Excerpt
Quantum Meeting:
Day 787. I
sponge Mom’s stringy arms and pronate her elbows. Suction saliva from her white
gums, careful not to disturb the psst-psst of the breathing tube. I attach
cotton-ball-size muscle-stimulation pads, all forty of them, to her biceps and
triceps, her deltoids and extensors, her flexors and hamstrings. As the pads
pulse against muscle atrophy, I crayon Chapstick on her lips, rub cream down
her pointed nose and waxen cheek skin, brush her dark hair splayed over the
starched pillow. I leave the waste bags for the nurses but check the
connections out of habit — the tubes to the catheter and colostomy bag, the one
to her nutrients. Then I sit, holding her hand, pretending to talk to her for
the sake of passersby, even though I know she’s not listening.
Not even in the
room.
Her body is an
empty vessel. A coat on a hanger waiting for her arms to slip in. A mollusk on
the beach, abandoned by its host. An empty carton of milk I’m here to make sure
they don’t throw out.
Because when I
find her — and bring her back — she will need her container.
They’ve told me
it’s dangerous to think this way. Psychologically damaging, Aunt Margaret has
claimed. A byproduct of grief, the therapists have said. Denial is a natural
defense mechanism, Dr. Horn has counseled. “But we can’t ignore the reality of
what the scans tell us.”
He means the
X-rays of Mom’s gray folded matter. The regions of her brain that still incite
spontaneous reflexes — causing her arm to jerk here, her leg to twitch there.
“All seemingly normal manifestations of brainstem function,” he’s told me
repeatedly. “But should not be confused with actual brainstem function. Without
which she has little chance of waking up.”
I can’t fault
him for thinking this way. The guy’s a neurologist — his business is brains.
But I know there has to be more to us than our bodies and brains.
Call it what you want — a consciousness, a soul, a spirit, a light being. It’s
the thing countless comatose patients swear gave them the ability to live whole
other lives while on respirators. The thing that philosophers and spiritualists
spent their lives writing about. The thing that makes us who we are. And maybe
even fuels the brainstem.
And Mom’s
brainstem went missing two years ago the moment she crashed her car.
An accident,
Aunt Margaret had said on the phone. Black ice. A telephone pole. Coming to
pick up you up in five. . . .
I flew down the
stairs of our apartment and rushed into intensive care, still in my red plaid
pajama bottoms, dried toothpaste stuck to my cheek. Mom lay behind a wall of
glass, and I heard fragments: Her chest had banged into the steering wheel.
Glass shards had lodged in her cheeks. She’s lucky to have made it out alive.
But define
“alive.”
For a week, I
watched machines automate her breathing, feed her, monitor her. I felt numbed,
stunned, dazed. Most of all, empty. Like something in my chest cavity had gone
missing, its hollowness threatening to suck my heart and lungs deeper inward.
I thought it was
coming from me.
Then one night,
following Dr. Horn’s delivery of yet another brain spiel — this one replete
with pictures of axon and dendrites that looked like tree branches — they let
us through the glass wall.
I plunked into
the pink pleather chair and held Mom’s limp hand in mine; ran my thumb over her
beige polish, chipped from washing beer glasses at Sharkie’s Bar and Grill. The
emptiness opened like a black hole, and I yearned for my best-friend
sister-like Mom, just 17 years older than me. The woman who wore my jeans and
tried on my life, from basketball tryouts to friendship blips. The woman who
let me inhabit her dreams of traveling the world.
“How much
tragedy can one family take?” Grandma Eloise was saying. “First, I lose one
daughter, and now another?”
“I know, Mom, I know.”
Aunt Margaret sniffled.
They were
speaking of Grandma Eloise’s oldest daughter, who had died as a teenager —
Mom’s oldest sister. And I had sat there, unsure of what to say. Not only
because there seemed to be some kind of dark cloud hanging over us, but because
they barely noticed I was in the room.
So, when they
decided to go to the cafeteria, I said, “I’ll stay here, then.”
Aunt Margaret
turned, her yellow, roller-set waves bouncing like in a retro TV commercial.
“Jett, I’m sorry. Did you want to come with us?”
“It’s OK. I’m
good,” I said, because I knew they were just trying to salve their own pain,
even though you couldn’t have paid me a million dollars to eat a bite of food
in that moment.
So off they
went, leaving me and Mom and my emptiness, and because everything felt so
empty, I climbed into bed with Mom, spooned to her side — admittedly feeling
sorry for myself in this new orphaned state — and blubbered away into her bony
shoulder.
Her respirator
lulled me into a sleepy state, and my mind drifted, thinking about her running
off as a teenager at 17 — just a year older than me now — to marry a guy
outside the enclave of this small town. Then that got me thinking about my dad,
the man I barely got to know, but whose hands for some reason I could see
peeking out from his electrician’s coveralls: coppery skin freckled like mine
with wispy red hair, as he meticulously spliced the wire of a lamp cord. Cut
before the damage. Splice by twisting. See his hand twisting a lightbulb in,
electricity zipping through its filament. We can travel as fast as this . . .
in our sleep. . . . We can meet in Hawaii, where the sand is black, and the
rocks are as large as grapefruits.
I must
have drifted off then, Mom’s empty container against mine, the respirator
wheezing rhythmically, everything hazy and meshing and sucking me under.
Just think of
where you want to go, my dad said, still coming to me in snapshots. His
freckled hands on a tabletop. Suntanned face. Fiery hair. A woman beside him
laid down cards splattered with ink. Palm trees swayed outside, and contentment
purred in my chest like a vibration.
Deeper and
deeper I drifted under, as darkness surrounded my eyelids and tunneled around
me, churning into a black liquid — the way dreams work — until it ended in a
circle of purple-blue light large enough to fit through.
I poked my head
through and found the air was watery, indigo-colored, and pocked with millions
of crystalline white stars. I wanted to climb through the hole and swim out
into the starry space. But when I looked up, I saw rectangles hanging in the
sky.
They were
outlined in what looked like glitter — the kind I recognized from my childhood
drawings, when I’d outlined geometric shapes with glue and glitter and blown
the excess off. And inside were movielike images:
Palm trees in
one.
The stairwell to
Mom’s and my old apartment in the other.
Where do you
want to go? My father’s voice sounded again, only this time my chest tightened
and pulled, as though there was a rope attached to the center, and I suddenly
got scared feeling . . . wondering . . . knowing. . . .
This wasn’t a
dream.
I was somewhere
outside of myself.
Definitely not
in my body.
And Mom . . .
she wasn’t in bed at the hospital. She was behind that rectangle . . . that
door.
I could sense
her, alert and awake, black hair not splayed on a pillow, but tucked behind her
ears and parted down the middle, revealing a white line of scalp; cheeks not
waxen and pale, but flushed from moving around the kitchen . . . pulling me to
her.
But because it
all felt so real, and because I didn’t know what would happen if I did dive
through that hole, I jerked my head back. And the next thing I knew, I was
yanked backwards and my whole body stung as though I were a human rubber band
snapping back.
Just in time to
find Aunt Margaret back from the cafeteria, shaking my shoulders.
“Jett, Jett,
wake up,” she called.
“Should I call
someone?” Grandma Eloise asked.
My eyes popped
open, and they gasped.
“You scared us,
you were in such a deep sleep,” Aunt Margaret scolded. “You’re not supposed to
be in bed with her.”
“I went to find
her,” I tried to explain. “Mom isn’t here. . . .”
“What?
Nonsense.” Aunt Margaret said. “You were having a bad dream.”
“Honey, we are
all under tremendous stress,” Grandma Eloise said.
“But there are
doorways up there,” I insisted. “We have to find her and bring her back. . .
Look, there’s no one inside.”
“Honey, we don’t
know what you are saying,” Grandma Eloise said.
“Jett, this is
hard enough on all of us.” Aunt Margaret’s tone steeled.
My mistake, I’ve
come to realize, was continuing to insist, back at Aunt Margaret’s, and for
months afterward, describing all I could remember, and lugging home research
and stories from the library about people leaving their bodies: about the idea
that a person could ostensibly be in two separate places at once.
“That is
absolutely enough. I will not have that kind of nonsense talk in my house,”
Aunt Margaret snapped finally, and the next thing I knew I was seeing Dr. Karr,
a grief counselor, and being asked to review more charts from Dr. Horn. And
when a year later, I still wouldn’t relent about the purple hole and the
doorway to Mom, and the fact that anyone can tell she is simply not in this
room, the grief counselor suggested medications, and eventually whispered to
Aunt Margaret terms like “grief delusions” and “detached from reality.” This
led me to understand two things:
Not only can I
not convince people to open their minds, as a minor in the State of New Jersey,
10 minutes from the state’s largest psych ward, I need to watch it, or I might
never find Mom.
