So Lucky

by Nicola Griffith

  Tick-tick of keys. “I’m afraid your income does not meet our requirements for a loan.” You’re no longer one of us.

  I thumbed the phone off and resisted the urge to throw it. Miz Rip mewled, then mewled again more piteously when I refused to play with the piece of string that was her favorite toy.

  “Assets, Miz Rip. What can I use as assets?” She patted her string hopefully, then stalked off into the kitchen. Her tag clinked against her food bowl as she ate.

  Cat food. Of course. All those people served by PAWS. Tens of thousands. A very specific group. A very specific mailing list.

  * * *

  I SENT OUT AN INVITE for CAT’s task force—I’d become allergic to the term “Executive Committee”—to conference on WebEx. For this conversation, email and Slack would not do.

  “We already deliver pet food to owners’ homes, free of charge, but our PAWS users might also need flea spray, pet-sitting services, name tags, collars, pet-grooming. With members’ permission we could offer the list to other vendors. Say a pet-supply store.” I waited for Kali’s speech-to-text app to catch up. “And think about it, if a client’s being served by PAWS, they’d probably also be interested in other specialty delivery services: pharmacy, food, home help.”

  “You mean sell the list,” Moke said.

  “We do need money, and it’s a salable asset. Think of it as extending our service.”

  “But everyone on that list would be exposed!” Kali typed.

  “Exposed to services they might want,” I said. After a moment her face got that set look.

  Moke said, “When you say exposed, Kali, are you saying we should hide the fact that we’re cripples?”

  Kali could not hear Moke’s tone but she could see the challenge on their face. After a moment she shook her head and typed, “No. No, of course not.”

  “We’d only sell to thoroughly vetted organizations,” I said. “And we’ll build in every safeguard.”

  “What kind of safeguards?” Doug asked.

  “I have experience with client data security,” I said. Which was at least adjacent to the truth, and in my tenure at GAP we never had a breach. And this would only be temporary, just until CAT’s finances stabilized enough to support permanent employees and qualify for group insurance. “But maybe you and Kali could also do some research on that.”

  “Sure, I could do some vetting,” Kali typed. Moke snorted, but Kali was already typing again. “No pun intended!”

  We went back and forth but in the end the task force voted yes. The full membership would follow our recommendations; they always did.

  * * *

  THE DAY AFTER I SIGNED the month-to-month contract with Christopher, my phone chimed with a message from the Justice Institute.

 

  It would be a golden opportunity to take us national. To stay busy and angry, the Rose in my head whispered. To not face your fear.

  , I thumbed.

 

  * * *

  I BOUGHT A FOLDABLE TRAVEL CANE, drove myself to the airport, and parked. Climbed out of the car. Realized I would not be able to walk all the way to the ticket counter with my carry-on and stood, feeling foolish, with my bag at my feet and the car door still open. The sky was dark with cloud and far too close. Atlanta had remembered it was still February.

  Okay. Just drive to the park-and-ride. There are buses there that will pick you up. No walking. Easy.

  Except I was terrified. What will you do if the bus doesn’t come? Use the phone. What if your phone doesn’t work? I could drive home and call the Justice Institute. What if the car breaks down? My air was running out. I couldn’t breathe properly. What if the car breaks down on the interstate in one of those dead spots?

  It began to rain. I tried to stay calm. I knew this trap. It was like my first self-defense lessons: What if the man has a knife? And when the instructor had shown me how to defend against a knife, I wanted to know, What if he has a gun? After she addressed that, I asked, What if there are three of them? At which point she laughed and told me that she had no idea how to defend against a tank or a nuclear missile, either, and if I thought learning self-defense could ensure perfect safety, I should ask for my money back. There was no such thing. There was always someone bigger, faster, better armed than you. Learn what you can, then improvise.

  The clouds thinned abruptly and the wet asphalt gleamed in the weak February sunshine. Do what you can. I could get a cheap spare phone. A backup charger. A signal booster. Always keep the car in good repair. What would I have done before MS if I’d broken down on I-85 without a phone? Walking on the interstate with cars hurtling past was not safe for anyone of any fitness level. I would have figured it out. I would have coped. Rose was wrong; I could face my fears.

  Nonetheless, I was almost giddy with relief when the minibus pulled into the parking lot. I laughed too hard at the driver’s joke about rain and runways, but I supposed he was used to nervous passengers. He dropped me off right outside the Delta check-in. It was less than a hundred yards to the counter and felt like a mile uphill. I was beginning to weave by the time I got there.

  “Tagarelli, Mara,” I said, and gave her my driver’s license and confirmation number.

  She gave me back the license. “I’ll call for your chair.” She picked up her phone.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Your wheelchair, ma’am. I’ll have to call for it.”

  The Justice Institute, of course. They would have arranged it. Probably just transferred the arrangements for their previous guest to me. After all, all disabled people were the same. I was still blinking at her when the chair trundled up, pushed by a porter.

  “She needs gate A-17.” She handed the porter my ticket.

  He nodded at the chair for me to sit down. “Time’s the flight?” he asked the ticket agent.

  “Two thirty-five.” She handed him my boarding pass.

  “She got baggage to check?”

  She. As though I were not there. The porter picked up my bag, slung it over his shoulder and nudged the chair at me—just an inch, he probably didn’t even know he was doing it, but between one breath and the next I had no choice. He had my ticket and my bag. I and my wants were no longer part of the equation.

  I was tired, and this was all new to me. I sat.

  He pushed me through the busy concourse, nodded to the woman at the security gate. She nodded back to him—I did not exist—and unhooked the barrier ribbon, and he shoved me through to the head of the line. I wondered if they would even hear me if I told them I’d changed my mind, that I didn’t want to fly after all.

  “Female assist!” the male TSA agent bellowed. “Female assist!” The porter gestured for my shoes, put them and my bag in a gray tray, and vanished through the line of scanners. All around me children with runny noses, adult men without shoes, and women with squalling babies bumped into each other, got in the wrong line, took the wrong bag on the other side of the scanner. One man ran right into me as though I wasn’t there. A woman hit me in the head with her swinging diaper bag, then glared at me as though I were the problem.

  No shoes, no boarding pass, no bag, no phone. I was stuck and no one had bothered to give me a clue how long I’d be here. What if I missed my flight?

  Another jolt, but this time it was a TSA agent trying without warning to push the chair. She huffed, bent past me, and flicked off the brakes.

  “I’m eight minutes past my time,” she shouted to another agent as she rammed me through the swinging glass gate.

  “Not my fault,” he said.

  “Well, all the other handicapped can miss their plane,” she called over her shoulder. “After this one, I’m done.”

  She wheeled me past an area wh
ere people were putting on their shoes.

  “You been through this before?” Extra loud, extra slow. “You want privacy?”

  While I was wondering why I would need privacy she pulled on blue gloves, said, “Hold out your arms,” and began patting me down.

  So much for choice.

  “Lean forward.” A cursory touch of my back. “Lean back.” Even more cursory pat down my front. “Lift your right leg. Left.” Then she swiped a piece of paper over the arms of the chair, fed it into a machine, waited, and at the green light stripped off the gloves and tossed them and the paper into a bin already half full.

  “Good to go!” she shouted to no one in particular, and stumped off.

  That was it? I could have been sitting on a bomb or an Uzi. I imagined the oiled heft of an Uzi; SWAT teams running; my red-splattered corpse on CNN and a witness voiceover sobbing, “She was screaming about being treated like a sack of potatoes.” And then the porter handed me my shoes.

  The airport looked different from a wheelchair. We traveled through the bowels of the building, the mysterious world of the passkey and freight elevator. No carpets down here. No neon. All gray, all concrete, with pools of yellow-white light, and deathly quiet, apart from the rattle and squeak of the decrepit chair. The porter did not say a single word. I was just baggage. I wondered if he thought about how helpless I was; how much at his mercy I might be.

  I had been in a chair before, of course, when I was first training as a counselor. To see how it felt. Then, I could get up anytime and call a halt. This was different. This was as though the chair had turned me invisible, written me out of the story. I began to understand why all those people at the AMSS group were so defeated.

  * * *

  LEAVING THE TERMINAL in Fort Lauderdale was like walking into an Atlanta summer: moisture thick enough to stand on that tightened around me like plastic wrap, the kind of air you have to sip rather than breathe. The hotel could have been any conference hotel in North America; I had never realized how far the walk was from drop-off to reception, from reception to the elevator, the elevator to the room. I had never been in an accessible room before: wet room rather than the usual tub and shower, sinks and counters low and weirdly skeletal looking, pipes exposed to permit wheelchair users to get in close. But it was spacious, I liked that. I unpacked and went down to registration.

  Academic or organizational conferences centered on social justice form a two-sided ecosystem, like the ocean on either side of an equatorial thermocline: the well-lit layer where professionals bask and sport above the dim reach of the slow-moving clients—or constituents or stakeholders, members or customers, special interest group or community, depending on the agency and the year. What never changed was the dynamic. The conference was organized around those at the top of the food chain, who made their living from those below. If you ran a nonprofit, or wrote papers about those who needed the services of a nonprofit, you floated in the warmth of power and influence. You were approached by corporate reps and interviewed for jobs, you hung out in the bar in good clothes and laughed with the journalist who had just sucked dry an angry, badly dressed member of the latest social justice struggle then tossed the husk back into the cold, oxygen-starved depths.

  As the executive director of the Georgia AIDS Partnership I’d swum in the dappled warmth, seeing and being seen. I was sought after and had access to those I sought. When the U.S. Conference on AIDS moved from one rich metropolis to another, D.C. to L.A. to New York, I moved with it, easy and untroubled. Every now and again I joined the larger shoal at the International AIDS Society in Durban or Melbourne, Rio or Vienna.

  The JI conference was not like that. I had been expecting some difference—it was a much smaller affair than USCA or IAS, and I did not have a long schedule of appointments and private meetings—but I had not really understood that I now belonged on the other side of the divide. I was a crip, not one of the real people. My purpose was to be brought up from the deep, exhibited, and cast back.

  For those in the warmer waters close to the surface, the big late-night, bar-based, strange-city conference teemed with sexual opportunity. I was used to the after-dinner meetings over wine that became a nightcap and moved into just-a-little-too-close, just-a-bit-too-touchy confidences. For most of my time I had been with Rose, and turned aside the propositions briskly or kindly or regretfully, depending. I had not realized that now part of me had been looking forward to the possibility of saying yes, or making my own proposals.

  I walked into the bar, deprecating smile ready, but those who looked up eagerly seemed to not see me. The cane outweighed even the special maroon-and-turquoise lanyard on my conference badge and KEYNOTE printed in block letters under my name. Even when I tripped over a woman’s purse on the writhing blue-and-white patterned carpet, gazes glided over me as though I were wearing a cloak of invisibility. The bartender saw me but the margarita tasted more sour than usual. When the second person banged into my bar stool without apologizing, my sense of unreality strengthened. The world began to feel insubstantial and treacherous. I ordered another margarita. As the bartender shook it, I heard a whispery laugh at my shoulder and turned slowly. Nothing. But I could not shake the sense that something had dodged out of sight and was mocking me from behind a pillar. It felt like a cruel child’s game that played on a human’s most atavistic fear: the monster was coming and everyone but you knew its name. You were the scapegoat.

  At two in the morning, sleepless, I wrote a long, wandering email to Aiyana about the old woman’s Small Dog Theory of illness: keep your illness tended and it won’t yap and mess up your life. Only her MS wasn’t my MS because what I was going through was not like a small fucking dog. No wonder she’s so old if her MS is just a tiny yapping pug. And if she really is so old she’s too old for sex, anyway, so what would she care? Or maybe that theory only works if everyone around you is so cowed they ignore the farting drooling vile little yellow-collared fucker …

  I deleted it. It was ugly, it didn’t make sense, and I sounded deranged.

  What was Aiyana doing right now? Maybe finishing her workday with a colleague, saying, Want to grab a beer? Sitting in their cutoff shorts, arms draped casually over the back of the wooden bar bench. The smiles that went on just a little too long, bare thighs close enough to feel the warmth, hear the catch of breath, bask inside the carefree scent of each other’s healthy body.

  * * *

  WHEN I GOT HOME two days later, the first thing I did was message my neurologist via the clinic’s patient portal.

 

  Liang wrote me an order for physical therapy.

  I’d been in PT before, twice, for training injuries. Both were short, focused courses. Brisk and businesslike.

  This was not that. Though it probably looked like that from the outside. We did the assessment: “Touch this, lift that.” Surprise, surprise, I have MS. Apparently my right peroneus and all three right adductors are weak. No shit. But that wasn’t what was weird.

  It took me a while to work out what was.

  * * *

  THE THERAPIST, Brian, had been perfectly polite, but it was clear I was of no account, a cripple not a woman, someone he had to touch because it was his job, about as important to him as a chair. For my whole life men’s sexual attention had been nothing but an irritating, occasionally exhausting consequence of being alive—like gravity: not something you think about much until it’s gone.

  The second session was worse.

  He’s big. Gentle, like I said, physically anyhow. He had me flat on my back, left leg bent at the knee and right straight up. He was stretching out my hamstring—I hadn’t even noticed it was getting tight—pushing until it released, then a bit farther, then holding until it released. It wasn’t painful, but it’s not exactly comfortable, and it feels dangerous because you’re so helpless and one slip would break you in half. Just part of the shit you have to endure at PT. So I was okay, until he said, sort of clinically,
“My friend was doing this with a client, a 73-year-old woman, and something went crunch. He broke her hip.” I blinked and he laughed and lowered my leg. Then he took hold of my left, and raised it slowly to its limit, then a little over. “But you know the crazy thing? She came back a month later after a hip replacement and he did it to the other one!”

  Aiyana took thirty-six hours to reply.

  I don’t think he was threatening you. I wonder if he was just repeating an urban legend—did you check Snopes?

  I stared at it for a long time. Snopes. So in addition to being an unreliable narrator, now I was a gullible fool, too? I imagined her with her new friends, rolling their eyes at the doily brain’s paranoia.

  Of course he wasn’t threatening me; he didn’t think I was worth threatening. She hadn’t listened to a word I’d said.

  * * *

  I HAD FORGOTTEN I’D SUBSCRIBED to MonSter! until I got an email apologizing for not being able to fulfill my subscription. Despite a “glorious thirty-year run as the beating heart of the MS community,” their subscriber base was down ninety-five percent since its nineties heyday—I was surprised at the graphic they included showing that in 1993 its circulation was in the six figures—and due to that and “a series of unfortunate circumstances” they were shutting down, effective immediately. I guessed that meant the founders’ health and will had faltered. When I went to their website I got a 404 Not Found message. Another community-based organization gone as tracelessly as a foundered ship.

  * * *

  LIANG DOUBLED MY DOSE of Rebif. I had severe reactions to the increased dose: headaches, muscle spasms, and vomiting. Once, after crouching and puking into a bucket, I lay on the carpet and a purring Rip bumped my sweat-soaked head. I soldiered on grimly. The spasms stopped after a while, and the vomiting. But my legs ached all the time and my brain felt packed in cotton wool. I canceled one then another PT session.

  One morning while the kettle boiled I was staring out the window when a flick of red caught my attention. I wandered out onto the back deck. That flick of red again down in the yard. A bird. Crimson with a black beak. And something smelled good, perfumey. There, down by the door to the subbasement we no longer used: a bush with tiny white flowers. I walked down the steps onto the grass: sometime when I was not looking it had turned from straw yellow to fresh minty green. And there were weeds. Was that new or something Rose took care of?