Читать книгу Like Wings, Your Hands - Elizabeth Earley - Страница 11

Journal entry dated September 27, 2005

My favorite place in the city is a cemetery. I visit every Sunday but my favorite season to visit is autumn. The tops of the trees are burnt orange and flame red, the leaves are curling and coloring and letting go to blanket the graves to crunch underfoot. Nowhere else in nature is dying so beautiful.

There is a still, green pool in the valley formed by the connecting of several hills. A sloping path surrounds it and winds through grassy plateaus, perfect for sitting and not being seen. When I sit at the banks of the pool at dusk, I watch the dragonflies being born. There are two important observations:

First, the buzzing of this new, exotic life stands in stark contrast to the stillness offered by the surrounding dead people. In the cemetery an essential fact emerges in sharp relief: life is perpetuated by death.

Second, the new dragonflies emerge from within the pond on the stems of foliage. Another important fact: life supports life. Also, things rise to the surface and the world decides to let them in or not.

They climb up and out of the water as nymphs, their larval stage of development. They have hatched from eggs lain in the water. In the right temperature of water, larvae will hatch from eggs in less than a month. The larva or nymph will grow quickly, feeding on small bacteria in the water. Some nymphs are passive growers, sitting and waiting for prey bacteria to come within reach. Others hunt.

Tetralogy of Fallot causes low oxygen levels in the blood. This leads to blue baby syndrome. The classic form includes four defects of the heart and its major blood vessels: Ventricular septal defect (hole between the right and left ventricles); narrowing of the pulmonary outflow tract (the valve and artery that connect the heart with the lungs); shifted verriding aorta (the artery that carries oxygen-rich blood to the body) over the right ventricle instead of coming out only from the left ventricle; thickened wall of the right ventricle (right ventricular hypertrophy).

Nymphs swim by forcing the leftover hydrogen from the chamber housing the gills, which acts like a jet to propel the nymph forward.

Spina bifida, or SB, is a neural tube defect caused by the failure of the fetus’s spine to close properly during the first month of pregnancy. Infants born with SB sometimes have an open lesion on their spine where significant damage to the nerves and spinal cord has occurred. Although the spinal opening can be surgically repaired shortly after birth, the nerve damage is permanent, resulting in varying degrees of paralysis of the lower limbs.

A nymph has a flexible lip that rapidly extends up to a third of the length of its body to help it capture prey. As the nymphs grow, they will switch to hunting larger insects, including mosquito larvae. Large nymphs can capture small tadpoles and fish. Nymphs will molt or shed their skin ten to fifteen times before they are mature.

Hydrocephalus is a buildup of fluid inside the skull that leads to brain swelling. This fluid is called the cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF. It surrounds the brain and spinal cord and helps cushion the brain. Too much CSF puts pressure on the brain. This pushes the brain up against the skull and damages brain tissue. Hydrocephalus may begin while the baby is growing in the womb. It is common in babies who have a myelomeningocele, a birth defect in which the spinal column does not close properly.

Dragonfly nymphs take up to five years to mature; years spent below the surface of the water, growing stronger.

It is the only species I know of that remains so vulnerable for such a length of time—almost as long as the human animal.

As the nymphs mature, the wing pads form and elongate. Colors gradually become visible through the translucent skin. When ready, they will move to the surface of the pond and start to breathe air. In the evening, nymphs climb up the stems of vegetation. Their first swallows of air cause their skin to split down the back. Gradually, the adult emerges. The wings slowly unfold as blood is pumped into them. Recently emerged adults are soft and exposed. They often don’t survive their first few hours as adults because they make such excellent prey. It will take most of the night for the wings to harden before the adult dragonfly is ready for flight.

I watch them until I can’t hold my eyes open anymore, or until I get too cold. They’re so still, creeping out of the nymph skin almost imperceptibly.

Sometimes I go in the morning, before sunrise. I like to see the first light of dawn reveal their shed skins, like abandoned outfits of clothes cast off from new lovers.

The babies under glass in the NICU require more patience. No adult emerges overnight from an infant. These are the nymphs just hatched from eggs. They are not the hunters. They take the longest to mature, the most care. They are the most delicate.

That evening, Marko watched a cartoon where a monster was depicted dragging itself around by its hands with short, lifeless legs and no feet. Perhaps it was a ghost and not a monster because it seemed to float more than drag. It reminded Marko of the dark body—a part monster, part ghost—that floated inside him; occupying the space inside his despair with incredible gravity and mass. When the dark body pulled Marko in, it made him hit himself. Although it was Marko’s own fist punching his own face and head and chest, it was the dark body that was hurting him and leaving bruises. But the ghost-monster in the cartoon didn’t look at all like the dark body. It looked happy and harmless and light in its weightlessness.

Marko believed that the black box warnings on all of the medications he had to take had a weight that pushed down on him and bent him forward. In real life, he had scoliosis, but as his mom said, there’s a metaphysical reason for all physical conditions. He took two medications for his heart condition; one medication for his hydrocephalus; and a couple of medications for complications of his SB. He spent a lot of time looking up information about the medications he took on the Internet. That’s where he saw the black box warnings, which gave him so much of feeling number one, fear, that he nearly lost himself to the dark body. Just a few of the weighty warnings he discovered inside of the heavy black boxes:

•Cerebrovascular insufficiency

•Cardiovascular disease

•Hypertension

•Diabetes mellitus

•Thyroid disease

•Prostatic hypertrophy

•Addiction, abuse, and misuse

•Life-threatening respiratory depression

Of course, Marko spent time looking up each of these potential conditions as well. It all got heavier. There was too much weight tethered to Marko to ever be able to float. Marko envied the black-box-warning-free ghost-monster and its ability to float. Getting from one spot to another without his chair took up a lot of energy. One time, he caught his mom trying it out—to move across a room without using her legs. He woke up earlier than usual and dragged himself out of bed. He was trying to be extra quiet in case his mom was meditating or sleeping. He glimpsed her as soon as he hit the floor and nearly gasped. There she was, coming out of the living room into the small hallway and to her bedroom. She let her legs drag behind her and stood upright on her arms. Each step forward with her arms was like a new, one-armed push-up combined with the effort and weight of dragging her legs. She grunted but she managed it. She was strong and built small, so it was easier for her than it would be for someone else.

Marko had felt a strange mixture of sadness and pleasure to see his mom drag herself along the ground. On one hand, he didn’t like being imitated or mocked. On the other hand, he was pleased that his mom cared enough to want to know what it might be like—to share in his hardship. Marko had sat on the floor and held these conflicting truths in his hands, the way his mom had taught him. “We have to learn to sit with opposites, as though we were holding one in each hand, and just let them both be true,” she had told him.

He’d been meditating the same way almost every day since that day. Sometimes, they practiced sitting meditation together, finding opposites to sit with like happy and sad or good and bad. Sometimes, Marko sat with two sets of feelings so tangled he didn’t even have numbers for them, like the feeling he experienced when surrounded by a group of adults having a conversation he couldn’t completely follow and then hearing them all laugh and not knowing what was funny. Or the feeling he felt when his mom touched his body in a place he had no sensation except an idea of numeric value or color in a way that seemed both built in and totally unrelated to his body. Over time, Marko got so good at the sitting meditation, and could do it for such long stretches, that it became like a waking sleep for him where he sometimes had vivid dreams.

Marko was more like the ghost-monster when he was little. He remembered the platform with wheels he scooted around on and how much easier that made it to get anywhere, how it sometimes felt like floating. But ghosts and monsters weren’t real. He wondered if he was real. Real, he decided, meant being alive in the world. Reading his mom’s journal entry about his conditions and the gestation of dragonflies made him remember when she first talked to him about what was wrong with him. He had been told that his condition was rare. In fact, he had three distinct conditions, each of them rare. So he was very, very, very rare.

Could he be both rare and real? He had required so much medical and surgical intervention to be kept alive and in the world. He, alone, had not been capable of staying alive and in the world. So did that count as real? He sat and thought about this for a long time. Then he held being real in one hand, and being rare and not real (and a ghost and a monster) in the other hand. He held them there together and felt their unequal weights.

After sitting that way for a while, Marko saw a group of yellow bodies hovering above him in the room, giving off light. They had heads and torsos with tiny arms and no legs. One of the bodies spoke to him, but not out loud with words. It spoke to him in his mind with thoughts. It told him that he was connected to another place, a real place, through a rope of light in his chest. Marko looked down and saw the light coming out of his chest like a luminescent rope. Under the light was something dark, something black. Marko was alarmed.

“What is it? What do you mean, a real place?”

“When people are born,” the yellow body said, “it’s as though they’re dropped from a plane. They accelerate at first, both horizontally and vertically, and the change in direction and speed are difficult to adjust to. They spend most of the time during the fall adjusting to the physics of falling. Once adjusted, they spend time fearing impact. But impact never comes: the body keeps falling for a long time. So where you are now, what you are, is a body moving in space in relation to other bodies moving in space. You’re on a rotating planet hurtling in an ellipsoid pattern around a sun, which is also rotating. And the whole system, all the planets and the earth and the sun, is orbiting something else. The compounded directions and velocities are unfathomable to you, but you’re so used to it that it seems as though you’re sitting still right now. If it weren’t for your perpetual motion, your body would break apart into a million pieces.”

Marko squinted at the yellow body and the other bodies around it. His thoughts were tripping over themselves, trying to keep up. Thinking about the perspective from outer space this way, being alive in any kind of body was all unreal and absurd. He was zooming around in a huge matrix of motion with everything else: falling through space for the entirety of a life. Not just growing used to it, but actually held together by it. Marko thought about the math in his head, the numbers and equations. They compensated for his lack of sensation but also gave him anxiety and made him feel tired sometimes.

“What is the place that’s real?”

“It’s where bodies aren’t needed because there is no falling. There are no forces of gravity. There are no kinematic equations. No cause and effect. What is just is, and it is free. Pure consciousness, pure thought.”

“Time for bed,” Marko’s mom said. He opened his eyes and saw her standing there, her black hair aglow with yellow light already receding from the room.

“Did you have a nice meditation? You were there for a long time,” she said.

“How long?”

“Over an hour. It’s late. Get yourself to bed.”

Marko held his arms up to her. He felt too tired to pull himself up into his chair. She leaned down and gripped him under his arms and legs and then lifted him from the floor. He closed his eyes and watched the math; numbers swarming to build a matrix in three dimensions of his legs hanging over his mother’s muscled arm.