Tragedy Plus Time

by Adam Cayton-Holland

  We all reacted differently to the pain we felt. While I wailed and created bad art like a Hot Topic goth, Anna demanded answers and action, flexing her civil rights attorney muscles from an early age. She worked at ATLANTIS in high school and eventually served on the board, helping to continue Wade’s legacy of fighting for social justice for people with disabilities. Lydia quietly ruminated. She suffered silently. Her teacher told us how she muttered to herself about Lincoln for months after his death, but would always deny it whenever someone pointed it out.

  She never asked for help, or clarification; she just processed things on her own. Eventually she came away with this profound appreciation for all living things, no matter how small. Which only magnified the tragedy she saw and felt. There was human suffering and loss to be accounted for, but the same sad fate befell animals and insects, even plants. Lydia cataloged it all.

  Our parents wanted to relandscape the front yard when we were young. Lydia wouldn’t have it. She insisted that they had no right to rip plants out of the ground and murder them. Rather than ignoring her and going about fixing their front yard anyway, my parents honored Lydia’s protest. Eventually they found a sympathetic gardener who offered Lydia a plea deal: he could take all the old plants and shrubs and trees and grind them into a mulch, which he would use to help fertilize a new front yard. That way all the old plants would be there right alongside the new. Appeased, Lydia allowed the landscaping job to proceed and our front yard boldly leapt out of the 1960s.

  She became a vegetarian when she was nine.

  Once we passed a dead animal on the side of the road and I noticed Lydia’s lips moving, as though she were reciting a prayer. I called her on it.

  “Are you praying, Lee?”

  “No!” she insisted, repulsed. Religion was anathema in our house.

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “I’m saying, ‘Rest in peace, little doodle.’ ”

  Rest in peace, little doodle.

  It was what Ned Flanders said to a cheese doodle in episode 89 of The Simpsons, “Boy-Scoutz ’n the Hood.” After a disastrous scout trip, Homer and Ned and their sons find themselves stranded at sea in a raft, starving. Homer decides to use a cheese doodle, their last precious morsel of food, as bait to catch a fish. He ties it to a line, hurls it into the water, and despite everyone’s protestations, he promptly catches a fish! Which promptly breaks the line and disappears into the water. Forever.

  “Rest in peace, little doodle,” Ned says sadly.

  Lydia loved that line. She thought it was sweet. So in the absence of any religion growing up, she appropriated the Simpsons-ism as a shorthand eulogy for fallen innocents. I saw her do it on countless other occasions over the years, often unconsciously. Not one sad piece of roadkill escaped her attention, and always, even midsentence, she would stop and murmur those words like a silent reverie: Rest in peace, little doodle. Not only were all deaths wrenching for her, all deaths were also worthy of mourning. We traveled to Borneo and Indonesia when we were kids. Lydia cataloged every dead animal she saw the entire trip. The final tally was over a hundred. Many of them we never even saw. She sought them out.

  Her vigilance was astounding. No death went unnoticed. She tried to cope as best she could, but you could tell that the death toll was adding up inside of her, like she was accruing it.

  I found a poem she wrote when she was in the fourth grade.

  There is a place in my heart reserved for two dogs, two special dogs that were here.

  But this place in my heart is pierced by a tear, a very, very sad tear.

  God took them for some extremely strange reason,

  And I think of the time that they were still here as a great, special season.

  Our dogs had been dead for two years at that point. The loss still felt fresh to her.

  And yet, this was never a cause for alarm in my family. My parents expected their children to be smart and sensitive, they were proud we felt so enormously. We were the Magnificent Cayton-Hollands after all! If we were to become all that they hoped we could become, our hearts had to be open to the world—the good, the bad, the heartbreaking.

  If there was ever any concern about mental illness, it would have been discussed. My parents sent me to a shrink at four; it was not a subject they shied away from. But this was the 1980s. The concept was hardly pervasive. Words like “anxiety disorder” and “bipolar” were still a generation away from commonplace. All we knew was that the world was a complex place, but we’d figure it out eventually.

  Right?

  The trick, then, became finding ways of circumventing the hurt and upset. If we were going to feel everything so damn acutely, we had to find a way to control those feelings instead of letting them control us.

  Which is how we all developed crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  SECRET SUPERHEROES

  It started with the tiny television in my bedroom, the one looming high on the dresser. Who knew what was going on inside that box? Starving African kids? Funeral of a friend on the local news? A rerun of Stephen King’s It? Anything could be banging around those unilluminated tubes. Never mind that the TV was turned off. Inside there were some thirty-odd channels allowed to run wild while I slept mere feet away. My unconscious was susceptible to all manner of unchecked, osmotic horror.

  So I developed a system for policing it. I would use the previous channel button on the remote control to leapfrog back and forth between Channel 4 and Channel 9 for seven couplets, before ultimately leaving it on Channel 4 and turning the television off.

  04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04.

  Why Channel 4? Because I had done my recon; I knew nothing sinister was taking place behind the screen on that network. It was merely the local news, The Tonight Show, Tom Snyder, then paid programming and the rainbow stripes buzzing till dawn. Safe, innocuous content. And if somehow over the course of the evening the television decided to meander of its own accord to oh, say, the last channel viewed, Channel 9 afforded a nearly identical viewing safety net. There would be none of the random slasher-flickery of Channel 31, no sci-fi befuddlement of Channels 2 or 9. The content was tame and antiseptic on Channels 4 and 9. So they alone were allowed to reign inside my television, their namesakes whispered like an om mani padme hum as the light fizzled inside the television and darkness swept over the room.

  04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04.

  Next I had to make sure my pillow was perfectly centered in my bed, which I accomplished by gripping the outer bars of my wrought iron bed frame and then counting inward, alphabetically—A, B, C, D, E, F.

  F was the bar where my hands met in the exact middle of the bed, and thus where I should place the center of the pillow. I would grip that bar with both hands over my head like a knight wielding his sword for a deathblow, and that was how I knew total balance had been achieved, and I could move on with my nightly routine.

  Let us pray.

  Dear Lord (we were agnostic), Dear Lord, please bless Anna, Lydia, Mom, and Dad. Then again, but in reverse, so that no family member would have preferential positioning over another: please bless Dad, Mom, Lydia, and Anna. Next, to the animals: Please bless Lily and Tundra; please bless Mama Kitty and Baby Kitty; please bless Ramona, Sugar, and Amy. Please bless Sam the Turtle, and all of Lydia’s rats. Extended family: Please bless Grandma and Grandpa; please bless Uncle Lauren and Aunt Maynee and my cousins Molly and Griffin.

  Amen.

  I then closed my eyes and hoped sleep would overtake me promptly. Because if it didn’t I would have to get up and pee again, the tank needing to be absolutely 100 percent empty in order for proper slumber to be achieved. And then I’d have to start the whole process over again.

  I don’t remember when I started performing these nightly rituals. All I know is once I did nothing ever seemed to go to complete shit. Life as I knew it didn’t collapse. And while I couldn’t prove that this was strictly because of dogmatic adhe
rence to my routine, I couldn’t prove that it wasn’t. In time it just became the truth: the world was a fragile place; my practices were the only thing holding everything together. Should I neglect my duties, who knew what horror would unfold? That’s how the cracks opened. That’s how the darkness crept in. It was an enormous burden, but it was one I was willing to bear. Because I was a secret superhero, the thin, neurotic line between order and chaos. I was unlike anyone else.

  Except for the two girls living down the hall.

  One day Anna confessed to me that before she closed her eyes at night the last thing she had to see was her bedroom door, never a window, or else terrible things would happen. My knees buckled.

  My god. You . . . feel these things too?

  Then Lydia revealed that she had to touch the door handle before the car was unlocked or she couldn’t physically get inside, and I realized that all three of us shared this burden.

  Once we learned of our shared compulsions, the floodgates opened. We traded our afflictions like Pogs. The rapid cataloging of teeth with the tongue, the depressing of diagonally corresponding bubbles on a to-go soda lid, speed-dialing to 100 on the telephone or a remote control, all of it helped. Nothing was too laborious or idiosyncratic. Our work was far too important.

  Anna developed a nifty prerequisite for air travel wherein every member of the family had to meticulously study the emergency instructions laminate before taking off. Never mind our familiarity with the content, our cognizance of the sad little troll boy patiently waiting for his mother’s assistance while she correctly attends to her own oxygen mask first. None of that mattered. This was a ritual and as such it had to be observed with diligence. Our parents obligingly studied the increasingly familiar bad clip art, heading off their children’s panic attacks at the pass. For were we not to engage in these behaviors, who knew the devastation that would ensue? Planes might fall from the sky.

  While Anna’s and my rituals had been grand-scale, designed to avert the impending disasters of the day, Lydia paid homage to the god of small things. Hers became attempts to ensure the well-being of all. Should a food item fall and touch the ground, rendering it garbage, you can’t just throw it away. Because then it will be lonely. You must throw another piece after it, another grape, another Goldfish cracker. Because then whatever sad fate those two food items are off to meet, at least they will be doing so together.

  For Lydia, this extended to any inanimate object. A straw wrapper wasn’t just bunched into a spit wad and thrown away. It was ripped into two, or three, or four pieces that were then discarded as a group, like some new gang of super friends off for the adventure of a lifetime.

  It was Lydia in a nutshell: champion of the overlooked and miniscule; thoughtful, crazy, and kind.

  We never asked for these burdens. They were bestowed upon us. And should we neglect them, there would be consequences. If not for the world at large, then for us personally. With great power comes great responsibility.

  I knew this all too well from my migraines.

  The first one was on my twelfth birthday. I had club soccer tryouts that day. I was in my bedroom gathering my shin guards and cleats when suddenly a flash went off behind my eyes somewhere deep. My temples felt like they were going to cave in on themselves. The pain was unbearable. I ran into the bathroom and vomited violently. Then I collapsed into my bed, writhing and grinding my teeth. My parents were beside themselves. What was happening?

  I knew.

  While countless doctors later would tell me the migraines were stress-related, that the nerves of soccer tryouts sent me down that road, I knew it wasn’t stress that had me groaning in agony. It was dereliction of duty. I had fucked up. I couldn’t say for certain what I had missed: the list of rituals at that point was long and growing longer. But what did it matter? I had forgotten something. Why else would this be happening? Some unseen villain or vindictive god had uncovered my kryptonite.

  It was the only justification I could think of.

  Over the years, as the headaches came and went with ever-increasing randomness, I ignored the advice of professionals to shoot whatever new migraine drug was available up my nose. I heeded the only doctor’s advice given to me that ever made sense.

  “You have to calm your entire body down,” one neurologist told me with didactic patience. “You start at your very tippy toes and say, ‘My toes are at rest.’ Then you move up to your feet and say, ‘My feet are at rest.’ Then on and on, all the way up until your entire body is calm and at peace.”

  Now here was a solution that made sense! A meticulous accounting of every single body part designed to summon order from chaos? The math checked out. This was the only logical remedy.

  So as the migraines continued over the years, as the medicines and understanding of the phenomena supposedly improved, I ignored all the science. I took my cerebral lumps and adhered to my own, neurotic prescription. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes I vomited multiple times from the pain; sometimes I saw spots so bad in front of my eyes I was unable to drive or read words on a page. But every time a migraine washed over me, I would retreat from wherever I was into the darkness of the nearest bedroom, lie there calmly and begin whispering to myself, “My toes are relaxed, my feet are relaxed, my ankles and Achilles tendons and shins are relaxed.”

  I would meticulously pull the wave of relaxation over my body, tracing the calm across every vertebra and rib, and as I did, a radiating peace would envelop me, a peace that somehow pierced through the pain, allowing me to finally fall asleep. It was like the turning point in every epic movie battle, that brilliant moment where you can feel the tide shifting away from the villain back toward the hero, toward the side of good, and right. Every time I drew the calm all the way up my body, finally coaxing it through the shaft of my neck and out through the top of my head, I would allow myself one final ritual, one last neurotic peace offering before collapsing into the darkness.

  “Oh four oh nine,” I would whisper with my eyes shut tight, tapping back into my essential binary code. “Oh four oh nine, oh four oh nine, oh four oh nine, oh four oh nine, oh four oh nine, oh four oh nine, oh four.”

  And like that, the world would be safe again.

  But who knew for how long?

  GHOSTS I’VE KNOWN

  We were at the market on Kearney Street when the atmosphere suddenly swallowed itself. The temperature plunged, the sky turned eerie dark, a stillness enveloped the neighborhood. We quickly loaded the groceries into my mother’s car, anticipating hellacious rain; then we heard the alarm. Children of the prairie states know it all too well: a disaster-howl that starts low and swells to a panic-inducing crescendo. The tornado siren. Growing up it rang every Wednesday at 11:00 a.m., a test of the emergency notification system that reverberated across the Mile High City. But it was just that. A test. Tornadoes didn’t hit Denver. They happened out on the plains, damn near Nebraska. That was trailer park shit. We were city kids. We would hear that siren as we sat bored in our classrooms and we would giggle nervously and make stupid white-trash jokes; then it would subside and we would go back to staring out the window on a sunny day. But this was different. This was late in the afternoon, not on a Wednesday, and there was no sun. The sky was angry and alive. The clouds swirled, low and threatening.

  We piled into our station wagon and my mom got the lead out, empty Diet Coke cans clanging loudly in the back with every high-speed turn. All around us neighbors were in disaster mode, racing their cars from their driveways to the garage, slamming their doors and windows shut. Ambulances and fire trucks tore past us in the opposite direction, deeper into Park Hill, our historic, tree-filled neighborhood. We turned onto Montview Boulevard, hauling ass, the odometer climbing to 50, 60, 70 miles per hour. Debris shot by. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw massive trees toppling some half-dozen blocks behind us, a chaotic melee of foliage and rain and howling wind. It was all so violent.

  I caught eyes with Lydia. She was grinnin
g, a fixed calm in the midst of the storm. She was frightened, but at the same time she was thrilled. Like she had been waiting for this, expecting it. Here it is, I could see her thinking. Here is our tragedy.

  We didn’t want to die, but a little taste of that damage would go a long way for our street cred. A little glimpse of the other side, the darkness. Like when you break your leg in school. No one wants to experience that pain, but then everyone signs your cast. Lydia and I longed for that that day, the way any American kid who seemingly has it all would. To not be in Kansas anymore.

  We pulled into the alley and left the car parked in front of the garage. We burst into the house and my mom herded me and Lydia down the back staircase into the unfinished part of the basement, where there were no windows. She stationed us near the laundry room, among the boxes of extra Christmas decorations and old clothes, and then ran back up the stairs to retrieve the many animals that made up our household.

  The neighborhood howled above us as we hunkered down together and waited out the storm. We tried to call my dad at work, to let him know we were okay, but the phone lines were down. The power was out in the whole neighborhood. Anna was in Colorado Springs at the time, staying with a friend for an ice skating tournament, so we knew she was safe; the radio said the storm didn’t reach that far south. Other than that, everything was up in the air. We clutched our flashlights and pet the dogs to keep them from whining, and we prayed that the storm would spare us. Or maybe we prayed that it would bear down upon us. In our hushed reverence, it was hard to tell the difference. Lydia sat crisscross applesauce on the blue tile floor. Her eyes were dinner plates deep in her skull.

  “I can’t believe this is happening, Lee,” I whispered.

  “It’s incredible,” she said.

  We waited, our hearts in our throats. Anything seemed possible. Everything seemed possible. The true nature of the world, maybe of ourselves, was revealing itself.

  And then, suddenly, it was all over. Outside grew quiet. The storm subsided and we headed back upstairs.