by Chris Eaton
One day, he died. And the next morning he woke up as if nothing had happened. Someone told him it wasn’t true. He stopped leaving the house and took up painting, crosswords, anything that left a permanent mark. So he could constantly reassess where he was by what was around him. He woke up from a dream about drowning, about war, about a city completely closed off by walls. More fighting. Planes crashing. He woke up from a dream of lying immobile in a hospital bed waiting to die, and he realized it was true. He woke up. And he was still there. He couldn’t move his legs. Complete paraplegia from the point of injury down. The rest of his body felt as though he’d been beaten with snooker balls. He woke up surrounded by friends and family, looking at him with those blank stares, and he failed to convince his father about their fishing trips, or the pumpkins. His sister smiled weakly when he brought up the swim meets. He had to tell them about the time he fell in the pool when he was two.
“I nearly died.”
“Sure you did, buddy… Sure you did…”
The only thing he seemed unable to remember was the trip with his friends in the ’73 Simca van, on their way back from Logan’s Run at the Torch Theatre out on St. Peter’s, all six of them shining with such promise, their youthful ignorance triumphant, the snow letting up, turning to rain, and the solidifying playset landscape taking shape around whatever base it could find, park benches, mailboxes, stranded cars, the entire planet hardening into a desert of ice. He could not picture being the only one wearing a seat belt, and Tony being tossed neatly out the window as the van did its first flip, as if God had just reached in and yanked him out like a tissue, couldn’t recall Conrad’s head striking the passenger headrest, his nose driven sideways across his face, snapping like one of those plastic cases that kept the cassette tapes high enough to see in the stacks previously made for LPs, couldn’t even fathom the steering wheel meeting Phil’s ribs, driving them into his bladder and eventually causing an infection that would prevent him from having kids and ruin his first marriage. There were only three bones in Andy’s right arm, but just the same, all three of them unanimously decided to give up when Andy tried to use them against his impact with the dash, the radius and the ulna pulverizing each other and the humerus driven up and through Andy’s scapula, escaping out his back and acting as a lever when his body was flung back against his seat, cracking his wrist against the door; when the car finally stopped moving, the glass of the windshield was still hanging in the air around them waiting for the world to exhale.
Eddie only got a black eye. He couldn’t tell the glass from the snow. Tony came walking out of the mist without a scratch, and Eddie immediately dubbed him Lucky Tony.
The emergency blinkers kept going red, then black, and then stayed that way.
But they were all lucky in comparison to Chris Eaton. Upon impact, the two-point seatbelt focused all of its attention in one place, and his vertebrae went to each other for support, huddling together with their inflamed nerve fibers clenched in their knobby fists, excited by the new experience but frightened by the sounds they’d never heard before, sounds they couldn’t quite place: skate blades on a frozen lawn? a rusted dock on polystyrene plastic buoys? They became frantic, stepping on each other in an attempt to escape the noise, but they also weren’t exactly sure where the noise was coming from. So they came together, and they went in every direction at once, confusing him on every sensory level. His balance was off. Someone had kicked him in the sternum, but who? With every neuron firing at once, he was simultaneously sure that his face was wet, someone was baking bread, he was on fire, someone was licking him. He was trying to open a can of corned beef, trying to fire off a perfectly executed corner kick. He tried to flap his wings. His fins. The trapezius muscle, which runs in a triangle up the neck and along both shoulders, clenched, and the sternocleidomastoid helped out as much as it could, threatening to lift off its scalene base.
The doctors were fairly sure he’d never walk again. At his initial physiotherapy exam, however, nearly six months after he first woke up in hospital, he was able to resist the therapist as she flexed his foot forward. The next day, he succeeded in moving the big toe on his right foot. Within four more, he could move that leg laterally, as if he were creating a snow angel, and was practically able to sit up by himself. It was, the experts claimed, a minor miracle. Tony and Phil stopped by to chat nearly every day. They were even allowed to take him out on day trips, with a return trip to the Torch Theatre to catch the big screen colossus of Superman, which he enjoyed, although he thought the time travel ending was a bit weak. His sister brought him a new pair of running sneakers so he could get back into shape when they eventually released him. It was clear that he would be able to return to his old life, to the Chris Eaton that he once was.
Then, just as suddenly, he was struck by a simple flu. Because he was perpetually lying on his back, he developed a sinus infection that quickly spread into his lungs, leaving him weak and out of breath. They had to place him on a respirator. They prescribed massive antibiotics to prevent the infection from spreading to any of his other injuries, especially the paralyzed portions of his body where he might not feel any discomfort until it was too late. But he was unable to attend his physio sessions for nearly a month.
And the feeling in his legs never returned.
Thorne put a hand on her leg, and the feeling came rushing back. But Thorne’s face was still. She tried staring at him harder. This was it. She was in love. But then his eyes fell, and his hand moved slowly to hers, helped her upstairs to the bathroom where she threw up, multiple times, held her hair back until she was finished and then called her a cab. There was no spreading, no eating, no final initiation into life’s mysterious carnality (for which she would have to wait another three years, and in the most horrible of ways).
Still, Thorne recommended her for the Master’s program in Early Childhood Education at Tufts, where she could put more of his theories into practice at Children’s Hospital Boston, as part of her practicum while composing her thesis. Chris Eaton was placed into various rotations throughout the hospital but always out of uniform so that the children could disassociate her from the procedure they were about to undergo – or the illness they were currently fighting – and see her more as an ally, a friend. Often she would be the last person they saw before going under; and the first person, if they were lucky enough to survive, when they woke up. The success cases in those serious patients were most often the worst, largely because they were flown in from all over the country, with insurance rarely covering the additional costs of their parents’ tickets, and many were from families much too poor to afford the frequent trips on their own. These children developed an even stronger attachment to her, as she did to them, because she was all they had, making her a sort of surrogate parent. And when the surgeries made it possible for them to go back home, the emotional blow was sometimes too much to take, because she knew, from experience, within a few months, that they would be back.
After graduating from Tufts, Chris Eaton was offered a similar job at the St. Hecarion Children’s Hospital in Houston, this time focusing solely on the terminally ill, or at least the ones least likely to make it, those with heart and lung problems and sometimes leukemia. She was tasked with setting up a private playroom – a space that was entirely off limits to other hospital staff – in hopes of furthering their comfort level, and even the children who were confined to bed rest were wheeled down at least once per week. She brought toys to them and helped them to decorate the curtains around their beds to create a starry night with full constellations, a circus or, strangest request of all, by keeping the white of the curtain as a snowy landscape, an arctic panorama with explorers trudging towards the grey strain in the top right. She met a young doctor, also named Julian (unfortunately), and after a few tear-filled confessions about the children over coffee, they moved on to dinner, then a movie, and eventually to dancing at the Bayou Mamma. Houston was going through hard times with the oil crisis, but was not y
et rough. It just wasn’t growing. Julian said Houston was like that nice kid in your class whose parents had just split and wasn’t sure what was right any more, and it was only a matter of time before he started breaking into your house when you were away for the weekend but for now he was still fun at parties. Chris Eaton thought Julian was funny, and cute, she thought she might even be falling in love with him, but the first time he asked her up to his place, she withdrew. Her period, she lied. She’d waited so long already, she didn’t want to enter into anything lightly, and she was naturally more than a little afraid. On the third invitation, she let him remove her top and even finger her uncomfortably, but it quickly felt like someone was flicking her frostbitten ear, or kneading a bruise, so sensitive was her clitoris, so she feigned a charley horse until he grew aggravated and went to sleep. Otherwise, things were good.
Soon after her arrival, Chris Eaton was asked to spend a few weeks observing a young boy who was so severely autistic she was almost sure he had no idea she was there, that he viewed her like any other piece of furniture, other than to kick her when he passed. He seemed happiest when his hands were submersed in water, so she kept a large basin of it on the floor in the centre of the room, but she had to watch him closely lest he stick his head into it, too. Otherwise, there seemed nothing she could do to break through.
Near the end of the second week, already growing hopeless, she decided to rearrange the furniture. He moved with such grace around the room, even with his eyes closed, seemingly paying no attention to anything he was doing. Not once did he ever trip, stub his toe, or deviate from his path except to kick her in the shin or ankle. So she thought transforming the environment might shake him up. He paused on entering the room, cocked his head to the left and back as if to smell it, then went straight for the basin of water as per usual. So she decided to remove that object, moving the chair to its opposite side and storing the basin in the closet. The next day he paused again, and stood still at the closet door. For the entire day. On the third day, she moved the chair again, to the other side of a toy castle, and took the castle away. On the fourth, she arrived to find him already there, the chair completely on the other side of the room, everything else in the closet, and the boy had even balanced another chair atop the first. So on the fifth day, she purchased a game of checkers and left it in the middle of the room, with two chairs, should he invite her to play. The next morning he was, again, already there. Both chairs were side-by-side. The table and the game of checkers were gone.
He was at a loss as to what to do with his life, so after four years at Kenyon, Chris Eaton made a go of it in Cincinnati, where he continued to explore a Grand Unified Field Color Theory, combining the elementary basics of color as unbroken, flat planes with the fundamental force of his violently distorted moods, and without the traditional field theory emphasis on brushstroke and gesture. He got a place in Over-the-Rhine above the old pool hall behind the Laundromat, where the rent was fabulously cheap because the area was being overrun by blacks who had been displaced by the construction of the Mill Creek Expressway, and still he convinced his roommates to cram a fourth person into the living room because they only ever entertained in the kitchen. Over the next two years, he had nearly a half-dozen shows at the Patty Salam Gallery, the Ijon Tichy Congress (decorated like a seventies Berlin apartment to separate itself from so-called “serious” galleries), the Georgi-Glashow Gallery (for which he had only two weeks to prepare and his standard model was unavailable), Studio SU(5), and Steven Weinberg’s The Decay. The Decay, in particular, was very seminal to the scene, setting the stage between the still-popular realism and what Weinberg labelled “progressive constructionism.” Weinberg was also key to the gentrification of the area, owning several galleries along the strip including Symmetry Breaking, Supersymmetry, Dreams of a Final Theory and the horribly named pop-art House of Cheese and Wein. For all that, Chris Eaton’s art had only been purchased by one prominent collector (and not even purchased, really, because it was just Weinberg, who didn’t pay for the piece because he felt the artist owed him for his meagre sales), his parents, two of his aunts and his dentist. He left the rest of his work in the apartment for his roommates to deal with when he moved out.
***
If he wasn’t going to sell anything he made, he might as well not make anything sellable. In fact, he might be better off not making anything at all, composing elaborate theoretical art projects that no one could ever complete, or would want to. He assembled the complete canon of eighties television shows with emergency tracheotomies (the pen in the military sitcom M*A*S*H, the quill in the historical medical drama Dr. Quinn, the straw in Happy Days, a hollowed-out pretzel in the bar at Cheers, etc.), and wrote a list of Great Ideas for Movie Sequels that will Never be Made:
•CK2: Rosebud’s Revenge – the long-awaited second installment to Welles’ masterpiece, starring Vin Diesel as Citizen Kane, and Anthony Hopkins as the voice of Rosebud: “You let me burn, Kane. Now, YOU burn!”
•Casa Blanca Dos – Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman get married back in the States and run for President
•The Better, The Worse and the Uglier – more hats shot off heads than ever before
•The Ramboer War – Rambo travels through time to fight in South Africa and makes sure apartheid never happened
•The Youngtouchables – a prequel, really
He turned to concept photography. In one project, he took photos of everyone he knew for two solid years, every time they had a chance meeting, and began affixing them to the walls of his dining room, using the cheapest children’s paste he could muster, starting at the ceiling and working down, until the whole space was rank with them, dripping from the walls like night sweats. Over the duration of the project, he learned three things: people cannot stand still for photographs; the scope of the city inhabited by his own personal daily routines – and those of his closest friends – was satisfyingly small; and no matter how many times their paths crossed, even if it occurred on a semi-daily basis for more than a week, people would invariably be wearing the same clothing.
At the same time, he started taking Polaroids of other drivers, taken from his own car (the same ’83 Corvette they used to film 45701), depicting their reactions after responding to his “Honk if you love Jesus!” bumper sticker and he gave them the finger.
In another, he planned to mount a camera on a tripod in the middle of a field surrounded by deciduous trees, like maples, or oaks, rain or shine or beautiful snow, one photo for every hour. And at the end of every twenty-four hour cycle, he would rotate the camera one degree to the right, for one entire year. For display, he’d need a round room, with entry facilitated by either trap door or skylight, because every inch of wall space would be covered, in order of the days, clockwise. Each hour would sit atop the last, midnight bracketed by floor and ceiling. And with appropriate shutter speed, the colors of the leaves, or absences thereof, and the relative light of day, would create a gradual, almost-abstract shifting of amorphous color, the Winter being particularly dark, Summer more light, with more green in the Spring and reds in the Fall. Inclement days would produce interesting grey smudges on the overall colorscape. 360 degrees; 360 days; 8640 photos. The only thing he had to really consider was which five days to choose as holidays:
1Christmas
2Easter (can’t shake the old religious mandatories)
3His birthday
4Halloween (the night it’s most acceptable for him to still dress as a woman)
5The US Open tennis finals
Also: he would take a series of abstract photographs, the exact number of which would be immaterial, indeterminate and potentially infinite. He would purchase a restaurant and operate it as you would any normal restaurant, with some key differences: all interior decorating would be done in yellow and blue, staff would wear only yellow and blue, and patrons would likewise be required to wear only yellow and blue. For those arriving without yellow and blue clothing, yellow and blu
e clothing would be provided to them. He would then place an out-of-focus camera in the corner of the eating salon, which would take photographs at random intervals to produce glorious abstractions. Other colors would be inserted on previously designated evenings. For this, most of his time would involve working for years to be able to afford a restaurant, and planning menus.
***
By the time he had reached an age whereby he might be able to make his mark in the world in some form or another, he discovered that the canvas was already full, with no more room for achievements to be made in traditional, visual art of any kind. The death of painting had long since come and gone and been forgotten, and the only ones who had apparently been invited to the funeral were Gillis and Drasche. The last original evolution of drawing had coincided, if not with the creation of the eraser, then with the Renaissance. And photography, which had begun purely as a scientific document of time, rejected by the art world until the nudes of Rohr-Steichen, had moved, through the ensuing centuries, from using the person as subject to capturing images of Nature to developing abstract concepts and impulses, after which it boomeranged on itself, like a basic child’s palindrome, to renew its fascination with the earlier subjects but in different contexts, so that “Nature” was something more urban, obsessed with the footprint of humanity, like the first steps on the moon, the person as subject was seen as a reinterpretation of Nature from within, and the documentation of time was more harried and hurried, to reflect the new age of rapid progress and short attention spans, such as the American who took untrained snapshots of every meal he ever ate, or the way he looked every morning on waking, or various other monotonous tasks like the ones Chris Eaton used to think up.
