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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781467034791 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 10/12/2011 |
| Pages: | 212 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.48(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Someone Traveling
By Jane Nicholson
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2011 Jane NicholsonAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4670-3479-1
Chapter One
Afterlife
My husband met death at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon. He was sitting behind his desk in his office in the Physics Department on the University of Iowa campus. A graduate student whom he knew to be agitated, stepped through the doorway, pointed a .38 Taurus semiautomatic pistol at him and fired. Twice.
Less than an hour later, my husband's colleague calls me. He is someone I know quite well. I do not quite recognize the severe calm that governs his voice. It is not at all his usual tone with me. For a calm tone it is awful. In a distant mental place, I have already sorted things out: to expect something—but not the worst. On Friday, November 1, 1991, the colleague's familiar voice intones a levelness that is beyond calm. The voice states, "He's dead, Jane."
"He's dead, Jane." He says it again and perhaps again; I think the repetitions are meant to overcome the distance between us. He reaches me in Tulsa where I, too, am in the profession of teaching. Later I realize that he called just ahead of the five o'clock news.
His tone of voice stays with me. I realize that it was suffused with stiffness about to break in his throat. Like his voice, my brain has stiffened. Like the practiced, strained quality of his voice, my brain too hides something from me. This is not my right mind, it is a mind flooded in fight or flight neural chemicals useless for long-distance calamity.
It seems to me that I mull these few matters of voice and calamity, truth, and fracture for hours though it would have been a minute or two at most. I inhabit fact and doubt like the broken person I am. Fact and bewilderment are strange but well-paired companions.
How do you contrive the tone of voice suitable for making a call that you do not want to make? What I cast as someone else's unique dilemma becomes something that I need to know, urgently. For, his sedate voice—coached, I now think—has instructed me to pick up the phone and call a friend. This, too, he repeated to me. And when I pick up the phone, much as he must have done, I am somehow as conscious of feeling his hesitancy as my own when I make the call. It is a simple benediction that my speeding mind prevents me from fully feeling my own strangeness. Its whirring also keeps at bay the urge to hang up before my friend can answer. For what I am about to tell Susan is too much to ask anyone to take in. When she answers, I rather calmly relate a preposterous story, that of a woman quite unknown to myself. But Susan does not balk at me or what I tell her. In no time at all, we are sitting across from each other at my kitchen table.
Susan fields calls from the media. At the first lull, she tells me that when I called her, the story was just breaking on the five o'clock news. My mind flashes a picture of a male broadcaster sitting coldly erect—the posture for news bulletins—but I do not conjure up a tone of voice. And I don't respond to Susan's comment aloud. My mind is humming and yet the two of us seem outwardly to be at a loss for words. Then she tells me that I need to eat. I say that I think I've put something in the oven. My mind stutters over this but she does not know it. It occurs to me that I put a prepared dish in the preheated oven after the phone call. This detail is hard evidence that I both do and do not know what I am doing. I cannot fathom how I darted out from behind a bunker of shock to do something utterly ordinary. Shamefully ordinary ... in response to a preheated oven that beeps. I eat a few mouthfuls and a carrot stick.
My mind has locked up the way bicycle brakes will do, catapulting you over the handle bars. Though I haven't ridden a bike in over two decades, this is precisely what I feel. I am a ten-year old who is launched, then cognizant, then sprawled. The soft wax of my memory-tablet bears countless bruises—the traces of that first, rough evening. Indeed, my mind was seizing matter as it had never done before. An indelible detail in my recall is that Susan phones her husband, John. She whispers to him that she thinks she will not sleep well unless she has her own pillow. I can tell that she does not want me to guess how skittish she feels. When she says, "Thank you, honey," I know that John will stop by with the pillow. He must have arrived in a matter of moments. Susan would have gone onto the porch discreetly to meet him. I don't recall seeing him, yet I feel so thoroughly the material residue of his act of responding to her request. I know intimately this responsiveness. That night John's response would have dripped with nervous energy. But his quickness would have reassured them that they two were safe, intact.
The world is an enormous pulsating nervous system. It occurs to me that it surely feels that way to everyone; I am among the last to know. But now that I am in the know, it seems to me so reasonable. Here is the state of things and I own up to it: This knowledge is neither an interpretation nor an analogy, but pure biology. Already, moments into the knowing, I find it an exhausting thing to experience the world this way. Endless nervy phone calls and the energy of Susan's request to John, and perhaps her need to see him—to look at him more carefully than she had as she raced out the door a few hours ago, make it easy to believe that the entire world is nothing but nerves.
This means that we are all very busy internally, I think. And even while I am thinking this, a different large idea zooms into my awareness. It announces that something is missing ... coupling or belovedness ... gone. It is far too soon to start rummaging around for the particulars of these things. Immediately is too soon. Too soon, too, to cut through the mind quite frozen in grief, the mind that also hums along as though mistakenly left "on." And while this mind toys with whatever is at hand, it sifts out any of the too-particular memories that would be unbearable. It blocks me from recalling my husband's ways of attending to me. I have recognized the moment of synchrony in coupled lives—the moment when we drop everything, as we say, to attend to the other. It is familiar, it is John and Susan, it is ancestral. It is given to me on this night as an inert blankness, durable and unromantic. But is it fit for standing up to disaster?
Sometime in the first weeks of grieving, I visit a chiropractor who tells me that the hard, throbbing knot at the base of my neck sits where the torque from the entry of the bullet into his temple would have shoved his head. She says solemnly, "Your axis vertebra is severely rotated. I don't think I've ever seen a car accident victim's like this." I can tell that I love this propinquity. I also love the symbolism of my axis being tilted by my loss. She has been right to say these things; they are true. But I also wonder whether I have done all this to myself. Have I somehow manufactured my response to the killing? I see the chiropractor just this one time, but it is a beginning.
Undoubtedly, my mind keened toward the idea of healers and helpers right away, at the first instant. My mind is grabbing what it seeks with the unquiet grace of a magnet hitting upon a ground of base metal, so that, despite my unease and confusion, ideas clunk and stick. And so, I find healers very near home. They exist in improbable proximity to my house, the one with the phone and the one that Susan slept in the first night. I marvel at this alternate world and its being so close at hand to my house. In fact, my knowing of the healers is no marvel; I have learned of this healing place from a friend who also deeply needed to heal. There is no marvel; there is need and work.
Soon, I am tracing a route back and forth from my home to the Victorian-style house converted to a wellness center. Each time, I climb the back stairs to the airy room where I will learn to breathe again. This part of the house must have been a second-floor porch at one time because it juts out over a lower courtyard into the crown of a large oak. The room perches like a tree house.
On this day, I don't look at the magical objects that I know hang, sit, and lean everywhere. I am seized by vertigo; I'm on edge. We begin the session. I am retelling a daydream that arose in me about a week after my husband's murder. It has the freshness of yesterday. It has fallen upon me, out of the blue ... if blue is the color of knowing. As I tell the dream to Mark, I shift registers so thoroughly that I nearly leave the room.
A woman is tearing a tree out of the earth. Her arms are live wires. Her face is taut; it is cast in iron. I am exerting energy so fierce that it is breaking my body. But now the tree is out of the earth. Its root system is intact. I am satisfied by what I have done. I am almost giddy to know that it is done. Done. I wanted to do this one thing more than anything I have ever done.
In the next moment the rest of the daydream and its aftermath wash over me. I exhale profoundly and resume my telling.
I sense that an offer is being extended to me: he will return to me if I can accept having the sky where the earth and water are and the earth and water in the place of the sky. I'm elated. It's so simple. Better, it's automatic. But I have blinked awake from the dream. Or half-way so. The contours of the rumpled covers on our bed seem to make a landscape. They remind me of hills I've walked and climbed. I realize that the barter is a fantasy. My short-lived relief is leveled by the corrupting strength of anger that runs in arms that have torn up a tree. The anger feeds one idea: the world is not right as it is and I cannot change it back. Awake, the woman is small again and quickly fills up with remorse before comprehending why.
I could not have known that I was about to retell the daydream or reckon how often it had played in my daydreams. Nor would I have guessed that the telling would amount to a kind of confession. All along, I'd been feeding the secret story of the tree and womanly arms; there was nothing left to chance in the way it recorded the raw power of my loss. The dream and my arms are fueled by inexhaustible, unhallowed stuff. But there, at the tail-end of the dream is my brokenness and it cannot redeem the soul whose craven greed was willing to wreck the design of life. It is nightmarish to swap earth for sky. And I have swallowed the dream whole so that is will always unquestionably be mine—the greed, the ephemeral state of being tantalized, the cravenness. And it will feed on the body I am healing in the room with magical objects.
I hear Mark's voice. He is beside me. "Did you feel anger in your arms during that dream?" I nod wearily. Part of me knows that we're about to do something I can't yet imagine. I know this much because I have already explored so much here, with him. He asks me to stand so that I can feel solidly grounded. "Feel the floor. Bring energy up your legs." I slide off the massage table where I've been sitting. I sense him moving quickly as I plant myself. A stack of pillows appears on the massage table. "Find a stance that feels solid and raise your arms above your head." Somehow I know what to do. I bring my arms crashing down on the pillows as hard as I can. I look stubbornly at the pillows and I see only pillows, a world of pillows. I raise and lower my arms. I fall down—I crumple—but get back on my feet. I am at work. Breathing heavily, I heave my arms over my head deliberately and slam them down. Perhaps I feel Mark watching me, but I work with abandon, freely.
I pound the pillows until a searing heat arises in me. I haven't left the room as I did in the daydream, but I'm here differently. I reel from exertion and say, "My neck feels like a mammoth tree trunk." My hands are raised up, poised about a foot away from either side of my neck. "Oh, it has rough bark and it's hotter than a furnace." I am the furnace.
I force my hands upward again; they are resting on my neck and they touch skin. It's as though I have two bodies. It is I who sense my neck as broad, rough, and hot; but the flesh of the neck I hold between my hands now is coolish and coolly familiar.
Mark throws a large pillow on the floor and I lie down. I make contact with the pillow and rug cautiously. Only then do I feel my legs. I extend them. They're roaring with the energy that they carried to my arms and neck. I let them shake.
I've collapsed into a dreamy state. I am almost certainly elsewhere. Mark's voice is distant. "Where are you? What are you doing?" He has nearly awakened me, but I want to speak.
"I'm with him."
"How is he?"
"He's cold and stiff."
I am crying. I've just told of my very last embrace with my husband. I'd answered the question too many times. "When did you see him last, Jane?" I knew what they wanted to hear. They wanted to hear of the last time we were together before he was killed. I know that time; I have evidence of it. And predictably, perhaps, my favorite photo of him is from those last few days. He's standing sleepy-eyed in the kitchen in Tulsa on Saturday morning and making a purring face at our new cat, Spike. I would not have taken the picture were it not for Spike.
To Mark, I've recounted the very last time I saw him ... in the special morgue improvised for me in a chapel of University Hospitals in Iowa City. There is such utter peace in that room occupied only by a dead man laid out on a simple, slim table. It's him. I know the form and also every line and mark. I am alert, awakened to his presence. I walk quickly toward the table as though my eagerness still existed in the continuity of eagerness that spanned more than twenty-five years. I am the lover. I smile for him. It occurs to me how someone has told me that he would look good and I feel the lingering ripple of my fear that he has been utterly blown apart by the bullet that pierced his temple. I run my fingers through his thick hair and very soon I feel a small groove and know instinctively it is the trace of the bullet that had merely grazed him. Orderly thought intrudes and I realize that I don't know whether that was the first one or the second. Then I touch him all over. These are the broad, muscled shoulders that made me ache in teen-aged years and here is the hand that reached for mine. Touch ... we are no longer in touch.
I awaken from this reverie subdued, no, exhausted. But I have just enough stamina to grasp this: the makeshift return to the morgue has pulled me through something. It is vital that I told the story to Mark. There is no other history of what happened there.
I try to sit up now that I'm alert and no longer in the morgue. As I use my right arm to prop myself up, my head does not follow my spine's lead. This neck, so thick and hot moments ago, is now a limp stem. "I can't hold my head up," I gasp. Calm flushes out of my body. Can this collapse be all that I have to show for months of body work? I reassess. Don't panic. I counsel myself further: consider today's ordeal and no more. I hear Mark telling me to nap in one of the empty massage rooms. When I rouse myself two hours later, I still can't hold my head up on my neck; my head flops over slightly to one side. I register Mark's voice gently ordering that I run a bath with mineral salts when I get home. "Make sure that your neck is immersed."
Outside, at my car, my aloneness inhibits me from getting in. But I do get in. Sitting in the cold dark evening, I understand that inside the old house I am taken care of. Out here, it is me who takes care of me. Me is going to drive me home. Me don't feel like it.
When I arrive home, I feel different in my gait as I walk from my car to the house. Thankfully, it doesn't occur to me that I am crazy to be thinking of my walk when I can't properly hold my head up. Overall, I feel limp, but I do not crumple to the ground as it seems I might. The limpness is loose and easy. I am pricked faintly by elation at this hint of release.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Someone Traveling by Jane Nicholson Copyright © 2011 by Jane Nicholson. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface to Someone Traveling....................1I. Afterlife....................11
II. Gravity and Levity....................29
III. Psyche: A Poetics of Awkwardness....................49
IV. Lovelorn....................73
V. Corpse....................95
VI. Homebody....................109
VII. Someone Traveling....................137
VIII. Encounters with the Natural World....................157
IX. When You Were Young....................185