up is such a miraculous event, every time. First there is the rushed confusion of a turbulent wood-between-the-worlds, half withdrawal of the land on the other side and part the scene that is in front of your open eyes, that is now taking over the world that before reigned in your mind.
It happens every arousal more or less quickly, more or less completely. There are so many worlds in the mind of a single person — every era, every mood, every day, sometimes, a world in itself to be entered or quitted. The less full is the awakening the stronger is the tangled bouquet-scent of a world that leaves a fragment in your mind so that you are never fully free from a day that became a world.
All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful moment we remember that we forget: hats off to the great G.K.2
On the day the fires went up, Christian took his wife Marie Aimee’s hand, and running out the back door, he escaped the violence of revolution for the second time. The ship with Christian and Marie Aimee on it came into the port of New Orleans. Stepping off the boat, they rolled into the city. They would make it like their home in France.
Waking up, walking outside of the door of your mind and standing on the porch for a bit, drinking it in, the brilliant sunlight streaming through the pines, sitting in the lap of the world. Mossy paths run through the yard like veins and you take the one that leads to a camellia bush the size of an armoire. Dew, dark glossy leaves, bright lipstick pink flowers in the fresh morning sun, the air crisp and warm wrapping you like a terry cloth towel. It is the most beautiful day in the world. This is the day that the Lord has made: you shall be glad and rejoice in it.
This is the day that is pasted in my mind as the standard for all other days to come, the picture of day in my first life. “Day” begins in the early morning in March on a porch in south Louisiana.
I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. The Lord has chastened me severely, but He has not give me over to death.3
The glare of white naked plastic pierces through the bluegray darkness and all that I know is that my body isn’t here, but my mind is punctured by the smell of the white plasticity, of a very green and natural scent that is clean as acid. Like a ship the room heaves, up and then down every now and then; when I open my eyes to stare, it is askew like a room on a sailboat lodged sideways between rock and sea. From my shelf-bed underneath the white sheet the world is a dying yacht wrecked by the ungence of bamboo the white-green shade of a neon moth. It feels like the fifth watch of the night — sometime when the sun refuses to rise or to set in those nauseous, uncertain hours after the night and before the morning.
This is the first day of my second life.
Christian was succeeded by Alphonse. Alphonse built the houses that are famous in the French Quarter for the curling Spanish iron for his wife. And the family lived in them past money, past TB and war.
The white house on the corner is the one where James and then Henry were born.
A very dear friend recorded a journal of the proceedings.
Aug. 4, 2002
Dear Molly,
We came to see you today. You did come out of the coma, so you’re able to move and open your eyes, but most of the time you look around like a deer in the headlights. I talked to your folks who were glad you could move, but wished you were up and going again. It is so hard to be patient. Your eyes were slightly opened when I came into your room, you looked the same as before, but they had strapped your ankles and wrist so you wouldn’t move so much. Your dad asked if you loved him, and if so squeeze his hand, and you squeezed a whole bunch! I hope they can take those pipes out of your throat soon, they must really hurt. I’ll talk to you soon.4
Everything is illusory, everything less vivid than a dream. All faces are blurred bobble heads to my unspectacled eyes, all distances deceptive, shallow as sand in clear water. Every object is a doorknob that my right hand is too weak to turn. Nurses are shadows talking at me. The world is alive when I close my eyes and become part of the night, watching the white room from odd corners, participating through nostalgic dreams; until I open my eyes and the room is flooded with sunshine.
A fire-breathing dragon crawls up and retches itself from my throat. This is more like a flame swallower, a sword-swallower dragging a serrated edge up the sides of his throat and messing up the trick. I open my mouth until I swallow my face, and the hose rattles up my throat like a Model-T on a washboard road. I remember taking out the ventilator and learning how to breathe — in, out, in, out — hah, hah, hah, hah, not air enough to fog a mirror from my shredded throat.
And then I can see again. The world rushes towards me all at once as Mamma slides my glasses onto my face and the scene is framed in focus. Richie is unshaved-scruffy and man-tall; he is grown up. Mom and Dad are older. They are all grown up. After a while, it hits me that I must have somehow grown-up in the meantime too. I am alive and now I see.
But a boy that I think I know is putting my shoes on and I don’t know how to keep both feet on the ground. Who is this man? Mom hands me onto a walker and we stumble through long hallways, one foot safely on the ground in front of the other with hands on either side.
I watch the building tops and the streetlights and the blue sky flicker past the windows from the ambulance bed all the way to the Rehab Center. You won’t remember this, they said, you won’t remember the I.C.U. No one ever does.
I do. I remember learning how to walk, and I remember the cock-eyed shots of buildings and sky-line through the window of the ambulance that brought me to the rehab center.
Now is surrounded by tubes and roses, white walls, Hallmark cards. The triangularity of the room wedges its way into the burgeoning reality of the world; the diagonal bed inserted into the corner becomes a mountain peak to be clung to.
“This is what happened.” And again, “This is what happened.” Over and over and over again, they say the same thing so many times, every time I open my eyes.
Someone is constantly reminding me that I have an arm on my left side. I meet lists of happy happy doctors and nurses who flip pictures, show me numbers, letters, ask me questions about the president, who is not Clinton any more, that’s right, and practice walking.
Apricot juice is icy, orchard-fresh, sugar-sweet, sitting in a plastic mustard-yellow chair in a blanket. I don’t eat the jello because the tray is such a nasty old-lady mustard-afghan color, the kind of plastic that you click your nails on. Aunt Eugenie tells me to eat it, because they can’t make the food that bad. But they can try, I whisper in my hoarse voice that slips out so soft that soundwaves are unreal and immaterial. She thinks that is so funny. I didn’t mean it as a joke.
Father, mother, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, others. An odd array of relatives and friends, acquaintances and strangers are here, sometimes some, sometime others, and the abnormality fits the disjunction of my now-life. Between them all everyone seems to be having lots of fun. They have so many funny stories to tell me that I have vague regrets that I am not a part of it.
I am bone-tired out by walking down the hallways holding on to a strong arm, or we sit in the wedge-room. Atrophied, they say about my broken knee.
The second or third day my blue baseball cap slips. There is a mirror, and I am wearing my glasses so I can look into it and see that most of my head is bald. Oh, so this is what they said. I should be dead, but I am alive.
