Microserfs (37 page)

She collected her breath and said, "Dan, I'm really sorry to have to tell you this, but there's been an accident."

I said, "An accident?"

She said that she had just spoken with Ethan in Palo Alto. Mom had had a stroke at her swim class, that she was paralyzed, and no one knew what would happen next.

Right there and then, Todd and his parents fell down on their knees and prayed on the Strip, and I wondered if they had scraped their knees in their fall, and I wondered what it was to pray, because it was something I have never learned to do, and all I remember is falling, something I have talked about, and something I was now doing.

plane window

towers

telephone lines

green squares

lights

baggage

The New World dream

The extended arm

The caravan traversing a million miles of prairie

Cross the uncrossable

Make that journey and build the road along the way.

You succeeded at memory-creation beyond all wildest dreams.

Two Weeks Later

TUESDAY, JANUARY 17,1995

Hanshin

Expressway

Stephen Hawking walking through quiet rooms pointing out things you've never seen before.

Mitsukoshi department store, Kobe, Japan, at a 45-degree angle, its contents smashed against walls

Western Washington State, minus Seattle's metro region, is assigned a new area code, 360, effective January 15, 1995

R U Japanese?

thin blood

Nirvana Unplugged

what I wanted

Nikkei Index

Cerebrovascular event

rear-view mirror

Hawaii

what really happened

Embolus

Possible reversibility

Monsterbreaker

Mothermaker

System-beater

Sharkprincess

Skywalker

Kidnapper

Codebreaker

Keypadburner

clot

Godseeker

Braineater

This is the day of days, and so the telling begins.

Karla massaged Mom's back in Mom's new room beside the kitchen, a room that we filled with her rocks and photos and potpourri and Misty. Misty, buffered by dumbness, unaware of the traffic jams in the blood flow of her master's brain: carbon freeways of cracked cement and flattened Camrys and Isuzus and F-lOOs; neural survivors as well as those neural victims, all as yet unretrieved from within the overpasses of her Self. Mom's brain is crashed and inert, her limbs as stationary as lemon tree branches on an August afternoon, occasionally twitching limbs appended by a wedding ring and a Chyx wristband from Amy. Images of a crashed Japan on every channel, the newscaster's voice floating in the background. At least Japan can be rebuilt.

Karla spent the morning massaging the lax folds of Mom's skin. I wonder, is she there? It is what I . . . we have lived with for weeks, we who look into Mom's eyes and say, Hello in there, thinking, We are here. Where are you, Mom? Where did you go? How did you disappear? How did the world steal you? How did you vanish?

Actually, Karla was the first to cross the frontier between words and skin; speech and flesh.

Karla invaded Mom's body. Last week Karla removed her Nikes, took a plastic squeeze bottle of mineral oil from the bathroom, cut it with sesame oil, and crawled atop Mom's prone form on the foldaway rental bed. She told Dad to watch, told him that he was next, and so Dad watched.

Karla dug and sculpted into my mom's body, stretching it as only she knows how to do, willing sensation into her flesh, into her rhomboids, her triceps, her rotor cuffs and spaces where probing generated no reaction; Karla, laser-beaming her faith into the body of this woman.

Last week was the beginning, the Confusion, when everything seemed lost, the image of Mom lying frozen and starved of oxygen in the Rinconada swimming pool haunting us. Ethan meeting us at the hospital, his own skin the color of white fatty bacon embedded with an IV drip; Dusty and Lindsay, Dusty sucking in her breath with fear, and turning her head from ours, then returning her gaze and offering us Lindsay as consolation.

There had been discussions, a prognosis, pamphlets and counselors, workshops and experts. Mom's functions may one day be complete and may be one day partial, but as of today there's nothing but the twitches and the knowledge that fear is locked inside the body. Her eyes can be opened and closed, but not enough to semaphore messages. She's all wired up and gizmo'ed; her outside looks like the inside of a Bell switchbox.

What is her side of the story? The password has been deleted.

Karla would take Dad's hand over the last week and make it touch Mom, saying, "She is there and she has never left."

And it was Karla who started us talking to Mom, Mom's eyes fishy, blank, lost and found, requiring an act of faith to presuppose vivid interior dimensions still intact. Karla who made me stare into these faraway eyes and say, Speak to her, Dan: She can hear you and how can you not look into these eyes that once loved you when you were a baby, and not tell her of your day. Talk to her, Dan: tell her . . . today was a day like any other day. We worked. We coded. Our product is doing well, and isn't that just fine?

And so I told Mom these things.

And so every day, I hold the hand that once held me, so long ago.

And Karla gently guided Dad up onto the foldaway, saying, Mr. Underwood, roll up your sleeves. Mr. Underwood, your wife is still here, and she has never needed you more.

And there's Bug, reading Sunday's color comics to Mom, trying hard to make The Lockhorns sound funny, then saying to his unresponsive audience, "Oh, Mrs. Underwood, I understand your reaction completely. It's like I'm reading 1970s cocktail napkins out loud to you. I must admit, I've never liked this strip," and then discussing the politics of syndication, and which comic strips he finds unfunny: The Family Circus, Peanuts, Ziggy, Garfield, and Sally Forth. He's actually more animated than he is in conversations with us.

There is the image of Amy telling rude jokes to Mom and Michael trying to curb the ribaldry, but being swept away by the filth, and Michael responding with Pentium jokes.

There is Susan, washing and cutting my Mom's hair, saying, "You'll look just like Mary Tyler Moore, Mrs. U. You'll be a doll," and discussing new postings on the Chyx page.

There is Ethan, Ethan on the brink of erasure himself, saying, "Well, Mrs. U, who'd have thought that I'd be the one to monitor you. Don't tell me

it isn't funny. Because it is, and you know it. I'd change your bandages for you, but you don't have any and that's a big issue here."

There are Dusty and Todd, demonstrating leg-stretching exercises, discussing physiotherapy and how to keep her muscles in tone for the day they once again receive their commands.

And there is Abe, who brought in a tub of money, a tub full of coins, and said, "Time to sort some change, Mrs. U. Not much fun for you, but I'll try and be talkative while I sort . . . oh look . . . it's a peso. Woo!"

Last week there was a jolt. Last week Karla said, "You have to go further, Dan, you have to hold her body."

I looked at Mom's body - so long in not holding - and I thought of families who have had to watch a member die slowly and who have said all that can possibly be said to each other - and so all that remains is for them to sit and lie there and nitpick over trivialities or talk about what's on TV - and so I held Mom's body, and told her how my day had gone. I talked about stoplights on Camino Real, line-ups at Fry's, rude telephone operators, traffic on the 101, the price of cheese singles at Costco.

This afternoon, this afternoon of the day of days.

I, in this mood where this earthly kingdom was beautiful in spite of life's cruel bite, took the CalTrain and BART over to Oakland just to get out of the house, to thwart cabin fever. Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to encourage that amnesia.

Along a roadside I saw an unwound cassette tape, its brown lines shimmying in the sun - sound converted to light. I felt a warm wind's gust on the Oakland BART platform. I suddenly wanted to be home, to be with my family, my friends.

I was met by Michael, who opened the front door of the house. He told me about a story he had once seen on the news, a story about a boy with cerebral palsy who had been hooked up to a computer, and the first thing he said, when they asked him what he would like to do, was "to be a pilot."

Michael said to me, "It got me thinking, that maybe your mother could be linked into a computer, too, and maybe the touch of her fingers could be connected to a keypad. So then she could speak to us." And then he saw my face and said, "She could speak to you, Dan. I've been doing some reading on the subject."

We entered the kitchen, where Bug and Amy were discussing an idea of Bug's, that "humans don't exist as actual individual 'selves' - rather, there is only the 'probability' of you being you at any given moment. While you're alive and healthy, the probability remains pretty high, but when you're sick or when you're old, the probability of you being yourself shrinks. The chance of your 'being all there' becomes less and less. When you die, the probability of being 'you' drops to zero."

Amy saw me and said, "Close your eyes right now, this very instant. Try to remember the shirt you're wearing."

I tried, and couldn't remember.

She said it would probably take me a lot longer than I'd think. "It's a cruel trick of nature that personal memory seems to be the first to go. You'll remember Alka-Seltzer long past the point where you've forgotten your children."

She then said to me, "Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can't. The brain doesn't process negatives."

I walked onto the back patio, and looked over Silicon Valley, clear, but vanishing into a late afternoon fog, unexpected, fanning in from the west. Karla was wearing a sweater, and her breath was like the swimming pool's wafting heat, there in the coolness. I told her that it was always in the fall when the crops were in, that the wars were called.

She said to me, "We all fall down some day. We all fall down. You've fallen and we'll all pick each other up."

In the distance I saw the Contra Costa Mountains, and their silhouette was blurred as I confused the mountains for clouds, and Karla dried my eyes with fallen leaves and her sweater's hem. I told Karla about a Lego TV commercial I saw twenty years ago . . . a yellow castle and the camera went higher and higher and higher and the castle never ended. She said she had seen it, too.

Dad came by with Misty, and we all went for a walk. Down La Cresta we went, and Dad had brought along the electric garage-door opener, and we pushed its red ridged button, randomly trying to open strangers' doors.

When we returned to the house, my friends were gathered around Mom, in front of a monitor, their faces lit sky blue; they had forgotten to turn on the lights in the kitchen. Mom's body was upheld by Bug and Abe inside a kitchen chair, with Michael clasping her arms. On the screen, in 36 point Helvetica on the screen of a Mac Classic were written the words:

i am here

Dad caressed Mom's forehead and said, "We're here, too, honey." He said, "Michael, can she speak . . ."

Michael put his arms over Mom's arms, his fingers upon her fingers and assisted her hands above the keyboard. Dad said, "Honey, can you hear us?"

yes

He said to her, "Honey, how are you? How do you feel?"

;=)

Michael broke in. He said, "Mr. Underwood, ask your wife a question that only she and you would know the answer to. Make me sure that this isn't me doing the talking."

Dad asked, "Honey, what was your name for me, when we went on our honeymoon on Mt. Hood. Can you remember?"

There was a pause and a word emerged:

reindeer

Dad collapsed and cried and fell to his knees at Mom's feet and Michael said, "Let's push the caps-lock button. Capitals make easier words; consider license plates. You're a State of California vanity license plate now, Mrs. U."

The caps were locked and the point size lowered. The fingers tapped:

BEEP BEEP

Dad said, "Tell us how you feel . . . tell us what we can do . . ." The fingers tapped:

I FEEL U

I cut through the crowd. I said, "Mom, Mom . . . tell me it's you. Tell me something I never liked in my lunch bag at school . . . " The fingers tapped:

PNUT BUTR

Oh, to speak with the lost! Karla broke in and said, "Mrs. U., our massage . . . is it okay? Is it helping you?"

The fingers tapped:

GR8

I LK MY BDY

Karla looked at the words and, hesitating a second, declared, "I like my body now, too, Mrs. U."

Mom's assisted hands tapped out:

MY DOTTR

Karla lost it and started to cry, and then, well, I started to cry. And then Dad, and then, well, everybody, and at the center of it all was Mom, part woman/part machine, emanating blue Macintosh light.

Joy lapsed into silliness lapsed into relief and cocktails.

The kitchen lights went on. Amy said, "This is so first-contact!" Messages lost became messages found:

MIST'Z OVER ETING

DAN CT UR HAIR

GTTNG BETR

LUV U ALL

Here it is: Mom speaking like a license plate . . . like the lyrics to a Prince song . . . like a page without vowels . . . like encryption. All of my messing around with words last year and now, well . . . it's real life.

After an hour, the message, GR8LY TIRED came onto the screen and Dad said it was time to wrap it up for now. It was dark, and the fireplace had been lit by Todd. Amy came in with a pile of old horse blankets and flashlights and a set of pen-size laser pointers from last Christmas, and said, Michael . . . Dan . . . Susan . . . whoever, help me move the couch out beside the pool.