Will & I (12 page)

 

20

Looking back, the path to now, to sitting at this desk and writing, seems so unarbitrary that it's almost impossible to deny the work of an outside hand. This is a comfort at times, enough to keep me grounded. But it also requires a perspective that lies outside of the action. Fate, so called, only works in retrospect. You can't experience it and understand it at the same time. The notion of fate appears only when we consider ourselves as unified consciousnesses moving through time, but such an identity is merely a role—or at least that's how I've come to see it.

Before the wreck, I'd never done much writing. I liked reading, and occasionally I would jot down some thoughts, but nothing continuous, just isolated impressions. I do remember, even in those moments, feeling the pleasure that could come from playing with language and finding the right words. After the wreck and stroke, it was one of the few pleasures available to me, so I began to seek it out. As a way to validate my time, at first, and then gradually, as a way to survive. For me it has been a healing obsession.

The rest of college—when I finally went back, a year and a half after the stroke—was eye-opening and miserable. In all my planning and hard physical work to return, in all my wondering about how I would be received, I'd forgotten to consider that everyone else on campus would have moved on. No one was waiting for me like I'd expected. Nor had I imagined that my former friends might be apprehensive about my return. I have a journal entry from my first months that sums up what I felt fairly well.

12/2/94

When I first started writing after the stroke (when I could remember what “normal” felt like), a friend said, “At least you know you've been through the toughest part of your life.” Well that was wrong; not being included in my friends' activities, for whatever the reason, is just as hard or harder than the issue of survival. I guess I'd envisioned some sort of praise, but instead, people tend to make me feel like I've done something wrong. I shouldn't expect everyone to be so “shit happens” philosophical about this as me. Nonetheless, I'm still human, so if I can get past this (and it's happening to me), why is it so hard for other people? It's trying, being inundated with people who don't think for themselves, and not having anyone to identify with. The only reason this hell is bearable is because of my ability to laugh. I still (with no logical basis) can't help but think something good has got to come out of this. It's still as unbelievable as ever.

One day, the dean of students invited me to lunch, at a place right across the street from my dorm. It was a humid, sunny day, and I almost felt good. I tried to be as casual as I could walking in with the dean. He was a sharp, laid-back, relatively young guy who taught some classes and interacted with the students all the time, but he was still an authority figure. After the wreck he'd driven my parents and my sister, who threw up in his car, down the back way to the hospital in Chattanooga.

“How about your classes?” he asked after we'd ordered. “Everything going okay there?”

I told him it was. “I'm gonna like Ethics, I think.”

He carried our tray to a table in the window.

“Let me know if I can do anything,” he said.

In the early part of the century a girl from Sewanee had drowned while swimming in Lake Cheston. Since then her parents had made it one of the college's traditions that you had to swim across the lake to graduate. I'd been fretting about this ever since discovering I could no longer swim. I didn't want to be excluded, though, and I was ready to die not to be. Maybe I could float on my back. Was there a time limit?

Once he'd figured out what I was talking about, he started smiling. “You don't have to worry about that,” he said. “We quit that a couple of years ago.”

A group of guys with black streaks on their faces and chests came running in, chanting something I couldn't understand. Their shirts were stuffed in their back pockets, and each held close to the person in front of him. They tried to hide their faces as they shuffled around a table where a guy and two girls were sitting. Their chanting changed. The guy at the table smiled bashfully and stood up. They picked him up over their heads and carried him out just as they'd come in. It was fraternity rush week.

The dean shook his head and laughed. “Y'all don't do that, do you?”

“Y'all?”

“The Phis.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “I'm not having any part in that shi … in that, anymore.”

“No?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “It could be good for you. You know, a way to get back into campus life.”

“Maybe.” I pretended to think about it. “I don't know.” But I did know. I wasn't about to associate myself with a bunch of predominantly unknown party guys for whom I would likely become something like a mascot.

“Sometimes,” I said, “I wish all of my brain had been affected. So I wouldn't know. Most of the things I've learned from what I've been through, I'd rather not know.”

The dean smiled apologetically. He then put both of his elbows on the table like he was going to lean forward and tell me a secret. “But you know,” he said. “You do.”

*   *   *

Will and I quickly began to get on each other's nerves. I had been given the role of his silent sidekick—and by extension, his little brother. He had been relegated to the role of my interpreter. Neither of us liked it. He had a girlfriend, so his presence was never as constant as I would have liked, though when he was there, we fought. I wanted a girlfriend, too. But I wasn't about to ask anyone out. I started pointing out Will's faults instead: he drank too much, he smoked too much, his impatience was going to kill him. He began calling me the Critic. “What do you do?” he said. “Not shit. You sit around here feeling sorry for yourself and you take it out on me.”

I got out and started taking walks. I began walking to the Cross, a sixty-foot memorial out on a bluff with a dramatic view of the valley below, which was down the street from our dorm. It was dedicated to Sewanee students who'd fought in World War I. The distance there and back was only a little more than a mile. I got to know every tilt of the road and imperfection in the pavement, but on one of the first mornings, I'd gotten to where the woods began, right after the soccer field, when I heard footsteps coming up behind me. The frost on the lawns hadn't begun to evaporate and the trees still hid the sun. I turned around to see a girl jogging in gray sweatpants and new turquoise running shoes.

“Hi,” she said breathlessly as she slowed her arms to a stop. She leaned forward and put her hands on her knees. “My name's Anna.” She extended her hand. “I've seen you around but I haven't had a chance to introduce myself.”

I told her I was Will Byars's brother.

She had long, wispy blond hair, dark, partially closed eyes, and porcelain skin with veins pulsating in her temples. She nodded and smiled, then looked confused. She didn't know Will. Then she said she was a sophomore, and I told her that technically I was, too. This led into my history, which I tried to downplay as much as I could, emphasizing “brain stem” stroke, as if anyone would know this was the kind that didn't affect cognition.

Three or four days later, I walked to the Cross again. This time I didn't get started until the late afternoon. As I started down the sidewalk, I saw a group of four or five girls headed my way. They saw me, too, and turned in toward each other as we passed, to avoid noticing me. I tensed up and tried to look as harmless as possible. I saw Anna in the back of the group. We made eye contact, and I smiled. Then she dropped her eyes and moved up beside the girl in front of her, causing a rush of disbelief and shame that made me replay the incident for weeks.

I did make a new friend, though, a Chinese woman named Nai-Chian. She was running a restaurant in town, the City Café, one of the few local places not owned by the school. It was a quiet, sit-down place that didn't serve alcohol and had flower arrangements on the tables. It was the type of place you'd take your grandmother if she came to visit you. I used to go in the mornings for the blueberry-and-banana pancakes, and sometimes for the spicy chicken and rice at lunch. Nai-Chian would quietly pick up the chopsticks from my table and set down a spoon for me to eat the rice with. She and I started talking one day when business was slow. She didn't say it, but I could tell she felt like an outsider as much as I did. This became our unspoken bond, and the basis of our friendship—but that was all it was. Her husband, a burly local who worked for the school's physical plant, silently eyed me with suspicion.

I couldn't tell how old she was. She had close-cropped, pageboy black hair, was short and in good shape. She taught a tai chi class every morning that met in the park. She didn't look any older than thirty-five, but may have been fifty-five. She was an accomplished seamstress, too. Later, for my birthday, she knitted me a pillow with my Chinese zodiac sign on it. The ox.

Writing absorbed my attention more and more. A well-known poet who taught at the school, Wyatt Prunty, was offering an independent study in short fiction. He agreed to let me in even though I'd recently declared philosophy as my major—a small act of kindness that's had a major effect on my life. I spent days holed up, trying out stories, but I couldn't get one to work at first. When I finally did, in an admittedly short amount of time, I felt something akin to security. I was able to escape myself and trust myself at the same time. Every word felt both inevitable and full of potential. When that story was later accepted for publication in the school literary magazine, I remember I felt almost as good seeing it in print as when I'd finished it and knew I had something. No longer was I simply that guy who left and came back; I was a writer. The looks of confusion I got down at the bar from a group of girls I didn't know, as if they now had to recalibrate their knowledge about me, were exhilarating. Everything would continue to flow from now on.

Then I tried to write another story. It didn't happen. Then another. And another. I was distraught. The more I learned about the mechanics of writing, the more my stories seemed lifeless. There wasn't any depth to them, no risk involved. They were just clever cuts into the surface, and sometimes not even that. Reason told me, “Why mess around and possibly fuck up your underlying sense of well-being? Go somewhere less personally relevant, less sincere.” Looking for any shortcut to hard work and serious consideration, I tried to locate the problem everywhere but within me. And that “me” seemed to be getting more and more contained as time went by. At times, frustrated, I experienced feelings reminiscent of when I'd been locked in, when I hadn't been able to move or speak. But then I'd had only one option, whereas with stories, multiple options always seemed to exist.

*   *   *

One night I woke up at two o'clock and couldn't go back to sleep. I threw off the covers. It was cold but I didn't care. I marched to the study and wrote—not typed but wrote longhand—a letter to Eleanor, saying we needed to get together. I told her it was my fault we hadn't before, I was just scared. But I wasn't going to sit and watch our relationship dwindle to insignificance, which I could tell was already starting. I included my phone number and asked her to call me when she got the letter. A sense of determination and happiness kept me up the rest of the night. I mailed it as soon as the campus post office opened the following morning. But after two weeks went by without a response, my hope sank into ambivalence. What had I been thinking? I was oddly relieved when eventually the letter came back, Return to Sender: Change of Address Unknown.

 

21

When I came home one Friday during my last semester, I think, I saw Candy's car parked in our driveway. I couldn't help smiling. It had been almost a year since I'd seen her—an afternoon when I'd driven out to her house in Forestdale, a small community about half an hour from Birmingham. The trip had been to celebrate getting my driver's license back. Walking to the door now, I wondered what her visit was about.

I couldn't see her through the door glass at first. When I walked into the kitchen she was down to my left with her back facing me. Her hair was tied up in a bandana, and she was bent forward as she pushed a mop back and forth across the floor. A bucket of dark, soapy water sat next to her.

“Hey,” I said as the door shut behind me.

She cupped both hands over the end of the mop and straightened up. “All right,” she said, slightly out of breath. “How's it goin', man?”

“Did you spill something?” My stomach started to sink.

“Aw, no.” She looked at the mop. “Check this out, Mrs. B. asked me to clean y'all's house.”

I chuckled. “What did you tell her?”

“I can't on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Thursdays, but any other day will work. Why?”

This wasn't happening. How could she do this? I suppose I'd thought we were in this together somehow. But apparently she was perfectly happy to go from being the keeper of my mother's retarded son to being her cleaning girl.

“What?” Candy said, like I'd accused her of something. Probably she thought I was going to be happy.

Quickly I realized I was being a spoiled shithead. She and I both knew that my mother would pay her well, better than she could get most anywhere else. She could see, though, that I was upset.

“I didn't know your other job was just part-time,” I said.

“Both of my other jobs are part-time.”

I didn't reply. I gathered up my books and hobbled back to my room, feeling ashamed and uneasy. We didn't talk any more before Candy left that day. She seemed to be avoiding me as much as I was her. But when I saw her again a few weeks later, it was like nothing had ever happened. She continued to clean the house for a year or so before she said she was moving back to Alaska. A little while after that, however, my sister swore she saw Candy in a yellow station wagon with the logo of a professional maid service on the side.