Mull

Just as I was leaving, my neighbor Buffie dropped by for a chat, saw my rental DVDs arrayed in their Netflix glory, and asked if she could borrow a few. Why not? I would be gone for a couple of weeks. And some of these DVDs have been sitting there for a couple of months. Eugene Onegin, for example. Who wants to watch opera alone? Buffie, apparently, for she took that one and a number of others. And the next thing I knew, SuperShuttle was whizzing me to the airport and I was thinking that, what the heck, she knows where the keys are, why not use my 50-inch TV? Or would that be wise? I mean, surely it would be better if I had put Buffie through the paces with the Blu-Ray and the Panasonic TV and the interconnected stereo...one separate control inefficiently used for each. After all, what if Buffie messed up in some way, the DVD getting jammed in the player, not being able to turn the thing off, everything exploding in a toxic puff?

So what? Things are meant to be used. Moreover, they are meant to be shared. And if they break, they break. Which is why I rang Buffie from the airport to say that while I am in England, and your son is with his father, please enjoy my home electronics. And though she declined, I still felt good because...even when I feel alone in the world, the world is not a lone place.

And then all the improbabilities of airline mileage forged into business class. A private lounge with a tomb-like silence. A seat that tilted into a position that bordered on the fully reclining, and once aloft felt like going to London on a water slide. After worrying and worrying and worrying...checking every 15 minutes to make sure that the passport in my pocket was still the passport in my pocket...things were on a roll. Or on a wing. And a prayer. And there's nothing wrong with the latter.

How else to explain the strange morning dream at the Novotel in London's Euston Road? I was in my birthplace, the desert home where my parents tore each other apart and shredded their kids in the process. A familiar scene of the dry town plane, the San Jacinto Mountains in the background. But in the dream, a rain had come. In fact, a flood. The town had been flash flooded in the best desert tradition. And now standing water, temporary lakes had covered over parts of the town. The effect was refreshing. A force fluid, feminine and nurturing, had transformed everything. Parts of the town were underwater, and all was good.

All was good, because in addition to dreaming, I was sleeping. Bad thing trying to get a good night's rest in the deathbed back in California. A better thing to be in London waking up in a French hotel chain and then just before midnight rumbling out of town for parts north. Caledonian parts north. At Euston Station, I couldn't quite believe I had it right. I had made the reservation in May, after all, a period of my life even more demented than the current one. And naturally I couldn't quite find the reservation code, and a clerk was advising me to ring a special number for fools who didn't have their ScotRail affairs in order. But suddenly there it was. Elliot, Marlou's Iowa nephew who had appeared at London airport precisely when and where he was expected, had pulled the magic number out of my manila file. And this combined with a credit card inserted into a ScotRail kiosk had a marvelous effect. Twenty-four tickets printed out their plastic little hearts, piling up like dead leaves inside the machine. And with my cousin's son Jake in tow, the three of us boarded the sleeper train for Glasgow.

The latter was a disabled-access retrofit, an old British sleeping car modified to provide space for one cripple, one friend and one wheelchair. The interior sections had to be juggled and worked under and over each other so that a shelf held the disabled person's suitcase right over the bed, the legs sliding under, while the leg brace came off the cripple and slipped into a narrow vertical drawer, normal purpose unknown. The companion, Elliot in this case, took the upper berth, leaving only the wheelchair to be accommodated. There was barely room for it. Only by backing in and making a fancy turn, could the door shut. A long night of railway roaring and shunting and roaring again and jerking to to a stop, only to roar back into the Scottish night. Until it wasn't night, and I was somehow awake and knowing it was 5:45 AM and time to get up and on with things.

And getting on I was. Normally, these are such frustrating moments for me. I curse myself for the stiffening joints or tightening of tendons that make maneuvering in cramped spaces virtually impossible. And ScotRail's disabled sleeper was among the worst of the worst. With my legs pinned under the suitcase shelf, no room to drop the feet to the floor and safely stand, what was there to do but wake Elliot and get assistance? Well, there was this. Spasming my paralyzed leg into a grip-friendly flexion, grabbing under the knee with my one hand, dropping the foot to the carpet...only to have it wedge against a wheel. And yet there was a grab bar and enough leverage to get the torso up and staring at the impossibility of movement.

But there was battery-powered movement. Turning on the chair, inching it forward, working my foot around one side. Then maneuvering the wheelchair back to make room around the front. And the danger every second of running over my own foot in the ScotRail darkness. And yet it didn't happen. Before long I was seated in the chair, pressing the electric door lock and heading out for the toilet. Scottish sunlight burst through the hallway glass. And then in another miracle Elliot and Jacob and I were trundling our way through Scotland's tough working-class capital. I muttered that Glasgow looked nicer than expected. Jake told me that we wouldn't experience the real place until we'd been stabbed. Which was enough to get us over to Queen Street Station and within minutes rolling along the valley of the River Clyde, then up some loch or other to another loch or other, Scotland's West Highlands growing greener with each mile, Ben Nevis looming above us, all of it looking remarkably wild for Britain. And on and on to the seaside town of Oban, where we stalled long enough to get Elliot some new shoes and me a new lease on life. I could tell the lease had been signed as the Inner Hebrides made way for each other, channels spreading like fingers, the big car ferry slowing for the Isle of Mull.

A low-sleep and high-concentration journey that might have begun in London or possibly California and was now ending here at a dock. I saw passengers rushing down a stairway. Panic. I was a disabled person in a wheelchair stuck on the wrong deck of a ferry that was letting off passengers one deck below. I was always in the wrong place. There was never enough time to get to the right place. And if I stayed here on the wrong deck, this enormous ship was going to set sail for the next Hebridean island of Iona...leaving Elliot and Jake and our hotel reservation behind. Which sent me scurrying in search of a lift. Which works differently on a ferry, and I was trying to make sense of the thing when one of the ferry staff approached me, all nautical in his Navy-officer's regalia.

Was I getting out of here? Yes. Was I hiring a car? No. And this set me off, because everyone assumes you are either driving or plan to be driving. Even quadriplegics, believed to be magically capable of wandering up to any Hertz counter, waving a credit card about and getting one's hands on a nice magenta low-mileage Sienna van with a wheelchair ramp and disabled controls fitted and adjusted to the neuromuscular specifications of the driver, cup holder mounted on the left. No, I did not want a car. Where are you getting off in Mull? I eyed the faux officer. The dock, I told him. I mean, he asked, how are you departing the ship? Down the gangway, I told him. No, he persevered, where do you wish to be when you alight? On the Isle of Mull, I said. No, but where? The landmass, I replied. The man was undaunted. Sir, he said, the gangway is being moved into place at this level. Hire cars are on the level below.

Sure enough, it was happening, the mechanical dock moving into place and all the other passengers making ready to depart from the same door they had used to enter. Lots of self-control, the ferry guy and me. No one overtly yelling. Everything working out. Everything quite exhausting.

Jake and Elliot and I made our way down the dock and along a half-mile of road to the Isle of Mull Hotel. It was there, right where MapQuest said it would be. Naturally, the disabled room wasn't. Sorry, said the receptionist, we do have a room, but it's down 16 stairs. Hadn't Expedia had an exchange with the hotel about wheelchair access? Well, the receptionist said, there were just five words....

And if one of the words was 'wheelchair' that would be enough, and I was at my wit's end, and while the Fawlty Towers staff went about arranging rooms, Jake recommended the universal Scottish antidote. A wee dram. I'm not a drinker, but this was the time to develop my skills. The Scotch felt good, smoky and doubtless peaty, and according to the promo on the bar, with hints of rosemary. The world has become one place. Even fucking single malt whiskey has to have 'hints.'

Travel with these two younger men is working out well. They can talk to each other about contemporary matters of music and girls and twentysomething life. And they can help. The hotel had that most surprising of things on bleak and rainy Mull: an indoor swimming pool. It was shallow enough, but I am at an age and perhaps a state of mind in which I appreciate having two able-bodied guys to help me in the water and keep an eye on things. Jake had forgotten his swimming suit, but he decided his boxer shorts would do. I couldn't agree more. I was past the point of caring. My wheelchair could not even make it in my hotel bathroom.

Later, the dining room proved to be full. Waiting 45 minutes for a table didn't sound too appealing, so we returned to the scene of the single-malt crime, eating in the bar. Through the window, a storm swept down the channels of the Inner Hebrides, lashing the coast with rain. It is all so unexpected, the rounded valleys and shorn rock peaks that comprise the Highlands. The green of it, water tumbling through every gully, the small harbors with fishing boats, the long inlets of Atlantic water, a ruined castle often perched at either end of the loch. Doubtless a brutal place in winter, and not a particularly easy place even in summer. But beautiful in its savage way. And remarkably empty of people, quite a miracle in crowded Britain. And somehow in the watering and green sloping openness, the dark and light of Atlantic weather always adrifting across the spaces, is some revelation about living and dying. For I have been dreaming about Marlou here. She has lost her hair in the chemotherapy stage of things, yet she looks vibrant and sexy in these dreams. Somehow, the mark of life is upon her, but life is very much within her. As though she has been through and beyond death. And what is true of the dead might someday be true for the living.