Will & I (3 page)

The discovery of my allergy to Demerol is probably my most vivid memory. This was nobody's fault, since I'd never taken Demerol before and there wasn't a history of reaction with anyone in the family. In fact, when my father had his first knee replacement surgery, he practically lived off it. But I knew something was wrong immediately after it was given to me. I was still in Chattanooga then. I remember my body going from feeling like every part of it was being dipped in lava to having the most extreme chills in a matter of seconds. I gritted to my mother through my wired-shut jaw that I thought I was going to explode.

When I came home from the hospital, with my arm in a sling and a patch over my eye, I walked into my old room, and the first thing I saw was a sign my high school girlfriend's little sister had made for me on her computer. “WELCOME HOME CLAY, GET WELL SOON,” it read. “From Ginny” was written in small but visible letters in the corner. My mother had hung it on the wall over my bed. I saw it and broke down.

She came rushing into my room when she heard me crying. “What is it, baby? Are you okay?” I sobbed that I was. “Bill,” she screamed to my father. Beee-ulll. I heard my father's foot-pounding run down the hall.

Despite the excruciating physical pain I was in, I felt like a kid on Christmas Eve. I couldn't explain it. Everything was happening so fast I hadn't even begun to reflect on what had taken place. All I knew was that I was alive. I'd never felt more alive. I'd always known that I could handle something like this—had privately thought that this set me apart—and now I was proving it. I didn't want to attach some reason to why I was still alive and ruin the play.

 

3

My parents eventually divulged the news they'd been dreading telling me since the wreck. They both came into my room and sat down on my bed. I was sitting at my desk overlooking the kudzu-sloped front yard. They never came into my room together, so of course I wondered what was up.

“I've got some bad news,” my father said. My mother sat on my bed and stared down at the carpet.

“Oh God, what?” I said, as if watching from above.

“Well,” he sighed, “there's this relatively new surgery where they take a nerve out of the back of your leg, your sural nerve, and piece it into your shoulder, into your brachial plexus.” (Right after I left Chattanooga, he bought a Ciba-Geigy medical book on the nervous system, and I can still hear the precise way he pronounced
sural
and
brachial plexus
.) “And the only places that do it are in New Orleans and San Francisco. Lucky for us, the man who invented the procedure is down in New Orleans.” But, he said, the doctors first wanted to give my nerve time to regenerate itself. Intensive physical therapy was how we'd avoid another surgery.

“So?” I said on the verge of tears.

“So you're not going to be going back to Sewanee this next semester.”

There wasn't anywhere in Chattanooga that provided the kind of aquatic therapy I needed. I could have made the daily commute to Nashville, but it was over an hour away and, with the addition of classes, wasn't very practical. Besides, Riverside rehab in Birmingham was one of the few other places in the Southeast that had what I needed.

In the back of my mind I'd already assumed that something like this would happen, that something else would go wrong, but hearing it in this well-prepared manner was devastating. My chest rose and my stomach sank simultaneously.

“What about my classes?” I said. Sewanee didn't accept credits from a lot of places. I knew they didn't from UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham)—they were on the quarter system.

My mother said they'd already spoken with Birmingham Southern and classes from there would transfer to Sewanee.

“I'm not going to live out there,” I said.

“That's good,” my father said, “because I'm not paying for you to live out there.”

“It's only for one semester, baby,” my mother added. “You don't want to have another surgery, especially one like this that's new and eight hours long—yeah, eight
owahs
.”

Even then I knew this was in my best interest, but it seemed like I'd just moved away from home. I'd only had one full year of independence, but what a year it was. I already felt like a grown-up. I thought I was my own unattached man who could take care of himself. Will also being at Sewanee didn't count. I hardly wanted to move back in with my parents, back to the adolescent lifestyle that I used to lead. It would bring what I considered was an old and outgrown past far too close to the present.

“What choice do I have?”

“Exactly,” my father said, and sighed. Then he smiled. My mother came over and hugged me before they both walked out.

When Will eventually found out, he was giddy with anger, he was so relieved. Another surgery likely wasn't going to be needed. When he discovered that he was no longer going to have a car, he acted as if that was a given—well yeah, sure. Everything was in walking distance at Sewanee anyway, and most of our friends had cars. He didn't care at all that I wasn't going to be there with them or that I might be lonely all by myself. “Boo-hoo,” he said. “Suck it up, you pussy.”

*   *   *

Months passed, and the progress wasn't what we'd hoped. My right hand was fine, but from the shoulder to the wrist, the arm was just a dangling extremity. I remember the nightly lightning storms that seemed to be taking place in it when the nerves would try to connect with each other. I would take the sling off my right arm prior to driving. Because the hand was fine, I could turn the key and grip the wheel, but I couldn't steer with it, because the arm wouldn't work, so I learned to drive with my left. Only on the open highway, when there was less turning to be done, could I use the right, anchoring the wheel with it.

I'd stopped wearing my eye patch right after the New Year. My damaged optic nerve had healed enough to allow my eyeball to track back and forth. I no longer had double vision everywhere I looked.

If I dwelled on the negative aspects of my situation—living back at home, having endless amounts of time, having the threat of surgery constantly hanging over me—I'd get lonely and depressed. I tried to concentrate on other things. This proved harder than I thought. Not submerging myself at all in my new college life at Birmingham Southern, I didn't make any new friends. And I didn't have any high school friends around I went to the trouble of becoming reacquainted with. I'd signed up for only two classes because I assumed my therapy sessions would go the full two hours every time, and they didn't. I went up to Sewanee most every weekend, but I still had more time to myself than I'd ever had before.

In the middle of March, my father and I went to the hospital downtown to have something called an EMG nerve-conduction test, meant to give us a more accurate picture of how my therapy was going. An attendant repeatedly stuck a long, acupuncture-thin needle down into my nerves, asking me to move my arm. It didn't hurt. Later, the Japanese doctor who deciphered the results presented the news to us with a big smile. The test had shown that my nerves were indeed regenerating. My father chuckled, as if to say, “See, I told you therapy would work.” I was happy and relieved, too, but on some level remained skeptical. Just because my nerves had regenerated a little didn't mean they would regenerate all the way, not a small distinction when you can't move your elbow. The nine-month mark, at which we'd need to decide about whether to operate, was approaching. Nevertheless, I smiled along with them.

 

4

A girl I'd known, whom I'd met on an outdoor hiking-and-camping course after high school, came to visit a couple of weekends after that test. Her trip had been marked on my calendar for a while. It had done more than anything to keep me from getting completely depressed during the previous few months.

Eleanor was from Illinois. I hadn't seen her since Alaska, almost two years before. We kept in touch for a while afterward, then lost touch, then started communicating again after the wreck. Eleanor was two years younger, and had been the only girl in the instructorless “small group” we had broken off into for the last week of the course. It was five guys and her. We'd all become good friends by then, which is undoubtedly why the instructors put us together. You get to know someone pretty well when you spend twenty-four hours a day with them without any distractions for an entire month—things friends normally don't know, or want to know, about each other. Bathroom things. Still, her boyfriend was reluctant about her coming to visit another guy. But she didn't tell me this until after she was in Birmingham.

My first thought when I went to pick her up at the airport was how much lighter and fluffier her hair was when it was clean. Otherwise it seemed no time had passed since that summer. We hugged over my sling.

“Hi, there,” she shyly said. I don't think either of us could have stopped smiling if we'd wanted.

We both agreed it had been too long.

We hugged again. Her perfume made me a little dizzy, but I didn't care. She patted my sling as we rode down the escalator to the baggage claim. “I can't believe all you've been through, Clay. I wish there was something I could have done.”

Eleanor had long legs and a mixture of shyness and self-confidence you see in girls who discover only after puberty that they are attractive. She'd told us she was a tomboy when she was little, and she still had an assertive manner. The night we'd hiked out of the woods, after the course, just as I'd fallen asleep in the hayloft where we were sleeping, she had leaned over and kissed me, something no one had ever done out of the blue like that before. Her sleeping bag was next to mine, but it took a second before I realized whose hair hung in my face. I instinctively flinched and then gladly went with it.

The first night of her visit, after we'd watched a movie in the playroom and tried to call the other guys from our camping group, I told her that I was going to bed. I noticed, or thought I did anyway, that my statement had upset her. So as if I had no choice, I turned and walked over to where she was sitting on the red leather couch. I said, “Do you mind if I kiss you good night?” She smiled and said she didn't.

“What took you so long?” she said, after I sat down beside her.

I was instantly relieved but defensively replied, “I thought you had a boyfriend.”

“I know.” She frowned. “It's just so good to see you.”

After kissing some more, I said, “I don't have a problem with it if you don't.”

“Let's go upstairs,” she said.

In retrospect, I get a certain pleasure from thinking that we walked hand in hand right past my parents' bedroom door, on the way up. At the time, I forgot that I had parents. My heartbeat didn't slow down until she walked out of the bathroom and into my sister's bedroom. I was already in the bed, naked and I'm sure with a hard-on. It was only when she laughed at her attempt to cover her breasts as she crossed the room that I calmed down and shifted to autopilot. Nothing felt illicit about this. And there wasn't that moment of hesitation that can come when you're initially confronted with a separate body. Because we knew each other as well as we did, my guiding principle had become forgiveness. We were in this together and whatever was okay. Her laugh echoed that. There was definitely desire—my hormones were raging—but it was secondary to a feeling of unity. I knew she felt the same way, even if she did have a boyfriend. So when I asked if she wanted to have sex and she said, “I don't know, do you?” I couldn't help but look down and laugh. We quickly went over our brief sexual pasts. Then she said, “Pull out before.”

Eleanor started crying at the airport before her flight home, but it didn't make me sad. We made plans for a return visit that summer. I kept thinking, could I really be this lucky? I walked around in a daze, dividing my time between fretting over surgery and wondering about her. But as time wore on, our phone calls dwindled. She was spending more time with her boyfriend, and it was probably awkward for her to squeeze me in. And then as the surgery began to seem more and more inevitable, I became preoccupied with it, and thought about her less.

*   *   *

My mother was completely against the surgery from the beginning. She accepted that it was my choice but said with finality, “This thing is just too new, Clay. You have nothing to go on. I mean, who is this guy anyway?” This guy was one of the most respected surgeons in the country.

I tried to remain calm, and looked to my father for support. “Mom, he's done plenty of these operations. If it comes to that. It may not. I'm not worried at all.” I was terrified.

Strangely, however, Will and I never discussed whether I should go through with the surgery. His fear for what might happen to me instinctively made him want to side with our mother, I could tell. But he knew what I had to do, what he would have been reluctant about but done himself.

This guy, Dr. Jeffrey Cohen, the neurosurgeon, was a short, later-middle-aged man with beady eyes, a bulbous nose, and prominent incisors. He had black hair with a widow's peak that he kept combed back. The edges were peppered with gray. It kind of disturbed me that he acted as if I were irrelevant as he examined me—all he wanted was my injury—but he had a crowd of interns making his rounds with him, and he immediately put me at ease by his confidence in everything he said and did.

“You see the lack of response from the biceps and deltoids, and the minimal response from the triceps and hand?” He held up my arm and had me try to move various muscles. “This is indicative of C-6 damage, and judging by the movement the patient exhibits, the damage is likely near the root.”

Whenever a doctor spoke objectively about things concerning me that I knew about as sensations, but didn't have the terminology for, I felt that much more removed from my body, which was both eerie and a relief.