faces almost looked scared, like all of a sudden they were realizing all of the other things throughout their lives that they might have been blind to.

Here's another example: car accidents. No one ever remembers seeing the same thing. One witness says the blue car braked unexpectedly. Another says, wrong, it was the red one that accelerated for no reason. Everybody's traumatized in a different way. Everybody's operating in their own, distinct universes. We've been doing it, too, but that's just how it goes.

I know that human beings are self-absorbed because that's the way we're built. Like I said before, we literally absorb ourselves. Still, we're missing things way smaller than bears walking through our lives all the time. Smaller, but more significant because they're personal comments on us, not just our lack of decent observation skills. Even lying in the same bed, you and I are living radically different lives. It's disheartening, but true.

I didn't think that writing a letter like this would solve that distance. That wasn't what I was aiming for. I only hoped that it would help a little. Sometimes I can feel myself getting incrementally better, healthwise. Even though, overall, I'm aware that I'm still sick, that slight sensation of getting better means the world to me. I hope it's like that for us. Obviously, you're never really going to know what it's like to be me, and I'm never going to know what it's like to be you. There will always be a rift that's bigger than our best intentions. Still, I think that the simple act of trying is worth a lot. That's what I wanted to give to you for Valentine's Day.

An incomplete and naïve, but well-intentioned, account of what I've been seeing all this time. If any of it is unrecognizable to you, then the good news is that that means we're getting somewhere.

I've been writing in the hospital, in the waiting room, after you've gone to bed. One final admission: that day last week when I told you that I was working on the paper about health care in Canada, I was working on this letter. This is probably one of the biggest valentines ever, in terms of sheer length. I hope you like it more than you'd like a shirt or chocolate or whatever custom says that I'm supposed to get you. If you really want some chocolate, I'm sure I can arrange it. Just let me know, so I don't have to read your mind.

 

I love you. A lot. I definitely do.

—Elodie.

From The Desk of Chester Hunter III

 

I felt like such a dickhead when you gave me your letter on Valentine's Day. That letter took me three days to read and I didn't know what it contained at the time. But I felt like a dickhead because you had come up with an amazing, one-of-a-kind token of your feelings, and all I had for you was a fucking bracelet.

I'd wanted to do lots and lots of candles for you, but Vivian and Sarah wouldn't let me because of that fire in that girl's room in Keeney at the beginning of the month. I guess the university sent out a “no tolerance” policy to everyone, just because of that one girl's mistake. I couldn't believe that the nurses were going to enforce the memo, since I felt and still feel that the infirmary should be considered a separate arm of the school with its own laws.

I loved that night of the fire, by the way. Watching everyone running out of the building across the street in towels and embarrassing, secret pajamas, and us kneeling in the dark, spying on all of them. It was like we knew something about human behavior that no one else did is the best way I can put it for you. I think that I haven't had that many moments in my life where I've been able just to freely watch other people without, you know, being watched myself. That night it was like we were one pair of eyes, and even though your letter argued against this idea, also one mind.

Anyway, I just wanted to tell you now that I'd envisioned lighting rows of red candles along the walls of the infirmary, and then putting white ones on the windowsills. I was going to make the infirmary look like someplace else for you, and that would have been way better than the bracelet.