Читать книгу Like Wings, Your Hands - Elizabeth Earley - Страница 7

On the plane to Bulgaria, Marko’s mom had to catheterize him in his seat. She placed a blanket over his lap for privacy. Marko was watching baseball on his iPad but only the games he had saved on the device because he didn’t have Wi-Fi. Sitting beside his mom, he was careful to avoid opening the secret folder where he had his private links and files. Marko noticed how tense and nervous his mom was when she catheterized him. She moved quickly, like a bird. Marko didn’t like to watch her thread the tube into the tip of his penis. He was always disturbed by how far she seemed to push it inside his body—was there really that much space in there?

Watching made math happen in his head, unwilled. Sometimes he could see sounds, smell colors, taste shapes. And sometimes, when he saw the unfeeling parts of his own body interact with anything—his own hands, his mom’s, objects, the outside world—the math happened. It wasn’t just math; it was a vivid, visceral, sometimes painful experience of numbers. The numbers moved in his mind. Sometimes they’d fly fast—that’s when they hurt. But sometimes they were slow. They could be dark, almost black, or they could be blindingly bright, or somewhere in between. Each number was a three-dimensional shape with a color and a texture. The number seventeen, for example, was mostly blue, a little yellow, round but not perfectly round—more like an ellipsoid—and it had a smooth texture like marble. Nine thousand and fourteen was rough and dry but also soft like wool, diamond shaped, and beige. Every number between zero and ten thousand had color and shape and texture. And because every feeling Marko experienced, physical or emotional, also had shape and color, each corresponded to a number or a set of numbers. So sometimes, when Marko didn’t know what he was feeling in words, he would know in numbers. He would think: I’m feeling 4,372, which is a yellowish-brown, sharp-edged asymmetrical triangle.

The math happened when his unfeeling parts came in contact with anything that had to do with spatial navigation in the half of his body whose boundaries he couldn’t sense. The numbers came together to give him the perception of the precise location of each point in space where his body ended and another thing began.

Marko pressed his face into his mom’s hair: long, straight and black threaded with gray. He inhaled her smell—which he associated with home—leaned back, and looked at her. He could see his reflection in her eyes: two tiny hims staring back. His face was long and narrow, his wire-rimmed glasses perpetually slipping down the bridge of his nose. His voice was deeper now that he was fourteen and his pubic hair was thicker. He had a single brown mole sprouting two coarse hairs on one pale cheek, matching similar moles on his mom’s neck and body. His hair was dark blonde and fine, unlike his mom’s thick, black mane. He changed his focus from his reflection to her eyes, their colors like autumn in New England: brown and burnt orange and yellowish green.

Being 20,000 feet in the sky, trapped inside a metal tube, hurtling forward at hundreds of miles per hour gave Marko an uneasy feeling in his stomach. It wasn’t quite sick but almost. Any time there was turbulence, Marko imagined a gust of strong wind flipping the plane and sending it spiraling down to crash into the ocean below. At this speed the surface tension of water would be the same as that of pavement—he knew because he had looked it up—and he imagined the plane as it smashed apart, all the scraps and all of the people and limbs and Marko’s wheelchair would sink to the bottom of the ocean floor, catching in the dense foliage of kelp plants to gather algae thick as moss.

“He has spina bifida. Paralyzed from the belly button down,” Marko’s mom said to the woman seated next to them in the three-seat row. The expression on the woman’s face in response was as familiar to Marko as the sound of his own name.

“I’m sorry,” she said, which was the soundtrack to the familiar facial expression. If it had meaning, it would have been mildly offensive to Marko because it would mean she was sorry about who he was—sorry about his heaviness in her mental notebook, the burden his existence was to the imaginations of able-bodied people—but thankfully, it was as hollow as the look of pity it accompanied. Unfortunately, the words didn’t seem to have lost their meaning to his mom, because she looked even more nervous.

To calm himself and distract himself from his mom’s nervousness, from the tube threaded into his penis, from the potential crashing of the plane, and to counter the swirling math, Marko decided to concentrate on something else. He looked for all of the printed numbers he could see around him and added them all up, dividing the total by three. If it were a clean divide, one that resulted in a whole number, then he was safe and the plane wouldn’t crash. If there were a fraction left over, he would simply add those numbers to the whole number and divide by three again. He would repeat this until he got a whole number as a result.

In the midst of this mental arithmetic, Marko’s mom pulled his arm down a little roughly. He wasn’t even aware that he’d had his hands up in front of his face again until she yanked on him. He tried to keep them down but they sprung back up involuntarily. He put them down again and kept them at his side, but when he did, he wasn’t able to do the adding and dividing in his head. His thinking was stuck. He started to panic. His hands went back up.

“I’m sorry, sweetie, can you hold still for just a moment until I’m done here?” His mom’s voice was soothing. He dropped his hands again and tried to relax. But then turbulence happened and he still hadn’t gotten to a whole number!

He quickly decided on another way to keep the plane safe. He listened for anything he could overhear from people on the plane, any words he could make out from their conversations. If he whispered those same words aloud to himself three times and then did it again with the next words he heard, the plane would stay safe. Marko listened. It was hard to hear voices over the roar of jet engines. He thought he heard “that was funny” after someone nearby finished laughing. Marko lowered his head and whispered, “that was funny” as quietly as possible three times.

“You okay?” His mom asked. He looked up at her. She smiled. He nodded, listening for the next words. But now she was done catheterizing him and she got up to go throw out the waste. Marko looked at the woman in their row. She was 92 percent uneasy being left alone with him. To make her feel better, he tried to make conversation.

“I’m going to meet my grandfather for the first time in Bulgaria,” he said. She gave him a nod and a tight, fake smile. Her uneasiness wasn’t reduced. In fact, it went up a few percentage points. He decided to take it up a notch and over-share.

“It all started six months ago when I found this book and my mom’s journal. And this box that I could lay down in and sort of time travel and have weird dreams.” He pulled out the book and held it up to her. The same strained smile stared back and her uneasiness had now topped out at 100 percent. She got up and walked off down the aisle. He was free to use his hands again, so he went back to the more comfortable task of addition and division.