P.S., Maria wrote, Sam and Jo are engaged. Don’t know when that happened. No one told me!
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Next day, insane with optimism or lust, I decided to set forth and apply for jobs. I drove to Jordan Creek Mall and walked around for two hours collecting applications, and then, to congratulate myself on the effort, bought an M&M cookie from Panera. I sat and ate it near a big gas fireplace, listening to adult contemporary music blend with echoey conversation, and everything looked airbrushed and glazed in honey and I felt an incipient dizziness behind my eyes, and I shoved the rest of the cookie into my mouth and tossed the applications in a wastebasket by the entrance and fled past the two great Republican heroes and drove down the interstate back to the city. On impulse, I followed signs for the Botanical Center, a geodesic dome on the east bank of the Des Moines River filled with tropical plants and birds.
As a kid, I’d loved coming here, a world within a world, immersive, the air redolent with strange vegetation and so thick you felt you were underwater; and now, on a February morning in my young adulthood, I found myself, amazed, back in that world, which, as if for my sole benefit, had been perfectly preserved. I don’t know how long I wandered among the cacti and palms, the banana and olive and coffee and fig trees, the waterfalls and ponds stocked with ornamental fish, pausing once in a while to look up at tessellated triangles of cloud and sky, but I do remember lingering for a long time in the bonsai room, staring at those stunted trees (cedar, elm, sycamore, pine) until they became not stunted but distant—normal-sized trees viewed from high above—and I saw myself sitting reclined against their trunks, looking up at their sun-shot, translucent leaves, so that when, later that afternoon, as I walked down the path along the river behind my house, I had the sensation of watching myself move through a miniaturized, enclosed, and enchanted world. Thin snow fell like sprinkles of light. Snow tufts shooting up from the ground became birds. The hawk perched in the tree across the river became an eagle, then a peregrine, then a plane. The forest I’d avoided all my life, out of a combination of ignorance and fear, was in fact a sanctuary for all that entered—protecting not only space but time—whose center was me as I moved through it. It contained all the scenes of my past and future, and I knew that when I died those scenes would still be there, giving form to the river, the trees, the shrubs, and the animals they sheltered. The thought of a squirrel became a squirrel. I was the creator of all I saw, step by step, view by view. From outside the dome I sized myself up: I looked good, resplendent with anonymity and readiness, and perhaps also love.
That evening, I watched from the living-room windows as Jess pulled her grandmother’s station wagon into the driveway. As I walked toward it I was a little crushed to see two other women inside—friends of Jess’s, I was told as I climbed in: Stephanie and Amanda. “Here he is!” the one in the passenger seat said. “Here I am!” I said, trying to mask my disappointment as Jess pulled out of the driveway at alarming speed. They were all wearing dresses or skirts; their makeup was prominent; I realized I didn’t know what kind of concert we were going to and I worried I was underdressed in my jeans and button-down, my old mittens and plaid wool scarf.
The half-hour drive up I-35 was mostly taken up by Jess and her friends recounting—not for the first time, I gathered—the details of Amanda’s recent breakup. She kept saying she was worried she would never find anyone else, what she needed from a guy was too specific, too strange, and somewhere in my impatience with that sentiment was the thought I am the oldest person in the car. Still, a part of me enjoyed the conversation, which was full of coded phrases and intonations indicating the warmth that comes from a shared history. After listening for some time in silence, I chimed in: “Amanda. I know we met like ten minutes ago, but it’s obvious to me already that you deserve way, way better than this chump.” Everyone laughed, and after that, the three friends made more of an effort to include me.
The concert was in a hockey arena on the Iowa State campus. By the time we entered, it had already begun: three or four thousand standing fans packed tight toward the flashing, hazy stage on which two men paced deliberately, rhythmically, to an accompaniment of a heavy, programmed hip-hop beat. Jess and her friends discovered or created openings I hadn’t seen and led me through the crowd till we were halfway to the front. By that time the two men had started rapping, but the words were drowned out by the crowd noise and the beat, whose bass I could feel in different parts of my body, sometimes in my collarbone, sometimes in my stomach, once in a while in the region of my heart, as though my internal rhythms had been hijacked by the music or else were in control of it.
Everyone around me was bouncing or bobbing; most people held one hand in the air. Through the forest of arms I watched the two men half-walk, half-dance back and forth across the stage. One of them was much, much smaller than the other, but I couldn’t tell if that was because he was small or because his partner was extraordinarily large. The big one was the main one, I soon understood: he did all the rapping, or almost all, while the little one chimed in only once in a while, either to give emphasis to a word or phrase or to help enact a brief call-and-response. The men were dressed almost identically in old-school Lakers jerseys—Magic for the big one, Worthy for the small—black sweatpants, dark sunglasses, thick gold chains, and knee-high neon green boots or slippers that looked like they were made from mammoth fur. Most of the time they seemed to be doing more or less their own thing—in addition to the slow-mo rhythmic walk-dancing, lots of bouncing, pointing and fist pumping, punctuated by occasional crouching, rocking, spinning, swaying, air-smoothing, and pulsating—but every minute or two their movements synced up for a few seconds in such a way that it seemed coincidental, though it couldn’t have been, and often in these moments the beat would change or drop out, and everyone would cheer, including me, because it was amazing. Jess and her friends had started bobbing the moment we arrived, and at some point I realized my body was bobbing, too. “Throw your hands in the air,” the men called out, but everyone already had their hands in the air; we were testifying to their amazingness; we were volunteering to be taken with them.
Other people in the crowd were continually brushing against me, so it took a moment before I realized someone was nudging me in the ribs: Amanda, not so much offering me a pipe as placing it in my unraised hand. I hadn’t smoked pot for over a year: half the time it made me pleasantly sleepy, the other half like my heart would explode through every vein and artery in my body. But by this point I wasn’t really myself, I’d been absorbed into the music and mass of bodies, so when I took three long, deep tokes from the pipe it felt like an action outside my control. The high was almost immediate, and so intense; it threw me back onto myself. I didn’t like it. The music had receded into the background, as if it were coming from another room. The rest of the audience had disappeared. My eyes searched frantically for something to attach to. The last thing I remember seeing before I lost my vision was two big men in black T-shirts onstage, standing behind or in front of the rappers, arms folded, glaring directly at me. Then my legs stopped working and I was down. That felt nice. I could relax on the floor for a while. The music became audible again down here: so that’s where it had gone. Then it occurred to me that it wasn’t right that I could hear and think when I couldn’t see or move, and in the same moment I heard voices near me saying, “Oh shit oh shit,” and “He fell asleep!” “Don’t worry,” I said, “it’s okay, I feel fine,” but no one answered so maybe I hadn’t said it. Then I felt me being lifted by the arms, which were attached to my torso by rubber bands, and those arms being draped around two sets of shoulders, and I couldn’t really feel myself being dragged out of the arena but I could hear male voices saying, “Oh shit oh shit,” and female voices saying, “He’s fine. He’s going to be fine.” Then the music had receded again and sometime later a change in temperature or air pressure told me we’d made it outside the building.
>
I was sitting on the ground, propped up against a wall. Someone was rubbing my arm and shoulder saying, “You’re going to be all right,” in Jess’s voice. “I am all right,” I tried to say. Somewhere nearby a group of voices were debating whether to take me to the hospital. This went on for a few minutes or hours. Then I heard myself moaning or laughing, and everything came back at once—vision, mobility, speech, volition—and I said, “I’m ready to go back inside now.” Everyone laughed, so I did. “Jesus Christ, man, you scared us.” Who was this dude? “Go fuck yourself,” I said, and everyone laughed more.
Back inside, the concert was still going. We stood in the back where there was more space, more air. It felt wrong to just bob or bounce back here, so we started dancing and wow! Wow. I’d forgotten what a fantastic dancer I was. Everyone was smiling and laughing in circles. Fragments broke off from the main crowd to join us, until the room was centered on me. I took turns dancing with my new friends, then with strangers, until all the strangers had become my friends. The concert ended; everyone cheered; the rappers disappeared; we kept cheering, we refused to stop; the rappers returned and the concert began again.
They launched into a cover of “Sexual Healing” and everyone went nuts. Jess started dancing with me or vice versa and as we danced we couldn’t stop smiling and laughing. Our bodies drew closer of their own accord. I leaned in to kiss her and she laughed and shook her head and said something I couldn’t hear. I laughed. We danced together for the rest of the song before dissolving back into a larger group. The duo did a few more songs, we cheered, and the concert ended again, this time for good.
The car moved south on I-35, holding its shape against the limitless night. The imagined cold of invisible farmland made the car warmer, or made its warmth closer. I felt charged. It was a perfect night. There were five of us now: some guy with glasses had joined us; he was sitting up front with Jess, while I sat in back with Stephanie and Amanda. I was in a state—new to me—in which there was more pleasure in wanting than there ever could have been in having. I had wanting. Amanda sat next to me, in the middle seat, lovely. She’d find someone new to fall in love with soon. Meantime she had the consolation of riding in cars with beautiful friends. In my mind I wished the man with glasses and Jess a happy life together. “He’s a writer,” I heard her telling him, and he turned to me and asked what I was working on. As I heard myself summarizing my grandfather’s memoirs—his five wives, his many reputed mistresses, his mistreatment of and eventual estrangement from my mother, his just missing out on World War II, his aimless drifting around the world—I found myself, to my surprise, feeling almost sorry for him. I talked about his childhood and adolescence, the beginning of his obsession with flight. The Great War, which ended a few years before his birth, had made pilots the heroes of his generation. He read the pulp magazine G-8 and His Battle Aces, about an American fighter pilot flying missions in France. The newspapers told of the intercontinental adventures of Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Howard Hughes, Billy Mitchell; my grandfather built wooden models of their planes. Saturday mornings, he and a group of friends would pack food and fill their Boy Scout canteens and ride their bikes through the St. Paul suburbs to the airport, where they lay on their backs on a grassy hill and watched navy biplanes landing and taking off, passing so close, if the wind was right, they could see streaks of grease and oil on the cowlings, flames shooting out from the exhaust. The day he turned fifteen he joined the Civil Air Patrol cadet program. His first flight was on a gray day in fall. As he sat behind his instructor in a high-wing Aeronca, the noise of the engine coming to life seemed to engulf him physically, mingling with smells of hot oil, leather, hydraulic fluid, rubber, and burnt plastic. Then the plane was rattling down the runway. He was sure it would fall apart. The moment of its losing contact with land was impossible to isolate.
The bodilessness of flight—he was a breath, or a shout, an exultation issuing from the earth itself. It was a feeling he knew only from reading and dreams. Contracting patterns of brown, gray, and gold spread themselves out beneath the plane. The world is enormous. He’d never seen it before. Horizon opening onto horizon. The cities he’d mistaken for the center of the universe proved to be transient and fortuitous settlements, temporary deformations of the landscape. Everywhere the artificial blurred into the natural. Everything is connected to everything else. The instructor made a series of gentle turns, and my grandfather leaned away from them, trying to keep his torso vertical to the ground. Then he relaxed and let his body move with the plane, the horizon tipping up and settling back, tipping up and settling back. The plane was setting the world in motion: the plane was flying the world.
The sky is dark and hazy now, and lights flick on in houses and farms, and shadows creep like a flood over the earth, which slowly expands as the light leaves it, a second sky. The plane, though, flies on in sunlight, as if it’s absorbed the fallen sun’s rays to release them now in a gentle phosphorescence, visible, he imagines, from a long way off.
7
Jess dropped me off in the early-morning dark, and after she and her friends drove away I lingered for a moment in the yard. The sky was clear. The night was alive with signs and stars. I went inside and heard music playing, a memory of the concert, I thought at first, but it turned out to be coming from my laptop—New Order—must have been playing the entire time I was gone. In another world, beauty’s existence doesn’t depend on its apprehension. Tears in my eyes, I turned up the music and wrote an email to Maria in which I recounted the evening and invited her to stay with me and told her I was falling in love with her. Then I ordered Contemporary Finnish Poetry and accepted Jess’s Facebook request and looked at photos of her and her friends—Amanda seemed really into horses and shots—then photos of friends and exes and acquaintances, and their friends and partners and children and pets, maybe I should get a dog, and I spent a long time scrolling through photos on petfinder.com, started filling out an application for Mason, a border collie/Lab mix puppy, ostensibly, but no, before I could get a dog I needed a home, or at least a job.
Dawn came, I went for a run, showered, ate breakfast, and went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep, my body craved movement, so I went for a drive at very low speed through the hushed streets of northwest Des Moines. No one was out. On the radio a man with a slight southern accent was telling a story about basketball. It was 1994 and he was playing in a Houston church league. He drove the lane and went up for a layup and heard not just through his ears but his whole body a sound like a drawer slamming shut. Bam! Everything went black. Time stopped. And he thought, Hmm, that’s a weird, funny sound. And then the pain. It felt like something had snapped behind his kneecap. He couldn’t walk. He had to shuffle around backwards on one leg, dragging his lame leg along the ground.
Next day he went to an orthopedic surgeon. “You tore your patellar tendon,” said the doctor. “It’s not good.” The man didn’t need some doctor to tell him that! “You need to have surgery right away,” said the doctor. And the man said, “Gee, Doctor, I appreciate your opinion, but I’ve got this very important trip next week, and I won it in a raffle and it’s all expenses paid, South Carolina,” and hem and haw and this and that, and “Doctor, can’t I go on this trip and then come back and have the surgery?” And the doctor said, “No, you can’t. I’m sorry. You need to have surgery as soon as possible. If you wait, the tendon will shrivel up and I won’t be able to put it back together.” That’s what he said. And I said, “Doctor, is this gonna hurt?” And the doctor said, “You bet!”
And it did. It hurt like hell. But you know what? I was a wounded man. And I needed surgery so that I could be healed. Tear your patellar tendon, thing don’t heal on its own! Gotta get somebody in there, tie it back together! Because fact is, if I’d gone ahead and left for South Carolina, I’d be walking backwards to this day.
I turned from Fortieth onto Madison and headed back toward Lower Beaver. C
ars pulled out of driveways here and there. Black treetops pierced the yellow-blue sky. Now what I want to talk about today, said the man on the radio, is men who have experienced wounds. But he wasn’t talking about physical wounds. No. He was talking about deeper wounds. Heart wounds. From childhood. Those real early, deep-down wounds. He was talking about Wounded Warriors.
A Wounded Warrior was a man who was wounded as a boy and carried that wound around with him as an adult. Maybe you’re a Wounded Warrior. Maybe your best friend is. Your brother. Your cousin. Maybe you know how hard it is. Maybe you want to do the right thing for yourself. But it’s not easy to be a Wounded Warrior who mans up and does the things he needs to do to heal those wounds of so many years ago, those deep-seated issues, those heart wounds.
Fortunately, there is good news. There is good news for the Wounded Warrior. And the news is that the Lord wants to help you heal that wound. Because the scripture says, “He heals the brokenhearted.” Because he is Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals, the God who binds up wounds.
When a boy gets his heart hurt, and doesn’t deal with it, as a man he’s still kind of stuck in boyhood. He’s in a man’s body, but his heart is a boy’s heart. And it might cause him to feel insecure. And it might cause him to feel inadequate. He can have problems with anger. With confusion. With understanding what a man really is. Because he’s stuck. He’s stuck hanging out with the guys and “Let’s play video games,” and not assuming responsibility. And he can become an irresponsible person. He might have a wife, might have kids, two cars, but it’s just like he is stuck. He’s stuck. Let me tell you: the Lord wants to bring healing to that. He wants to help these Wounded Warriors.
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