“On the third day” (I would never have said it myself, but Shatner does it for me on the show), Worth woke up. The nurses led us into his room, their faces almost proud, and we found him sitting up—gingerly resting on his elbows, with heavy-lidded eyes, as if at any moment he might decide he liked the coma better and slip back into it. His face lit up like a simpleton’s whenever one of us entered the room, and he greeted each of us by our names in a barely audible rasp. He seemed to know us, but hadn’t the slightest idea what we were all doing there, or where “there” might be—though he did come up with theories on the last point over the next two weeks, chief among them a wedding reception, a high school poker game, and at one point some kind of holding cell.
I’ve tried many times over the years to describe for people the person who woke up from that electrified near-death, the one who remained with us for about a month before he went back to being the person we’d known and know now. It would save one a lot of trouble to be able to say “it was like he was on acid,” but that wouldn’t be quite true. Instead, he seemed to be living one of those imaginary acid trips we used to pretend to be on in junior high, before we tried the real thing and found out it was slightly less magical—“Hey, man, your nose is like a star or something, man.” He had gone there. My father and I kept notes, neither of us aware that the other was doing it, trying to get down all of Worth’s little disclosures before they faded. I have my own list here in front of me. There’s no best place to begin. I’ll just transcribe a few things:
Squeezed my hand late on the night of the 23rd. Whispered, “That’s the human experience.”
While eating lunch on the 24th, suddenly became convinced that I was impersonating his brother. Demanded to see my ID. Asked me, “Why would you want to impersonate John?” When I protested, “But, Worth, don’t I look like John?” he replied, “You look exactly like him. No wonder you can get away with it.”
On the day of the 25th, stood up from his lunch, despite my attempts to restrain him, spilling the contents of his tray everywhere. Glanced at my hands, tight around his shoulders, and said, “I am not … repulsed … by man-to-man love. But I’m not into it.”
Evening of the 25th. Gazing at own toes at end of bed, remarked, “That’d make a nice picture: Feet in Smoke.”
Day of the 26th. Referred to heart monitor as “a solid, congealed bag of nutrients.”
Night of the 26th. Tried to punch me with all his strength while I worked with Dad and Uncle John to restrain him in his bed, swinging and missing me by less than an inch. The IV tubes were tearing loose from his arms. His eyes were terrified, helpless. I think he took us for fascist goons.
Evening of the 27th. Unexpectedly jumped up from his chair, a perplexed expression on his face, and ran to the wall. Rubbed palms along a small area of the wall, like a blind man. Turned. Asked, “Where’s the piñata?” Shuffled into hallway. Noticed a large nurse walking away from us down the hall. Muttered, “If she’s got our piñata, I’m gonna be pissed.”
The experience went from tragedy to tragicomedy to outright farce on a sliding continuum, so it’s hard to pinpoint just when one let onto another. He was the most delightful drunk you’d ever met—I had to follow him around the hospital like a sidekick to make sure he didn’t fall, because he couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t concentrate on anything for longer than a second. He became a holy fool. He looked down into his palm, where the fret and string had burned a deep, red cross into his skin, and said, “Hey, it’d be stigmata if there weren’t all those ants crawling in it.” He introduced my mother and father to each other as if they’d never met, saying, “Mom, meet Dad; Dad, meet Dixie Jean.” Asked by the neurosurgeon if he knew how to spell his own name, he said, “Well, doctor, if you were Spenser, you might spell it w-o-r-t-h-E.”
Another of the nurses, when I asked her if he’d ever be normal again, said, “Maybe, but wouldn’t it be wonderful just to have him like this?” She was right; she humbled me. I can’t imagine anything more hopeful or hilarious than having a seat at the spectacle of my brother’s brain while it reconstructed reality. Like a lot of people, I’d always assumed, in a sort of cut-rate Hobbesian way, that the center of the brain, if you could ever find it, would inevitably be a pretty dark place, that whatever is good or beautiful about being human is a result of our struggles against everything innate, against physical nature. My brother changed my mind about all that. Here was a consciousness reduced to its matter, to a ball of crackling synapses—words that he knew how to use but couldn’t connect to the right things; strange new objects for which he had to invent names; unfamiliar people who approached and receded like energy fields—and it was a good place to be, you might even say a poetic place. He had touched death, or death had touched him, but he seemed to find life no less interesting for having done so.
* * *
There is this one other remark:
Late afternoon of April 25. The window slats casting bars of shadow all over his room in the ICU. I had asked my mom and dad if they’d mind giving me a moment alone with him, since I still wasn’t sure he knew quite who I was. I did know he wasn’t aware of being inside a hospital; his most recent idea was that we were all back at my grandparents’ house having a party, and at one point he slipped loose and went to the nurses’ station to find out whether his tux was ready. Now we were sitting there in his room. Neither of us was speaking. Worth was jabbing a fork into his Jell-O, and I was just watching, waiting to see what would come out. Earlier that morning, he’d been scared by the presence of so many “strangers,” and I didn’t want to upset him any more. Things went on in silence like this for maybe five minutes.
Very quietly, he began to weep, his shoulders heaving with the force of emotion. I didn’t touch him. A minute went by. I asked, “Worth, why are you crying?”
“I was thinking of the vision I had when I knew I was dead.”
Certain that I’d heard him right, I asked him again anyway. He repeated it in the same flat tone: “I was thinking of the vision I had when I knew I was dead.”
How could he know he’d been dead, when he didn’t even know we were in a hospital, or that anything unusual had happened to him? Had a sudden clarity overtaken him?
“What was it? What was your vision?”
He looked up. The tears were gone. He seemed calm and serious. “I was on the banks of the River Styx,” he said. “The boat came to row me across, but … instead of Charon, it was Huck and Jim. Only, when Huck pulled back his hood, he was an old man … like, ninety years old or something.”
My brother put his face in his hands and cried a little more. Then he seemed to forget all about it. According to my notes, the next words out of his mouth were, “Check this out—I’ve got the Andrews Sisters in my milkshake.”
We’ve never spoken of it since. It’s hard to talk to my brother about anything related to his accident. He has a monthlong tape erasure in his memory that starts the second he put his lips to that microphone. He doesn’t remember the shock, the ambulance, having died, coming back to life. Even when it was time for him to leave the hospital, he had managed only to piece together that he was late for a concert somewhere, and my last memory of him from that period is his leisurely wave when I told him I had to go back to school. “See you at the show,” he called across the parking lot. When our family gets together, the subject of his accident naturally bobs up, but he just looks at us with a kind of suspicion. It’s a story about someone else, a story he thinks we might be fudging just a bit.
When I can’t sleep I still sometimes will try to decipher that vision. My brother was never much of a churchgoer (he proclaimed himself a deist at age fifteen) but had been an excellent student of Latin in high school. His teacher, a sweet and brilliant old bun-wearing woman named Rank, drilled her classes in classical mythology. Maybe when it came time for my brother to have his near-death experience, to reach down into his psyche and pull up whatever set of myths would help him make sense of the fear,
he reached for the ones he’d found most compelling as a young man. For most people, that involves the whole tunnel-of-light business; for my brother, the underworld.
The question of where he got Huck and Jim defeats me. My father was a great Mark Twain fanatic—he got fired from the only teaching job he ever held for keeping the first graders in at recess, to make them listen to records of an actor reading the master’s works—and he came up with the only clue: the accident had occurred on the eighty-fifth anniversary of Twain’s death, in 1910.
I’m just glad they decided to leave my brother on this side of the river.
MR. LYTLE: AN ESSAY
When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew or “old man” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux. He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” He was about to turn ninety-two when I moved into his basement, and he had not yet quite reached ninety-three when they buried him the next winter, in a coffin I had helped to make, a cedar coffin, because it would smell good, he said. I wasn’t too helpful. I sat up a couple of nights in a freezing, starkly lit workshop rubbing beeswax into the boards. The other, older men—we were four altogether—absorbedly sawed and planed. They chiseled dovetail joints. My experience in woodworking hadn’t gone past feeding planks through a band saw for shop class, and there’d be no time to redo anything I might botch, so I followed instructions and with rags cut from an undershirt worked coats of wax into the cedar until its ashen whorls glowed purple, as if with remembered life.
The man overseeing this vigil was a luthier named Roehm whose house stood back in the woods on the edge of the plateau. He was about six and a half feet tall with floppy bangs and a deep, grizzled mustache. He wore huge glasses. I believe I have never seen a person more tense than Roehm was during those few days. The cedar was “green”; it hadn’t been properly cured. He groaned that it wouldn’t behave. On some level he must have resented the haste. Lytle had lain dying for weeks; he endured a series of disorienting pin strokes. By the end they were giving him less water than morphine. He kept saying, “Time to go home,” which at first meant he wanted us to take him back to his house, his real house, that he’d tired of the terrible simulacrum we smuggled him to, in his delirium. Later, as those fevers drew together into what seemed an unbearable clarity, like a blue flame behind the eyes, the phrase came to mean what one would assume.
He had a deathbed, in other words. He didn’t go suddenly. Yet although his family and friends had known for years about his wish to lie in cedar, which required that a coffin be custom-made, no one had so much as played with the question of who in those mountains could do such a thing or how much time the job would take. I don’t hold it against them, against us, the avoidance of duty, owing as it did to fundamental incredulity. Lytle’s whole existence had for so long been essentially posthumous, he’d never risk seeming so ridiculous as to go actually dying now. My grandfather had told me once that when he’d been at Sewanee, in the thirties, people had looked at Lytle as something of an old man, a full sixty years before I met him. And he nursed this impression, with his talk of coming “to live in the sense of eternity,” and of the world he grew up in—middle Tennessee at the crack of the twentieth century—having more in common with Europe in the Middle Ages than with the South he lived to see. All his peers and enemies were dead. A middle daughter they’d buried long before. His only wife had been dead for thirty-four years, and now Mister Lytle was dead, and we had no cedar coffin.
But someone knew Roehm, or knew about him; and it turned out Roehm knew Lytle’s books; and when they told Roehm he’d have just a few days to finish the work, he set to, without hesitation and even with a certain impatience, as if he feared to displease some unforgiving master. I see him there in the little space, repeatedly microwaving Tupperware containers full of burnt black coffee and downing them like Coca-Colas. He loomed. He was so large there hardly seemed room for the rest of us, and already the coffin lid lay on sawhorses in the center of the floor, making us sidle along the walls. At least a couple of times a night Roehm, who was used to agonizing for months over tiny, delicate instruments, would suffer a collapse, would hunch on his stool and bury his face in his hands and bellow “It’s all wrong!” into the mute of his palms. My friend Sanford and I stared on. But the fourth, smaller man, a person named Hal, who’d been staying upstairs with Lytle toward the end and acting as a nurse, he knew Roehm better—now that I think of it, Hal must have been the one to tell the family about him in the first place—and Hal would put his hands on Roehm’s shoulders and whisper to him to be calm, remind him how everyone understood he’d been allowed too little time, that if he wanted we could take a break. Then Roehm would smoke. He gripped each cigarette with two fingertips on top, snapping it in and out of his lips the way toughs in old movies do. Sanford and I sat in his truck with the heater on and drank vodka from a flask he’d brought, gazing on the shed with its small bright window, barely saying a word.
Weeks later he told me a story that Hal had told him, that at seven o’clock in the morning on the day of Lytle’s funeral—which strangely Roehm did not attend—Hal woke to find Roehm sitting at the foot of his and his wife’s bed, repeating the words “It works,” apparently to himself. I never saw him again. The coffin was art. Hardly anyone got to see it. All through the service and down the street to the cemetery it wore a pall, and when people lined up at the graveside to take turns shoveling dirt back into the pit, the hexagonal lid, where inexplicably Roehm had found a spare hour to do scrollwork, grew invisible after just a few seconds.
* * *
There had been different boys living at Lytle’s since not long after he lost his wife, maybe before—in any case it was a recognized if unofficial institution when I entered the college at seventeen. In former days these were mainly students whose writing showed promise, as judged by a certain well-loved, prematurely white-haired professor, himself a former protégé and all but a son during Lytle’s long widowerhood. As years passed and Lytle declined, the arrangement came to be more about making sure someone was there all the time, someone to drive him and chop wood for him and hear him if he were to break a hip.
There were always those who saw it as a privilege, especially among the English majors. We were students at the University of the South, and Lytle was the South, the last Agrarian, the last of the famous “Twelve Southerners” behind I’ll Take My Stand, a comrade to the hallowed Fugitive Poets, a friend since youth of Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, a mentor to Flannery O’Connor and James Dickey and Harry Crews and, as the editor of The Sewanee Review in the sixties, one of the first to publish Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. Bear in mind that by the mid-nineties, when I knew him, the so-called Southern Renascence in letters had mostly dwindled to a tired professional regionalism. That Lytle hung on somehow, in however reduced a condition, represented a flaw in time, to be exploited.
Not everybody felt that way. I remember sitting on the floor one night with my freshman-year suitemate, a ninety-five-pound blond boy from Atlanta called Smitty who’d just spent a miserable four years at some private academy trying to convince the drama teacher to let them do a Beckett play. His best friend had been a boy they called Tweety Bird. The day I met Smitty, I asked what music he liked, and he shot back, “Trumpets.” That night he went on about Lytle, what a grotesquerie and a fascist he was. “You know what Andrew Lytle said?” Smitty waggled his cigarette lighter. “Listen to this: ‘Life is melodrama. Only art is real.’”
I nodded in anticipation.
“Don’t yo
u think that’s horrifying?”
I didn’t, though. Or I did and didn’t care. I didn’t know what I thought. I was under the tragic spell of the South, which you’ve either felt or haven’t. In my case it was acute because, having grown up in Indiana with a Yankee father, a child exile from Kentucky roots of which I was overly proud, I’d long been aware of a faint nowhereness to my life. Others wouldn’t have sensed it, wouldn’t have minded. I felt it as a physical ache. Finally I was somewhere, there. The South … I loved it as only one who will always be outside it can. Merely to hear the word Faulkner at night brought gusty emotions. A few months after I’d arrived at the school, Shelby Foote came and read from his Civil War history. When he’d finished, a local geezer with long greasy white hair wearing a white suit with a cane stood up in the third row and asked if, in Foote’s opinion, the South could have won, had such and such a general done such and such. Foote replied that the North had won “that war” with one hand behind its back. In the crowd there were gasps. It was thrilling that they cared. How could I help wondering about Lytle, out there beyond campus in his ancestral cabin, rocking before the blazing logs, drinking bourbon from heirloom silver cups and brooding on something Eudora Welty had said to him once. Whenever famous writers came to visit the school they’d ask to see him. I tried to read his novels, but my mind just ricocheted; they seemed impenetrably mannered. Even so, I hoped to be taken to meet him. One of my uncles had received such an invitation, in the seventies, and told me how the experience changed him, put him in touch with what’s real.
Pulphead: Essays Page 5
