One More Theory About Happiness

by Paul Guest

  “By setting me on fire.”

  His father made the vaguely explosive fire gesture again. He opened the satchel he was carrying, retrieving a small cup, not much larger than a shot glass, and began to speak to me in Romanian. Tony translated.

  “My father says you will be very safe.”

  His father continued to speak.

  “My father says there is very little pain. He says that it will leave red marks. But they will go away.”

  “Good to know.”

  There was a part of me, the boy still in me, who loved fire and the fireworks my grandfather kept, that was curious to see this shrunken old man practice his gift on me. But even that curiosity could not change the reality of the moment: that two Romanian men, a father and son, stood beside my bed well after midnight calmly discussing how best to safely set fire to my skin.

  “Actually, Tony,” I interjected. “I don’t think I’m up for anything involving self-immolation—”

  “Self-what?” Tony asked, puzzled.

  “Immolation. It’s—it’s like ritualistically setting yourself on fire.”

  “Who would do such a thing?”

  “That’s my whole point.”

  I could tell that refusing him might be an insult. I tried to think of some way to politely refuse. They waited for me to say more.

  “My injury,” I said earnestly. “My body is different.”

  “Your quadriplegia.”

  “Right.”

  “I had not considered this,” Tony said, looking abashed.

  I saw that I had reached him. They whispered to each other.

  “Forgive me, but my father has requested something.”

  “Yes?”

  “He has asked if he may pray for you.”

  The wizened old man, his fur-lined hat still on his head, knelt painfully. He brought his gnarled hands together.

  To depend on someone else for everything you cannot do for yourself, no matter how private, is to cultivate a forced intimacy. To engage in this with Tony, who carried me in his arms like a child, who announced himself as mama when he did, was to invite indignity after indignity. It was a compact struck with myself, with the fact of my injury, made to enlarge my life. Even so, there were moments when the cost of that new independence was almost too much to bear. One night, when I was about to bathe, seated in a shower chair which rolled on small caster wheels, I was wearing only a white T-shirt and one sock. Tony stood beside me, folding the day’s clothes while the cascade of shower water warmed.

  Before I realized what was happening, he had dropped my clothes on the floor, and was pushing past me in the cramped bathroom, rushing to the toilet. Before sitting down, his face twisted in pain, he paused for a moment, as if he realized that I was still there, half naked in a chair my arms couldn’t push from the bathroom, as if he were searching for an adequate apology. There wasn’t one. He dropped his zebra-striped sweatpants and sat down, eyes on me.

  His bowels emptied into my toilet, less than three feet from me, liquid, explosive, unending. Facing him, I couldn’t look away.

  When Tony was finished, he flushed and leaped up, clapping me hard on my shoulder, a wild grin on his face.

  “I guess,” he laughed, “that the honeymoon is over!”

  When my mother left Illinois, when she left me to begin an independent life, she drove for six hours, past rivers and rolling sheets of bluegrass and mountains dissolving into hills, back to Georgia, where she had always lived. How hard that was I’m left to imagine, and in this, despite every poem I have written and every book I have published, I fail. From the sidewalk, I watched her go, gripped by the sadness of good-bye but exhilarated by everything before me, all of it unknown.

  Inside, as a motorized door opener drew my door silently shut, I looked about my little apartment. The blue couch beside the door and the long L-shaped desk beside it, on which my computer slept. Two walls with high windows looking out on to a lawn where ROTC students would later march, calling cadence in the snow. My bed, an electric hospital bed like the one I had slept in for ten years, with a switch on a flexible armature that controlled the lights, the door, and a radio on the windowsill for times when pain would wake me and hold me back from the brink of sleep. A small bathroom but one I could enter in my wheelchair.

  It was mine, at least for a time, and thinking this, as alone as I was, I smiled.

  chapter FOURTEEN

  I did not like her. Not when we first met, in class, and she talked nervously, blurting jagged bolts of talk, laughing loudly, pulling everyone’s attention to her, even as she seemed not to want it. To prefer quietly attending the tides of discussion, without being dragged into them. I knew how that felt, could be empathetic, but here she was, unable to stop laughing at wan jokes, smacking her hands on the table so that papers and books rattled with every percussive snort, and, when discussing someone’s work, exclaiming her own worries. Tall, with hair pragmatically cut, well dressed but unfussy, Lydia left quickly after our first poetry workshop, disappearing, as if she might not return.

  During the day, if I was with no one I knew, I ate by myself, ordering a sandwich from one of the fast-food places in the student center. After asking an employee to carry it for me to a table, preferably one far from others because I hated the sensation of strange watchfulness that would fall on me as I ate, I leaned over to the plate, taking a bite. I could see that some thought it sad, pitied me, but it was enlightening to exist this way, learning how I could be capable on my own, learning how best to function in solitude.

  Lydia was eating an open-faced ham sandwich when I saw her again and she waved me over to where she sat against a wall. For a moment I hesitated, reluctant to go over, to talk to someone who had so frankly annoyed me on that first night of class. But I went, knowing I needed friends and wanted them, and though there was an unexpected exhilaration that came over me every night when Tony would leave, turning off all the lights, I knew that it could only last so long, that feeling, and beyond it would be astringent loneliness, which slowly reached your core, your heart, and would not go, static as stone and as heavy. To be paralyzed was to first be estranged from your own body, a loneliness which would always be with you. To be estranged from the bodies of others was the next and greater danger.

  “Would you like to share this?” she asked, her mouth chewing. “There’s plenty. There’s too much. I can’t eat it all.”

  I considered. There is an awkwardness involved when I eat with someone for the first time, depending on them to feed me each bite. Parallel to that runs an inescapable intimacy. I have to judge the person and the situation; I never want to make another person feel uncomfortable. Many times I’ve claimed I wasn’t hungry if I felt like the person had not thought about what I would need. Lydia smiled sweetly.

  “How can I turn down a—What exactly is that?”

  “It’s an open-faced ham sandwich,” she said, her voice still thick with sandwich. “I love them. Call me crazy, but I do.”

  “Well, sign me up.”

  We ate and talked and soon were laughing. We gossiped about our classmates, the beanpole classic rock maestro and the soft-spoken philosophy major who carried fragrant tobacco with him for his pipe. We complained about the ones who said nothing and the ones we wished would say nothing. Soon the lunch we’d shared was gone and with it the time. We decided to meet again the following week.

  A few charged weeks passed this way: lunch, e-mail, the phone. I felt heavy with longing, as though the air were lead. I had no idea what to do. The phone rang one night in November while I worked on a poem at my desk. I answered.

  “Can I come by?” Lydia asked. “I’m at the library making copies.”

  When she arrived, she came with bags, books, food. We ate, listening to music. Lydia lay on the floor, on her back, beside my old stereo.

  I turned to where she was, now sitting up, her back against my couch. She began to play with the leather laces of my shoes, too long, forever untied. She
tugged at one of them, drawing it out. It reached to her waist where she tied it loosely through a belt loop. She untied the lace and slipped my shoes off before returning to the floor, stretched out.

  I turned to her, leaning over, looking down. Her eyes were closed. I didn’t know what to do. With as much dexterity as I could manage, I extended my leg, running my foot over hers. Her eyes remained closed when I reached her waist, her stomach, massaging her. She was quiet and still. I was unsure of what was transpiring, if I was even ready.

  She had on a gauzy white button-down shirt. I traced its meridian of buttons upward. No longer so nervous, I touched her right breast, tentatively, waiting to see that she did not resist.

  “Come here,” I whispered. She opened her eyes. Getting up, she looked to my door, leaning back against it, her hand on the knob. She was thinking of leaving.

  She said something soundless, just breath. I leaned slightly into her, kissing the arm closest to me. But she leaned into me. We kissed, there against the door, for the first time. I forgot my fears. There was only her.

  When that kiss had ended, long and sweet, when we pulled slightly apart from one another, when I looked up into her face and the hair that had fallen across her face, all my words were of no use. An ease had fallen over us, an acceptance. Neither of us shook. We were not scared. She smiled sweetly and I knew that I loved her. I kissed her hand.

  She led me to the couch where she sat, staring off, working through something unspoken. I let her think, saying nothing. She reached for the lamp beside the couch, dimming it. The room fell into a burnished dimness. She looked at me.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “Would you mind…” She paused. “Would you like to lie down with me? Can I take off your pants?”

  A shyness had returned to her. It melted me. I kissed her once more. She helped me to stand from my chair. For the first time, we were eye to eye. Lydia helped me to sit, then to lie back on the couch, just wide enough for both of us. It would become the place where we would always go, my bed too narrow, uncomfortable, not right.

  Her hands unfastened the button of my jeans, slipping them down my legs and off me. She laid them neatly across the back of my chair. Next was my shirt, tossed to the side. Her clothes fell away from her in a clump. I watched her watch me.

  We nearly fell when she came to me, when we began. Our bodies slid from the low couch halfway onto the floor. We laughed, kissing, moving back, slow, her body atop mine, covering me like a blanket. Her hair fell around my face. She wore a perfume I didn’t know.

  I loved her as best as I was able, given the paucity of my experience, a form of immaturity which led me into mistakes and misunderstandings and misreadings: confusions which, in the course of our time together, broke us apart. When we argued, I felt like I was sprinting through hip-high water, impossibly slowed, saying the wrong things, again and again and again. All my life had been spent reading books and writing poems and these were not the same as reading a person’s concerns, fears, insecurities. For three years, the length of my studies in graduate school, we flailed, trying, failing, apart as much as we were together.

  We said good-bye beneath trees beside the lake. Dogwood petals fluttered in the air. The next day I left Illinois and I felt smaller and sadder than I ever had.

  chapter FIFTEEN

  When I came to Tuscaloosa, to the University of Alabama, with three years of poems, the chill of Midwestern winter, and the sting of loss still fresh, I had no idea what I would do except teach and, once more, try to create a home for myself where none was. I knew no one, no one but a professor named Dana Ream who had invited me to teach there, when we met following a reading I’d given in Chattanooga, where I lived with my parents following graduate school. In the weeks before I moved, I would dream of parachuting into darkness, noise of a silken rip all around me. Whatever waited below, unseen and unknown, I fell toward it, unerring, a stone.

  My parents, the twins, and I left home early on the fifteenth of August with a U-Haul truck packed with my possessions. When we arrived in Tuscaloosa, it would be the nineteenth day in a row with temperatures above one hundred degrees. The air was hard to breathe, leaden with humidity. Nothing moved, or if it did, it moved like regret. The asphalt parking lots glittered, molten, tacky. I began to wonder if, maybe, this was a mistake.

  In some ways I was right.

  Down the sidewalk a man in an elephant costume dragged a rubber chicken behind him, its floppy, broken neck in a heavy rope noose. No one in the crowd seemed to think him strange: they hooted their approval, high-fived his other hand or hoof or whatever it was waving cheerfully. I followed him. It was the first home game of the football season. Expectation swept like a plague over everything and everyone. I had never been around anything like it. Winnebagos had begun cruising into town two days previous, on Thursday night, filling up parking lots normally ceded to students—who had to vacate or be towed. From my apartment I could see season ticket holders fire up countless gas-powered generators. The polyphonic buzz sounded like giant, burping armies of locusts. Wide-screen television sets and satellite dishes were erected in the lots, and full kitchens arrayed under the broad shade of magnolias.

  I walked back to my cramped apartment with its weirdly stained carpet: dark splashes ringed the floor. I’d soon learn the previous tenant was a drunken, combative quadriplegic given to changing his colostomy bag anywhere he felt like it. He would dump his waste into a bucket in the hallway outside his door, beneath a hand-drawn biohazard symbol.

  I only hoped my neighbors bothered to tell us apart.

  My apartment building was ancient, heated and cooled by an arcane complex of vents which dumped so much moisture into the air that my bedsheets always felt damp and towels never fully dried. Drafts of poems on my desk would curl up and books would swell and bow, deformed by the air. I lived at the end of a long hall where once I awoke to the blurry murmurs of sex against my door: You promised, you promised.

  On my first day of classes I set out early to find my way through the campus, jewel green, even in a drought, sprinklers kicking beads of water in long arcs through the air. The day was still cool and quiet. I felt good, absorbed with humming.

  But a sidewalk ahead was busted up, blocking me from going further. In the near distance, the English department building glowed and faded as clouds passed above in the pewter sky. I turned around to enter the student center, to take its elevator to a level above the construction.

  The electric door opener at the entrance had not been switched on so early in the day. I had to wait, either for staff inside the student center or for someone to happen along. I stared through my reflection in the wide glass doors, looking for a custodian, for security, gradually falling into a daydream.

  Then there was a meaty arm draping my shoulder and a woman’s rouge-splotchy face uncomfortably close to mine.

  “Do you need help, young man?” she trilled, hugging me tight.

  “I’m, uh, I’m waiting for someone to open that door,” I said, flummoxed by this woman, heavy and pale, and too close.

  “I’d be glad to help you with that. Would it bother you if I prayed for you? Do you believe in a risen savior?”

  She positively radiated Jesus. I knew her type well. They flitted about in public like epileptic wrens, darting and swerving and praying like Pharisees.

  “Sure,” I said, hoping that was the path of least resistance, the quickest escape.

  “Lord, he is determined. We see in him the same determination with which you created the sun and stars and the earth and moon. Bless him, Lord. Bless him.”

  I winced, wanting away.

  “Can I tell you something?” she asked, her face floating in like a cheap planet.

  “OK.”

  “You’re beautiful!”

  Her lips mashed to my cheek, hot and smeary. In my head, I began a startled, anxious prayer of my own. I said nothing.

  “Ope
n that door,” she said, nodding to her right. I turned my head.

  Her son, I guessed, slablike and impassive, tall and seemingly narcoleptic, swayed from one foot to the other. She whistled, shrill and high, into my ear and at him. He sprang towards the door and I went after him, fleeing.

  Receding into the distance, she sang out, “Maybe I’ll see you around sometime!”

  I only accelerated, faster and farther from her and her blessing.

  Nothing felt quite right in Tuscaloosa, even in the early days: the buses had no lifts, leaving me stranded on the island of the campus and its surroundings. I roamed, trying to acquaint myself, finding shuttered businesses and men on corners with evangelical broadsides. Once, a young man, barely twenty, swallowed up by his suit, sweating in the heat, offered me one, crumpled in his hand like an old dollar bill. I looked at him, at his hand.

  “What’s it about?” I asked, though I knew the number by heart. His entire body paused—for an instant, it ceased to move. The question confounded him.

  “It’s—” he stammered, stunned to have been acknowledged. “It’s about, you know, um, it’s about Satan.”

  “No, thanks,” I said, going on my way, before he could recover himself, before he could hurry after me, his pamphlets forgotten, asking if he could pray for me, right there on the sidewalk, in the shadow of a liquor store.

  The poem that became the first poem in my first book began as an error.

  I had misread an entry in an immense dictionary that the English department kept in its narrow mailroom. I could only wedge myself in far enough to page through the yellowed book. A kind of thrill took me one day, scanning down a random page, when I read that melancholia, in Middle English, meant black hole. The sense of that etymology, its essential rightness, sparked all through my brain. This was a poem, I thought. And it was, but not the one unfolding in my imagination like a sheet of hammered silver, bright and friable.