What We Are (45 page)

“Again!”

“Ready!”

“Go!”

—won't visit. I've been frilled and prepped like a wedding cake for this day.

Death
?

Well.

OF COURSE,
I live.

Three days down in this sticky hospital bed. Yesterday I got my mouth back, can painfully move it around to speak a few words at a time. My tongue feels like a fat slab of raw tri-tip in my mouth. I've got oxygen tubes stuck up my nose, but the doctor said the X-ray showed that I'm recovering. My own quiet room may be a long hike up the stairs. Nobody came to visit me in the darkness, no one comes now in the light. Not even my uncle, the crossed-up old soldier who went back to the war for more. Tali called, but her maternal, disappointed tone made me say, “No ... I don't ... want .. . to see . .. you.” It's just like the freeway: everyone busy during these happy days of our lives.

I didn't expect anything different. You have to give to receive with this deal, an aphorism that seems to work fairly well for others. For me, I've just never really known what to give or to whom, so I've given everything to anyone in my vicinity and haven't asked for a damned thing back. That way everyone's covered or at least can shut up. There's more to it, of course, always more, but I'm fair: got no complaints. No celebratory dances either. I mean, I'm always expecting
at the end of these messes to be dead, and the only real problem I foresee whenever it happens is that there will be no means to express my wholehearted gratitude.

The nurse says, “Here's your discharge papers, hon.”

Between watching her flitter in and out of my room, I reread an old tale, the only book on the floor worth reading. The protag's un-mentioned problem, a missing body part that he wouldn't talk about, should make me appreciate the scale of my own problems. I have a few lacerations on my face, across my neck, my chest and abdomen are swollen, a lung is partially collapsed, but I didn't go into shock, my heart didn't stop, I have no concussion, no internal bleeding, and I am not, after all, Jake Barnes, with the worst war wound you could walk away with as a man.

The nurse is above me. She detaches tubes and yanks out needles with the speed of a pit crew changing tires at Nascar. Probably helps that she doesn't give me any eye contact. She's thoroughly unimpressed by my story, the hairy chest, the little boo-boos.

To get by today, I should abdicate Hemingway's belief that a man can be destroyed but not defeated. Head and heart wounds aside, he'd pass me up as a potential protagonist for a story. He'd review my bio and general disposition and discover that I lacked the fierce clarity of his fishermen. He'd walk past the tiny Filipina nurses and into the clean well-lit room with a greased and thick-stocked double-barrel shotgun tucked tightly under his arm and pump a .762 German-manufactured shell into my chest. That's how he'd read me: a shivering foal with a broken leg sprawled on the hay-scattered floor of the barn.

He'd say,
You got no follow-through, son
.

I'd say,
Well. Nothing out there worth following through on, Papa. Nada y pues nada really truly means nothing now
.

I remember when my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Silveira, pulled me aside one autumn afternoon, the light tinted in gold like some
antiquated Byzantine mosaic, and said, “In my twenty-eight years of teaching, you have the best chance of all my children to be president someday.”

I'd thought,
What a nice lady
, and told no one what she'd said.

Later that same day I threw in
ignorant and desperate
as I watched her ignore the foreign-born Vietnamese, Mexican, and Filipino non-hopefuls for the White House.

Congressman Norman Mineta believed in me too, signed my papers for appointment to West Point. He was very sad when I failed the physical and even sent me off to a doctor specializing in spondy-lolisthesis, a degenerative back condition whose symptoms I'd fished up out of a medical dictionary while awaiting the army physician. He never knew, the poor sap. Hours before the examination at the Presidio, I'd read about Mishima faking insanity to avoid flying a kamikaze jet, a paradox I still don't get to this day (
You have to be sane to fly your plane into a ship, Mishima-san
) and I thought,
He loved his country but loved his life more and I at minimum question both
.

“Any conditions?” the army doctor'd asked.

“Spondylolisthesis,” I'd said, without blinking.

This was an hour after I'd whipped out fifteen pull-ups, topping the list of my group of candidates. Two hours after the facilitator had noted my foot speed on the shuttle run.

“I see,” said the doctor, nodding.

He may as well have said, You don't believe in anything, do you?

Back then I would have said with pride,
No, I don't
, but now I'd say,
I'd like to
. Or borrow a line from Brando: “What've ya got?”

My current physician returns for the check out examination. She's a lovely Hindu named Dr. Patel, whose kindness reassures me that under all the body of knowledge there's a caring mother, a sister, or at least a daughter in there. Early forties, weary-eyed and wise, traits that seem to co-exist too often. I can tell that she's seen a lot of life's shit even before entering this ward of death.

She smiles, adjusting her gadgetry. The steel of the stethoscope jolts my heart, and she says, “Sorry there. Just for a little bit, okay?” I can smell curry on her breath, her doctor's jacket, her hair. “Deep breath, Mr. Tusifale.”

I take all the spices in, wanting to say something nice. I manage through the wincing, “Are you ... doing ... all right ... today?”

“Yes,” she whispers, still investigating my body. Her hands are magical, so soothing that I want to sleep. In the interest of what she'll say next, though, I stay awake. “Now, you have been in quite a hassle, Mr. Tusifale. I am a bit concerned, you know.”

I nod, look up at her with what I hope is tenderness, a reciprocity in spirit and goodwill. I don't know why, but I care that she cares.

“Am I ... okay?”

“You are asking me?”

I blink yes.

“Well, let me say that I am encouraged. You are strong. And you have made a good recovery in so short a time.”

“Okay.”

“Now I want you to get some rest at home.”

“Okay.”

She nods, smiles. Something big is coming. “But first I must ask you a question.”

I blink in the affirmative again.

“The paramedics reported that when you went under, you said you wanted to die.”

Hearing this makes me lose my breath.

“Do you want to maybe talk to a volunteer about it?”

“About ... what?”

“Well.” The gentleness behind the wiry gold-framed glasses makes me feel almost shameful. Taking up her time, needing her expertise, involving her in my confusion. “What you were talking about in the ambulance.”

“No.”

“You are sure?”

“Yes.”

She pats my knee. “I will be back, okay?”

I close my eyes to rest. Open them a few seconds later and find again the lifeless machinery and laminated posters of knees and joints found in any office of Western medicine. The stuff that works without thought on the body, the gadgetry and knowledge that helps load the dice in our favor for a while.

I stand to see what life is going to feel like after the crash. I'm a little wobbly, but I don't need to sit down. It's as if the accident occurred from the inside out, not the outside in. Amazing the kind of punishment a body can take. That it was built to forgive you of forsaking it. I'd leave right now if it weren't for the wisdom and kindness of another human being. The doctor putting out for the cause, retying her profession to its original purpose of healing.

I open a drawer and find alcohol swabs and ammonia capsules and soap packets. Needles sealed in see-through plastic and a dozen different kinds of Band-Aid. When I slide it shut, the lock clicks like a fingernail on formica. Above the counter the cabinet is also open and I investigate, not knowing what I'm looking for, but somehow knowing that I'll leave it where I find it. The moment I have this thought I come upon a framed photograph, face down beneath a stack of carbons.

She's young and she's happy, surrounded by Indians at an outdoor market, the eyes, nose and mouth of the swaddled baby in her arms centering the photograph. Bringing it peace. My breath catches again. Second time in five minutes.

I put the photo back and drift, intent on tapping this emotion, all the content that matters. The gold in this office, the real fuel, the story of a life. I imagine the worst reason for the picture being hidden, that core fear of all parents who watch the infant sleep for the first time, and she's back.

I slink onto the patient's bench. “I'm sorry.”

“Not at all,” she says. “A doctor's office is more boring than most think.”

I nod, smile, I wonder.

“Well, thank you for waiting.”

“Yes.”

She sits down on her doctor's stool and rolls slowly toward me. She leans forward and squints, as if trying to better make out the lashes of my eyes. Then she pulls back, upright now, and says, “Do you mind if I ask you again?”

“No. It's ... okay.”

“Do you feel,” she says, reaching out for my hand, “as if you're going to hurt yourself?”

I swallow the dryness in my throat, look down. She's holding a pink slip of some kind.

“No.”

“If it is not too much before I sign you out, could you repeat to me how you feel, Mr. Tusifale?”

There must be things to do, and reasons for doing them. People to find, and reasons for finding them.

“I want ... to live,” I hear myself say. “Of course.”

I FEEL
some kind of liberty in my bones and my blood today. If the job from NOW comes through, I'll take it, heal during my first week of work. This morning I don't know what I'm going to do except defy the doctor's orders. Because rest can wait. Somehow keeping the rules would be disrespectful to life.

I take to the road on my own, the Bridgestone Trailblazer beneath me, heading south from Old Almaden Road, breathing the dry air deeply through my nose. My lungs are hot at first, but not burning, and when the mind takes over less than a half mile into the ride, I settle into the pain okay.

The tall brush of the yellow, distant, unadorned hills is pushed by the hot wind into rows of diagonal lines. On the road ahead are farmhouses with wide lots and double entrances separated by a homemade batting cage, an outhouse on the lawn, stacks of hay bales. Storage barns and water towers and horse apples in the driveways. American flags and political stickers on the old school mailboxes at the edge of the street, a hundred yards from the houses. The plots of land stretch out in no particular pattern because these homes were built one at a time.

The oaks and acacias thicken. The shadows from their careless branches widen over the low-shingled farmhouses. I see a white-backdropped banner in red letters over the road up ahead:

NEW ALMADEN
1854

It hasn't changed much by virtue of space, perhaps—it's small and not conducive to carpet-bombing construction—but I'm sure its day will come. This valley has gone through worse facelifts than wiping a quaint town off the map.

But still I hope for this time warp of a town, if only to provide a reminder of something, though I'm not sure what. You feel as if you're in Yoknapatawpha County, 1929, crawling along the yellow lines of a giant storybook. The post office has one door, one room, one window, and when I bike up the little wooden walkway it creaks under the tires like an old Victorian. I pull back onto the main road and pass two little outlets with wooden bridges over a shiny stream. Get suspicious glances from ladies in scarves watering their vegetables on their knees.

The houses out here have names and copper plaques. You pass the Randol Family House and the Robert Scott Home and La Casita de Adobe, and if you go far enough down the Alamitos road there's a ranch set deep in the woods with a wrought-iron fence at the entrance and the words
A Day's Lovely Glen
welded across the bars of the gate. A restaurant called La Foret sits aside a lush creek of pine and jasmine. No set schedule for business. I watch a bobcat big as a groundhog scuttle up a precipice of ivy with raw meat in its mouth, the domesticated cats crouching on the porches in fear and jealousy. A family of turkeys crosses the street with confidence. Every now and then a car comes, often a Ford truck with tires high as the rooflines.

I ride on decidedly, my lungs still warm, feeling almost undamaged.

At the end of town I enter the Deep Gulch, a tunnel through the green that reaches up the hill like a giant brown arm. I start the mile-long climb to the Rotary Furnace atop Silvermine Plateau. Manzanita huddles in the crook of the branchless cedar trunks. Ivy covers the base of every tree, like the first line of defense, green soldiers, green battalions. In the shine of the morning sun, the leaves of the cedar branches look like snowflakes, like glitter, stars in a mild sky. Moss shrouds the skin of the trees, fluorescent as seaweed, easy on the eye, a dress shirt for the body and arms of the wild oaks. I can see the shoe prints of the steeds carrying their overfed rangers, the zigzagging prints of anxious dogs caught between instinct and yielding to the loud biped with the leash. Everywhere the organism of the surrounding wilderness seethes with animal scent. I am doing my damnedest, like the dog, not to think too much. To stay on the trail and let the greater force that I can't and won't understand drag me along.

Let me bike up this damned dirt trail in peace, safe from myself and my own corrupt heart, hopeless soul, let me be clean of the connection to anyone else, let the tang of each sour step
quicken me all into verb, pure verb
. I'm closing in on the silver mine, escorted by the low spreading silver clouds, the path barely visible. If this is as close to heaven as I'll get, it's just enough to make the next blind bend in the trail, and then the next. The cool mist of the nearing hilltop collects at the tip of the nose and—
You can say it, man, say it!
—how good the clean condensation feels on the insides this early morning.