Grinding, Mechanical Things

It was like someone had me in a 24-hour chest lock, in protracted imitation of CPR, squeezing the life out of me, the terror into me, while I went about rote tasks, such as opening my wallet to retrieve the Amtrak reservation. The ticket agent silently eyed the number and went to work on his computer, gazing over Raskolnikov glasses with half lenses. Train's a little late, he said.

I pushed the wheelchair over to the high backed wooden benches. Actually, "pushed" isn't accurate. My functioning left arm shoved the wheel rim, and my left heel dug at the floor. I was using the spindly folding wheelchair, because it would fit in the trunk of my Seattle brother's car. It took a lot of effort to propel myself this way, even when I was 30 years younger and roaming the corridors of a Los Angeles rehabilitation hospital.

Seattle was a long way. It was 24 hours away. This thought made me shake my head as though dispelling light anesthesia. Actually, having barely slept in the last two days, a little sodium pentothal wouldn't make much difference. I grabbed a pant leg and hoisted the paralyzed foot onto the bench. If someone objected to this shoes-on-seat situation, I'd be too tired to argue and too tired to move the foot. So, I'd stare at the person and drool. I laughed out loud. No one around me noticed. No one around me was under 80.

Get a load of this crypt-like Southern Pacific waiting room. Coughs echoing off the beam ceiling three stories overhead. The Amtrak agent's stapler going down, the sound going up, the echo bouncing off a dusty mural of the California Gold Rush. Below, the sense of a waiting room full of refugees. An old woman sharing the bench with my foot wore a jacket of puffy, thread-dangling tweed. Her fiberboard suitcase was trimmed in cracked brown plastic, what used to be called leatherette. I was old enough to remember leatherette.

Too bad I couldn't remember what happened this morning. Was it yesterday that I had mounted a full assault on Amtrak's 800 number? I wasn't traveling because now I was unemployed and couldn't pay for traveling, and I wasn't hanging up without a refund. Let me speak to your supervisor, I'd said. I'll take Amtrak to small claims court, I'd added. The agent sighed a little too much like Dottie and suggested that I either use the ticket or tell it to the judge. Travel or gavel. And now I was here, my head lolling, objects sliding from my lap. At least the train would have a bed.

When fear finds its gear and slips into traffic, you become its trailer. Terror is the driver. Towed along by its grinding, mechanical force, sleep, judgment and volition all shrink into the back seat. Terror has no destination, never stops for gas, just drives on and on, uncaring, uninsured, unconscious. Fear needs no rest, but you do, badly.

A little too much like 1968. I didn't sleep for days after my injury. Ambulance guys lifted me off a Berkeley street, carted me to the campus hospital, and there I stayed, paralyzed by nerve damage. In the evenings, drifting towards sleep, the slightest stimulus wakened me. A door slamming, the rattle of the medicine cart, footsteps in the hall, anything jerked me alert, got my full adrenal attention. Fear wound the reels, life's movie flickering, no intermission, on and on.

No one could talk me out of the terror. The traumatic moment was over, and wasn't I safe and recovering? No. I was as inert as a rump roast at Safeway and kept asking the nurses to lift my hands out from under the covers, then tuck them in, then take them out. But wasn't this temporary, being paralyzed from the neck down, terrified from the sundown? No. A night injury on a residential street, and the night kept going for days?.

When the nurses gave me pills, and then shots, everything in me dropped, except for one eyelid. Until on the fourth or fifth night, I dropped again, this time into darkest space, tumbling toward the darkest worst. After that, I slept.

A pile of magazines slipped from my lap to the floor of the Amtrak waiting room, as I watched, dazed, gaga. The woman in the threadbare coat silently rose and picked up the reading material I wasn't reading. I offered her a magazine. The woman shook her head. I arranged the magazines on the bench.

It's a high-performance job, being crippled. The one-handed management of objects demands full attention. Rest is essential. Sleeplessness does for quadriplegia what marijuana probably does for air traffic control. It wasn't doing much for me.

Losing a job should not trigger all this adrenal, fight-or-flight panic, even for a cripple. Not in 1996. Silicon Valley was booming, companies had plenty of jobs and I'd soon be back at work somewhere. I knew this was true, and it didn't matter. I was pedal-to-the-metal with fear.

Across the waiting room the snack bar proprietor went about the turning off of lights, the rolling down of old-fashioned metal shutters, the snapping of padlocks. He was a middle-aged Hispanic guy, which was to say, my age. The man performed his shutting and closing with care and certainty. This was all you could do. Shutter, lock and hope for the best. Someone might come at your place with bolt cutters. Someone might sue for salmonella. You had to trust.

Time for a musculoskeletal change of scene. I pushed myself up to standing, turned 180 degrees, dropped my butt on the bench and lifted the foot onto the seat of the wheelchair. Now I was sitting on fine old wood and had an excellent view of the ticket counter, brass scrollwork, Art Deco. The agent was nowhere to be seen. The clock said 10:30 p.m., then after a few New Yorker cartoons, it said 11. This bench hailed from an era when California had many more oak trees than orthopedists. My butt ached, and I needed to define certain terms, particularly "a little late."

I grabbed my crutch and hobbled the 30 yards to the agent's window, fatigued, wobbly and ready for nothing but straight answers. I pushed the agent's bell. When would the train arrive? The agent clicked away at his computer screen. Oh, he shrugged, the train was last seen departing Paso Robles. Lots of freight trains, he added. I crutched back to my wheelchair.

Midnight brought another dimension of folly to the trip I shouldn't have taken. There was nothing to do but doze and drift in the Amtrak station. The commuter trains had stopped running, and there was no way to get home to the suburbs.

1968. It wasn't just that I was lying paralyzed in Berkeley's campus hospital. My parents were there too. They journeyed mightily, and separately, to see me. My father arrived on a morning flight, his five o'clock shadow visible at noon. I had once rubbed my boy's face against his, feeling a pleasurable warmth and foreign bristly skin. My mother drove in each afternoon from a suburb, bearing food and nervously joking with the fellow nurses.

At first, my parents brought a measure of reassurance. Soon, they were musing about my next moves as a paralytic?which rehabilitation hospital?where I would live after that?. Student life, my web of friends, all had been shown to be insubstantial. My parents had regained power with the afternoon ease of a Paraguayan coup. I wanted them gone.

I began with my father. In late morning he stood at the foot of my bed opining about my future life. After some rehab, he pointed out, I could live in a special wing of the campus hospital. I and the other wheelchair students. Except, I told him, I wasn't going to be a wheelchair student. He told me to face facts. I told him he hadn't faced a fact in 30 years. He took an afternoon flight home.

At lunchtime, the day nurse guided a fork to my lips. I was beginning to sleep at night, but only for a couple of hours. Feeding took forever. This room, this room?smelling of shit every morning, bedside teams observing the limbs. Can you move this? That? Any feeling here? There? No, we thought not.

In late afternoon I woke to find my mother standing at the foot of the bed. She asked how I was. They were interchangeable, my parents, both foot-of-the-bed standers. I told her things were peachy. The nurse chirped that my mother had brought an enchilada. It's actually a burrito, my mother said. I couldn't raise my head enough to see.

Barely audible, my mother whispered to the nurse, her voice strained and tough, "He really needs to sit up."

" 'He' will tell you what 'he' needs," I said.

The silence filled with rustling aluminum foil. Raspy whispering, voices not audible, but I caught something about a crank or cranky.

"Oh, I'm a cranky old crank," I said. The nurse said she was going to crank up the bed. Hard not to like the nurse, the way she smiled and held my gaze. My mother held the burrito close to my face, nervous, missing my mouth. Closer, I said. Chicken. Hot sauce. Good desert boy stuff. I let her wipe my face with a napkin. The nurse brought a wash cloth.

My mother sighed, looked at the wall, then me. "Son, I think you'd better have a look at the wheelchair ward upstairs."

"Mother, I told you no. No. No. No. No." I was screaming this, as much as one could with a half paralyzed chest. "No. No. No."

Nurse whispering, and the door closed. With the room empty, I faced the campus evening, catching the glint of a bicycle rim, the swaying of tree shadows. No, no, no.

At 2 a.m., most of the Amtrak passengers were dozing, a couple even snoring. Not sleeping could push you over the edge. Sometimes you needed a push. Sometimes you needed to push your own wheelchair, with your own arm. Sometimes you need to push yourself outside to the platform, take in the night air, gaze down the track at whatever was coming.

At 3 a.m., the other passengers streamed into the chill night to join me. A rotating light appeared in the distance, sending up a bright cloud through the eucalyptus trees. A swoop-nosed locomotive neared, the headlight went dark, and the engine roar dropped to a purr. The Coast Starlight drifted by, silent except for the occasional rasping of a wheel from the two-story stainless steel coaches.

The train was bigger and more improbable than I'd imagined. It came rolling like the Empire State Building on its side, car after car, baggage, dining, observation, and then the sleepers named for states, Ohio, Arkansas, Minnesota. Doors opened, light spilled across the platform, and uniformed Amtrak agents stepped down, extraterrestrial in their capacity for 3 a.m. chatter. Two train guys hoisted me aboard. One folded my wheelchair, and the other handed me my crutch. The conductor, vaguely Wild West with his vest and dangling chains, inspected my ticket, tore off a portion and said he hadn't a clue why the train was late. Good night, he said, departing without eye contact.

Within moments I was bouncing through Santa Clara, holding tight to the sink in the corner of my room with my one usable hand, wondering how to brush my teeth without falling. I wedged my butt into the corner, released my grip and picked up the brush. Now I stood staring at the other side of the tracks. In the compartment everything was cozily miniaturized, bed, sink and toilet. The door locked against the world, and the world streaming by Amtrak window curtains. I saw castoff things of iron in back of autobody shops, peeling tanks, shopping carts lying on their sides.

Terror was a grinding, mechanical thing that held you in its maw. This train was a grinding mechanical thing too, but it held you like a mother. A good mother who knew you had to grind on and on, because nothing else felt safe. Who knew that although, once aboard, it was hard to get off, eventually the whole thing would arrive, come to a stop. Meanwhile, you needed to be warm and enclosed in a tiny room that was a conveyance. You needed to be borne like a Pasha through Santa Clara. You needed to have someone fold down the Amtrak sheets and place this chocolate on the pillow. I didn't want to eat the chocolate. I wanted to cry.