by Matt Cardin
We sat for a long time while I tried to figure out why I had come there, and why I was staying, and when I would leave. With a bit of surprise, I realized that I wanted to take Paul’s other hand, the one Lisa wasn’t holding, and tell him that I forgave him. I wanted that to be his final memory of me, if indeed he was aware of my presence at all.
But it would have been a lie anyway. Sitting there watching Lisa stroke his fingers with her face molded into an expression of loving concern, I didn’t feel at all forgiving. The only attitude or emotion I could feel was a semblance of the old shock and desperation, now stiffened with disuse like a crusty wound, that had been my parting feeling toward the both of them three years earlier. And beneath it, that cold fist of deadness that was slowly, subtly squeezing my heart with an ever-tightening grip.
After awhile the wheezing of the respirator began to sound like the wind scudding over the low desert hills. Its dry whisper filled me with an aching desire for solitude, and I breathed a silent sigh of relief that I had not taken Paul’s other hand.
3
“I want to ask where you’ve been.” Lisa’s voice, soft and smooth, woke me from a stupor. I blinked and realized I had been dozing. Paul was still unconscious, still a mere mechanism of flesh and bone. I looked around for a clock and saw that the one on the bedside table read 1:15 a.m. We had been sitting there for just over an hour, and I had spent most of it trying to stay awake. Apparently, I had failed.
“What?” My voice came out thick and sluggish. The coldness had coagulated in my chest and I was having trouble breathing.
“I want to ask where you’ve been and what you’ve done since you left town,” she said. “You never called or wrote. We’ve been worried about you for three years. But I’m afraid you’ll be angry if I ask.”
I wiped a hand over my face, wincing at the sharp scrape of whiskers against palm, and inwardly agreed with her. By all rights, I should have been angry. She had no right to know how I had chosen to live my life after leaving Farrenton, especially since my departure had been based solely on the fact that I couldn’t bear to stay there and see the two of them together.
But something about her presence was exerting a magnetic pull upon me. I had spent the last thousand miles and thirty hours steeling my resolve to remain aloof and distant. I had told myself that I was only returning to Farrenton because it would be cruel to refuse a summons under these circumstances. But as I sat there looking across the injured body of my comatose best friend and into the face of the only woman I had ever truly loved, I found I actually wanted to tell her what had happened to me. I wanted to shock her with the viciousness of it, to force her to experience a living measure of the pain I had borne in solitude for three years.
The words began slowly but soon gathered momentum. With growing amazement at my own willingness to open up to her like this, I began to tell her of my life without her: of how only a few weeks after I had fled from her and Paul, I had become involved with an activist group devoted to fighting the destruction of the Brazilian rain forest. The story sounded alien and ridiculous to me as I related it, almost as if I were talking about another person. Prior to encountering that activist group I had been the farthest thing from a “joiner.” Despite the lip service that my self-conscious spiritual hipness had led me to pay to ecological issues, I had never done a single thing to back that up in concrete action. Nor had I imagined how frighteningly simple such hypocrisy would be to change. A chance encounter in a new city with a man handing out pamphlets on a street corner, an impulsive trip to the address listed on the cover, and one short screening session later, and I found myself seated on a Boeing 757—I, who had never left the continental United States—headed for Brazil to join the protest. Even at the time, I knew that my impulsiveness was mostly driven by my escapist fantasy. I just wanted to flee my past and forget that my two best friends, who were also the two most spiritual people I had ever known, had betrayed me for each other.
The memory of this part enhanced the pain of telling the story to Lisa. It also made it all the more delicious. I began to revel in recalling minute details of sight and sound, taste and smell, image and emotion. I told her of my first impressions of South America when I got off the plane in São Paulo: of the stifling heat and humidity, the moist ripe smell of earth and jungle, and the way the horrendous humidity acted like a lens to focus the sunlight and roast one’s flesh. I told her of the protest that fizzled after just a few days, the tiny band of friends I made, and the eventual disillusionment I felt when I realized that nothing we did made a difference for the rain forest, nor for my personal pain.
Lisa asked no questions while I talked. She appeared mesmerized by my account, and maybe it was her enraptured expression that lulled me so much that when I arrived at the part of my story I had never meant to tell—the part about the revelation or vision I received one night while sleeping in the open air under a mosquito net—I just kept going, as if my words had cast a spell over both of us.
The fact was, after living for several weeks with the constant assault of the jungle noises droning in my ears—all the unidentified swishings and scrapings and screechings—I stopped noticing them. The pungent smells of earth and bark likewise faded from my awareness, until I became as oblivious to them as I was to the stink of my own body in the tropical heat.
But on that single special night, three months into my stay, with no warning or prelude, the jungle suddenly became vivid again. I awoke from a deep sleep into a state of extreme disorientation. With a tinge of panic, I realized that I had utterly lost my bearings. Where was I? Why was I lying in a tent under a net with a cacophony of tropical night buzzing all around me? I lay there in mounting terror with the jungle saturating my senses until my ears actually began to tingle with all the secretive murmurings. My nose stung with the sweat of tree bark and jungle beasts. My tongue stiffened with the tang of mold and grass. My skin inhaled the moist rotten heat of hidden decay.
And I was sickened by the florid life all around me. For no cause that I could discern—and I tried long and hard afterward to divine a reason for it—I was suddenly horrified by the organic eruption that was the rain forest. The sole idea that I recalled from reading Sartre in college came to mind at once: de trop, “too much.” The jungle was too much. It was too ripe, too juicy, too pungent, too sharp, too alive. That was the crux of the matter: it was the principle of life itself, bursting and blooming all around me, that was a horror.
After that, nothing could be the same. My acquaintances in the activist group, who liked to call themselves my friends but who in truth knew nothing about me, were shocked when I quit them without explanation and left the jungle to return to São Paulo. I flew back to the States and tried to reboot my life again, but this proved impossible when I discovered that the midnight vision from Brazil had accompanied me. Leaving the original scene of its onset merely brought the new perception home to inhere in the things that were more familiar to me, as I quickly understood when the oaks, elms, cedars, and walnut trees bristling from the Ozark hills began to inspire the same reaction as the rain forest. I couldn’t stop thinking about the root systems of those trees, all twined and knotted like diseased fingers digging into the loamy earth. Nor could I stop thinking about the rodents and birds nesting in those trees, and the snakes and insects toiling in secrecy beneath the matted forest floors, and below even that, the worms and grubs tilling the soil, consigning the whole pungent mass of it back to a primal black organic mash.
After awhile I uprooted again and drifted westward into Oklahoma, then northward and westward into Kansas and Colorado, following no plan. Eventually I found myself in Utah and in the presence of Dr. Malcolm Pryor, professor of vertebrate paleontology at Utah State, who hired me on the spot, on a pure whim, to serve as his informal assistant. I had no training in paleontology or archaeology or any other relevant field. I brought no necessary skills. My only job was to help with the grunt work in his ongoing excavation in the desert land out
side Vernal. But he asked very few questions, apparently seeing in me a suitably solitary temperament for the lonely dry work ahead.
It turned out he was right. The arid land of the Utah desert proved a perfect environment for me, since its primary resident life was of the scaly, scrubby kind: junipers and sagebrush, lizards and vultures, the occasional mule deer and coyote. I could forget about the grubs and worms there, where the earth was a baked desert crust. My ontological panic attacks gradually faded as I spent my days helping to uncover carcasses long dead and buried, the remains of lives long desiccated and sealed off from the danger of rot and decay. I often felt a great yearning, so sweet it was painful, when I gazed at the rough desert floor and thought of the dead husks that slept comfortably beneath it.
And the memory of these husks brought me to the present. I stopped talking abruptly. The respirator pumped dryly next to the bed. Paul’s face appeared darker than it had before, as if he had somehow heard me speaking from the blackness inside his head. As the spell of my words dissipated, I realized that I didn’t know how much of my story had actually passed my lips. I had grown so absorbed in my personal recollections that I might have revealed far more than I had intended.
When I looked at Lisa, she was watching me with a mixed expression of pain and something else, something that might have been wonder or terror. I feared she might be doing her mind-reading thing again, and this sparked my anger.
“So what do you think of me?” I said. “What do you think of your long-lost Stephen, who always wanted to be as spiritual as you and Paul?”
The idea that I might have misjudged her—that I might have always misjudged her—did not occur to me until she began to cry again. This time her tears were for me. And they were beautiful to behold.
“Oh, Stephen. Oh, my God. I’m so sorry.” She sat with her hands in her lap and her head bowed. When she finally looked up, her cheeks glistened and her eyes flashed with a crystal film. “We both loved you. We both wanted you to stay. I know you only left because we betrayed you. I feel like everything you’ve suffered is our fault.”
These astonishing words hung unchallenged in the air for maybe five seconds before the night nurse entered the room to check on Paul’s vitals. She was an unpleasant-looking woman with a pear-shaped body and a face full of acne, and she gave me a look of muted disgust, as if she couldn’t fully accept that someone with my ragged appearance would be sitting up late with an injured friend. I kept my face blank as she told Lisa that Paul was still stable, while Lisa, for her part, struggled to compose herself and show proper politeness.
When the nurse had departed and we were alone again, the moment of intimacy had passed, and whatever Lisa had been going to say next was lost. I tried not to care, but even when I had retreated back behind the mask of my habitual apathy, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would have wanted to hear her words, even though I knew they could have done nothing but increase my suffering.
4
By three a.m. my hallucinations had returned. We had sat in total silence for over an hour, and my strung out state finally brought me to the point of full-blown delirium. With horror I realized that I was slipping into that awful state of warped perception again.
In one of the visions, I saw glowing bands of light connecting Lisa’s heart to mine. The same golden strands also connected me to Paul, and Paul to her. We formed, I saw, three corners of a web of spiritual energy, but instead of peace or joy, the vision brought only shock and revulsion. The last thing I wanted was to be connected to these two people in this intimate fashion, and I fought violently against the image.
My struggles only increased the force of the vision, which was soon joined by a second one in which Paul and Lisa appeared more plantlike than human. The transition was not subtle. I simply looked away from her once, and when I looked back at her again, her face had disappeared and been replaced by a beautiful multicolored blossom. When I looked down at Paul, the same change had occurred. Instead of looking into his face I was looking into a thick nest of lush, satiny petals. Their bodies, too, had transformed, and were now delicate stalks of deep green, encased in a translucent covering of cellulose skin that revealed a clear liquid circulating through a network of veins. When I looked down at my own body, I saw only a blackened trunk, like the remains of a twisted tree after a forest fire. The blips and beeps of the medical monitors morphed into screeches and caws, and soon I couldn’t tell whether I was still seated in a hospital room or lying in a tent in the rain forest.
After an hour of feeling immobilized by these impressions—which, despite their surface beauty, were no less nightmarish than my earlier vision of Lisa’s darkening eyes—I awoke as if from a dream and arose on shaky legs to see if the night nurse was still at her desk. A moment later, after bidding Lisa goodnight (and noticing with relief that her face had returned to normal), I followed the nurse down the hallway to a hospitality room, feeling Lisa’s gaze caress my back the entire time as she stepped into the hallway to watch me depart.
The hospitality room had a bed and bathroom, but I had left my bag of clean clothes out in the van, so I didn’t shower. I just stretched out on the bed fully clothed and tried to sleep. But the mattress was hard and the pillow stale, and I soon arose and went to the bathroom for a drink of water. It tasted bitter and musty out of the paper cup, and I poured most of it down the drain. When I returned to bed, all I could think to do was to get in my van and leave, or else go back and sit with Lisa again. Both options were intolerable.
Finally, I did something I had not done for years: I laid the pillow on the floor in front of the bed and seated myself on it. Then I crossed my legs in a rather stiff half-lotus, having lost most of my former limberness from lack of practice, and focused on my breathing.
Everything slowed down after only a few minutes. All night I had been feeling like an out-of-control river rafter being swept along by a dangerous current. Now I started to feel safely aloof from the situation, and a familiar inner image resurfaced from my former meditative days: that I was safely distanced from my troubles, tucked away in a protected cave from whence I could survey my inner and outer landscape with a semblance of objectivity.
I spent maybe half an hour savoring the sweet sense of distance. Then the ache in my legs became too much to bear, and I had to stop. When I arose and stretched, the feeling of restlessness returned instantly.
I did not consciously choose to avoid Lisa when I ventured out into the hallway. I merely happened to notice a sign on the wall announcing the presence of a chapel at the end of the next wing, and before I knew what was happening, my feet were carrying me in that direction.
The irony of my intended destination was not lost on me. From informal Zen meditation to Roman Catholic hospital chapel in less than five minutes. It truly was a night for mysterious conflicts and connections.
5
I spent nearly half an hour alone in the chapel before Lisa found me. My first impression upon entering it was a sense of awe. I had known the hospital was a Catholic institution, but that hadn’t prepared me for the elaborateness of what revealed itself before me. The very word “chapel” was inadequate, for the place was more like an entire church built seven stories above ground level. I stared up at the chiseled arches and saints, traced the lines of the sacred figures with their frozen gestures of holiness, and experienced a palpable sense of the numinous spilling out from the gray stonework like a physical wave.
After basking for a while in the glow of the rich ornamentation, I began to skirt the perimeter of the church and study the depictions of the Stations of the Cross mounted high on the walls. This was an element of Catholic spirituality that had always fascinated me. I studied Jesus’ face in each scene, observed his expression of intense suffering, and tried to imagine the awesome depth of his sensations, both spiritual and physical, during the experience of his passion.
At last I paused before the altar, turned my face upward toward the giant crucifix where Christ hun
g in agony on the front wall, and then backed away and sat down on the third pew, where at last the enormity of recent events came home to me. My abrupt transition from the Utah desert to this hushed place of holy reflection seemed positively unreal, as did the fact of Lisa’s waiting for me in a hospital room nearby where Paul lay dead for all practical purposes, having been reduced to a mindless engine running only by means of external aid.
In the silence, a memory spontaneously resurfaced: of Paul sitting before me on a cushion in the spare bedroom of our shared rental home, which we had decked out as a Zendo. He was smiling at me with that good-natured expression of peace and wisdom that I had come to cherish. And he was saying, “It’s so easy. This is all there is to it. Now, outside of your head and right here with the in-your-face reality of the present moment, is the whole point. There’s nothing secret about it. Enlightenment is like a big, friendly joke.” When I balked and said it was still beyond my ability to grasp, he laughed, squeezed my shoulder, and said “That’s nothing but enlightenment, too.” And amazingly, he actually made me feel better about my spiritual dullness. I felt lighter in his presence, more alive and aware, more capable of understanding the things I had always longed to understand. He really seemed to regard his advanced state as something not to be coveted, but to be shared freely with dullards like me, and more than anything else this marked him in my eyes as the icon of everything I hoped to become.
The memory dissipated when I sensed the presence of someone else in the chapel with me. Her perfume rode the breeze ahead of her and reached me before she did. Then she was sitting beside me and I was raising my head from my hands. I hadn’t been crying, but it had been something like that. My face felt twisted into knots by the forces struggling behind it.
