A Diagnosis Confirmed

I was in full fury, and there was nothing I could do, because even when my back wasn’t broken, could I catch and chastise four cats? Of course not: they had eaten my Cubano sandwich, and then had fled upon seeing me. A sane man would have gone to bed, rested the back, and gotten up to fight again later. But I wasn’t sane, I was raging, because, well, why me?

“Marc, how does it feel to be an angel?” Lady had once asked me. I told her—I’m no angel, though I confess to be pleased to be mistaken for one. But even if I weren’t an angel , it seemed so completely unfai, what was happening to me; I was swearing and shouting (sending the cats even further into exile) and yelling at the god I don’t believe in.

“SO JUST FUCKING GIVE IT TO ME! YOU WANT TO MAKE ME A CRIPPLE! YOU WANT TO SEE ME ROT IN A WHEEL CHAIR? GREAT, JUST FUCKING DO IT, ASSHOLE!”

Three weeks or so of pain had boiled over, and I could bear it no longer. I raged for ten minutes, pondered punching a wall, deeply regretted that our own walls are three feet of brick and stone, and then—still angry—retreated to bed.

It was two hours later, when the phone rang: it was from the MRI lab, and they wanted to know how to get a hold of my doctor. I asked why—they had told me I could pick up the results on Monday.

“You’ve got two compression fractures,” said the woman, “and we’ve faxed the results to your doctor, but we want to make sure she sees them today….”

So stunned was I to learn that I had a broken back, I didn’t realize the further implications: when a lab makes all that effort to reach a doctor, the news probably isn’t good.

I had been angry before, but now, I began to weep. What would happen to me? Would I have to have surgery? Here, in Puerto Rico, with its excellent doctors and terrible hospitals? What if something went wrong?

The insanity of what I hade just done struck me—I, with my back broken, had been out riding buses hurtling over potholes. The wonder was that I hadn’t severed my spinal cord—it was a miracle that I could still walk.

And what if I ended up in a wheel chair for the rest of my life? How would that be? I had a routine, in the days of health, of walking by the ocean and listening to music. I dimly remember it: the comfort of walking by the old walls of the old city, of approaching the opening of the San Juan harbor, of seeing the giant ocean swells crash against the rocks. The early morning light made prisms of the drops of water as they shot up and then fell. Did I say prisms? No—diamonds.

It was part of my life, and it was a large part of keeping me sane. I had grappled for years with depression, and the simple joy of walking, hearing music, looking at the ocean—all that was at least as effective as all the pills I was taking. I could go without it for a few months—that was no problem. But never again? Never to walk again?

Crying harder now because it’s so unfair, so unfair, so fucking unfair—why should it be me? What the fuck had I done? I had been, after, a good son, a good husband—well, I hoped—no, goddamn it, I had been a good husband. I had done my best and had done it better than most, and now? A cripple in a wheel chair?

And what, oh God what would this do to Raf? He had looked in my eyes—as I did his—and promised to care for me in sickness and in health, but could he? We are both 59 years old: neither one of us is ready for that kind of blow. How would he handle it? How would he adjust to having a husband in a wheelchair for the rest of his / our lives? What would we become?

Where would we live? The apartment that we had struggled to find—and pay for—is perhaps one of the largest in the city, and we still marvel that we have it. True, there had been toilets in every corner of every room (it had been a boarding house, and had held about thirty people in tiny cubicles throughout the apartment)—we had worked hard to restore it. But it was on the second floor of the building—up some twenty odd steps. Nor was there a way that I could see to install an elevator, or even the little chair that goes up the staircase. So would we have to move?

The idea of moving was almost worse than the idea of being in a wheel chair for the rest of my life, because stuff? We have stuff in abundance—from the seven sets of china to the four sofas to innumerable linen table clothes to….do I have to continue? It would take a crew of highly backboned guys weeks to pack up all of the stuff we have managed to accumulate.

I would need him to do things for me: I would be dependent. Who would shop? Me? In a wheel chair in the tiny store that charges outrageous prices, accompanied by horrendous service? I can barely walk through the aisles, since most of the space is occupied by fixtures holding more merchandise—how would I maneuver with a wheel chair?

I lay in the bed and sobbed, sobbed for a life I didn’t know I could lose, and hadn’t appreciated until I had lost it. Did I consider the possibility that I might, after all, escape paralysis? No. So terrifying was the possibility of being invalided, that it completely darkened any other possibility.

Had I given into despair?

I think not. Rather, I was seeing a future I abhorred—and I was terrified and grieving and mourning what I had not yet lost, and what I had never imagined I could lose.

I heard the front door open. Raf, my husband—coming home from work as he always does, at the same time, saying the same things. How infinitely dear of him—how incredibly comforting, these rituals of ours that make up our lives. “It is so very easy for a man to be somewhere else,” said a female character in a Dorothy L. Sayers novel. But Raf was never anywhere else but there, with me.

My heart was breaking for him.           

Just Another Trip!

At some point, it was clear: I would have to go back to the Emergency Room. So then it became a question: would I return to the same ER from which I had barely escaped? True, they had (I believed) treated my ailment correctly, but as for the rest of the treatment? It was unlikely that I would meet the same doctor, but still….

And so we started off, this time to go to another emergency room at a hospital specializing in ambulatory surgeries. An excellent facility, but I had chosen to go there on a Saturday, since Raf would be available to be at my side. That made sense, except that, while the ER had doctors and nurses, the radiology department was closed. So that meant going back to the facility of Monday morning, waiting another three hours, and then seeing the doctor, who told me that I might have a fracture. Then again, it might be an old injury. Anyway, if I wanted to, I could do a CT scan.

Did I want to? Of course not: I wanted to go home and go to bed. Which of course I did, and then called my internist, who would be available on Wednesday of the following week.

And so I waited another nine days, and then went to see my doctor: a tall, wiry, woman in her mid-forties. Supremely competent, she also is a worrier: in addition, she spends time that she doesn’t have. Yes, her waiting room may have every seat taken, but she still takes ten minutes to see if she can coax a smile or laugh from a depressed patient. (I know—the patient was me….)

She was instantly alarmed.

“Marc, you have two compression fractures. And we should get an MRI as soon as possible….”

I was, of course, in pain—that was explicable, but why had I lost another seven pounds in the three weeks since they had weighed me in the first emergency room? What was going on? At any rate, she gave me prescriptions for half a dozen medicines, ordered lab tests and—most importantly—ordered an MRI.

“It tells you just as much as a CT scan, and it only takes a few minutes, instead of the twenty minutes or so for a CT scan. Get that as soon as possible.”

During this period, I was able to do only one thing a day. So I grabbed all the prescriptions, went to the pharmacy, and then went home to bed. The next day, exhausted from having woken up at 3 in the morning, I decided to stay in bed and rest: hadn’t I already been several weeks with the pain? Was anything truly that urgent?

And so on Friday I went to get the CT scan: I walked down to the bus station, and saw that the T9 was about to leave. Clearly, I thought, luck was on my side.

How little I knew….

It was almost Christmas, a holiday that leaves me cold. But not so the seventy-year old lady—rail thin—but with the lungs of an elephant. Which she was using, all the better to belt out Puerto Rican Christmas carols. How did I know they were carols? By the lyrics alone, since she was so out of tune that the melodies were almost indecipherable. To compensate, she incorporated telling political commentary (mostly about our governor). All well and good, or rather, it would have been, if she were not accompanied by a younger woman, who had the loudest laugh I had heard in all of 2015. And so for twenty minutes, it was song, commentary, and gales of laughter.

I was ready to slug both of them….

Worse, the bus had no shocks, and the road was full of potholes. So while my ears were being blasted by caroling, my eyes were trained on the road, and the inevitable lurch that would occur. Finally, I arrived, did the test, and then staggered out to catch the bus back. But I was hungry: I had eaten nothing all day, and there was nothing much at home to eat. So I went to a local café, owned by a student of mine, and ordered a Cubano sandwich.

The day was almost over: all I had to do was catch another bus back, go to the pharmacy, and then go to another store. That was it, and what could go wrong?

I waited for the bus. Then I waited some more. Then I waited and waited and realized that—although I had been sitting in the café looking out the window to the street, I had seen no buses go by. So for an hour on a Friday afternoon, there had been no bus service on the busiest road in San Juan (called Avenida Ponce de Leon—a nice touch).

But wait, there was service, since a bus was approaching! I stood up to hail it, since—another local custom—bus drivers will sail right by unless you indicate that you are truly wanting the bus. After all, you could just be resting your feet and absorbing the carbon monoxide, right?

So I hailed the bus, and the bus? It sailed right past me, since it was jammed packed. OK—it was jammed packed at the front, but at the back there were actually empty seats. Nor is it the fault of the driver, since a driver’s job is to drive--anybody can see that--and if people don’t step to the rear, well, whose fault is that? He just drives—got it?

The pain is getting worse and worse, since I’m fatigued, but I go back to waiting, and then—the gods are merciful—I spot a taxi! So I hail that, and get in, and greet the driver, who asked me if I had called from the Iglesia Santa Mónica. I tell him no, but that I’m in pain and that he has got to take me back to Old San Juan. So we go around about that, and I point out that an actual customer—that would be me—is better than a putative customer—that would be Santa Mónica, or her agent. Anyway, we’re moving toward San Juan, which augurs well, and even if I have to keep arguing all the way back home, well, that’s a small price to pay. Oh, in addition to the 18 dollars for the half-mile fare.

So we are moving and arguing, and then we get to Iglesia Santa Mónica, and guess what happens? Of course, a woman flags the cab, and the taxi driver gets out of the cab, and then it turns out that the argument that he and I had been having was nothing more than a warm-up, a rehearsal for the real argument that took place in front of Santa Mónica’s very nose (all right, her statue’s nose, but I swear that as the argument progressed, the statue of Santa Mónica looked increasingly disgusted….)

Well, it was a full Latin argument, which meant that arms were raised, hands were hurtled through the air, every slight since childbirth was invoked; the couple approached each other, got nose4 to nose but still manage to shake fingers in each other's face. They backed off in disgust, only to regroup. The woman had called the taxi, the driver had picked up the wrong person, and was it her fault that her cab had been abducted? Of course not, so the obvious thing to do was to evict me from the cab. After all, I could call a cab myself, just as she had done!

I suddenly could abide no more. I had been weeks in pain, and now, all I wanted was to lie down, alone in my room, and count my breaths until—perhaps—I could sleep. And so I put my head out the window, introduced myself, inquired after her health—she was fine, and much invigorated by the argument—and then I told her I was not fine. I told her about my back, about the pain, and I begged her: just get in the cab, and I would pay her fare.

Well, we were back on the road in no time—and I was wincing and gasping and crying out over every pothole, since the cab was as shockless as the bus had been. But we arrived, and I got out of the cab, preparing to go to CVS for wine. Here, the woman leaned forward, touched my arm, and murmered, “Diós te bendiga!”

That was the nice part.

The less nice part? The cab driver, who having quoted me an 18 dollar fare, took the twenty I gave him, thanked me, and roared off!

Did I object? Was I upset over two dollars? Of course not, since having a bad back teaches you things: all of the petty things that you worry about are, well, petty. All I wanted was to get home, and put my back to bed. So I grabbed the bottle of wine, went to the self check-out, scanned the bottle, and then swiped my ATM card in the machine. No problem—hadn't I done this hundreds of times?

Who can say what happened? I only know that the machine, instead of asking for my PIN, inquiring if I wanted cash back, asking if I wanted to support St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, and then processing my transaction—the machine decided to comment on my entire day by cooking up a never -before-seen screen. And the commentary was?

PLEASE WAIT!

What? I had waited and waited and waited all damn day, and I was in pain—horrific, now—and I was within two blocks of my bed, and now? Please wait?

And guess what? I waited, and waited, and waited—and all of a sudden all of the staff of the CVS had disappeared, and I was alone, alone with my machine, and the message—which I hardly needed—to wait.

Please.

Or rather, I wasn’t alone, nor should I have expected to be, since I had seen the Carnival Cruise ship dock, as I was being blessed and fleeced on exiting the taxi. So now, the entire cruise ship—the passengers, I mean—is flowing through the doors of the pharmacy. OK—not flowing, since Carnival apparently has this requirement: nobody can take the cruise without carrying at least 300 extra pounds on them. So I am watching the machine telling me to wait, and also watching and marveling at the cruise passengers, who have invented a wonderful new way to enter a building!

They’re coming in sideways!

In the meantime, the pain is stabbing now, and I am wincing and weeping and at last see someone in a blue vest, and she comes and presses buttons or maybe waves a magic wand—I’m in too much pain to tell—and then I have to figure out: will I walk through the store, trying to move around elephants, or will I go out the front of the pharmacy, walk around the block and up the two blocks to my home? Stupidly, I chose to walk through the store.

Well, by dint of going through the last aisle of the pharmacy—the only passable thoroughfare—I get out the door, and can anything else go wrong? Of course not, though the gods of Puerto Rico—those deities who practice absurdity the way Paganini practiced the violin—yes, the Gods of Puerto Rico decided to send an entire classroom of school children rolling down the (narrow) sidewalk I am walking up. True, I am taller, but also true, they were thirty times more numerous. So I am stopped dead in my tracks, as swarms of children—all so cute in their tiny little uniforms, out for a field trip in Old San Juan—surge past me. But not to worry, because guess what?

They’re singing!

And what are they singing?

Alegrí, Alegrí, Alegría!

Joy, joy, joy!

My back is in agony, I am in agony, and the endless river of children sweep past me, until at last there is an adult, clearly the teacher, since she gives me a teacherly smile—I don’t know how they do it, but they do—and wishes me a merry Christmas. Oh, and also blesses me, which is needed, since suddenly, my guts give out, and I have got to go to the bathroom.

So there I am, holding my belly, which is spasm-ing  badly—maybe out of jealousy, since the back has been getting all the attention, or maybe in sympathy. Or maybe it was just trying to divert—who knows, since I am now rushing as much and as fast as I can to get to the bathroom, and I drop all of my packages—the little bag carrying half of a Cubano sandwich (my dinner) and the bottle of wine and the knapsack with my iPad and my Kindle and the various detritus that such bags attract, and I race limply for the bathroom and yes, make it just in time before my bowels explode. Relief! I stumble out of the bathroom, and then prepare to gather up the bags, so that at last, at last, I can go to the bedroom and lie down and call this debacle over. And what do I find? Everything is just fine, especially for the cats who…

Are fighting over the last crumbs of my sandwich!   

 

Broken-Backed in Puerto Rico

Here’s what I’m afraid of:

1.     Children on bicycles.

2.     The Carnival cruise ship ladies turning the corner at the Pandora store

3.     The sidewalk

4.     Anyone who has a cell phone

5.     My cats

These are by no means the only things: the bathtub terrifies me, for example. But if I leave the list incomplete, it’s really to protect myself, since I cannot dwell on the things that scare me. Yes, I could, I suppose, barricade myself in the back bedroom (closer to the bathroom): my doctor would love me to do that. But however alluring a two month sentence of bedrest may sound, trust me, it's not. Yes, I vowed to read The Brothers Karamazov, and War and Peace, and Don Quixote (again, but this time in the original), but I don’t have the strength.

You may wonder—how much strength does it take to read a book? Well, even Great Expectations—which I read before I was a teenager—proved too much for me: I flinched when Uriah Heep was about to put the screws to Mr. Wickham.

What happened?

Some night in the middle of November, I awoke with a Charlie horse in one of my legs. This was hardly unusual, and I did what I always had done: spring out of bed, grab the footboard, and force myself to stand on tiptoes. It works, though the muscle usually remains sore. But on that night, I fell hard, harder than I have ever fallen, and onto a marble floor.

I remember the sound of it—since a falling body (that is, a human body) makes a quite distinctive thud. I know that I moved myself off the floor, and was able to clamber into bed. What do I know after that? Very little.

I had grown up seeing my mother with her periodic bad backs, and I vividly remember her going on hands and knees to the bathroom during one particularly bad spell. And so she had seen a variety of chiropractors. What had happened to me, I imagined, was the same.

It’s true that the pain was more severe than anything I have felt in my life—but is that surprising? I am lucky to have good health: never to have been hospitalized, never to have broken a bone. Dental pain—yes. Childbirth—duh, no. And never, thank God, migraine.

I remember only fragments: the rest I gleaned from my husband, Mr. Fernández: I got up to eat dinner, for example, but it was he—not I, as it normally is—who went to the grocery store. I know that I took a hot bath every day, and that in the process, I learned the first of many physical routines that I had never contemplated before.

I could describe it: which hand first grips the side of tub, followed by the next hand a bit closer to the front of the tub….but isn’t it tedious? Certainly to write, then to read, and especially to live.

Tedious, but necessary.

I am a restless sleeper: various lovers, bedmates, others have described me as most of the way toward full swirling dervish status. But to turn in bed was an agony. I would stay in one position—ignoring my desire to turn onto my other side, or onto my back—as long as possible. That, of course, was counter-productive: by the time I could longer stand it, I was thoroughly awake. And so, at some point before maximal discomfort, I would grab the headboard, flex my knees, lift my torso, and then plop down onto the other side. There was, of course, one moment of necessary torsion, and that was when a lightning bolt struck the base of my spine. So if I were not already half awake, I was certainly awake now.

The solution, was to focus on my breath, and to keep the mind clean—old Buddhist tricks, but never had I practiced them as I did then: I counted to ten—inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale—for hours, then days and finally for a week. I felt the cool air on inhalation rustling the hairs in my nose. The warmer air of exhalation soothed the top of the nasal cavity. Through it all was a pain that made even thinking about movement an agony.

Let me jump ahead of the story to tell you: my internist asked how I was treating the pain, which she said must be excruciating. Later, the doctor who admitted me to HIMA hospital asked me: “what are you taking for the pain—morphine?”

In fact, I was taking Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen, on the advice of my doctor. Did it work? Not really, but it was something to take—I then, thinking that I was in muscle spasm, sent Mr. Fernández off to beg the pharmacist at Puerto Rico Drug Store for Cataflam.

It’s a secret in everyone’s mouth—or on everyone’s lips—that the local drugstores will happily supply you with antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs pretty much on demand. True, you may have to invent a good reason or two—your doctor left for six months to treat the refugees in Greece; you are boarding a plane for Thailand in the morning. The pharmacist will smile, and give you drugs in little plastic bags, one size up from a nickel bag of dope. So Mr. Fernández went off and begged, returning with two bags, upon which something had been scrawled. Was that a problem?

I am normally a fanatic researcher of drugs on Google: am I willing to put just anything in my body?

Yes.

Hell yes!

You could have given me rat poison, and I would have swallowed it by the bucketful, if I had thought it would have taken away the pain. In fact, even if I had known that it was rat poison, I might have taken it. And here I will say that if there had been a gun in the house? You wouldn’t be reading this.

No one can describe pain—but there certain things that it does. First, your world shrinks: before the fall, I had worried about things that seem insane, now. What was the Afghani army doing keeping sex slaves? Or was it the Iraqis? Whatever, I would have known about it, and worried about it, and perhaps even written about it. I would have known that in December—when everybody was busy and anyway had forgotten about it—the Vatican had at last released the autopsy results of the pederast prince of the church, Jozef Wesolowski. Ah, and how I would have snorted to read that no, there wasn’t a trace of any drugs or medicines or substances—not even a bit of alcohol from a glass of wine—in the ex-papal nuncio’s blood. Nope—he was clean as a whistle, that man who so conveniently had a “heart attack” the night before the first day of his trial, landed in intensive care,  and then had been able to be released from the hospital two days later. (Is there any other explanation than drug overdose that could explain that?)

Yes, I would have worried about this, because I didn’t have a body. Well, I did, of course, but having a body is really sort of a nuisance. One has to wash it and take it to get its hairs cut and feed it, of course, but really, having a body is not interesting to me. I do not make it run with balls to put through hoops or take across white lines in stadia or kick into cages. So what are we talking about? Horrendously poor design, since the only thing I have a body for is to support my brain, and let me play the cello. I contemplated this on those many nights when an antidepressant—Remeron—had driven me to crave Peanut M&M’s. For those of you with healthier diets, it’s the M&M with two little feet, and a bright smile.

Thus, there is NO reason why half of my body has to be legs. And if we eliminated 90% of my legs, everything else could be downsized, too. And consider toddlers—do they fall, those charmers just learning to walk?

Of course, and so close to the floor are they, they barely notice it. And so they get up, take two steps, fall again, etc. Walking and falling are twin processes for them, but for me, at six foot three? I was being dropped from the Empire State Building.

And so, now space—which had included the Vatican and Afghanistan—was whittled down to (for most part) the bed, the bathroom, and (reportedly) the dining room table. And as for time? Well, the dreaded Monday morning of anybody with a job had nothing for me. And so, days meant nothing, nor did day or night: I was just as likely to be awake at 3 in the morning as at 3 in the afternoon. And so I was floating in time and space, and the only thing that tied me to any sort of reality?

Pain.

In the midst of it, imagining a time—such as now—when I would be without pain was impossible. Even in death, I would be in pain, and I spent that week in a suspension of agony.

Pain is different—I suspect—for different people, and in different cultures. What if the same injury had happened to me on the battlefield? Would I have experienced it in the way that I did? I think not: I would have run in retreat or—adrenaline pumped—continued to charge. And what I were Puerto Rican, and not gringo? Would I have reacted the same?

A nursing instructor had once told us: Norwegian-Americans are stoic. True, they may have their detached arm lying in the fields, and their amputated stump is shooting blood like a Monty Python sketch all over the ER, but “no, Doctor, I’m perfectly fine—you go off and take care of someone who needs it more than I….” So with these patients, you have to ask probing questions, and quite specific, as well. They will grudgingly admit—if you ask them—that they have an elephant sitting on their chest, they can’t breath, they are nervous. Otherwise—they’re fine.

With Puerto Ricans, the instructor explained, this tactic is disaster, because they have anything that you might suggest to them. And if they don’t have it? Ah, well then they will, and it will be the worst, the most extreme, the most horrific of its kind!

To test this, in my irresponsible youth, I had once asked Mr. Fernández if he was experiencing any itching under his fingernails.

“OH MY GOD! I COULDN’T SLEEP LAST NIGHT, THE ITCHING WAS SO BAD!”

This is unique in the medical literature, but did I tell him that? Of course not. And so I simply ask—when he is ill—what he is feeling, and I get most of a medical textbook of symptomology. I then discount by half, ands decide what to do.

And so I was in bed, but I was also a gringo, and also a nurse. Or rather, I had been a nurse, so that meant that I was completely capable of making clinical decisions, right? I mean, if I needed to go to the doctor, I would, right? Or maybe the ER? Or maybe call the ambulance?

I did none of these things, because I wasn’t a nurse. I was, instead, as trapped in my pain as the deer is in the headlights, and just as immobile. The nurse walks into the room and takes charge: I was in bed, and no one was in charge.

And what about Mr. Fernández? Well, guess who tends to make the health decisions in our house? Who says, “OK, we gotta get to the hospital!” And remember that good stoicism that the Norwegian-Americans exhibit. Yes, I told him I was in pain, but in his context, if I had been aching, I would have been screaming.

And was it something else? Pain is accompanied by fear, and fear breeds denial. Was I prepared to admit that I should have been taken, siren screaming, to the best hospital on the island? You know, the one where they take the worst car crash victims to?

Reader—are you still there? Because if you are, it’s a miracle. Yes, that you carried on to the (temporary) end, but more…

…that there would have been anyone to write this.    

         

           

A Childhood Remembered

(Note--proceed at your own risk, and I have no idea what this is about....)

There were ghosts everywhere, within and without, waxing and waning in the basement especially, but also under my bed. The ghosts within were better than the ghosts without, and so were much more to be feared. For a ghost within can lurk in the hidden places of your body—in the grape-like sacs of your lungs, the space between cuticle and nail bed, and more terrifyingly, in the synapses of your neurons.

You know them when you see them, the ghost-possessed, the ghost-afflicted, the ghost-ridden. Or perhaps the ghost-drenched, since they had taken me and thrown me into a pit of ghosts, who caressed my face and lulled death songs into my ears.

Yes, one day I would be one of them—I knew that. I too would fade and flare into the minds of the living, sucking at the life sap that surged through their veins, that sap that fueled the rage, excited the loins, made men mad-blind with power and women quiver-faint with love.

Ghosts, so many ghosts in my childhood. There were the basement ghosts: one put his hand on my chest as I was sleeping, in the improvised room that was never finished. The carpet—a cheap remnant from a seedy store. The fireplace—red brick. All very good for ghosts, but it was in the back of the basement, where light was shunned, where the dust bunnies could strangle cats, where every demon on earth came, on starless special nights, to mingle and consort—the back of the basement was the very evilest. Mother, my mother—why did you keep the food you had canned back there, on the scratched-together shelves that, by themselves, would have been a magnet for ghosts? Didn’t you know that that’s how they got into us? Infinitely tiny, they slitthered through the Mason jars, moved through the stalactites of the glass and sand and water. Tiny, yes, but then they grew engorged by sugar and water and all matter of nutrients.

The applesauce you made—it was laced with ghosts. The green beans—not so much. The beets were irresistible, and so full of ghosts that they even came out of our urine, the next day. And so we became ghost-filled.

Filled with ghosts, we moved like ghosts—from the green sofa where my father lay after breakfast, trying to cast the ghosts within into the ghosts without. Mother, in the kitchen, waiting for father to leave, so she could sneak a forbidden cigarette on the porch outside. She crashes the cheap, plastic dishes together, and scolds them into the drainer, the anger and the power tidal-waving out of the kitchen, all the better to wake him. To get him to leave, so she can expel the ghosts in smoke.

We were three, my brothers and I—and all of us had ghosts that crept along the sinews of our muscles, and roller-coasted down our nerves, exploding into the synapses.

Ah, a ghost in a synapse is fearfully bad, for the ghost tears from one nerve ending to the next nerve beginning, and then back again. No other message will get through—and none did. The feet moved, of course, and the mind worked well enough, enough so that I can tell you: Lansing, state capital of Michigan. Principal products of Idaho: potatoes, wheat, and livestock corn.

These facts were important, since they could occupy the spaces not yet afflicted with ghosts. But each day, the ghosts grew more numerous. They flitted through our brain and played Frisbee in our guts, nor did they hide or flee when any ghost removal specialist, sent from the Department of Ghost Affairs, came by. No, the ghosts stayed at the street corners of our minds, leaning against lampposts and jeering.

It may have been that they, our parents, wanted us to have the ghosts—and why shouldn’t they, since they themselves soldiered on with ghosts, while the dreams of power and love slowly greyed—the color of ghosts—and then faded, and then turned into a wisp, and at last ceased even to be a memory. Yes, that can happen, I can tell you—I come from the land of ghosts, and I know.

Miss Cairns

Kindergarten teacher

Died the summer after my Kindergarten year

Miss Warren—first grade teacher.
Room 148.

Referred to only as SHE.

The rest? Ah, the ghosts had gotten to me: the names and the faces and the individual quirks all forgotten now. Shoved away by the ghosts, who only got more numerous as the minutes dragged in those leaden days when the holidays themselves refused to come, and summer was a place like Paris. A place for other people, who would know how to order the café au lait and chat with the waiter. Yes, the holidays kept receding even as you approached them, so that Christmas day was an impossibility, a figment of the mind, something occurring—if at all—just after the Second Coming.

The little desk with the chair attached, and the desk top that comes up and reveals last week’s math homework which you were afraid to hand in, so riddled with mistakes it would be, and now your name is on the blackboard, under the heading of “Pending Homework” so that everybody can see. And whose fault is it? The ghosts, of course, who have come up through the hole in the desk and turned the sevens into threes, and have twisted subtraction into division, and have rolled all the sixes down to the bottom of the page, where they are learning how to invert and become nines.

I should have put tape over that hole, that stupid, meaningless hole at the bottom of the desk—did you know that’s pupitre in French? That’s the kind of fact we hurled against the ghosts, only to have them hurled back at us—why else can I, age 59 and with a broken back (so heavy have the ghosts become), tell you this silly fact, that even the French don’t know?

It was a conspiracy, that’s what it was: they knew that Mindy Peckham (future Harvard alumna) had gotten to the desk first thing in the morning of the very first day of classes, and she had PLUGGED that hole, dammit, so that actually doing homework was unnecessary. All that was needed was to lift the desktop, and poof! The homework assembled itself, and then the grade appeared, and then was entered into the fearsome book (grey, of course—though sometimes red, for failure) that the teacher alone could see. Yes, the grade-book, filled with checks and marks and letters and numbers—all the better for the divination of the calculation of the sum and subtraction of the products of the square roots that would be you, on a June day that will never come and that cannot be escaped. Well, by merely lifting her desktop, the numbers in the grade-book are soaring, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of Midvale Elementary School hitting the highest notes of Joy To The World, which is what Mindy is, and why John Harvard is salivating bronzely from his perch above the slab of marble in Harvard Yard.

But the ghosts had gotten to me already, and befuddled my brain and fogged my vision—so I didn’t, like Mindy Peckham, who would become the spiritual consort of John Harvard—I didn’t see the hole. And then, all the papers and erasers and pencils and books and notebooks got all crammed together, and then the pens exploded, and it became a SURGING MESS, and that’s when the teacher announced—desk inspection!

I can’t open the desk because the ghosts will come out—you can see that, can’t

 you?—and Miss Steensland will look at the ghosts and know: I am soiled and polluted and dirty and filthy and ridden with ghosts. More ghosts than a dog has fleas. More ghosts than a leper has sores. More ghosts than all the piranhas in the Amazon swimming siren songs to all the snakes in the steaming jungle.

Ghosts!