To Feel Stuff (16 page)

“Wow. Are you still in touch with those two friends?” you asked.

“In sixth grade they got into double-dutch.”

You thought there was supposed to be more. “And?”

I said, “And I don't really like to bounce.”

From there we got on the topic of favorite childhood songs, and I told you about how my mom believed that Kermit the Frog was psychically connected. You cracked up when I pointed out the line from “The Rainbow Connection”:

“And have you heard voices?/I've heard them calling my name—”

I told you how my mom interpreted this to mean that Kermit had access to the “other side.” I said, “She thought the Rainbow Connection was a metaphor for describing the portal that exists between us and the afterlife. So the dead were seeking out Kermit because he had the ability to cross it.”

And I remember you saying, all of a sudden, ‘1 love the way you are.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, my hand flying over my mouth.

“The way you talk. I don't know,” you said. “I don't know. It's great. That's all I know.”

“I like the way you talk better,” I told you. I figured that if we were going to dork out together, we should just fully go for it.

“I—” you said, but didn't finish.

“What?” I asked.

“I—I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say here,” you confessed, and you were blushing. “I—”

“Are you in pain?” I asked, because I know that everything in the world that matters shows up as some kind of pain. Or pang. Joy included.

“It's not the knees,” you said.

“Are you in pain because of me?” I phrased it badly. What I meant was “Do you feel like I do?” Being with you, it was like I was falling in love with myself, as bad as that sounds. Everybody else seemed to want to give something to me—diagnoses, warnings, advice, instructions, prescriptions, injections, blood tests, meals, fluids, pills before bedtime, psychological readings, good cheer, sympathy, comfort, fame, meaning. But the way you hung on my every word. The way that you kept trying to size me up and the way you kept failing. It was then that I really started to fall for you. Because you wanted to take something from me.

From The Desk of Chester Hunter III

 

On our “first date,” when you asked me if I was in pain, you asked it so calmly. That question came without any of the normal signs of distress that anybody else would show when asking it, and I'm talking about even the slightest alarm in your voice. There was none. It was just like you were waiting for me to own up to the truth that you already knew.

I remember you asking this: “Are you in pain because of me?”

“You?” I asked back, because I was trying to give myself some time to figure out a lie, if I'm going to be honest here.

“Yeah. Is it me? I feel like it might be me,” you said.

“No, it's not you.” I was caving, caving. “Or, it's not you in a bad way.” It was then I realized that I was definitely on the verge of admitting something dangerous, so I put my fingers to my forehead and looked up at you, hoping I wouldn't have to say it.

And then you told me, “I think that you could fall in love with me.”

The feeling your comment produced in me was very similar to the one I had when my mom found a
Barely Legal
under my mattress when I, myself, wasn't even legal yet. “Wait. Wait!” I said. “I'm the one who's supposed to admit that. To you.” But I knew you were right. The love was there. I had no idea where it had started.

As a kid I used to go to a bunch of birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese, and I loved this ride that took your picture by freezing a video image of you tiding in Chuck's plastic car. There was a bust of Chuck in the passenger seat. You'd pretend to drive. Some kind of rolling mechanism underneath the car would simulate a hilly road. Anyway, I'd smile for the black box that was mounted on the car hood, and I'd have to hold that smile for the entire ride because there was never any outward indication when the video froze the image. There was no flash or clicking at all. At the end, when I'd climb down from the driver's seat and go get my picture, it was impossible to figure out when it had been snapped. I was smiling. What moment? Where?

That's what I asked myself in that moment with you. “What moment? Where?”

While I'd been thinking, I saw that you'd pushed your plate away from you. And god, I was hit with a gigantic rush of fear because I was convinced that you were going to get up from the table and close yourself off from me for good. So even though we'd met before, obviously, it was like I underwent the pressure of having to make an irresistible first impression. But I could only come up with a distant whisper of how I used to do it in the days before I had to summon effort, even though I know how cavalier that sounds. The method came back, thankfully, kind of like mental bicycle tiding. I had to make you feel like you were necessary in the situation, that there was something about you I couldn't live without.

Then the epiphany came. I really did feel like there was something about you that I had to have near me.

I think you mistook the expression on my face for the bad rather than the good kind of bewilderment because you started apologizing, “I'm sorry. That just leapt into my head and I said it without thinking.”

I shook my head and for once, decided to be intentionally brave. “Come here, please. I'd come over there, but with maneuvering the chair, it could get ugly.”

“Come where?” you asked.

I swept my hand across my side of the table, and said, “Here. In the general vicinity of me.”

So you walked around the table until you were standing inches from me, but you looked at me innocently, like you didn't know what was going on.

“Like here?” you asked.

“Yeah. Like here,” I said, just wanting to look at you up close again. And then you surprised the shit out of me when all of a sudden you just put yourself down in my lap. I didn't see it coming. But once you were there, I felt like I could die of happiness, El. I put my arms around your arms and held the whole of you tight, pressing my lips into the back of your neck. I put my forehead on the back of your head, and all I could see was the black of your hair. And being like that, it felt like I'd stepped out of the boring, average, mean world.

The memory of French kissing you came back to me so strongly that there was the physical sensation of my tongue getting bigger. This might sound ridiculous, but I swear it started to feel like I was trying to keep my mouth closed around one of those enormous cow tongues you see at a butcher's shop. I had to figure out how to kiss you again.

But you caught me totally off guard. You turned your head and initiated a kiss. Still, I have to remind you that I was the first to start the tongue action. I had to do it because I was under the sincere impression that there just wasn't room enough in my mouth anymore. There was instantaneous relief when your tongue met mine, like contact with you had miraculously turned me back to normal.

I remember putting my hands around your neck because I had this crazy idea that I wanted to pull myself inside of your head. Your hands were locked on my temples, like you were trying to do the same thing except with a different grip. Then I opened my eyes and I saw that yours were open, too, and that was when I first became aware that you were making me incredibly hard.

I knew you obviously knew that I had an erection, since you were sitting on top of it. To distract you, I tried sliding my hand up your sweater. You were braless, but your tiny breasts impressed me. I thought to myself, “She's so compact. She's everything in the world crammed into the smallest space possible.”

When you went for the top button of my pants and it dawned on me that we were authentically moving in the direction of sex, I began to worry, to get obsessed with particulars. I'd contemplated asking Vivian to buy me a pack of condoms when she was at CVS, but I'd changed my mind at the last minute because I didn't want to seem presumptuous. And I didn't want her to tell you that I was a presumptuous kind of person. And I didn't want to deal with every single nurse in the infirmary knowing what I felt was only mine and sparkling new.

So now that I needed a condom, I didn't have one. Reading this, you're probably thinking that I just should have said something. But, the truth of the matter is, I didn't want to fuck up the moment, a moment when we were connecting in a way that transcended the usual discussion of safe sex. The simplest way to put it, I guess, is that I really wanted our first time together to be what I believed it was, which was fate.

“But I'm in an infirmary,” I reasoned, and I knew that somewhere,
somewhere,
there had to be a stash of free condoms. But how to get to these theoretical condoms? I considered telling you that I'd be right back, but I thought that would leave you alone in the room with nothing but time and solitude to maybe discover how far you were above me. And also, I didn't know how long the search would take, and I needed a reason to be searching in case Sarah found me looking around.

I tried to attempt a voice so sexy that it would make my suggestion seem conventional, but I have to own up to all this now, my true motives behind why I said, “Let's play hide-and-go-seek.”

The Journal of Parapsychology October 2004

 

A pattern started to emerge. Every time I became concerned that I'd lost my patient, I'd receive a harried phone call. E would have a strange incident to report and request that I review it. The Monday following Thanksgiving I received such a call from her, and we made an appointment for the next day. E asked that I come to Health Services to see her, but that we meet in the pharmacy waiting room instead of the infirmary.

When I arrived at the pharmacy the next morning, she was standing with her back to me, looking down at the floor. Joking, I asked her if she'd lost an earring. E didn't respond to the joke, but told me that she'd found us an empty room. She was much more mysterious than usual, and I soon discovered that this was because of her desire to keep our meeting secret from C, her infirmary roommate.

Before we left the pharmacy, she asked me, “Do you feel anything in this room?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Anything at all.”

I said, “Well, I feel pleased to see you again,” which received no response. E led me down the hallway to an examination room and, after we entered, made sure that the door was locked behind us.

E did not want to sit on the examination bed, so she took the stool, and I leaned against the counter. I thought it would upset the power dynamic if I took the examination bed myself.

After a pause, E began. “I was playing hide-and-go-seek last night—”

“That's quite a beginning,” I said. “Who were you playing with?”

“C,” she answered. “It was his suggestion. It was something I haven't done in forever, so it sounded good to me. Maybe I'm a little too young to be trying to reclaim my childhood already. But it sounded good.”

“What did you think when C suggested the game?” I asked, wanting to keep her open.

“I thought—” She paused. “What I thought was that I've found someone who can surprise me. And that his ability to surprise me means that he's really, really separate from me. That's not as obvious as it might first seem. Do you know what I mean?”

“I'm not sure exactly,” I said. “Please explain it to me.”

“Okay. When I was little, I had a rabbit. One day I walked in my room and saw my rabbit just sitting on my dresser. Before that, my rabbit always stayed outside in the backyard. I didn't know how my rabbit got inside, and I didn't know why she chose to sit on my dresser. But I was so surprised to see her there. She was gray and my dresser was black. Suddenly I was struck with this awareness that my rabbit was an original, decisive thing. I was very touched by . . . I guess what I'd call the phenomenon of individuality. Maybe this is easy to take for granted in people, but, as a kid, it was more awe-inspiring in a bunny.”

I knew what she meant. How could I not, sitting across from her, the precise embodiment of the concept she was attempting to explain? E produced the same feeling in me—sheer wonder at her individual existence. At no moment was I ever unaware that she was something entirely distinct and alien from myself, and this prospect was moving. This must have been what early explorers felt when they discovered a new culture, a new people. It was the opposite of recognizing a soul mate. It was awe in the face of barely comprehendible difference.

I told her, “Thank you for your explanation. I understand your impressions better now. I take it something happened during the game of hide-and-seek?”

“Yes. I came in contact with the ghost.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

While C counted, E went to hide. She chose the pharmacy, which was dark for the night. Knowing that her time was draining, E crawled underneath one of the chairs in the waiting room. She figured that “because of C's wheelchair, he'd have trouble seeing me at floor level.”

While underneath the chair, E began to feel pain “everywhere,” and her fibromyalgia made it difficult for her to hold the position. She remained hidden, longing to successfully play the game. “I didn't want to f——it up,” E explained to me. “It was a game. It was for fun. How sad is it if you can't even play a game right because you hurt too much?”

Within five seconds of getting settled, E heard the infirmary door open and C call out, alerting her that he was beginning the search. Because of the acoustics on the second floor of the building, E was able to aurally follow C's movements. She could tell by the diminishing returns of the echoes that the first room he chose to visit was the main waiting room down the hall.