by Paul Guest
The professor was balding, snaggletoothed, sublimely acerbic. His hands gripped befouled coffee mugs like claws. He barked and guffawed and had no illusions that I was somehow delicate, grunting my last name.
Mona sat two rows over from me in the narrow classroom, one seat back. Always a flutter in my peripheral vision, she took notes that seemed to capture every syllable in wiry loops of ink. If I didn’t stare straight ahead, she’d be there, a feathered blur at the edge of my sight. I tried to bore my eyes into the wall, the tattered map of America’s topography unspooled beside the murky chalkboard.
Still, there were days when I had no interest in the knobby spine of the Appalachian mountains and let myself watch her. Her studiousness, which seemed to seep the air from my lungs. There was a day I learned nothing when she applied lotion to her darkened legs, oblivious, intent. Another day when, passing through a parking lot, I stumbled on her in her car, furtively changing out of her workout clothes. For a moment all I could see was hurried, undifferentiated skin, a blur which took my breath.
Over time we became friends. Nothing more would come of it. Entering class one day, I spoke to Mona, as always, but noticed a young girl, six or seven, in a desk beside her, coloring spare paper with outsized boredom. Mona introduced me to her daughter, who didn’t look up from her crayons until scolded. I said hello but my eyes had gone instead to Mona’s left hand, where there was now a simple wedding band. And always had been. In my naiveté, I’d never considered that she might be married. That surprise must have been evident.
“I bet you didn’t know I had a little girl,” she said, her face amused.
“I didn’t even know you were married.”
Mona paused a moment, tapping her pen. Her daughter had returned to coloring.
“Oh, yes,” she replied, not sad, not wistful, not any single emotion, looking out a window, but not really. “Since I was fifteen.”
The story was too familiar, too obvious, to be further surprised: older boyfriend, pregnancy, small-town scandal, forced wedding. Alongside that narrative, my own foolishness played out, weeks of mooning for what I could not have.
In some ways, we grew closer, as if this last bit of elided biography had prevented any friendship beyond that of the casual acquaintance. As if she’d brought her daughter along rather than speak of her existence.
And, yet, in that closeness, in which we continued to talk, had lunch, occasionally studied, I withdrew, willing to be a friend, to listen, to be an ear receptive to her long unhappiness. I was kind and patient and, above all, present. She could open her heart to me because I was safe, incapable of acting.
I nursed a kind of bitterness and was ashamed. I listened and spoke and tried to craft consolation from whatever I could, whatever I had, which didn’t feel like much.
Mona knew where I lived with my family and sometimes would call if nearby to see if she could drop in. She would bring lunch from a fried fish house nearby, which had a bussized catfish in its front lawn. Battered cod or shrimp, hush puppies that sweated grease into their cardboard containers. Taught to be polite, I always ate the food, which was either awful or sublime or both all at once, depending on how little you cared for the integrity of your heart.
The following summer, after Viking history, Mona appeared once more at our home. Outside, everything broiled beneath a pane of faded-out sky. She asked if she could take a swim in our pool, out behind our house. The moment felt wrong or warped but I said why not, that she could change in the bathroom.
She wanted to talk, even through the door, which left me beside it to listen and respond. A minute or two passed. She announced she was coming out.
Mona stepped out in a two-piece swimsuit the color of foamed milk. The curls of her hair were tied up in a chestnut haze. Her top covered her breasts entirely, or would have, if not for the mesh pane between them, and the freckled skin it exposed.
Mona walked down the hallway into the living room, where the door to the back porch and steps down to the pool were located. She hadn’t said a word. My mother was watching television in the living room while knitting.
Mona waved to my mother before opening the door, before speaking to me.
“Do you like my swimsuit, Paul?”
I nodded dumbly and followed her out to the heat and the water and the stage of her loneliness. I watched her laze through the water, dipping under its lacquered surface, laughing like a child. In that heat, I couldn’t follow any conversation. Due to my quadriplegia, I was susceptible to sunstroke. Too long in that light would leave me weak, the sound of my blood in my ears, spots of light flecking my sight. As she swam, I tried not to reach that point.
When I had retreated to shadow thrown from the roof’s eave, Mona lifted herself from the pool and covered herself with a beach towel. It was time, she said, that she go. She would be late to pick up her daughter. In her clothes again, by my bedroom door, Mona seemed sad. My body couldn’t cool. That was all that I cared—that was all that I wanted. And for her to go. To take nothing more.
chapter THIRTEEN
“I don’t know if I can leave you,” my mother half sobbed the night before she drove home from Carbondale, Illinois, where I was about to begin graduate school, living on my own for the first time in my life. Her voice had flattened into anguish, a simple, sad O. Quickly, as quickly as it had erupted, she pushed the fear back, palming away the tears which ran in hot strands down her face. I was in bed already, the same hospital-style bed I had slept in for ten years, in a small apartment across the street from a law school and beside a lake which was already filling with leaves as fall came on.
Ten years had taught me no better how to be cried over. Which was a form of mourning, long distended. I thought of my father, in the days following my surgery, when I’d felt like something emptied and then filled again with pain, and how he had sobbed beneath the weight of love and its unbreakable responsibility. Then, I’d been a child, saved from pain for that moment by his. Whatever fear I felt now, in Illinois, on the eve of my independent life, became concern for her, though that hardly gave me the right words to speak.
“I’m going to be all right,” I said. “I will.”
I looked away. Though I believed what I said, I had no way of guaranteeing it. No way of seeing into the uncertain three years while I completed a master’s in fine arts. All I could say had been said. It was late now and we were tired, ready for sleep, even though we’d say good-bye in the morning. I shut my eyes.
She had been in Illinois with me for two weeks while we looked for someone to assist me every day, and after a long run of candidates who had never worked in health care before, were not even sure of the work I wanted them to do, or those who had, who wanted jobs which would pay them to look after me the entire day and through the night, as if I had dementia, and swore to my mother I wouldn’t escape their all-seeing eyes. No one, no one, seemed right, and privately I think we worried no one would suit my needs. Then, after another day of calling strangers, numbers and names given to us by motley sources, a man answered brusquely, in a hurry, just at the edge of impatience. He spoke with what I guessed was an Eastern European accent.
“Yes, yes, what is it?” he said loudly. A woman yelled in the background and I was silent while he yelled back. “What do you want? Who is calling me today?”
He spoke quickly, almost too quickly to follow, his words smashing up against one another, but in an oddly formal way, with surplus verbiage scattered throughout. Every sentence rose to a little giggle, as if its true meaning were a secret amusement.
I explained to him what I needed and what I didn’t need. He interrupted me.
“I did this,” he barked. “Do not fear: I am your man!”
I paused a second, closing my eyes. He would be the one. I was certain, rueful, intrigued. “You’ve worked with quadriplegics before?”
“Many!” he shouted, excited. “Yes. I know how to remove your urine and your poop and none of this bothers me.”
The way he said poop was either charming or insane: delicate, yet high-speed, not quite aware of how truly strange he sounded. How plosive and boyish.
I looked over to my mother, who read on the couch. She listened to us on the speakerphone, smiling but determinedly looking down at the page lest she break into her own fit of giggling. She waved her hand at me, wanting no part. I asked him to come over that evening.
His knock pounded into the metal door like machine gun fire. Blamblamblam. He was nearly through the door before it had opened, his head swiveling around, his arm clapping me on the back, smacking hard. My skin stung for minutes. He was short, but thick with bands of muscle. His hair bristled, dark black and full of gray, as was the mustache which rested on his lip like an enormous caterpillar. He wore zebra-print jogging pants, a fanny pack around his waist, and an aqua muscle shirt from which a thatch of robust chest hair sprang.
“Hello, hello, hello,” he half-shouted, taking my mother’s hand in his own before kissing it lightly, bowing comically, his arm extended behind him in grand flourish.
He introduced himself as Lazar Tonu, said I should call him Tony, from Romania, most recently employed on the riverboats in Metropolis, where gambling was legal, as a janitor. His wife, whom he met in a karate class, was Japanese. He went on.
“Are you curious how I speak so well your language?” he asked. “I can assure you we were never taught it in school.”
His eyes bounced back and forth between us, measuring our interest, clearly excited to have an audience for his tale.
“Oh, of course,” I said, trying not to look at my mother.
“I tell you,” he said, leaning closer, inviting us into something secret. “At night, I would enter a library through a window in the roof that was broken. No one knew that it was as good as a door if you climbed to the top. No one knew. But I knew.”
This was important to him. His index finger shot up and he pointed to his chest.
“That’s something else,” my mother said. I glared at her.
“I knew,” he continued. “At night I crept in through this window and I hid with books I could not read and books that I could read and all night long I remained this way. Night after night. Risking discovery. Until I had taught myself English.”
He paused to let it sink in for us before going on. We were quiet.
“And when I could read, I made my plans,” he whispered, an air of the conspirator about him. My mother had begun to be drawn in, I could see, and so had I. Despite his cartoon absurdity, his Wile E. Coyote machinations, he possessed an inexplicable hint of gravitas and couldn’t be entirely dismissed. He leaned even farther out from his chair, adjusting his fanny pack, eyeing us.
“I watched and waited,” he confided. “For many months, I watched and waited, biding my time.”
I began to worry about what he had waited for.
“And then when the signs were good and no moon was in the sky…” He paused, relishing the moment. “In the darkness I swam the river Danube and escaped my country Romania.”
He sat back in his chair, smoothing his zebra-print sweatpants with his palms, and waited for me to hire him, who had also lived through much.
Later that night Tony announced himself with his signature attack on my door. I let him in, smiling to see the same zebra stripes, the same fanny pack ringing his hips. He seemed to be all energy, all enthusiasm.
“Are you ready to fly?” he asked, switching from foot to foot, like a sprinter preparing for a race. I had no clue what he was talking about.
“I usually transfer from my chair to my bed by standing,” I said. “With your help. With your arms under mine like you were giving me a hug. You know what I mean, right?”
I asked this hopefully. He scrutinized me, jittery.
“I like to do this in another way,” he replied. “Will you let me try? I am strong. Do not worry.”
He twisted his fanny pack around to his back, widened the stance of his legs, then clapped his hands loudly. I winced.
“Are you ready to fly?” he asked, looking me in the eyes. He waited for me to say something, I realized. “You must say it. Say that you are ready.”
I just stared at him, then relented. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m ready to fly.”
“Come to mama!”
He scooped me up in his arms like a small child, holding me to his chest, and ran from my wheelchair in the middle of the room to my bed, where he dropped me on to the mattress like a professional wrestler. He giggled, pleased with himself.
“I didn’t expect you to do that, Tony,” I said, a little stunned, bemused by this odd man. It was important to him that I be impressed by his strength and, in truth, I was, having been lifted up and sprinted to bed like a participant in an Olympic event that never made the cut. His eyes, small and bright, flickered with obvious delight. He rubbed his hands together, ready to prove himself in some other way.
“You see,” he said, as if inviting me into knowledge that very few might ever possess, “there is no weight so great that I cannot lift it.”
I smiled, or tried to. I depended on him now. I needed him. I was his weight, his proof of strength and mastery.
After months Tony had not changed: everything he said bore the weight of revelation and still he insisted on scooping me up in his arms every night like a frenzied parent running from a burning home. He always wore the same clothes, the same fanny pack, and would call his wife from my phone, engaging in long, twisting disagreements that seemed to resolve nothing. When he hung up, he would stand for a little while at my windows, absently pushing his hands through his coarse hair, and when he turned back to me, its disarray was sad.
“My wife forbids me to drink soda,” he would say at night. “Might I have one?”
His eyes, always a little wild, took on a burdened aspect. He would sit in front of me while he pensively sipped Pepsi. Soon, he began bringing his own stashes of forbidden items: soda, chocolate, potato chips. He hid them in my closet, retrieving something every night with boyish glee.
When he learned that I wrote poetry, he would expound at length on the poverty of modern art, and poetry in particular, that it had abandoned rhyme and meter and all the other pleasures that were characteristic of truly great poetry.
“Why can poetry no longer rhyme,” he asked intently, “and what good is all its darkness? Morbid, morose—no good! I tell you, the greatest poet of Romania only writes of graveyards and children who have died too soon! Who says that he is great? I do not!”
By then, I had learned how to exist inside one of his conversations, which was to agree or disagree as deftly as possible, saying little, listening more than anything.
That winter I tore a tendon in my right ankle, falling out of my wheelchair in the parking lot outside my apartment. I lay there, the night sky whirling above me, until two male students found me and lifted me back into my chair. My ankle throbbed.
Inside, I called Tony. He arrived quickly, bounding into my apartment, but his face was framed by concern. He looked me over.
“You have been drinking, have you?” he asked darkly.
“I don’t drink, Tony,” I replied. “You know that. Get this shoe off me?”
My right foot was swelling already. I groaned.
Tony looked at me, thinking hard, running his hand through his hair. He went to my refrigerator for ice, filling a plastic bag. He helped me into bed, elevating my foot, applying ice.
Tony, preoccupied, muttered to himself. At last, he looked to me.
“May I use your phone?”
“Well, yeah, sure, be my guest,” I said. I was irritated that he wanted to call someone.
He dialed, waited, his face tense. He placed his hand over the receiver.
“I pray that we do not wake my wife,” he said, winking. “Hello? Hello. Yes. Were you sleeping?”
His face darkened. He turned away, as though I would be shielded from the heated words with his back to me. He reached back, giving me
a thumbs-up. He waited for a few moments, humming to himself. Minutes passed. Finally he began to speak.
“Hello? Hello?”
Another moment passed. He began to speak once more, not in English and not in Japanese. I guessed it might be Romanian.
When Tony left, he would only say that he would return very quickly, that I should not be concerned. Before I could question him, he had gone, his manic urgency multiplied by an unknown factor. The ice bag fell from my ankle. I wished he had turned off the light so I could try to rest. I wondered how long it would be before he returned, if he would return at all. My leg began to spasm sharply.
Before long there was a light knock at my door. Tony unlocked the door with his key, stepping inside. He spoke to someone outside then waved him in.
A tiny man, shorter than Tony, ancient-looking, slowly walked in. He wore a drab winter coat and a hat with furringed flaps over the ears. He carried a weathered leather satchel.
That’s his father, I thought.
“He does not speak English,” Tony said.
“And you brought him here—Why is he here?”
“My father, he is an old man,” Tony said, “and he knows the old ways still. He has a gift.”
“A gift for what?”
“For healing,” he said quietly, almost whispering. “It is of the Lord.”
“Yeah,” I said, wishing I could vanish.
“It involves fire,” he said, gravely serious.
A weird fascination was beginning to take hold. When Tony had said fire, his father nodded vigorously, making a gesture like a flame leaping up from his palm.
“Fire,” I repeated. Father and son nodded in unison.
“It is an old way of healing,” he said. “My father will take a special oil and place it on your skin. Where you have injured your ankle.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He will ignite that oil.” Tony grinned. “Then he will extinguish it with a glass cup. This will draw the pain from you.”
