I Totally Meant to Do That Page 15

  But this is not my loft. This is not my life. How did I get here? Where is my bungee cord? I’ve traveled too far to still feel weightless.

  “I give up, John,” I said. “Walk me home.”

  We moved in silence through the growing dawn, defeated, knowing that tomorrow’s exhaustion would have no excuse, creeping along the base of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway like derelicts.

  “That was strange,” John said with a chuckle. Yes. But it wasn’t as strange as what happened next: My mother called my cell phone.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s a boy!” she screamed.

  “What?”

  “It’s a boy! Lou went into labor around midnight,” Mom explained. “I would have called earlier, but I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I responded. She hung up so I could “go back to bed.”

  I turned to John and said, “It’s a boy.”

  “What?”

  “My sister had a baby,” I said. Then I went home and slept like one.

  York Samaritan?

  It begins with a prophet who smelled of urine, carried his earthly belongings in a blue plastic bag, and did beseech subway riders, “Repent! The end is nigh.”

  A man with a briefcase approached the prophet and tried to trap him, saying snidely and with air quotes, “Master, what must I do to receive eternal life?”

  The prophet parted the sea of flies to answer him, “What do the Scriptures say?”

  The yuppie answered, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

  “You are right,” the prophet replied. “Do this and you will live.”

  But the man wanted to justify himself, so he asked the prophet, “Who is my neighbor?”

  The prophet answered:

  “There once was a man lying half dead on a path in Brooklyn; three people passed by him, including a lowly, impoverished writer named Jane.

  “As the sun rose, Jane traveled the road to Brooklyn from Manhattan, where she had pimped herself as a talking head to an early-morning news program that taped in Rockefeller Center, so desperate was she for the measly media fee paid by the magazine that employed her. The man lying half dead had been working all night as well, providing relief to wicked men, peddling tiny vials filled with the unholy spirit, you know, selling heroin.

  “She had passed the man, who lived in the apartment beneath hers, hours earlier while he was plying his trade. And she had said unto him, ‘Sup.’ But he replied not, speaking only into his phone, ‘Ask and ye shall receive in exchange for twenty dollars.’

  “Jane had every reason to distrust this man, for he had persecuted her. One afternoon, while she washed laundry, he picked her lock and stole the portable electronic computing device that he knew was near the front door because he’d just been upstairs to ask if the exterminator had come, and seriously there was no sign of breaking and entering so it was definitely an inside job.

  “And twice she had returned home to find police vehicles flashing lights the colors of wine and sky, because he had been out turning the other cheek until his eyes did swell and his nose did break, but, man, ye should have seen the other guy.

  “Alas, Jane was too poor to find new dwellings, for she had spent her last pennies, in a most desperate moment, on a Super Lotto ticket. So she remained in the haze of his hemp and Halo parties, brushing past the thieves and lepers he invited to their stoop.

  “And lo, how his phone would ring through the night. And loud how the dragon chasers would shout from the street, ‘Yo, Justin! I know you’re there!’

  “Verily, Jane had every reason to despise the neighbor, yet her heart was filled with pity, for his alcoholic, abusive parents were both locked behind the bars of the state, which is why her saint of a landlady took him in off the street in the first place. Then again, she also had gout, so neither had her path been lit by wise decisions.

  “And it then happened that, while approaching India Street, on the road from 30 Rock to her bed, Jane did encounter two lums-of-the-hood fleeing the building, who spake naught to her and scurried toward the rising sun. And lo, upon ascending her stairs, she did rediscover Justin her neighbor lying half dead on the second-floor landing in the middle of her path. Where he once had conducted business, now he lay prostrate, stripped of his raiment, shaking as a man filled with evil spirits. In his pallid skin, his eyes did roll and his tongue did loll and his mouth did froth. Jane saw that he was tweaking and saw that it was bad.

  “He looked to her, slowly raised his arm, grunted with great effort, and reached his hand toward her in need and in terror.

  “Gazing down upon his face, Jane said only, ‘Ew,’ then lifted her foot, stepped over him, and continued up the stairs.”

  Concluded with his tale, the prophet asked the lawyer, “Which now of these three was neighbor unto him?”

  The lawyer replied, “I think they’re all assholes.”

  And the prophet said unto him, “Exactly. This is New York, you fool. Also, the aliens are trying to eat me because my hands are made of crackers. And I took your wallet.”

  Something slick and cold. Locate it, pinpoint it: face. It’s resting on my face. I have a face! A cheek, in fact. Oh, I’m getting good at this. OK, but what is it, a fish? No. The tongue of a giant Arctic beast? That’s ridiculous. Wait: It’s not on me; I’m on it. And so are my hands. I have hands!

  I opened my eyes.

  Tile. Of course: bathroom tiles. Whoa—my bathroom tiles. Yes, this is my apartment. I am a person. I’m a Jane! I live in Brooklyn. Those are my hands and that is the angle where the floor meets the wall. Check and check.

  I pushed my torso away from the floor.

  Blood! That is definitely blood. I know what blood is. That is it. Oh God … hey, I know what God is too. Or, well, I know the various ways in which we perceive God. I mean no one really knows what—Focus Jane.

  I tried to stand.

  OK: I know those are underwear. I know those are knees. And I know that the latter is not where the former go. Aha! I was sitting on the toilet—yes, I remember now. I woke up to go to the bathroom. That is why there are sheep pajamas in a heap at my ankles. That is why it is night. It is night. That is why.

  I looked in the mirror.

  This explains the blood: a gash above my left eye. Actually, gravity explains the blood. This is coming together: I fell forward off the toilet and landed on my eyebrow. Man, that’s rough; I’m glad I wasn’t conscious for it … wait, that doesn’t make any sense. Also, if that had been my trajectory, wouldn’t there be correlating—yep, throbbing pain in my kneecaps.

  I started to clean myself up.

  Hmm, the blood on my face is dry. That can’t be good. How long was I out? The puddle of blood on the floor is wet. And the gash is still moist. I could sit and time how long it takes for more to dry, or I could wipe the floor and go back to sleep.

  I went back to sleep.

  what happened: micturition syncope, meaning that my brain shut down because it didn’t get enough blood, due to a swift drop in blood pressure. This sudden dive was caused by vasodilation. Such an opening of the vessels occurs normally under various circumstances, such as waking from a deep sleep or emptying the bladder; the brain reacts by constricting the vessels so that blood is forced upward. However, when a body is fatigued and severely dehydrated, the vessels can dilate beyond the brain’s ability to compensate. And when two otherwise normal dilations occur simultaneously—to a body already compromised—it’s like delivering a one-two punch to a fighter who’s leaning on the rope.

  Basically, the cause was fatigue. Fatigue threw the kegger; everyone else was upstairs trying to do homework.

  Figuring this out required visits to a few different doctors: one who determined I was hypoglycemic and said the problem had to do with my vagus nerve, another who guessed that I dehydrate too easily, an immunologist who ordered so much lab work that I almost fainted again during the withdrawal of thirteen vials of blood, and a gynecologi
st who discovered I have polycystic ovarian syndrome, which means, among other goodies, that when I’m older I’ll have a mustache. Wheee!

  All of these things are true, as it turns out, and each contributed to what I shortly thereafter dubbed “my Vegas experience.” What medicine couldn’t explain, though, or at least hasn’t yet, was the aftermath. I woke up as a tabula rasa, and not only in the sense that I didn’t know who or where I was; we’ve all had that feeling before, maybe in a hotel room or after vigorous trampoline jumping. This time was different. When I got out of bed the next morning my senses were heightened—cleared, as if something had Roto-Rootered out of me all of the gunk that clogs our receptors over time. Either that or I had superpowers.

  Car horns were louder. The wind felt like needles. I smelled cigarettes on nonsmokers. I could see light breaking into crystals in mirrors. Colors were crisper and somehow more primary. And the sun, my goodness, I had to wear both shades and a visor. I tried not to go outside between ten and two.

  This lasted for days, maybe two weeks. I could eat only bland foods. I was particularly sensitive to salt and sugar, the latter of which not only assaulted my tongue, but gave me an instant dizzy high. A cup of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt made me ill. High-fructose corn syrup was like crack.

  Then, slowly, I dulled again to my surroundings, returned to normal, or what I now refer to as generally accepted abnormal. But for a couple of weeks, I experienced the world as babies do, without a protective sensory filter. No wonder they love shiny objects; a wristwatch is the equivalent of a whirring, glowing UFO.

  I know this sounds like hyperbole. All I have as a nonfiction writer is my word. And believe me when I say that I found it stranger while it was happening than you are finding it now. It straight up freaked me out.

  I was moving through the world in slow motion, unable to ignore anything. Every tiny stimulus competed for my attention. And New York is a city of stimuli. I experienced the city unbridled; and I couldn’t handle it. Every child born here must be a crack baby.

  That cliché about becoming “numb” to something? It’s backward. The image it invokes is of a wearing down, suggesting that contact with the incessant, horrific stimulus—war, animal euthanization, ice-cream-truck music—scrapes away at your nerve endings until they no longer function. But that’s not how it works at all. The stimulus doesn’t take a part of you with it; it leaves a part of itself behind, like the stinger of a bee. Over time, all of these little parts build up, until you’re completely covered in a sweater of bee butts. They act as a shield. Et voilà: you feel nothing.

  After living in New York for eight years, I was wearing one of those sweaters, and also long johns underneath, as well as a ski romper on top and, for good measure, a hazmat suit. Then, suddenly, I was naked. On the bathroom floor.

  The effect was that of a rebooting, which, in addition to real pain, gave me a paranormal anxiety. The collapse mirrored too neatly my concurrent emotional state: a waxing inability to feel. It fit together a little too perfectly. I mean, come on, a psychological crisis manifests itself in a physical breakdown? A fifth-grader could have written that. It’s unoriginal and trite. But I can’t help that; it’s just how it happened. So seriously, am I calling the shots or am I the main character in some eleven-year-old’s creative-writing assignment?

  My musical obsession during that time was the album Universal Audio by the Delgados: “See us. Watch how the city consumes us. Watch how the city destroys us.” Also, right around the time I crashed, so did my computer. I can’t make this up. I’d be crap if I did.

  Of course, these are merely coincidences. They shouldn’t mean anything. But, as Paul Auster wrote on the first page of City of Glass, “The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.” That responsibility falls to the listener. Deriving meaning from fiction is a reader’s most basic instinct. We even see allusions and draw conclusions where a writer didn’t intend them to be.

  And I posit that the fiction reader and the nonfiction writer employ the same process: We search for patterns and meaning in stories that have already been written. Therefore, instead of discounting my story’s hackneyed climax as eerie coincidence, I am compelled to make assumptions about authorial intent. And since I don’t believe in predetermination or the Fates, I am left to guess that a pockmark-faced prepubescent chubbo has created me for his final project in English class.

  Well, unh-uh, sorry, out of the way, kid. If anyone will get creative with this tale, it will be me. And the first thing I’ll do is throw in a dash of magical realism. If we’ve determined that coincidences carry as much weight as facts, then I have failed to divulge the key plot point: Around the time of my collapse, I received a cursed stone.

  Did I believe that the gem was magic when I accepted it? Of course not. Do I believe now? No. Does this story give a flying flip what I do or do not believe? Not at all. The question is the story itself. And it starts in 1956.

  the door of 496 Hawthorne Drive in Danville, Virginia. It was dusk. He carried a wedding dress and a small box, and he was distressed.

  My grandmother opened the door. She was expecting him, as he’d called ahead to ask if he could bring a couple of things to my aunt Jane, who was sixteen at the time. His wife, Patty, had recently died.

  The Dickersons were close friends of my grandparents, and my aunt was touched by the gesture. Although she declined the gown—Mrs. Dickerson had been quite petite—my aunt wanted the box. It held a five-carat, rectangular topaz, yellow-brown and clear. With my grandmother’s permission, she accepted it.

  They thanked Mr. Dickerson kindly, reasserted their condolences, and closed the door, at which point my grandmother announced that the stone could not stay in the house. Patty may have been tiny, but her problem with alcohol had been huge; it’s what killed her. Furthermore, the Dickersons had no children. The combination of these circumstances led my grandmother to believe that her neighbors had bad luck, the kind you can catch. She then deduced—by some voodoo bastardization of the first law of thermodynamics—that the stone now carried the Dickersons’ misfortune inherent, and that because they had given the stone to my aunt, the bad luck would be transferred to our own family.

  Cursed or not, though, it was a nice rock. Aunt Jane didn’t want to throw it out. So Nana suggested a compromise: They’d bury it in their neighbor’s yard.

  That afternoon, she had my aunt wrap the topaz in tissue paper and place it in a mason jar. Then, Nana rang the front bell of the Hermans’ house next door. While she distracted Elise Herman with neighborhood gossip, my aunt crept behind the house, dug a hole in the side garden with a spade, put the jar in the ground, covered it with earth, and snuck back to 496 Hawthorne Drive.

  There the stone remained for twenty-one years. When Elise died, long after her husband had, nearby Averette College purchased their house for its president. My grandmother, full of worry, called my aunt to come dig. Jane, now married and living in Raleigh, drove to Danville, exhumed the jar—she remembered exactly where she’d put it—and took the topaz back with her, where it sat in a chest for another twenty-eight years. Apparently my aunt Jane isn’t as superstitious as her mother was. Then again, that would be difficult to achieve.

  If I forgot something from Nana’s house, and went back in to retrieve it, she’d make me sit down before leaving again, even if just for a second, because she believed it was bad luck to enter a home if you didn’t plan to stay. The sitting down was some kind of supernatural con.

  And we always walked into a house or store through the same door from which we’d left … or was it that we had to exit through the same door we entered? This one was particularly confusing for me, as I’d always lived in the same home: How could I follow a pattern if I didn’t remember the way it had begun?

  There were also the standbys: spilled salt, shattered mirrors. When a black cat crossed the street in front of Nana’s Buick LeSabre, which happened frequently since one lived
in her neighborhood, she’d slam on the brakes and put the car in park. Then we’d both get out, turn around three times, and get back in.

  If you pass a truck on the street with a load of hay, don’t look back at it. If you see a white horse, you must (1) make a fist with your right hand, (2) lick your right thumb, (3) swipe your wet thumb against your left palm, (4) smack your wet palm with the bottom of your right fist, and (5) repeat steps one through four twice more. Failure to execute any of these rules led to bad luck.

  My first impression of superstition: kind of laborious.

  But my father feared that I’d find it attractive. One night, instead of telling me stories before bedtime, he said he wanted to have a talk. I was maybe eight or nine—old enough to reason but young enough to be impressionable, not so young that I don’t recall the conversation but definitely too young to remember the dialogue.

  He wanted me to understand that superstition was false. It went against reason, he argued. How could returning home to grab an umbrella cause bad luck? And if it did, what would sitting momentarily on an ottoman possibly do to stop it?

  Here, here, I responded. It all seemed silly to me.

  More important, he added, superstition was sacrilegious. It was the equivalent of worshiping a golden calf. Unsurprisingly, he’d never made this argument to Nana, who was a devout Presbyterian and, more important, his mother-in-law, which is likely why he suggested we not tell her about our little talk. I nodded that I understood. He kissed me on the forehead and turned out the light.