One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir (5 page)

An orthopedic surgeon came to my room with a tray of tools. I was in my wheelchair. He reclined it all the way back. Then he injected anesthesia into the skin near each bolt. With a torque wrench, he removed each one: there was no pain but I felt each one loosen, a weirdly abstract notion, as if it weren’t really my head, my bone, that had been drilled into.

When all four were removed and put aside, the bars were disconnected from the vest and the halo lifted away. I lay still. The vest was unfastened. Finally, all of it was gone. Another collar was placed around my neck: I’d have to wear it until my neck regained its strength.

“Are you ready to raise up?” he asked. “Your neck will be very weak. Your head will feel like a huge weight. OK?”

I smiled. He was right. My head seemed enormous, impossibly heavy, and the muscles in my neck, so weak from months of disuse, screamed, burning. Days would pass before the pain would, when I’d begun to regain basic muscle tone.

He cleaned the holes in my head with gauze, mopping the caked gore that had built up over time. From each wound he tweezed long stray hairs and laid them aside.

Often I was bored, listless. The hallways would empty, and the floor go silent, save for the continuous weather of muffled machinery, respirators hissing unseen, monitors translating sickness into beeps. Patients withdrew into their rooms. Once I passed the room of a patient who had been injured a long time, years, while a respiratory therapist snaked a long, thin tube through the hole that had been cut into his trachea. The machine connected to the tube whirred and snuffled. A vacuum noise. The woman was drawing out the mucus his body couldn’t expel. I could see it run, cloudy, thick, through the tube, away. His face was lunar with acne and he grimaced, clearly in pain.

When she was finished, she pulled a table back over to his chair. On the table was an easel, a magazine stand fixed with a mechanical arm to turn pages.

I left when I saw he was reading
Playboy
.

The gymnasium at night was always empty but the stereo was usually left on, filling up the space with music. While driving my wheelchair in long circuits around all the mats and between the exercise equipment, I’d listen, humming along. Through the windows I could see Atlanta’s skyline, which stood on a high ridge above the surrounding land. Whole evenings I lost in those windows, while top forty played all around.

That night, the night I watched the phlegm be sucked from anonymous lungs, I went into the gymnasium; I could hear music. Lonely, sad for what I’d just seen, I was hoping someone might be there to talk to. I looked around but no one was there. I turned my head, scanning the room, and when I did, something gave way inside my neck. There was no pain in it. Not really. But it stopped me cold, right there in the gymnasium doorway, and though I had no reason to think it, I knew then that all the months in the halo, with my spine held immobile, had been for nothing. That I’d soon face the surgery we’d hoped to avoid. There was no real pain. Just an undeniable
wrongness
, a sense that something had shifted.

It scared me. I asked to go to bed early. I told no one.

When my parents were waiting for me in my room, in the middle of the week, I wasn’t surprised. The day before, my
spine had been X-rayed; I had hoped against all hope the results would be fine, though I knew my neck felt wrong, unstable.

“What are you doing here,” I said, less like a question than they must have expected. I’d been downstairs in another patient’s room, inspecting his new wheelchair, an awful purple.

“Yesterday we got a phone call,” my mother began tentatively, looking to my father, whose skin seemed made of old ash. “There’s something still wrong with your neck.”

I had known it. But then I couldn’t say anything, too scared, too miserable to consider it. A part of me was angry, too: angry that the halo hadn’t worked and angry all that time had been for nothing. But it was eclipsed by the fear I felt, which had been seeded one week ago.

“You’re going to have surgery tomorrow,” my father said. “It’s urgent.”

“When?” I croaked. “Can’t it wait a day or two? What time tomorrow?”

“Early. It has to be tomorrow. It has to be, Paul. This isn’t something that can wait.”

“We’re going to be here,” my mother said. “We’ll be here the whole time. When you wake up, we’ll be waiting. And everything will be all right.”

If I had ever been so swamped by mortal sadness, I don’t remember it. The surgery seemed a gross insult, a piling on, pain added to so much pain.

I smiled. Or tried to. Tried again. My parents did the same.

When they came for me, it was early. Not quite light. I’d slept well, after a while, after my parents had left for their hotel room. They’d see me in the morning, they promised. At first, in the raggedy fog of waking, nothing was wrong, nothing seemed amiss. Then there were my parents again, stepping in with coffee. We spoke a little while. Nurses soon came, administered a slight sedative to calm me. The last thing I remember is my mother’s face.

Up I swam through the floodwaters of morphine-deepened sleep, dreaming nothing, and opened my eyes. The ceiling like sky drifted. I was covered to my shoulders with a warm blanket. Everything seemed to glow. To be light like an incandescent bulb. My only thought was that I had not felt so good in months and nothing hurt and then I sank again. I wouldn’t wake back up for twenty-four hours and when I did, it would be awful.

Nurses had come to turn me from my back to my left side. Beneath me was a folded sheet; I could be turned by pulling one side of the sheet against my body. One of them spoke.

“Time to turn, honey,” she said. “This may hurt a little.”

I could see my father, seated by the window, reading in its light. He began to stand up, as if he might offer his help. Then they turned me.

Pain cut through me, so severe I was amazed, stunned by the instant eradication of all the ease I had felt. The incision blazed. I had been opened up from my hairline to my shoulder blades and then closed with staples, so that the nape of my neck resembled a long, ghastly zipper.

Accustomed to pain, to great pain, even, I was, nonetheless, in no way able to ignore it, push it back. I screamed. Wept. They didn’t stop. Could not. As much as the turn hurt, the nurses had to do this and I needed it, no matter the discomfort. When they left, I sobbed. My father came to my side, leaning in close. He was a young man still, tall and lean, with hangdog eyes, though I had no sense of that perspective. He was my father. He touched my shoulder, almost, his hand stopping in the air. The pain was beginning to fade to a wracking throb. My face was tacky with tears.

“Sometimes I think—” he said, his voice quavering and low. “Sometimes I think I haven’t been a very good father to you.”

He was tenderhearted and I knew this, but even more, he was prone to practical jokes, pretending one thing or another and never very well. I thought, at first, he was playing, mistaking the rawness of his grief, the largeness of it, for another dumb ruse. I began to say something, but stopped
before any words came. His head had bowed like it was his neck that had been broken, incapable of holding up his face to mine. He shook with tears.

“Oh, Dad,” I said, shocked, for a moment forgetting my neck. “Oh, no, don’t say that. No, that’s not true, you have been good.”

He didn’t say anything for a while, crying that way. I felt helpless in a new, almost larger way. Whatever had gone before, however sad or terrifying, I knew that this was worse. I knew that my injury had changed everything and everyone, forever.

“I’ve been reading the Bible,” he said, when he could speak again, palming the tears off his face and from his inflamed eyes. “About Job. I want you to remember this verse.”

He reached for the Bible he’d put aside when I screamed, thumbed through the pages.

“Job 23:10:
When He hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold
.”

I didn’t say anything, though the meaning was clear.

“You’re being tried, Paul. We all are. But when it’s all over, you’ll be like gold. Believe that. Believe that for me, OK?”

I had been raised in a church that was largely filled with the old. A province of the dying. Its long hallways smelled like time. Everything I learned, everything I was taught, was apocalyptic, was mortal. Still, I’d never learned this verse be
fore. I would believe it, I said, and my father kissed my forehead, lightly, like something broken, about to break again.

After the atrophy of my neck muscles while wearing the halo, and the painful period in which the muscles had to restrengthen, I hated how the surgery had cut through them. I hated that I was forced to wear a collar again. At night, the skin of my neck itched; the incision throbbed. Maybe, just maybe, I hoped, this was the end of this particular pain. Maybe, after miserable months, my neck would be whole again, no longer the focus of so much discomfort.

What I learned after surgery, when my time at Shepherd seemed to have no discernible end, that I might stay there forever, was that I was, all the time, being considered. Measured. When I no longer made any real progress, I’d be discharged, sent back to my home. The thought scared me. I would watch the large marker board by the nursing station, on which patients were moved from stage to stage. I feared to see my name move from its initial column. I watched other patients, some I knew, progress and then be marked for discharge. In a few days, they’d be gone. At some point, I would leave as well, leaving an environment in which no one was particularly different, and entering my old world, my old life. I’d be the changed thing, then.

Muscle spasms began to knot the muscles in my legs at night. All night, sometimes. The muscles would violently contract,
and no medicine helped. Nurses would try at night to stretch them, to massage the muscles into stillness, but nothing worked. A nurse was once knocked to the floor while trying her best to help me, my leg resting atop her shoulder as she straightened it. Morning would come, slowly, and I would feel like a dishrag, wrung out by powerful hands. Doctors suggested it might always be this way: my damaged nervous system misfiring wildly into the night. Whenever someone said this, inside I shrank back from the thought. It was all I could do.

In the end, these long nights, when my legs seemed to be banded by iron, lasted two years, long past my hospitalization. There was no moment when I knew it was ending; only, a gradual subsiding, a storm of outraged nerves finally calming.

One evening in the middle of the week I was taken to a shopping mall with other patients. Accompanied by recreational therapists, we wandered about, a strange bunch of shoppers in wheelchairs, who couldn’t breathe, whose urine hung in bags from their chairs or on their legs, in plain sight, who were embittered, depressed, even suicidal and maybe dying. We rode up in the mall elevators, whole groups at a time, while women with bags from Macy’s clucked their impatient tongues behind us.

I loved to go out, to see some new place, and I didn’t
much care that others watched us go by with mixtures of sadness, pity, and curiosity percolating in their faces. Old men would stop me, nosy and folksy all at once, their minds seeing the wiring of what we went about in.

“Young man,” one might say. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

At first, this was confusing, alarming, dreadful. I had no idea what I’d say if asked about any number of topics: what happened to me, would I get better, did I believe in Jesus.

“Sure, I don’t mind,” I’d reply, smiling big, smiling always.

“How many miles you think you can go in one of these?”

I really had no idea, then. I made up estimates. Five miles. Ten. Twenty. Whatever I thought would satisfy them, send us both our separate paths.

“There are two big car batteries in it, so it goes a long way.”

“You don’t mean it,” he’d say, his voice a little distant, full of admiration. Something like this usually did the trick. I’d be blessed and notified I’d be appearing in his prayers and then we could part company, this bit performed.

And that night in the mall, eating ice cream fed to me by a therapist, I learned I’d soon be going home. When the cone was finished, the therapist hopped up, and his hand darted to the side of my wheelchair where a lever deactivated one of the chair’s two motors. He’d disabled the left one and I looked back to him, shocked.

“Time you learned how,” he said, hurrying away from me.

“How what?” I asked, annoyed.

“How to ask strangers for help,” he called back, leaving me there. With one motor disengaged, the chair would only drive in long loops, difficult to control. With every turn, I could see my group trailing farther off. I was nervous, and angry with him. I tried to follow after them, circling, circling, watching all of them vanish. Then I ran over something. Someone.

“I am so sorry,” I blurted, my face blushing instantly, my forehead dampening. It was a woman, tall and bookish-seeming, her eyes lost behind thick glasses. “They left me and they undid my motor and I can’t catch up to them.”

I was humiliated, blurting apologies to her. She put her hand to my shoulder, kindly, lightly.

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m fine. Completely. Believe me, I’m used to a wheelchair running me over.”

“Really?”

“My girlfriend has multiple sclerosis,” she replied. “Used to be in remission but a few years ago it came back. She has a wheelchair like yours. It’s older. We get around all right. Let me fix that.”

She knew what to do and then wished me a good night. “No more circles,” she said.

The prognosis for my recovery had never been exactly certain: at first, there was every reason to think I’d never move,
never feel anything again. When that began to change, when my legs began to respond to therapy, and I could slowly extend them with light weights wrapped around each ankle, therapists wondered aloud, as we worked, if I might recover enough to walk again. Perhaps with a walker or crutches or other prosthetic devices, braces, splints, and dozens more, which would in time fill my closet and make of it a sad museum of hope. Perhaps, at least, I might be strong enough to push my own chair, and feed and bathe and dress my own body, however compromised. Perhaps any hundred degrees of recovery, of return, of resurrection, as though the life I lived were not exactly a life, but something else, in between, a limbo in which happiness was not quite possible, a hypothesis, a theory exhorted, but in half measures, in half consolations.

Therapists like Steve with his boundless empathy, and others I’ve forgotten, were stewards of my body and my hope, and between us passed the pain of never knowing when the end to that hope had undeniably come.

And so I knew that my time had come when nurses informed me I’d be taking my first trip back home for a weekend. I knew this visit was rehearsal for the day I was discharged, and for all the days which followed, for however long I lived with my family, dependent upon their care, and though no doctor would say it, that span of time might come to be forever.

I found out exactly as I feared I might. On the board beside the nursing station, my name had been moved into the last column, marked in red. I stared at it, deciding how I felt. Nearly five months of surgery, therapy, and daily pain had passed. Indignity after indignity and complete loss of privacy. Hundreds of strangers by then had seen my naked body, either in bed or in the hallway while I was rolled to one of the floor’s several communal showers. It hardly mattered anymore.

But to return home? It had been a far off, undetermined day. Now it was no longer. Now I’d be sent home for a weekend visit, to live with my family again, though by everything that had happened we’d become impalpably estranged. I asked a nurse doing paperwork when my visit would take place.

“This weekend,” she said. “Your parents will pick you up on Friday.”

She returned to the work. I returned to my room, nervous, and said nothing to anyone.

When my parents came for me, I was waiting for them in my room, seated in a manual wheelchair, the kind that had to be pushed. Our van wasn’t accessible: after being rolled inside the van on portable aluminum ramps, I rode the hundred miles home, reclined flat, staring up at the roof. At home, no ramp had been built yet; I couldn’t go upstairs. I had to
enter the house through the garage and into the downstairs den, connected to my old bedroom, and there spend the weekend, fed by my mother while everyone else, my dad, my three younger brothers, ate in the kitchen. There was no room for us all to be together; there was no other way.

The twins, Bo and Clay, were still babies, little more than a year old, and my middle brother, Chan, was only about eight: he said little all the while, nervous, hidden. My home felt unchanged. The walls downstairs were the same cheap wood paneling and the furniture was still mismatched; in the carpet was the same stain I’d made with yellow paint years before, up late with monster movies playing on our ancient television set.

All was the same, and, really, wasn’t I also unchanged, in some essential manner, beyond the damage I’d brought to myself?
No
, I thought,
I’m not
.

Saturday night, late, after a day and a half of watching movies, eating meals cooked by my mother, visiting with my family, I lay in bed, sick, my stomach spiraling about itself. Whether it was the stress, the worry of the visit, or the change in diet from institutional blandness back to the old meals of greens and fried potatoes, corn bread and sweet tea, or a fear all this could go badly, I don’t know. It was late,
the room was dark except for the green luminescence of the digital clock beside my old bed, where my parents had lifted me into bed from my chair, and in my old bed my bowels had moved, staining all the sheets, my legs dirtied by each effort to move, to turn away.

I’d called for my mother and she had come, clearly tired. I thought that there was only one thing worse in all the world than this: not the asking for help, but its need.

“I’ve had an accident,” I said.

“A bowel movement,” she stated as much as she asked.

“Yes,” I said, hating myself.

She was tired, moving through the fathoms of interrupted sleep, but she set to cleaning me, to changing the sheets. It took a while and we both were silent.

“Oh, Mother,” I whispered near the last. “Am I a burden? I don’t want to be a burden.”

She snapped awake, stopping for the moment.

“A burden? No, how could you be? How could you be? Don’t ever think that.”

The next morning I left my home and family again, and on the road to Atlanta, reclined in the wheelchair, my sadness faded and a relief grew. I wanted to hate it, but I couldn’t, not quite.