Body Language

"Even if I don't have cancer, I live here too."

This is what emerged from my night mouth at the 11th hour on a particular Friday. Suffice it to say that Marlou and I are under stress. On this particular occasion my nighttime T-shirt had slipped behind the bed for the umpteenth time, and I was making rather heroic efforts to maneuver the bed back in place, where it should be, against the wall. Of course, lacking the neuromuscular wherewithal to do this, I turned to battery power, in the form of my wheelchair. Which wasn't a bad idea, and I had aligned my foot rests with the end of the mattress quite nicely, I thought, and slipped the joystick forward. But, wanting paralytic finesse, my hand either jerked or the wheelchair did. The result involved less than jamming, more like slamming, the bed against the wall. Marlou accused me of furniture crashing. I told her I was tired of dropping things behind the bed. She told me the silly T-shirt was hardly worth worrying about. At which I flared into mild rage. Which was more than I, or Marlou, expected...and there we were, stunned. And even with our supposed communication skills, neither of us really had much to say. We went to sleep, or tried to.

Talking came easier the next day. "I'm not perfect at all this," I told Marlou.

"I'm not either," she said. "And I don't want to be."

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, what do you mean by "this?" I'm not perfect at all "this" -- what "this?"

When you're caught in a maelstrom of marriage and cancer and mortality and swinging from fervent hope, to dark anger, to occasional giddy humor...what "this" are you in? The whole thing is happening minute by minute, and there's no time for an ESPN replay, and the commentators are so baffled that they've wandered out of their skybox for one long commercial break.

I settle down to write each morning at a set hour...9 a.m., or so I tell myself. I keep telling myself this same thing about 11 a.m...an hour that arrives as unwanted as your neighbor's shipment from Harry and David. Except that Harry and David themselves are in the box, which you open, and the two of them sit there mute, staring at you while you don't write. And they don't want anything, either of them, except to sit there in a half opened carton, their bald heads pointing your way, their eyes astonished at how two full hours of literary compositional opportunity have been squandered in calls to Comcast, unanswered e-mails, musings upon the Bay Area's transit future and other pressing matters. Or depressing matters. Harry and David sadly shake their heads and say it all with their eyes...you silly bastard, the way this morning has gone, were you really expecting a box full of Oregon fruit wrapped in tissue paper?

Writers complain about writing avoidance under the best of circumstances. But these circumstances are not the best. Which is why in certain moments, rare ones, I'll admit, it occurs to me that one should be grateful for the ability to do anything. Marlou goes to work each morning, and she may feel the same way. Neither rain, nor hail, nor snow, nor chemotherapy shall stop us on our appointed rounds.

We are not exactly comfortable with rancorous outbursts, Marlou and I. But we manage to have them and get over them, faster than ever. We're under pressure. And not just pressure to pay the plumber, or phone the plumber, or remember what a plumber is. But pressure to remember what's important. Not to forget each other. And, above all, pressure to take chances. To risk it all.

Maybe there's no other way. The bullet that entered my cervical spinal cord ended an illusion. My personal myth, well constructed, was about to be shipped from late adolescence into early adulthood...the idea that I was okay and prepared for life. After all, I had friends, vague plans, as much a future is anyone about to graduate from Berkeley in 1968. But the person who was gunned down and now waking up each morning in the student hospital, paralyzed below the neck, had more than physical problems. I was short, demanding, insulting...enraged. The latter had much to do with the return of my parents.

They were gone from my life, or so it had seemed, now that I was paying my own rent in the world. And suddenly they were back, standing around my hospital room making plans for my future...evoking my desperate need for their love...my hope that they would nurture and save me...and the bitter, galling truth which kept running beneath their conversation like subtitles crawling below a TV screen.

In those campus hospital days...less than a month before I was transferred to Los Angeles...the smallest moment seemed full of portent, every utterance momentous, layers of meaning emerging from the casual observations of a nurse, some offhand observation by a visiting friend. I was trapped in bed. My hands were either under the sheets, or over the sheets, and either way, someone had to place them for me. Each moment as preposterously real as the next, my utter immobility...reduced to an angry observer...as people came by to cheer me.

I was grateful to see my friends, my siblings, even a professor or two. Yet the parents, both of them, could set off longings and rages too powerful to master. My father flew into town several times, and when he leaned over my hospital bed to kiss me hello or goodbye, childhood memories of his stubbly cheek flooded back. I'd been angry at him throughout my adolescence. And now our life together achieved a strange focus. It came to me now how his battles with my mother had been infantile and pathetic...and that many of my college friends were already more emotionally mature than my own father...which was a disappointment and a reality. And because there was so much reality surrounding me every moment, every paralyzed moment in which youth had ended and the future had died...and it was impossible to foresee a livable life...and that was only the moment.

After 10 days or so I was past the terrified stage of not sleeping...and no longer feeling what it was like to be shot over and over again...the hospital routine took over. At night, the evening nurse discreetly slipping out of the room so I could slumber, the day's psychic agenda exploded...the first item, the state of my body. My right leg shook, bent involuntarily, then shook again. "That doesn't look good," my neurologist had muttered. I hadn't asked him to elaborate. I didn't want to know what I knew already. Or thought I did. Actually, the fact that I could feel my leg bending and shaking was a good sign. Life is a mixed bag. Even paralysis is a mixed bag. Today my right leg is strong in its own spastic way...supporting my weight when I hobble, just as sure as the Tower of Pisa leans while supporting arcades, columns and a sizable tourist industry.

Those hospital nights, my right arm was jerking too, the fingers clawing, wrist bending uselessly. My head sank deeper in the pillow. On the weekend my father would be here again. He would lean over the bed, discuss my transfer to a rehabilitation center in Los Angeles...and I needed to tell him something. It came out of the darkness, and it was an essence composed of his visits to my bedside and his theft of my childhood...his current devotion to my physical recovery and his wife-hating years of neglect...his affection for me as a child and his narcissistic manipulation of me as an adolescent...care and exploitation...love and hate. That's what I needed to tell him. That I loved him and hated him. Preposterous to even consider saying such a thing to this man.

My shoulder blades drew together involuntarily. They too were spastic. Fuck it. Everything was broken. Each day brought a new discovery...no feeling here, no bowel control there.... Well, if I did really talk to my father, really told him this vivid realization I was having now, quite on my own...that my feelings were like transparencies superimposed, love on top of hate...hate on top of love...both. I stared at the ceiling, the blades of shoulders now relaxed, the plastic cervical collar no longer biting into my neck. No way was I even going to try real conversation with my father. My shoulder blades drew together tight as rubber bands, digging and aching. And yet, if one didn't take chances, didn't try to say the things that hadn't been said...I couldn't finish this thought. But somehow, it seemed plausible, possible that I could say this momentous thing to my father and.... My shoulder blades released themselves. Good to feel my own scapulae leave me alone. No, my father would never understand, and it was no sense trying to explain. My shoulder blades drew together, trying to touch.

Or, maybe I could talk to him. This last thought had been a test, a deliberate experiment to demonstrate or confirm this neurological oddity. That my shoulder blades were talking to me, telling me what I had to say to my father. Resolve to speak to him and they would relax. Decide not to, and they would spasm into painful proximity. It was like being possessed.

Or it was like the body talking. Something deep emerging in a time of crisis that had to be heard...and not only heard , but obeyed. Some force was taking over. One could give this power any number of names, but the best was also the simplest: the truth. I had always wanted to understand what had happened in my 21 years of life. And now my body was explaining. In that instant, it was even telling me what to do. Perhaps, if I listen, it still is.