Above me, she struggles to open the window. The layers of paint on paint stick until she squeezes through. I see the thick rope around her waist: a contingency plan, a strategy filled with harmful error. In this action I register a glimmer of hope. Her overzealous faith is an act. “Julie!”
She bares her teeth like a sick animal. “Your appreciation is a lie! I keep guns in my brain! I barge through reason to get to truth! I flush the cough syrup down the drain to be sure your voice runs out quicker. You are a minor flaw! I will descend on you and you will be erased!” She loses her footing for a moment on the sill. Even if she doesn’t intend to jump, she might fall. I wake up. I grasp that only I can stop her. I run into the house cursing. I hear the bawl of her shouting. I don’t hear the words. I climb the stairs in threes, racing. I reach the second floor. I see the parachute of her nightgown tumble past the hall window. I reverse. I sprint down the stairs to the yard. I have never moved so slowly.
I reemerge. It’s like I’m staring through smudged glass. The rope hangs her a couple of feet above the ground. Her rag-doll fingertips and knees and toes dust the tips of the grass.
“Julie.”
She groans.
I fear her spine has snapped. I think about not moving her. I move to call paramedics. I will let them make the decisions. On the stairs, though, I invert my instincts. I dart for the gardening shears. I am willing to take the blame if this is the wrong thing to do. It must be better to get her solidly on the ground instead of suspended like livestock being bled. It takes me several well-muscled attempts to cut through the rope. I catch her as she crumples. “Can you move?” She twists a little, whimpering. I see the farthest parts of her crimp and uncoil. Faith and confidence hide behind my fret.
Her hand travels to her abdomen. I peel the cloth up carefully. Already, the dark purple is forming in a thick band around her belly. The rope calls out of her more of what is lurking inside. The bruise ripples with proof.
78
I UNDERSTAND WHAT I’m doing and I have good reasons and it’s not difficult to salvage beauty from the debacle, but I can’t breathe so I can’t explain this to James.
Each of my organs cinched, my pulse running ragged within me, I feel hammered out. That leap and fall flashing at the speed of hocus-pocus, Hoc est corpus meum, a prayer. My lungs well up like a soggy ashtray and my bladder sparks a fistful of anatomical tinsel. My bowels blistered, my womb bombed out.
Not-James holds me, staring in my eyes, willing me to swan out of the depth of myself again, but he leaves me and returns with a wheelbarrow and a mouth so pursed I swear it must be toothless and I am no longer my own.
“You will be safer in this.” He lifts me, me without the will to balk, and he settles me into the cart, but my edges are too delicate for the broad metal and I try to trap the pain and arrest the scratch against my skin and focus instead on the blood snuffing through my eardrums. I can tell how concerned not-James is, but I wonder what it will take to get him to call an ambulance, and I wish the blood would show through, because all this bruising, the skin stretched to breaking, hides the truth. I moan and not-James tells me this is a good sign, that at least I’m alive, but I feel choked, and I want the flushing release of my throat’s opening to let in everything I need. I feel the route of my injuries banging through my cranium and the deficiencies hiding deep in the center of my spine when not-James hoists me over his shoulder at the front steps. “Almost inside,” he says at the top, but the pressure on my belly forces the sick out of my mouth and it runs down not-James’s back. He gets me in the door and sets me on the couch and sees a deep red rim around my mouth, the blood having found a way out, and he goes for the phone and I feel pale time pass so deliberately as he demands urgency from the operator. I want to be clean and I want to beat off anyone who might help, but while I’m distracting my mind with these desires, I lose myself and fall away and grunt as if I were shot. I’m gone.
79
LIFE, EVEN AT its most dangerous, pushes through mundane details. Its procedural pace infuriates me. I am eager for development and answers. I am shocked by the profound dullness. Julie lies in a hospital bed. I immediately answer questions the doctors pose. Every request I make, however, takes hours to fulfill. In the ICU, the nurses and social workers and aides and doctors hear every bell and beep and respond with a measured hurry. I learn quickly to tune them out. I grow to assume nothing new is wrong.
I find it difficult to stay engaged. This alarms me. Surely, in these moments, I am concerned with nothing else aside from Julie’s well-being. I operate at the height of myself. Yet, I find myself distracted. I get lost in what will come next and what I could have done differently. The doctors emerge with updates. I ask them to repeat themselves. It is hard to understand the simplest things. I can’t stay trained on the present moment. I tune in and out like listening to a sermon. I keep saying things that make little sense. I notice my eyes scuffling around pages, unable to read them. I commit my signature to the line anyway. My breath lurches. I haul Julie’s chances of surviving through my mind. I squat in my own belly. My viscera form teethfuls of nervous heat. I stare at a lightbulb until I’m blind. Sight knuckles the edges of the burning cataract.
Family visit in waves. Julie’s parents show up. The adaptation of their daughter they find in her hospital bed disturbs them. My parents blow through. They make recommendations. They insist they’ll return to see the house soon. Connie comes to the hospital. She has instructed Julie’s other coworkers to leave us our privacy. My hope is that Julie can recover quickly. I hope people won’t see this alternative version of her. I hope they won’t hold it up as a comparison every day moving forward.
I avoid accepting Julie’s condition. I disappear. I ask myself, What is better? To accept the horror presented before you or search for a way out? To hunt in yourself for a comparable defect or to pull yourself tall and strong to support the correction of someone else’s faults?
There is no acceptable, untainted name for a wilderness of the mind. People will always wonder what to believe. They expect the stray inaccuracies to be looted out and abandoned. They expect the mind’s voice to unstitch only when alone. When the seams rip, they look away.