Elegy on Kinderklavier (25 page)

We'd been married for two years when Charlie's body began to change. Up until that point, she had looked more or less like she had the night we first met; if anything, she'd lost weight, seemed to have become younger somehow. In the eighteen months between our first date and our wedding, she had grown more and more animated, her neural circuits blinking faster and faster, her hair becoming relaxed
and silken, her skin smooth and clear, full of color. Most days during our time together in college, I dropped her off in her study room, an abandoned office in the graduate mathematics department (the office where, lost in her depression the year before, she'd spent months of long afternoons lying flat on top of her big desk, asleep), only to return after class to find the big chalkboard that dominated one wall filled with complex systems of numbers, symbols, and signs. By the time we were both graduating, Charlie had won a prestigious mathematics prize from an international science organization for her thesis work, which turned out to be the hypothetical solution to a problem that had stood unsolved for seventy-five years. This award came with a large cash award, but in order for it to be granted the judges' committee wanted a fuller work, a long paper to be peer-reviewed, a more elaborate proof.

We moved that fall after graduation to Attica, Missouri, home of Attica State University, which had offered Charlie a fellowship with a large stipend in order for her to complete her work on the proof under their auspices. It was a good university—one of those tiny schools with a handful of highly specialized faculties, largely supported by very specific government or corporate grants for research or innovation. The only catch was that we had to move to Attica, Missouri.

It was a very small town in the southeast corner of the state, with four restaurants, a mall, and one movie theater whose reels always seemed to be slightly damaged. I was still a little in shock that for all my worrying about what we would do after graduation (what job I could get with my literature major, how we would ever be able to start paying off our student loans in six months, when they began to become due) it was Charlie—Charlie who preferred not to talk about a “careerist future,” Charlie who seemed to just drift forward in her academic life with the fickleness and detachment of a child—who ended up with the good job, the good paycheck.

Because of the low rent in town, we managed to find a small house with new fixtures and a room in the half-finished basement that Charlie, in a gesture of support, agreed could be my “office.” We took walks to the nearby city park, which had a duck pond. I spent the days staring at my computer during the hours I was supposed to be working on a novel. Charlie called it our “starter town.” If we can learn to be married here, she often said, we can be married anywhere. When I complained about things like the lack of culture in the area or the fact that the nearest bookstore was forty minutes away, she tsked and smiled, shaking her head, not looking at me. “The writer in exile,” she said.

What does one remember of the collection of selves one must inevitably prove to be to sustain a marriage over the years? The story of our time in Attica, Missouri (and even that of the years afterward, in Iowa) is so tired to me, so oft-repeated and reduced down into the kind of cocktail party summary that proves to be so startlingly effective that you eventually forget that the things which made the experience meaningful are exactly what you now excise, all the details that would most likely matter to no one else but you.

I remember spending those two years marooned in small-town Missouri learning and relearning Charlie's body, falling in love over and over with the angularity of her jawline as it drew close to me in the morning just before she left for work, with the pulsing, contracting spasms around my fingers as she orgasmed when I went down on her. There always seemed to be something to learn. I remember leaping, shoeless, from our wooden stoop onto the hood of Charlie's moving car to keep her from driving away after a particularly bad fight. Our fights were not even saved by being interesting, or original, and Charlie was always leaving. She'd come back a few hours later, never saying anything about where she'd gone, and be silent until she'd slept, after which it would be like it never happened. We
thought we were learning how to be married. “Think of us living here,” Charlie said, “as performance art.”

Then, of course, came the things not so easily protected from the logic of narrative memory, from the construction of theories and psychology. I remember these things helplessly, and with no small amount of reluctance. An awkward visit in the middle of the day from a university administrator. A call from a colleague, urging me to come to Charlie's office, where she had locked herself inside, and the whispered conversation that followed through the wood of the door, where I could feel her just on the other side, crying softly.

Then the day before she was to present the first half of her paper at a regional mathematics conference in Kansas City, she didn't come home from work. At first I assumed that Charlie was punishing me for some perceived slight, perhaps going out for a celebratory dinner with some of her research assistants without telling or inviting me, and then, as it got later into the night, I thought that maybe she'd left early for the conference, gotten the dates messed up. It wasn't until I pulled into the highway rest stop and saw her sitting there on a bench with a state trooper on either side of her, one of whom must've been the voice on the phone a few hours earlier telling me my wife had been found wandering the shoulder “confused,” that I even believed it wasn't a joke. And I'll admit that what I thought of on the ride back was the shame, the humiliation of walking toward them, of claiming Charlie, who looked so happy and surprised to see me (looking at me with, unmistakably, the wonder of a child) that it utterly broke my fucking heart.

The thought of Charlie talking to a therapist—Charlie, who, when I pressed her, often gave a survey-course-in-miniature over Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and nihilism as well as depression psychology, and applicable ontology, not to mention the medical science and epistemological implications of antidepressant, antipsychotic, or
mood-stabilizing medication—was so ridiculous that I couldn't even bring myself to demand it. The next day we got halfway to a local therapy office before I pulled the car over to the side of the road and looked out over all that blank snow and punched the steering wheel over and over again, the ancient horn bleating ridiculously. This was Charlie, whose soft, pale flesh of thigh and gluteus and back pressed into my nuzzling body in bed each night and fell asleep that way, in that hold; Charlie, who stood on Saturday mornings with her back to me in the kitchen, in T-shirt and underwear, with one hip cocked, foot turned out to the side, her legs seeming oddly short and thick in the blue light. This was my wife. I knew her.

She did not go back to work. When I went to collect her things from the office, I found the room almost completely bare.

Charlie ended up going to a psychiatrist by herself, of her own accord. In the months we spent holed up in the house, waiting for our savings from the fellowship to run out, we made rules to get through the days.

Mathematics was the great enemy, it seemed, and one rule was that Charlie was no longer to work with numbers, to do any kind of math at all. Somewhere along the line, Charlie told me during those months, she'd become lost in the world of digits and signs, symbols and systems. She tried, as we took walks down to the duck pond, to explain, to point to a small group of children and talk about the systems of equations that could describe each of their forms and chances, about the algorithms that they—their human selves—made up, the least of which could be found out, could describe simultaneously their fetal development as well as their choices in the game they played as they ran past us, and how this was essentially the same math that can be used to describe the shape of the universe.

Sometimes, when neither of us had spoken for a while as we lounged around the house or went for groceries, Charlie would
speak differently, trying to reach into my world. “Imagine a forest where all the trees are made up of numbers,” she said. “Imagine you have to build a boat out of their boughs.” There at the end of her work, she'd begun to think of the collections of numbers and symbols as little machines, and in the single box I filled with the contents of her desk's drawers from the office, there were hundreds of white sheets, each with a small ink drawing of withered, maimed numerals that tangled together to make sinister-looking spiders, tractors, airplanes, landscapes, and cars.

Charlie seemed embarrassed by the diagnosis of severe manic depression her therapist-psychiatrist team came up with and, as if to show its inaccuracy, she refused to display any of the classic side effects; she did not gain a pound, and if anything her sex drive became more consistent, on the whole more lively, spurred by our boredom. Every third weekend our mothers would visit and I'd talk to them while they sat with Charlie in the living room, both of them eyeing Charlie uneasily, as if something unexpected might happen at any moment.

Of course, the fellowship dried up and the promise of the cash prize receded, but after a while it seemed to us just a small part of all the money we would never have. I'd made a late application to several creative writing schools, and we agreed to move wherever I got in. That summer, after twenty months in Attica, Missouri, we celebrated our second anniversary, and two weeks later moved to Iowa, for me to go back to school, and us to have an honest restart.

It was easy to start over in Iowa, to pretend that the fever dream of our small town psychosis had simply never occurred. Charlie had a stable summer, and took a lot of interest in the new house. In essence, we switched roles: now I had the fellowship, now she was the one with the office in the finished basement, and the free time to pursue whatever she felt like. And she went out of her way
to assume the kind of normalcy we had never really had in Attica; now she found obscure apple orchards in the farmland around Iowa City, planned whole day trips as if they were apologies. And it was in Iowa City that I first began to notice the changes in her body.

Charlie's breasts and ass deflated slightly, descending from their nubile perches just a little bit, settling in comfortably to the hold of a mature body that no longer needed the taut energy of lingering adolescence. The skin beneath the complicated eye makeup that she no longer wore became puffy in the mornings, making her eyes reassuring in their calmness. And it was only then—as if to prove even further her stability and optimism, as if to finally regain our purchase on the kind of marital story we had once believed ourselves to be a part of—that Charlie began talking about wanting to have a baby.

•

I woke up this morning because an alarm on one of Haim's screens was going off. It was his oxygen levels, which I knew by the alarm's tone, and by the time I could get my eyes unblurred they were down in the 80s. A nurse appeared in the doorway, and together we turned and looked at Haim, who was trying to roll back and forth, his pupils wide, eyes glazed. When we went to him, he grunted and looked wildly up into our faces in confusion, recognizing neither of us.

Last night, after we came back from Ava's room and went to bed, Haim had to get up three times to vomit. In between he moaned quietly and complained about his head hurting. At two in the morning I called the doctor who is overseeing Haim's treatment at his home number, and he said some things I was already thinking about possible increased cranial pressure.

The nurse asked him where he was and who we were, and Haim still didn't seem able to answer. Two more nurses and our doctor showed up. By this time I was standing nearly in the hallway. You learn to stay out of the way. “He's unresponsive,” I heard the doctor say to someone, and then a nurse turned around to tell me we were going to the PICU.

In the PICU I really did stand out in the hallway, watching through the room's big corridor-side window, as if keeping a couple feet outside of the room would make it impossible for anything too serious to happen inside. I could just barely see part of Haim's chest through all the nurses' bodies and medical detritus around him—its rise and fall was almost imperceptible, one of those foci that make you distrust your eyes and the world in front of you. I counted his breaths. In two minutes he'd breathed ten or eleven times, and I stood there thinking
which one was it, ten or eleven, ten or eleven,
until they went to intubate him and his entire pudgy body began to strain violently, and I stepped back inside.

At one point a screen high above Haim's bed began beeping and flashing and, as if in concert, the doctor and all of the nurses stopped and looked up at it, in silence, just for a moment. This was his blood pressure skyrocketing. Then they all began doing things with an even more frenetic fervor. I could see the doctor leaning down over Haim's face, pulling open his eyelids. Haim was having a seizure, I would be told later. The doctor would say later that he'd never seen a child's pupils so big, as if there were no irises, as if they were not eyes at all.

There are no small emergencies, of course. There are no close calls. For Haim, being alive at all is a close call, a chance escape. This is what this time is now, as I'm sitting here in his room in the PICU watching the sun set over the Thames and the little boats nodding against the pier—a gift of unknown providence, a chance only to escape one kind of waiting for another.

They've just a few minutes ago brought back the test results from earlier today; a resident explained them, occasionally glancing up at me and then at Haim's still, unconscious body, like he might be listening. Haim's sodium level is now at 123; since it was at 134 earlier in the day, a sudden drop seems to be the key medical clue. The numbers themselves (and all the infinite scales they assemble) are so arbitrary that, even now that I actually understand them, I often imagine, half sleepless, that they should bypass their medical literality (which means nothing to a parent anyway) and reach instead to a description that could approximate the level of emotion the numbers should be communicating. For instance, the resident could have said that the amount of sodium in Haim's body dropped from the amount of salt one might cup with two child-sized hands to the amount one might cradle in one child-sized palm, and, moreover, that it had not been lost slowly but all at once, as if the hands had been parted unexpectedly, and that Haim lying there now is desperately trying to keep his little damp palmful of salt from blowing away in the bodily winds that are threatening to carry him right out of this room, this night, this tired conversation. A test result like that might mean something to me.