One More Theory About Happiness

by Paul Guest

  I shucked them off meekly, terrified and sad: I had not realized what had happened to the boots, how they had been ruined. I’d had no idea.

  Screaming, she threw one. It thudded against the back window. And then the other came down, missing me by inches.

  I gathered it up in my arms and cowered on the floor-board, holding it like a trophy of my own foolishness. We drove home.

  That night now seems like a precursor to the morning of my injury, when I did not know enough to avoid damage, when I wanted so badly for my body to be other than it was, but not, if I could have known, what it would become, when nothing could protect me from myself, not even my parents.

  chapter NINE

  Junior high dances were loud pageants of melancholia, held in the school cafeteria, darkened, festooned with glittering tinsel, loud with heavy metal, a prelude to the suffocating sway of pop ballads. I went alone but tried to speak to friends, yelling above the decibels. It felt like torture, like something inside me with deep roots was slowly being pulled out.

  The air was dense with noise and hot: the ecosystem of the young. From a corner, I watched couples pair off, draw close when the ballads played. Teachers threaded through the crowd with flashlights, clicking them on when someone danced too close to their partner, when kissing began. Weak bursts of light winked through every song.

  I longed to join them. To participate in the communal swoon. But in another body. Not the one I had. I refused the half-measure of attempting to dance in my chair.

  Because it would be no more than that: an attempt.

  There were times I could have. When the Trundle sisters, already matronly, faced me on both sides, clumsily writhing, suggesting sensuality, I shook my head, shouted them away, hating them for even trying to involve me. We were strangers and we always would be.

  A girl who had a crush on me, a sweet, attentive soul who always spoke in the halls, who passed me handwritten notes declaring her feelings, once came to me in the dark while everyone else pressed their bodies together, and knelt beside me. She spoke into my ear.

  “Would you dance with me?”

  I didn’t say a word. I was unable. All the breath inside my lungs stopped. She put her warm arm around the back of my neck and touched her forehead to mine.

  For as long as that song lasted, she touched me that way. Not moving. Quiet. Her arm around me. As the song ended, I thought to kiss her forehead.

  To press my lips to her skin like an apology.

  But I did nothing and when the music began again she stood up, smiling sadly, and walked away, back into the crowd, where she vanished, though I tried to see her.

  And then, it was over: the dance, the night, and soon enough, junior high, where I learned that longing is the body’s true lesson.

  The hair of Bob Burnes recalled the weirdly inviolable, spray-shellacked dome of a television evangelist. He had been the principal of my elementary school at the time I broke my neck, a devastated, weeping visitor in the first days following my injury. Three years later, at the start of high school, he would be my principal again. That summer, in the days before classes began, I thought of what it would be like to see him, a reminder of my past, and felt indefinably blank.

  No part of my injury had been his fault, though it happened at the home of one of his teachers. I’d known him in the way any child feels he knows a teacher, or visible administrator, which is to say that when I saw him in the hallways of my elementary school I thought, He knows me but no one else. I am special. I will be remembered.

  And I would be, of course.

  A few weeks before the start of the school year, I visited the new campus to inspect it for any issues with accessibility. I roamed empty halls, more interested in battered lockers and old textbooks stacked in precarious columns. Rounding the blind corner of an enormous trophy case, filled with fading jerseys and retired numbers, trophies, plaques, and photographs from other decades, I almost ran over him. We had both been distracted but we stopped, exhaling before we spoke.

  “Isn’t it good to find you here,” Bob Burnes said. He seemed to be speaking to himself, repeating something to himself that was, in fact, gladdening. He touched my shoulder, lightly, afraid I might suffer from any touch. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “It’s been a while,” I said. “Are you liking it here?”

  He had just been promoted to the high school. He sat down on a wooden bench, looking down the long, featureless hallway, turning something over in his thoughts.

  “Promise me one thing, Paul,” he said, his voice still far away. “In four years, when you graduate…”

  He trailed off, weighing the thing he wanted to say. I waited for him, though a dread began to build inside of me. I didn’t say anything.

  “When you graduate, I want to see you walk across that stage,” he said, facing me now, very much present, his eyes wet and bright. “Can you promise me that?”

  I said the only thing I could. I promised to walk across my graduation stage.

  By any reckoning, it was an awful thing to ask, as though all that had held me back in the three years since breaking my neck was a cringe-inducing request in a high school hallway. As if I had been waiting around for the right challenge, as if a high school graduation ceremony were the glory of my youth and I should cross it in full stride.

  When I promised him I’d walk again, it was a promise I knew I’d never be able to keep. Enough time had passed for me to know, for me to feel in my body, that I’d come to the ends of any real physical improvement: no more strength was going to return to any part of my body, at least nothing that would be of practical use.

  No morning would come when I’d wake and find my arms restored from the atrophy that had already taken place. My legs wouldn’t bear me up like a miracle.

  I had reached the end of the body’s capacity to heal itself. There was no more. Though this was something too painful for loved ones to hear, who kept a vigil in their hearts for me, I had made my peace with it. This was my body and this was my life.

  A new school brought a nearly maddening chain of new assistants. The night before the first day of classes Sharon called our home to see if she could come by for a visit, to meet before the next day’s first bell. When she arrived, my mother invited her into our living room. She sat primly, clutching a purse, absently touching her hair like she was nervous, on edge. My mother asked her where she was from. My mother prided herself on detecting any hint of a person’s birth.

  “I’m from Scranton,” Sharon said. “Pennsylvania. Not far from Philadelphia.”

  “It’s cold there,” my mother offered.

  “That’s why I like it here,” she replied. “Nice warm weather. We were ready for a change. Me and my husband.”

  It was the sort of talk I hated. Idle and weightless, going nowhere. I imagined it five days a week, and my eyes wanted to cross. I stared out the window at the lawn, which was withered in the summer heat, the last of it, before autumn’s onset. After a while, I realized I was being discussed.

  “Paul wears a leg bag,” my mother said. “Are you familiar with what one is?”

  Sharon shook her head stiffly. Her dark beehive of hair floated above her like a hint of bad weather. My mother reached over to me, raising the left leg of my jeans to expose the plastic bag, half filled, strapped around my calf, and the tube with a valve hanging down.

  “You might have to empty this sometimes,” she said breezily. “If it gets full. With urine. His urine.”

  She nodded blankly, watching my mother.

  “Don’t worry, it’s easy,” my mother said, standing up. “Let me show you.”

  She walked away. Sharon, who appeared to be shrinking with every minute, smiled approximately. I imagined her like a character in a comic book, with a thought balloon rising up from her mind, except there was nothing in the balloon. Nothing.

  When my mother returned, she was holding a Mason jar. She knelt on the floor beside me and sat the glass jar on the carpe
t by my left foot.

  “This is what we empty Paul’s urine into. All you do,” she said, “is take the tube and it has this plastic snap—”

  Urine puddled on the dark navy carpet. She had opened the valve accidentally.

  “Oh, shit,” my mother said brightly. “I wasn’t being careful. No big deal. I’ll just get a washrag and scrub this right up. That just happens sometimes.”

  The woman looked over at me, miserably. I felt a little sorry for her. Soon, the spill was cleaned up and the jar returned to the bathroom. We resumed our meeting.

  “I should be going, I suppose,” the woman said.

  “Oh, don’t rush off,” my mother said, patting my knee. “Would you like some sweet tea?”

  “No, thank you very much,” she said. “I do have two questions. Well, one is more of a statement and the other is a question.”

  “OK,” I said, listening sickly.

  “The first thing I should tell you is that I can’t spell. I can’t. You will really have to help me on that.”

  “I imagine we’ll work that out,” I suggested, spotting my mother in the corner of my eye. She wouldn’t look back, a forced smile on her face.

  “And my question,” Sharon said, her face very serious now. I tried to think of what she wanted to know, ran my mind through the usual catalog of queries: What happened to me? Had I been born this way? Did I have a personal relationship with the Lord?

  “Go on,” I said, bracing myself for whatever she wanted to ask.

  “Will there be someplace where I can keep my purse?”

  I had the same cheery rictus as my mother and the thought balloon which rose from my head like pale smoke read, Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

  chapter TEN

  E-V-E-R-Y L-E-T-T-E-R O-F E-V-E-R-Y W-O-R-D. N-O M-A-T-T-E-R H-O-W S-I-M-P-L-E, N-O M-A-T-T-E-R H-O-W S-E-E-M-I-N-G-L-Y O-B-V-I-O-U-S.

  In class, Sharon’s job was, ostensibly, to take notes while a teacher lectured or write my answers on class work or tests. Instead, I whispered in her ear every letter of every word of every line of notes I needed for every class, while attempting to disturb no one else: my classmates, whose pens and pencils sped across the pages, and my teachers, who listened to the class-long mutter I made in her ear with growing frustration.

  A biology teacher, grim and humorless, watched Sharon flail every day with increasing disdain. Before class one day, he came to where we sat. He fixed her in his flat gaze.

  “I can give you my lecture notes,” he offered her, acidly. “It might improve the, ah, situation.”

  That word was drawn from his mouth like a serrated blade, meant to cut, and he had expected it would. I could see it. He waited for her to flinch.

  “Oh, no, goodness no, thank you,” she said. Her round face beamed.

  He looked to me, a brief softness in the long shape of his face before it hardened for her. He began recording his lectures at night, passing me cassette tapes when class ended and she had already left the classroom. Sometimes there were hand-drawn diagrams of cellular structures, complicated explications of processes, and obsessive, enthralling passages on etymology. Language itself was a living thing and all its secrets were also its possibilities. I think my first training as a writer, as a poet, began then, though I had no idea of this at the time. Even as Sharon labored beneath the shroud of language, I grew to love what it could reveal.

  Sharon’s hand would shake, scrawling out mistake upon mistake, while I hissed, no no no and finally yes. I consigned myself to watching written rubble pile up on the page.

  She laughed nervously, rubbing the pencil’s eraser entirely away until its metal end tore through, making a long, pulpy accordion in the page. She would reach for another sheet, solemnly, and start over. By the end of each class, a fraction of that day’s lesson had been successfully taken down. When the bell rang, Sharon would hide for a few moments in the teachers’ lounge, where her purse was stowed in an open cubbyhole.

  I followed her there once, entering the offices by another door, and from a distance watched her seated beside a humming soda vending machine, her eyes locked on the purse, as though it were a hatchling that might be blown from the nest.

  I felt guilty when, after two months, I requested that we no longer work together. And I felt guilty when, the following summer, a postcard arrived from Reading, Pennsylvania.

  The writing on the back of the card appeared to have been written by someone else, with none of Sharon’s blocky, all-caps lettering. The message read:

  Hi Paul! I think of you often. Hope you are well. We have come to back to PA and are happy. But cold! You may write (if you wish) to this address.

  I felt no guilt when I ignored the card, letting it become buried by books and papers, and, most of all, by time. I couldn’t bear the thought of contact with her. A residual degree of frustration and anger lingered in me like a venom.

  Now, that is gone, replaced with clarifying irony: she must have been dyslexic, or beset by some other cognitive disorder, none of which I am in any way qualified to diagnose. But it makes a kind of sense, or it helps me to think more kindly of her and feel, in all my fallibilities, all my incapacities, a long, latent, wounded empathy.

  Days after Sharon’s replacement began working with me, I began to wonder if I had been rash, if, maybe, by the school year’s end, if I had not murdered Sharon, things might have improved. If I might have somehow been able to train her in the inscrutable mysteries of the alphabet. If all the stars and all the planets, everything strewn about the cosmos like burning litter, might have lined up like glowing cherries in a Las Vegas slot machine, hitting jackpot, with all the letters and then all the words tumbling forth in a slurry of golden sentences. I wondered this.

  Hiding from her replacement in the stacks of the school’s modest library, pretending to be interested in biographies of Oliver North and Bob Dole, I wondered this.

  Jennifer, or Jen as she wanted me to call her, had appeared with a mug of coffee in her hands, a voice that tittered and trilled and then softened to instant sobriety, her heart larded with grief. For me, for you, for the children she someday intended to bring forth into the world.

  She could spell, quickly, perfectly, and for a short moment I felt like maybe this would be better. This would work.

  But when Jennifer asked me what had happened to me, and listened with perfect gravity to my story, her eyes fattened with tears. She touched my forearm.

  “You have been through so much,” she whispered. “So, so very much.”

  “It, ah, hasn’t been so bad,” I said. In situations like this, when a stranger’s grief appears ready to ignite, I tried to tamp down their sense of my suffering.

  “You are so wise,” Jennifer said, her hand still nestled on my arm. I pulled it from her touch, onto my lap, but she didn’t notice. “Let me help you.”

  Gingerly, she took my arm in her hands, returning it to my wheelchair’s armrest. Anger spiked inside me. I pulled away once more. We were in the library, during a study period. Students moved about in bored circles.

  “I’m going to look up some books,” I said, more forceful than necessary. Her eyes blinked. “You stay here.”

  “Yes, of course, Paul,” she said, her voice wounded. “You take your time. I’ll be right here.”

  As much as I had learned to inhabit my body, with all its changes and difficulties and outright agonies, I had been forced to try to respond to strangers who didn’t see me in my broken state, in pain, struggling, so much as they saw their son or daughter. As they saw themselves. For all the gentle curiosity, the questions about which batteries my wheelchair used, or how I used the bathroom, people couldn’t help their fascination with ruin. With their future selves. The downward arc of dotage. In me, they could see a rehearsal of the flesh, how it might all end.

  I could say nothing to her that wasn’t suffused with heroic stoicism: in her eyes, I was a vessel for suffering. Or courage. Maybe pluckiness. Maybe all of the tired tropes which had b
een pinned to my life like a badge. There was nothing I hated more fervently than playing that imaginary role. A consolation to others but not to me.

  And, yet, I understood it. I felt it. The urgency of grief, even when utterly misguided, when knotted in self-interest.

  That spring the radio stations in town, the little ones which seemed to warble from a great distance, broadcasting thundering, disembodied Sunday sermons, began advertising an upcoming appearance by Joni Eareckson Tada. The teenager whose book I skimmed through the night before my injury was now grown, married, in charge of a large foundation and host of a syndicated radio show. My mother requested free tickets for us both, though I had no desire to go, to participate in or be defined by disability, whether it was mine or that of someone else. My mother replied: You’re going anyway.

  I wanted no part of going and wanted nothing from her story. I knew enough of my own injury to understand how changed I was and how set apart.

  The venue’s stage was flanked on both sides by paintings Tada had completed by gripping a brush in her teeth. A lamb, a lion, a glade exploding with summer. We waited while the room continued to fill up and metal parts clanked and unseen bodies groaned and the metallic hiss of respirators went up into the air.

  After a short while, a woman wheeled Tada up a ramp beside the stage and to its center where the light fell down on her. Nearly forty, she was no longer a wounded girl in a book. More than ever, I wanted to leave.

  Tada was dressed in bland clothes; her brown hair was pulled back. Everyone clapped and flash bulbs began to pop throughout the crowd. Tada waited for the applause to boil off before she spoke, greeting us. Her voice was warm and practiced, every syllable liquid. Then she began to sing. There was no music. Only her voice.