My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (2 page)

It was Sarah who had found me at the emergency room that morning, told them she was my mother, and they let her through. Sarah is thirteen years older than me and should not be able to pass for my mother, but this is an emergency room in downtown Seattle in the middle of the night, so they're accustomed to odd family engagements, even the blatantly incestuous, as would have been our case.

“Can you do this?” she asks me now, as I'm stumbling along and beginning to breathe shallowly, quickly, in fear. More fear. People are going about their business, crossing the street against the light, drivers avoiding them and making abrupt turns, people meandering on an otherwise unexceptional February weekday, and my blood is pumping with cortisol, stress hormones, and anxiety, and I am feeling very much like I want to run again, and hide again, and get underground again, and pull the door shut behind me. Feeling that I don't belong here, and that they will all find that out at once, point at me and burn me out in a “scorched earth” policy, where the herd weeds out the weakest, the one who broke and gave up, and they all turn on that one, and offer him up for the survival of the whole.

“No,” I say to Sarah. “I don't feel like I'm a part of this anymore.” How do these people function, day to day? How do they step up onto a bus, ride a bike to work, shop for groceries when at any minute their foundation could be pulled out from under? They slip through life like people who have not experienced horror, move around like their closest loved one did not die horribly just a few days ago, like their children are not at the mercy of the closest maniac with a rifle and low self-esteem, like nature is not out to kill them and their families and they have many layers of protection between abject terror and their lattes.

“You feel ‘other' to yourself,” Sarah says, in the way that she has. Sarah can be both wholly sympathetic and the detached observer. I couldn't understand or trust this about her when we first started our twice-weekly walks around Greenlake, when we'd simply talk the whole length and blather on, like new mothers in the mother's ghetto that the three-mile park tends to be. It was a friendship like I had never before experienced. I'd met her at a time when Steph and I were having trouble, but there was no chemistry between Sarah and me, we told ourselves. I told myself. We weren't age-appropriate; I didn't want to do that anymore. We'd both found the other incredibly interesting and talked ourselves into thinking it was only friendship. That was all.

Sarah was quoting a sentiment from Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher. She was a professor of philosophy at the Jesuit university here, in Seattle, and had become my one guiding star in this darkest night, an Archimedean point of truth, when all the craziness was swirling around it. She was the one thing I believed to be consistently right, and I'm not sure why, or why I was convinced of it. I needed someone to trust and she happened to be there, had been there a few times previously.

Sarah was also fond of repeating, “Everything changes in the instant,” from Joan Didion's seminal work,
The Year of Magical Thinking
, which Didion wrote after she lost her husband and her daughter in the same year, and catalogued her recovery in a sort of autonomic function of writing. Everything had changed, for Steph and me, in the instant, and I was slow to understand how comprehensive that term
everything
really was. Sarah had purchased a copy of the book for me, a week after Steph's accident. I couldn't get past the first hundred pages, couldn't concentrate anymore, focus on words. I couldn't put three thoughts together. But Didion's pain had been akin to my pain: We had both suffered profoundly. Though Didion had not nicked at her soul, like I had. Didion had support, had people around her. Didion had not given up, acted out in desperation, decided she could take no more.

I did. And that's why Sarah found me that morning in the dark emergency unit, alone, sitting upright like Steph, with stitches in my wrist, a deadened feeling up through my left arm and into my heart, wondering how the hell I ended up there, with security guards standing outside my door.

When they wake you, those early morning calls never really tell you they're about to change your life.

Cell phones have changed the late night phone call; it was once far more dramatic when your bedside telephone started clamoring for attention at 2:00 a.m. You were naturally alarmed, not simply because of the volume but because the decorum was different. Now, when your phone buzzes in the dead of night, it can be anything from an errant dial or a text message from someone who expects you to have your phone on silent, to your kid letting you know he or she will be late: Don't worry.

I've had two of these phone calls that changed my life.

“Flashbulb memories,” they're called. What's interesting about both is that neither raised any particular alarm when I received them, when they made my cell phone glow blue in the dark of my bedroom. I was alone each time, the first at 4:25 a.m. on March 17, 2007, the night my younger brother, Derek, an ostensible student at the University of Texas at Austin, drank so much liquor he blacked out and collapsed backward, like a felled pine, and broke his fall with the back of his head.

The call came some hours later from Robert, my mother's second husband, his voice teeming with controlled hysteria as he drove my catatonic mother west from Houston at top speed. I began to comprehend, as I was coming awake, what he was telling me, as he yelled over the cell line as if he was declaring testimony in a courtroom, at 4:25 a.m. in Seattle, 6:25 a.m. in Texas.

“June, this is Robert,” he said. “I'm calling for your mother, Velva. Derek had an accident in Austin. He's in the hospital there, and we're on our way now. I've called your sisters and Dan, and we're all going to meet at the hospital in Austin. He's still alive but they say it's serious and they want your mother there. He's going to have surgery in the next hour. That's all we know right now. We should be there in two hours.”

I remember hearing his voice, him shouting over the sound of a stressed engine and calling me “June,” my nickname within the family, and in my memory of this moment, I felt like I could hear the sound of the Texas wind roaring by, but that's likely false since there hasn't been an open automobile window in Texas since the late 1980s. But I do know that I didn't hear a word from my mother, who I imagined was in a collapsed bundle in the passenger seat, crying. I know my mother, and I know she was crying.

And so I didn't ask Robert anything. I didn't have a reaction, because what I was hearing was impossible.

It had never occurred to me that anyone in my family could die. Never. Or, not yet.

I know how that sounds, but until that moment, it was true. Certainly not the youngest, certainly not Derek. And it was that line, that tone in Robert's voice when he said, “He's still alive, but they say it's serious . . .” How that means so much more than what it says, even then.

I think my response to Robert was, “All right, call me when you know more.” I shouted it over the cell phone, like tin cans attached with string over five states.

And then I was alone, in my apartment three thousand miles away, sitting on the edge of my bed, the light around me already changing and my mind going nova with the idea that I would never again speak to my lost little brother, who died without redemption.

The second early morning phone call that changed my life came about two and a half years later, at 2:24 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

It's funny how you remember specifics: Your awareness opens up to twice its size to absorb detail when mortality is in the air. It was mid-December, 2009.

For this one, I was awake. I had developed a habit of playing fifteen or twenty minutes of Jim Dale reading one of the Harry Potter series every night before I went to sleep, and then also when I'd awaken during the night, which happened often, as I suffered from a severe case of apnea. Three minutes of Harry Potter and I'd be under with no problem, and it was helping me sleep. Better than anything over the counter.

I was awake for this call, though, with my iPhone in my hand as I was making my way back to bed after a groggy bathroom visit.

I'd become a fat man at this point, after I'd been dating and breaking up with a woman named Stephanie, who preferred “Steph,” for over a year and had gained about twenty-five or thirty pounds, which made it hard to move around. Hence the apnea. That night, I'd had three slices of pizza and a six-pack of Miller Lite while watching a movie before I felt the food coma and went to bed, alone in my studio apartment near downtown Seattle.

Steph, as my . . . ex-girlfriend? Ex-fiancée? Girl I was having trouble with? She was busy, had been at work all night, as she was behind during her busiest time of year, and I was free to go to “zero.” That's what I called it, when I had an evening free and I could spend it alone, doors and curtains closed, phone off, and I could idle watching films or documentaries or TV and have some beers and keep out all stimulation that would otherwise annoy me. We were, after all, child-free, and at this time, free of one another, while we figured out what we were going to do next, independent of one another.

And she was at work, safe: Even though we were split up, I was still concerned for her.

So it was a bit of a surprise that her father was calling me that morning, as I was setting the Jim Dale reading back to
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
.

I remember smiling as I saw her father's name light up my iPhone, immediately concluding that he'd accidentally made what's affectionately called a “butt dial,” or meant to ring up someone else at 5:24 out east, as Steph's family were Yankees, from New England. The sort of people who fought off the British way back.

“Hello, Harold,” I said, upon answering. “What a pleasant surprise.”

Harold and I were on good terms, in a sort of collusion that conspired around the idea that we both knew Steph was quite the handful. In a manner of speaking. When we met, or were around one another, Harold would give me looks on the sly when Steph had one of her “moments,” like, “See? I told ya.”

But this morning, I heard the panic in his voice as soon as he heard me answer my phone.

“Domingo, what the hell's going on?” he asked.

“Sorry?”

“I just had a call from the Washington State Highway Patrol. They said Steph was in an accident and she's downtown in a hospital.”

My first response was that of betrayal, because this was an emergency, and Steph had never changed her emergency contact numbers. Meaning that she never trusted me enough to change her information. I made a mental note to bring this up, if we ever argued again about “trust.”

My second response was, “What?” It was nearly 3:00 a.m.; what was she doing up that late?

“I'm not sure what you're saying here, Harold; I haven't heard anything . . .”

“The deputy said she's in . . . hold on a sec,” and here, I heard Steph's mother shuffling papers and shouting to Harold, “Harborview Hospital,” and this was where I came fully awake and frightened: Harborview is the shock trauma specialist on the West Coast.

This was really serious. Holy fuck.

I was dressed and waiting at the front desk, in the freezing cold, in less than thirty minutes.

Harborview Hospital is built into the side of First Hill, deep in the labyrinth of the downtown Seattle grid, possibly one of the only sections of the city that is laid out in right angles, a predicament endemic to most Pacific Northwest cities, due to all the damned nature.

There are lakes and hills and mountains to plan a city around, so logic took a hit with early urban planning. Harborview is one of the oldest hospitals in the city, and has been built upon with modern extensions added yearly like a half-hearted Lego project, byzantine. It takes a tour guide and the friendliness of the doctors and nurses who work there to guide you through the buildings, some of which are connected by an underground tunnel. It's possibly the most disorienting building I've ever seen, in the densest part of the city. But after this night, I would know it very well. Or rather, I was going to start knowing it very well.

The drive to Harborview that morning through the dark and empty streets felt ominous, with the radio off, felt like everything was about to change in an instant, and for the serious.

I drove my car straight to the front steps, parked right in the emergency zone, figuring no one would mind at 3:00 a.m.: I had no idea what I was doing, or where I was. A feeling of utter helplessness radiated down my limbs, and I'm sure, settled quite telegraphically on my features.

I parked the car and forced myself to stride purposefully to the front desk, careful not to betray that sense of powerlessness.

A homeless man sat in the chair opposite the one receptionist, stuttering out a perceived or fabricated ailment so he could spend the night indoors. Ten other homeless people waited behind him.