Feverland: A Memoir in Shards - Softcover

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KISSING GOD

You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
―Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I

My son is born into a Caravaggio painting. At 3:34 in the morning, my wife labors in the doom light of a hospital room in Fort Worth, Texas. There are pools of blood and hushed murmurings. Sideways voices curl through the darkness. It is the middle of January 2012. In less than two weeks I will turn thirty-three and most days I am amazed to be alive. My boy―who does not yet have a name, who will not be anything but baby boy for the next seven hours, who is simply my son, my grime-slicked boy, my wailing and blood-roped son, my boy, blinking, teary, how much pain you look like you’re in, my son, my son, my crumple-fleshed son―the head of my son appears in the muggy space between his mother’s knees. I swear to you: there was nothing there and then, suddenly, there was. Blinding shine of the silver bowl and I move to stand at Ariane’s head, her black hair frizzed with humidity. My knucklebones grind as she crushes my hand in hers. Slick skin and the darkening light of ecstasy and oil paints. My field of vision narrows into a tight circle around my wife’s pelvis. The nurse and doctor and doula hunched at Ariane’s feet, urging her on, all vanish into the shadows. Everything slows, and the room gets even darker, darker, darker, slowed way down, so slow that the weak feeling in my knees is already gone, has turned into Maybe. I’m. Not. Feeling. Anything. At. All? Maybe. I’m. Feeling. Too. Much. And then everything ratchets back up, it gets louder and louder. It’s palpable, all of the life in this room; it teems with noise. Grimacing, smiling, hurting, my wife stares as a wrinkly boy appears, some trick of birthing-room light, smoke and mirrors, a movie’s special effect―I swear to you: there was nothing there, and then, howlingly, there was. A person, much too large to fit inside another person, to have lived and grown inside my wife for months. A whole human being―can you hear me over the crying? over my screaming son?―like pulling a bonfire out of your mouth, a white tiger out of your hip pocket, a magic trick, and, in the keening air, a baby boy materializes in a red-soaked towel.

[sb]

And then less than a year later, it is spring and beautiful and I’m blowing through stop signs to get to the same hospital. I’m staring big-eyed around the ER’s waiting room. I lean against the receptionist’s desk and the wall of Plexiglas she’s sitting behind. My chest feels like it’s being jigsawed apart. I have a wife and a baby boy at home. I am going to die. I put my ear to the circle in the Plexiglas to hear her next question. I press the flat of my hand to my heart to show her where the pain is, run a hand down my left arm, fluttering the fingers when I describe the way it hurts. I fold the readout of the EKG performed at Emergency Care two hours before and pass it to the receptionist. It shows that I’m having an irregular heartbeat―peaks and valleys and lines―something about one of the ventricles, something that’s not beating correctly, the nurse had said, before adding that I needed to go to the ER immediately for more thorough medical procedures, to be sure, to make myself right. I’d driven straight home from Emergency Care, slowly, with both hands on the wheel. In the driveway, I tried to figure out what I was going to say to Ariane, but then, trying not to cry, flatly told her that my heart was fucked up. I kissed her shocked face as Felix clambered up my lap and grappled around my neck.

“What’s going on? What is it?” Ariane had asked. “You need to bring your MRI.” I wouldn’t have thought of it myself so I tried to smile at her. I sat down, said, “Sure thing, thanks,” and stared at our reflection in the kitchen window. Felix laughed, and then leaned toward my cheek with his mouth open and kissed me wetly.

Before I left, crying, I kissed them both again.

In the ER waiting room, I don’t look directly at the receptionist because my nystagmus―the uncontrollable bouncing of my eyes―has gotten more severe. I have diplopia, double vision, too. I can’t focus on anything; it looks like I have eight fingers, a blur of digits on each hand. I raise my arms and say that earlier in the day, there was a limb of pain branching down the entire left side of my body. Right to my fingertips. Both of my hands are numb, my face too.

“Or,” I tell her, trying too hard to suggest it’s no big deal, “it might also be my brain.”

She looks up, nonplussed, from the chart she’s filling out.

“My brain.” I notice―starting to blush―how loud I am. I’m making big arm motions at her. I drop the hand I’d been pointing at my ear. “My brain stem,” I say. “I had a bunch of brain bleeds, brain surgery over ten years ago.”

I run my finger down the scar on the back of my head, then lift the MRI films I’ve carried in with me.

“When I was twenty-one. I have my MRI films here. I just got one a week ago. Haven’t even gotten the results yet.”

II

“I think gold would be good,” the dentist says. He’s just a voice emanating from the blinding light above me. His rubbered fingers push in my mouth and over and against my teeth and lips. It feels like a cuttlefish, a squid, is trying to get inside me. I have sea creatures on the brain.

I am twenty-seven and life is good, only getting better. After my dental appointment I’m going to walk out into the California sunshine and breathe deep the flowery air and get fish tacos at the restaurant that’s a few storefronts down in this strip mall.

“Gold, gold, gold,” the dentist mutters to himself, like I’m not there at all. The room is thick with his honeyrot cologne. My head snaps each time he jabs my teeth with the tiny metal hook. The dazzle off his diamond and gold bracelets, his heavy gold chain, makes me squint. He stops scraping my gum line and stares out the window at the shine of the Lexus-packed parking lot. “Good value. Good keeping.”

Like someone trying to catch a snowflake on their tongue, I nod, open-mouthed, ask, “Really?” but it comes out “Aaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeee?!?”

[sb]

As a little boy I dreamed of tigers. I’d be sitting right behind the animal’s colossal, mawing furnace of a head, controlling its loping by tugging its ears, urging it forward, faster―or to slow down, or stop―with the fragile bones of my ankles. Two bluffs cradled the part of Red Wing I lived in. The Mississippi River snaked by on the other side of Barn Bluff. Wisconsin was just a bridge away. It was all very Huck Finn and I was already one hundred years old. I rode my bike to the craggy mouths of caves charred black by old fires, that were littered with the starlight of Bud Light cans; empty soup cans and shattered liquor bottles littered the deer paths I hiked. I scrabbled up the slopes of loose rock to the brittle grass on top of the bluffs.

For whole days, I hung my legs over edges, hundreds of feet straight down. I lay stomach-down on hot flat stones, my head lolling over sandstone lips.

From Barn Bluff, like some tiny impotent god, I watched all of Red Wing buzz and weave below. I felt burnished with the sensation that I almost, just almost, could control what I saw down there. The cars and people just toys for me to move―four steps forward, four steps back―around the board game that was my days.

[sb]

I can’t figure California out―the beautiful tedium that bleaches the day of sorrow while growing a gnarled pit of sadness inside you―but I think some part of me loves it, this gorgeous shitshow. A perfect day―the cloudless, bluest sky above Thousand Oaks, 72 degrees and a breeze shuffling the pomegranate trees―will be followed by weeks of calamity. Midnight earthquakes. Rain, rain,...