Amp'd (2 page)

“Why, what could possibly slow me down?” Dad shrugs, staring at my throat, inches from my eyes but miles away. I feel a flush of shame for pressing him. “I'll be okay.”

“You go first. In case of the lunatics who broke in.”

“
Walked
in,” I correct him, but really, I know he's sending me up first so he can break my fall with his already broken body if I slip.

The first thing you learn about missing an arm is not the obvious—all the things you can't do without it. It's the havoc it plays on your balance, like a glass suddenly removed from a passing waiter's crowded tray that causes the rest to tumble to the floor. The simple act of standing up is difficult, and one lone arm swinging freely is a pendulum trying to tip you over. (And just try walking without swinging your arms.) Gripping the railing to pull myself upward, I can at least enjoy a momentary steadiness against the permanent imbalance of the one-armed.

When my head breaches the surface I'm surprised by what I find: it's actually quite livable, considering the haste with which it must have been thrown together. First of all, it's cleaner than any other room in the house, and freshly painted, although apparently the only paint handy was garden-shed green. Mine will be the dreams of a man sleeping inside a martini olive. Dad's unfurled a plush little area rug over the wooden boards that give ever so slightly under every creaking step, and he's somehow managed to get a fold-out couch up here. (I imagine ropes and pulleys and exasperated deliverymen suffering under Dad's shouted direction from the ground, perhaps having to replace a broken window afterward.) He's also hung a vintage black-light poster belonging to my older sister, Jackie, serializing in six panels the melting face of a drugged cartoon character and proclaiming, “Stoned Agin.” Finally, he's taken all the books I remember strewn in precarious stacks about the house and organized them in a short bookshelf that runs the length of the attic, adding one disturbing touch: my old sports trophies from school and summer camp.

“We did the best we could.”

“‘We'?”

“Your mother helped. And her boyfriend. He's a fireman.” Good God, Mom's dating a fireman. As if he could read my thoughts, Dad continues, “She saw him on one of those charity calendars,
Hot and Hunky,
or some such thing. Went after him like a foxhound. He never really stood a chance.”

“How old—”

“He's a lot younger. But your mother is a decade younger than me, so if you ask her, it's all the same. But I wouldn't advise asking her.”

“Do they live—”

“Let's have an early dinner, I'm pretty beat from the drive.” Dad trundles back to the attic stairs and submerges with the authority of a U-boat commander, safe again beneath the surface where the onrushing torrent of emotions swirls around him but cannot touch him, secure in his dry, airtight vessel.

I'm left alone in the attic, where the junkyard of a life is supposed to accumulate. Instead, I'm the remnant of a broken thing, stored here for spare parts should they prove useful at a later date before leaving the rest of me out by the curb. I'm nearly forty, divorced, woefully out of shape, clinically depressed, on “sabbatical” from my job as a high school teacher, alone, living in the attic of my father's house, one-armed. That last label, “one-armed,” now punctuates every description that will ever define me, an exclamation point to all that preceded—a litany of life's disappointments—adding a final, sad coda to the person I once was.

Suddenly, I need to lie down.

*   *   *

In my dreams I imagine my missing arm looking down on me from the afterlife of dismembered limbs—legs lost to cancer, feet to crushing accidents, toes to frostbite, fingers, hands, and yes, arms. The arm watches and knows,
He's fucked. This is not a guy who faces down hardship and emerges a better, fuller person. Those things that don't kill him do not make him stronger; they just further diminish him over time, until he disappears.

 

EXCEPTIONALS

Randy Pausch was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who learned in September of 2006 that he had terminal pancreatic cancer. A year later, he gave a talk at CMU entitled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” an inspirational monologue of life lessons in the face of certain death. It went viral on YouTube, getting eighteen million views and counting. (But, I'll point out, fewer than hundreds of music videos, a thigh massage instructional, something called “Charlie Bit My Finger,” and the on-air meltdown of a beauty pageant contestant.) Pausch's lecture was turned into a bestselling book, and he became an inspiration to anyone struggling with a terminal illness, and an exemplar of human bravery.

But the rest of us are not like Randy Pausch. That's why we call him and others like him
exceptional,
because they are the
exception;
the rest of us are not brave or strong or fearless—we are not fighters against all odds, preferring the odds to be with us rather than against. We don't welcome the challenge of adversity but run from it, and the only struggle we offer when it catches us is to weep and flail and cry out for it not to be so.

We are not Warren Macdonald, a double-leg amputee who managed to summit Kilimanjaro in 2003, or Aron Ralston, whose self-inflicted loss of his lower arm saved him from certain death and freed him to pursue life as a one-handed adventurer. We are not Sir Douglas Bader, who lost both legs in a 1931 plane crash only to lead an RAF squadron during World War II; or Basque Naval midshipman Blas de Lezo y Olavarrieta who, in the early eighteenth century, lost his left leg from a cannon shot, his left eye in defense of Toulon, and his right arm in the siege of Barcelona, yet subsequently captured eleven enemy British ships.

We are not Franklin Roosevelt, who overcame crippling polio to become president, or Stephen Hawking, whose mind would not be shackled by the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that claimed his body. We are not Helen Keller, or Randy Fucking Pausch. We aren't even Cher, with dyslexia.

The rest of us, when our bodies are broken, break along with it. And these heroic exceptions with their incredible ability to rise above the most awful circumstances imaginable just make us look bad.

 

MORNING

Mornings are the worst. The disorientation of unfamiliar surroundings since the hospital—then ITCH, and now the attic—is compounded by hours of sleep during which the pain meds wear off, and the stinging realization, before I even open my eyes, that my arm is
gone.
Mornings are made worse by the dream interrupted in which, regardless of whether I am being chased by dogs, losing teeth, flying, drowning, or having sex with a woman I never met, I am always whole.

I start the day with a V
2
boost (Vicodin and Valium), and Dad and I are in the car on the way to breakfast before the wooziness overtakes me. I'm not thrilled to be up and out in the world, especially a world as small as this one. It's still the place where I grew up; the only unfamiliar thing here is me, the temporary blemish of an angry pimple.

The din on the radio recedes behind the shimmering tinnitus that recurs at irregular intervals like visits from the neighbor's cat. But then a woman's voice cuts through the ringing—it's sweet, sultry, smart, and belongs to the station's science reporter. Her name is Sunny Lee and her show, ninety-second interstitials of fun science fact, is called
The Sunny Side
:

Think your shiny new car's GPS is sophisticated? Well, it's got nothing on this tiny traveler: the ant! Foraging ants travel distances up to seven hundred feet from their nests—which may not seem like much to you and me, but that's one giant leap for ant-kind. So how do they find their way back to the colony? The same way a mom finds her teenage boy's gym clothes: scent trails! Ants leave a distinctive odor allowing them to find their way back, even in the dark.

But what if the ant in question is, say, all stuffed up with a head cold? Ants are also visually inclined, and some navigate using a combination of physical landmarks and the position of the sun, while others can detect Earth's magnetic field. And some even measure distance with an internal pedometer that actually counts their steps! Amazing! And all this time you thought they were just … clairvoy-ANT. This is Sunny Lee, for
The Sunny Side.

Over the coming days and weeks Sunny Lee will tell me things I never knew, about the speed of falling raindrops, the peripheral vision of hammerhead sharks, the torque of a spun pizza. By the time we pull up to the Four Corners Diner, I'm in love with her.

Although located at an unusual intersection of
five
corners, the Four Corners seems to have been named in deliberate denial of the unusual in favor of the mundane. Sometime after my departure from Paris, this became Dad's ritualistic breakfast place. For someone who expresses incredulity at the concept of “eating out” (“Why would I pay someone to cook me a steak? I can cook my own steak. And seven dollars for a beer—you can buy the whole six-pack for that.”), Dad has embraced breakfast here with an enthusiasm usually reserved for a child hearing the jingling approach of an ice-cream truck. I could go ahead and point out that eggs cost about a dime apiece or that for the price of three or four cups of coffee he could buy himself an entire one-pound can, but he would disregard both like my missing limb. What Dad enjoyed about breakfast out was the camaraderie, the sheer comfort of the familiar.

All of which flee upon our arrival like birds.

Heads turn and conversation stops. Dad's oldest friend, Fred Weber, is frozen, a forkful of omelet poised to enter his mouth. Behind the counter Michelle's attention is wrenched from the act of refilling a coffee mug, but it doesn't matter because, I swear, the coffee itself has stopped pouring midstream. Even the kitchen roaches have petrified midscurry. The only movement in the room belongs to hastily averted eyes, as anything and everything—the food on the plates, the speckles in the Formica tabletops, the lint on George Jones's sleeve, the faded painting on the wall (a boat in a Venice canal, which had adorned the wall unnoticed for decades until this moment)—suddenly demand attention.

Dad slides into a booth and gestures for me to sit across from him and then disappears behind his newspaper. It would be very still and quiet here were it not for the ringing in my ears. By the time breakfast comes (me: mushroom egg-white omelet; Dad: Lumberjack Special, despite no previous lumberjacking experience), things have resumed some degree of normalcy. Michelle sprays the room with toothy smiles, and Mr. Weber, in full attorney mode, orates at a decibel made necessary by his failing hearing, as coffee flows and roaches scurry once more. Dad circulates among his neighbors and occasionally recalls me to them—“You remember Aaron”—and I nod from the table, waving with my good hand lest I appear double-amputeed.

“You look good,” Michelle flirts, as she once did with the handsome teenager I used to be, and I wish I could muster a flattering lie in return.

“He lost weight!” Mr. Weber shouts from his table, and as the room is now forced to ponder what an arm might weigh, silence reigns once more and George Jones returns his attention to the problematic lint on his sleeve.

Michelle presents a rhetorical diversion—“More coffee?”—the space between offer and delivery too narrow for refusal. This is my third cup, and anyone here longer than I've been has surely suffered their fifth or sixth. It's astounding our sleepy little hamlet isn't rife with insomnia.

Dad slips back into the booth across from me. “How was that omelet?”

“Well, you know you can't make one without breaking a few eggs.”

“Why does it cost more for egg whites? You're getting less; they take out the yolks.”

(That's more like it, Dad.)

“I wonder what they do with the yolks,” he ponders.

“I think they just pour them over the Lumberjack Special.”

Dad pokes at the nub of a sausage link on his plate as if trying to provoke a reaction. “Have you thought about what you're going to do?”

“I'm going to finish my breakfast. Then, there will be lunch.”

“I mean when you're feeling fit again.”

“I'm not sure ‘fit' is what I'll be feeling, but whatever it is, I'll only be feeling it with one hand.”

“You planning on going back to that fancy high school?” he asks as the sausage squirms away from his fork.

Any return to the life I knew seems so improbable, especially my previous position teaching social studies to the profoundly disinterested. Shaking off the discomfort of commanding a room's attention had taken my entire first semester as a teacher, and I'm loath to return to face the scrutiny of teenaged eyes riveted to the place where my arm used to be. Or to manage its awkward opposite—the averted eyes and frozen smiles of fellow teachers cornered in the break room (not to mention the one-armed wrangling of coffee and stale doughnuts).

“It's not fancy,” I deflect Dad's notion. “We have the same challenges any high school faces in trying to prepare kids for a future in a hazardous world. We're like NASA, training astronauts for a mission to Mars that we know can only end badly.”

And here we are, in our own future of sorts: this moment where all the events and circumstances of our lives have led, here at the Four Corners where Dad asks me what my plans are to find local work and my ears begin to ring some more. I excuse myself and head to the bathroom, momentarily pulled to one side by the heaviness of my arm and the equilibrium-fucking combination of V
2
. Eyes veer from my path and avoid my clumsy trail, and as the bathroom door snaps shut behind me I imagine the rush from the diner to escape the awkwardness of my return. I make it to the toilet before throwing up breakfast, consoled at least that my drug dosage has already been absorbed into my bloodstream and cannot be so easily expelled.