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I See You Everywhere - Part One

By Julia Glass

Safety-pinned to my blanket is a pink "While You Were Out" slip (an "Out," I'm to learn, of titanic proportion). Your sister called. Loves you very much. Coming by train tmw. I puzzle thickly over those three letters. Tramway? Tomahawk? Tunisian Motor Works? My mind feels like a fly-mobbed garbage barge plowing through a sea of tar. At the foot of a strange bed, a strange window: leafy branches, bright sky, parking lot of blinding glitter. Pinstriped curtains wall me in.

My right arm is in a cast. From my left hand, an IV snakes its way up to a large crystalline prune. HYDRATION, my brain remarks, the word flashing out, a lighthouse on my sea of tar. I turn my head -- to another flash, this one exuberant pain -- and there's an electrocardiograph showing the placid skip-to-my-Lou of a healthy heartbeat. E K G, my brain instructs, each letter another beacon, a tiny gem in the murk.

Wow, so this is amnesia. But now I recognize the woman asleep in the strange chair by the strange window. My name, my profession, the goings-on in my life: I seem to know all these things and am vaguely disappointed that I do -- except for Jerry, hot-as-a-short-order-skillet Jerry.

The pink note still clings to my thigh. "Oh, tomorrow. Shit." A whisper but, against the white noise of life support, stunning.

In a flash, my mother's awake and pressing a hand to my forehead. "Honey, honey it's you."

"Like I'd be, who, Mick Jagger?" I sound like wheels on gravel.

"Don't talk! Save your energy, sweetheart." She pulls back the curtain and calls out, "Gwen! She's with us at last, she's here!" Someone shushes her gently. Before she lets the curtain fall, I see half a dozen beds in a long arc, some tented, all flanked by machines.

Mom scrapes her chair up beside me. She clearly wants to take my hand, but both are already taken -- one by the IV, the other by a sling.

"You're in the hospital," says Mom. As if I might think we're in a pool hall or carwash. "You've had an accident, but you're going to be fine." I am about to say, Jesus Mom, what hospital, what accident, when she puts a finger to my lips. "Please, sweetheart. In a minute, I'll call Dad. He had to go home to dry-dock a Friendship and feed the horses." Again I take stock: My father runs three boatyards. My mother is an accomplished rider, a master of foxhounds. They live on Pemiquisset Point in Rhode Island, where I grew up. These swatches of knowledge are safely intact, that part of my cerebral quilt unfrayed. But the NOW of my life as I know it takes place largely in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I am staying with Jerry while I figure out where my next job's going to be. Jerry says that maybe I should figure out, first, why I change jobs so often, especially since I never get fired.

A nurse enters my tiny lair. "Well, well. Forty winks and then some." She wrangles a pressure cuff onto my cast-free arm. As she leans across me, I see her badge. Her name is Gwendolyn Treeble, she is a blizzard of freckles (in person; the flash of her ID photo bleached them all out), and we are at the hospital in Boston that my father, who went to Harvard and had a broken femur set in this place, calls Poobah General. My brain flings out the weirdest details.

"'Scuse me," I say, figuring she will be more helpful than my mother, but then a man in a white coat pops in behind her. "Well, well," I hear again, as if it's the password. "And how do you feel?"

"Caved in," I say, straining to enunciate. "Kicked by a Clydesdale."

He laughs, a small mannerly laugh. "Vocabulary an excellent sign." He leans in from the foot of my bed and holds out a pen, moves it back and forth before my eyes. Then he untucks the bedding, pulls it up to my ankles, and uses his all-purpose pen to stroke the soles of my feet. When I flinch, he winks. "Guess we'll forgo amputation." Finally, he puts his hands around my neck, hands as cool and dry as a lizard. He seems to be making sure my skull is still attached to my spine. His badge tells me he is Eric Slocum, Chief Res., Emerg. Med. His clipboard, now on the table beside my bed, tells me today is July 28. But wait. That date is more than a month in the future. Isn't it?

"Doctor, excuse me, but have I been out cold for a month?"

He watches the ceiling while taking my pulse. "We don't know why you aren't a lot worse off. You are a very lucky young lady with a noggin of grade-A granite and a pair of very resilient lungs."

Real conversations with these people are going to be difficult. But then, I've been at the mercy of doctors before. I know their game of bait and switch.

Mom's eyes are swollen. Weeping isn't her style, so something serious happened here. She is a woman made of gristle, pumice, and more than the customary dash of testosterone. If my noggin's made of granite, her genes are to thank. She believes in the supremacy of genes; that gene I got from her, too.

Jerry is in the business of genes. I had never wanted a guy the way I wanted Jerry, almost the minute I met him. I was feverish, crazy, jealous of everything he touched, from his cat to his phone to the steering wheel in his Jeep. By nature (genes again!), I am far too skeptical, too bound by gravity to ever get swept off my feet, but if anyone's come near, it's Jerry. Jerry is a high-tech veterinarian. He flies around the country and orchestrates in-vitro breeding of pedigreed cattle and horses, from genetic counseling to the carefully engineered reproductive moment of truth. (His dream is to do the same for lions on the Serengeti.)

I met Jerry last winter in Augusta, Maine. I was alone in a bar, consoling myself after a disastrous interview for a job I might have had tagging moose. Till now, my work has taken place on the ocean, but lately I've been restless for the reassuring enclosure of mountains and lakes. And the ocean is becoming too politically charged. Overfishing, nuclear testing, PCBs, and a mulish nostalgia for whaling have all conspired to make the practice of Darwin-style biology next to impossible.

We got talking about something predictably high-minded like the dawning obsolescence of wilderness. He was wearing a bolo tie, a ridley sea turtle treading water at the throat of his denim shirt, under the reef of a coral-red beard. I remember wanting desperately to impress him. That's not like me, so I was partly hooked, partly annoyed. We'd been talking less than an hour, had moved on to Richard Dawkins and selfish genes, when Jerry admired my earrings: tear-shaped slabs of turquoise hanging from silver studs.

"How'd I look in one of those?" he said. He reached out and gently unfastened my right earring. I was acutely aware of his callused fingertips; of his beard, like fiery sagebrush, grazing my face. Not a soft square inch on the man except this pair of blue eyes, a blue like bridesmaid satin. I expected him to turn toward the mirror behind the bottles and hold the earring up for show, but instead he set it down. When he took an ice cube out of his scotch and held it to his right earlobe, I laughed and said, "You are bluffing."

Merely smiling, he put the ice cube on the bar, where it slid aimlessly away. He took the earring and, just like that, pushed it through. The noise was faint but excruciating, a cell of bubble wrap popping. He did not blink.

"Now we're a package," he said, pressing our naked ears together and facing us toward the mirror. "Siamese, inseparable."

"Get away!" I shoved him, but I was laughing hysterically. The part of me that was hooked had just won me over against all survivalist caution, of which I've been told I possess next to none.

---

Just like that, I've lost a month of my life. Sloughed off my frontal lobe like snow shearing off an ice floe in May. Other people fill in the details, but what do you believe? One incidental thing I'd like to remember: the helicopter ride to the hospital. A chopper careening up the muscleman arm of the Cape: Ride 'em, cowboy! Woo hah! My mother says, "No you would not want to remember, honey, believe you me. You were in a lot of pain. Sometimes God is merciful. God or whoever. Whatever." She is a Minnesota-born Presbyterian and goes to church only on Easter and Christmas Eve. She went a lot more often when Louisa and I were small, to make sure we had our full dose of Sunday school -- like a course of antibiotics -- but she could never drag our father along, not even for the "Hallelujah Chorus" by candlelight. (He is not swayed by bravura or sentiment, least of all by a merger. In this way, at least, I am his daughter.)

The afternoon is ruthlessly long. There is no conversation around me, and the fading light outside has no impact on the homogenized glare within. Dinner, equally dull, might as well be intravenous, and afterward, every time I drift toward sleep, Gwen or some resident pokes me. Or I hear another patient in distress. Even if I had the energy to complain, I'd feel like a brat. It's no secret that some of my companions here, just beyond my curtain, are going to die -- die right here and soon. That's why they're here. They're like planes in a holding pattern over an airport, waiting their turn to land. This doesn't spook me -- I think about death sometimes as a state of respite -- but I know that I'm moving away from them, that I'll make it out of here. At which point I'll face another struggle. Best not to think about that now.

In my jackknifed bed, subdued by a pill whose name I've forgotten, I assign myself a mental calisthenic: to configure my life as a timeline of medical crises -- of which there have been quite a few.

1 year old: Rolled off the changing table while my mother answered the phone, landed on my chin, and bit through my tongue. The scar's still there: a tiny crescent, like the nail shard clipped off a pinkie.

2 years: While visiting my father's cousin, an antiquities dealer in Charleston who thought she put everything I could destroy out of reach, meandered into an empty room and found, on a low table, a primitive stone head as big as a melon. Carried it all the way to the kitchen, to show the grown-ups, before dropping it on my right foot. Stone head unharmed, middle metatarsal cracked.

4: Bitten in our barn by a rat I was determined to befriend. I wasn't angry; I understood his fear. He was cornered in the grain bin and I'd been too pushy. Winced through the ministrations of the cardiologist who lived next door, but couldn't comprehend my mother's hysteria or the grim aggression with which my father trapped the rat in a shoebox and marched him to the car. A scalding July afternoon of beach traffic; it took us (all four of us -- Louisa hissing in my ear, over and over, "Boy are you gonna get it") three sticky hours to reach a sterile, stingy-windowed building up in Boston. Dad said we were taking the rat for a checkup but emerged from the building without the shoebox. The ride back mostly silent, my questions dodged. That night, overheard Dad describing to Mom how beheading was the only test for rabies (still true; when I worked one summer for a wildlife refuge, I hated that part of my job -- raccoons and foxes, loitering like drunks on somebody's lawn, that I had to corral and deliver for decapitation). Mourned my lost friend all night in secret. Next day, made a shrine under our privet hedge: a cross of twigs beneath which I buried a matchbox holding two cashews, a morsel of cinnamon Pop Tart, a zebra shoelace, a snip of my hair. That same week, Mom came home from the animal shelter with four scrawny cats and moved them into the barn.

7: A violent allergic reaction to blue cheese dip, which made my throat swell up so tight the doctors threatened tracheotomy; I still remember the terror in that one alien word. Having never liked blue cheese, can't imagine why I'd touch it. Forced by Louisa, I bet. For a year or so there, she'd trick me into eating disgusting foods by promising favors that she rarely fulfilled. A sandwich of dill pickles, Marshmallow Fluff, and paprika stands out in my mind.

10: On a Girl Scout camping trip, heading off to find firewood, trampled a nest of yellow jackets. Luckily, this is one allergy I don't have. Stung twice on one arm, once each on lower lip, left eyelid, left ear. The ear hurt most, throb¬bing to the core of my brain. Eye swelled shut for two days. The perfect excuse to drop out of Scouts. I was tone-deaf to that kind of fellowship anyway.

15: To impress the boys with whom I'd broken into a public pool at one in the morning, dove off the high board completely stoned. Landed on the water like a johnnycake flipped on a griddle and was sure I had broken my nose. Mostly, I'd pulverized a slew of capillaries and bruised my left cornea. For the next week, I looked like a raccoon wearing a tea strainer over one eye.

22: On a bike in Michigan, racing with my old boyfriend Luke (we still talk on the phone: lots of silences, mostly his anger, which I often deserve), roared across what I thought was a one-way street -- let the record show I was winning -- and sideswiped a station wagon, plowing a foot-long gash in my thigh. Now a magnificent scar, a conversational ice-breaker when I'm in shorts.

22 again: An ectopic pregnancy that threatened to rupture while I had a plum internship on a project to record whale songs on a sailboat off Newfoundland. Completely unexpected, since I hadn't seen Luke in two months (though there was this flyboy, one sweet fly-by-night in Montreal on my way north). If I were ever to change my mind about children, I might be a little tense...

23: ...though somehow, a year later -- stupid, stupid, stupid -- I was careless enough to get pregnant again.

Then a period of grace until now, seven years later, this. Again, at sea; so I'm told. Head trauma, fractured collarbone, assorted nicks and bruises. Two cracked ribs, three days in and out of a coma, five weeks of memory erased.

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