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Well let me just say that it is really a bad idea to go to a funeral right after you almost kill yourself. Great gospel singing though. I don't think I've ever heard His Eye Is on the Sparrow sung with so much passion.
It is also a bad idea to wear a lined black suit on an 85° day and I will definitely be wearing my gym clothes home!
Here's what's on my freelance plate for this evening: Finish up some editorial work on a cookbook, work on a few preliminary sketches for a book that I'm illustrating, and then turn again to the behemoth 1,200-page manuscript that, I swear, is getting longer every day.
It's true. Several people have spotted it and called the cops, who sort of humorously noted that they can't exactly outrun an emu.
(And I am fighting the urge to throw all responsibility to the wind and go try to find it.)
Meanwhile. here's a micro story I've been working on. It started out as nonfiction, but I wanted the mileage I'd get from the beeper and medical references—memories of living with Tree during med school, I reckon—so I took myself out of it.
THE HOLLERIN' CONTEST
Draft, © 2005
Every June, in Spivey's Corner, North Carolina, hollerers gather to share their lexicon of calls. Many bring their calls down from the mountains, where they developed these sounds to convey specific information across great distances concisely. An anticipatory bark might tell a wife that her man is one valley away and heading home; a piercing howl might say he's broken his leg and needs help right away. I imagine the hollerers' mournful voices drifting over the mountaintops, coloring the fog as it settles in.
A phalanx of Duke residents and I, wearing scrubs and beepers, wander the alley of vendor tents and crafts displays. The fact that I'm on call and must be ready to leave at a moment's notice looms large in my mind as I study the nuances of the callers' sounds and eat my bag of kettle corn.
A cacophony of other sounds competes with those of the contestants. The deejay by the kids' rides plays nursery rhymes. Vendors shout out their wares as we pass them. Car alarms reverberate off the sound equipment as a businessman barks into his cell phone by my ear. The teenager beside him describes her new Guess jeans to some disembodied person on the receiving end of her phone call who has probably never even heard of a hollerin' contest.
It is difficult to imagine a place devoid of any other means of communication, especially here. Research Triangle Park is headquarters to so many high-tech communications companies, after all, a virtual Promised Land where cell phones and wi-fi–enabled coffee shops and gas-station fax machines and household T lines deliver and receive information instantly.
Despite this ever-present technology, though, I have not mastered how to convey some information across great distances with accuracy.
The emcee insists that hollerin' is the earliest form of precise communication between human beings, but I know it's sex. Yeah, I talk a good talk beforehand, but I never really communicate with someone until we make love. My previous communications sound right, but they are guarded, selective, partial, incomplete. I reveal glimpses of myself through a copy of some poem or a humorous story about my workday or my careful, measured replies to personal questions. These words offer insight into who I am, but I dispense them from behind a protective wall that hides my vulnerability. Until I stand naked with someone, until we discover how to speak to each other's bodies without the need for words, I am incapable of conveying love or deep emotion in unrehearsed syllables.
The first year that you loved me, you studied my hands in public until you knew that I knew you were doing this. Good hands, you called them. Made for fucking.
Your friend Deborah inevitably called when we were deciding if we were hungry enough to get out of bed. You laughed when her call came through, said, "that would be Deborah," told her that yes, as a matter of fact she had done it again and that she was speaking to Ginger, the well-fucked woman.
We had our own language then, a holy vocabulary between us.
Later, in a restaurant, you studied the thumbs that had been inside you and I thought about moving them toward that specific spot near my tongue that makes you gasp unintelligibly, each of your unarticulated sounds and movements leading up to that moment conveying so much information: where and when and how and how much and with how much intensity—precise instructions that you conveyed without ever speaking a word.
I told you, over dinner, in whispered words that made you blush from your neck up to your hairline, exactly what I would do with my hands when we returned home and we stared across the table at each other, anticipating the moment when my entire hand would disappear inside you, reducing you to babel.
We shared this quiet language of whispers in such public places.
This morning, in the emergency room, a migrant worker howled in misery. Unable to articulate the source of her pain in words that I could understand, she curled into the fetal position instead and howled at me, her dark eyes desperate.
Como esta usted? and the few other phrases that I learned in orientation conveyed nothing useful to either of us, so I ordered a battery of tests and sent the nurse for a translator, did what I could to apply deductive reasoning to our babel as I used my hands to search her body for some clue that could tell me how to heal her.
Bodies convey information even when their owners can't—send signals to the lymph nodes that trigger them to swell sufficiently to indicate an infection; cause pupils to dilate enough to indicate a concussion or drug overdose or loss of brain function or any number of other medical conditions; dispense tears to indicate depression in patients who insist that everything is fine, just fine, just couldn't be any better. These miraculous, fragile bodies enable us to communicate love through physical expression more profoundly than any word in our vocabulary can, but bodies keep their own language, too.
People who lose loved ones share a unique language. If you look closely, ICU waiting-room walls reflect this language in anguished glyphs of hope and denial and sorrow. The glyphs whisper "failure" to doctors who lose patients, too. "Hope" is the primary word in this whispered lexicon though—until I deliver the coup de grace that demolishes any possibility of it with as much distance as I can muster: "We tried to save your wife, but her heart was too damaged. We tried to save your son, but he is gone. I am sorry for your loss."
How did the hollerers isolate that specific sound that represents loss, that mournful call that can make a stranger choke up, missing someone? Adrienne Rich knew the sound. There is no other language for it, she assures us—we have to call it grief. In my case, my friends call it bravery too, tell me what a great job I am doing of holding up, remaining in control.
But the poets remind me that my walls do not protect me, that studying your blue eyes failed to provide sufficient insight into your interior world, your desperation.
My grief moves over me in waves, becomes a mountain that I lug around inside me, making me obsess about that phone call we shared when you discussed the meal that you had prepared the night before. For yourself, you said, this meal worthy of Gourmet magazine. Your voice said other things too, though. And later, when I showed up unannounced and you blushed deep red from your neck up past your dimples, all the way up to your red, red hair, you reiterated that you were alone, that you were just craving silence, even as I noted the two wine glasses on the counter, the dishes stacked in twos on the table, ready to be put away.
I need a new language to hold all this sorrow, a deep-throated, gutteral holler that can convey this staggering loss.
But I am on this earth to learn, to at least attempt to articulate my experiences authentically and in meaningful sentences, to organize these rabbit screams that escape from me sometimes into meaning. I want to do something with these "I do" and "Forever" memories that have ended so abruptly now, translate our eleven years of shared language into meaningful sounds and phrases.
I write words on charts that heal patients' bodies, speak knowledgeably about immune disorders and disease and disease prevention and loss of bodily function, but know that I have become a child again—someone who requires a cardboard wheel to identify what I am feeling.
I study this wheel that is divided neatly into two concise outer sections. Am I happy or sad? The answer is obvious. Your body, our language, are divorced from me now. I will not see you grow old or even wrinkle around your deep dimples and what I feel is anguish. I keen in sobs loud enough to announce our broken union to our neighbors.
I do not give you to him, but I have let you go—have walked away and know I must keep walking. I do not know this ground and yet I walk it, take these first strange steps toward a new vocabulary—some descriptive holler that can locate the hollow behind my eyes where I always feel you gone—search for a word that can make me me again.
3:46 p.m. - 2005-04-20
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