The doctor said I’d have been a once-in-a-generation genius had the babysitter not left me, at six months, on the edge of the kitchen countertop to take a phone call, had pieces of my skullcap not, afterward, been exploded onto the linoleum floor.
Clinically, it was a fractured skull, a crack probably jagged but centered under the flattened crown.
*
I can’t remember the pattern of the linoleum but I do remember it was brown and in panels maybe eight inches square and the pattern repeated in full through the kitchen and dining room and hallway and foyer, ending abruptly in a quarter-pattern framed by a grooved metal bezel. The rest of the house was carpeted. The kitchen walls were covered in wallpaper with an orange and blue and brown fleur de lis pattern. Recently my parents moved and, in getting the house ready to sell, they installed hardwood floors, pulled down the wallpaper, and painted the kitchen green.
*
I’ve never been clear on the nature of the injury to the brain. Something so fragile, I like to think of it as shattering like glass. Or that maybe it was more like a bruise, swelled, turned black and blue for a couple of weeks, stung. Though I know it was more like blunt trauma, the force of the linoleum, that there was some kind of exposure through the crack in the skull. If the brain were skin, I imagine now there’d maybe be a patch of scar tissue, thicker than elsewhere, discolored, more like canvas than anything human.
*
Like any thing survived, there were all the lucky that’s: [insert things about it that were lucky here].
*
In middle school after I’d begged to be allowed to play football and was being fitted for a helmet, I was told my head was oblong and that no standard helmet would fit perfectly, that they couldn’t assure my safety and couldn’t be held responsible for it. They gave me one that was a size too large. My head rattled around inside it.
*
When you do something stupid, people ask, “Were you dropped on your head as a child?”
*
All my life I’ve suffered from blinding headaches. My childhood ENT—a tall bald man with a Skeletor face and a well-polished head mirror—said I had the sinuses of an eighty-year-old man.
*
I have difficulty measuring and quantifying pain—or really, anything abstract and omnipresent, like happiness or fear or knowledge—according to any sort of numerical or other rigid rubric. This is one reason I’ve always been skeptical of the value of standardized tests. That, and I’m afraid I wouldn’t score as well as I think I should.
*
Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl conceived of suffering as similar to the behavior of gas: “If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.” In this way, suffering is all-encompassing and relative and unquantifiable.
*
I missed so many days of school I was considered truant. Still I was always a few years ahead of the other kids in my class. I did well on tests not because I studied but because there were some things I just knew and, otherwise, could solve problems creatively. I was recruited by the area’s private alternative/arts school. I stayed in public school instead.
*
Summers, we’d go to our family’s cottage, an old green-painted cabin built on an eroding sandhill above Lake Erie. The hill had been blown out from under parts of the house, including the bedroom I slept in. We called the room “Precipice.”
*
The time I shaved my head as an act of rebellion and courage, afraid while I was doing it there’d be a long ugly scar I’d never seen.
*
There were a couple of surgeries and, at least in my memory, it feels like I was in and out of hospitals once or twice a week. I’ve never been good at remembering maps but I can think of a bunch of different layouts to different hospitals and different parts of hospitals. Where we entered for regular appointments. Where we’d go for specialists. Where we’d park if it was an emergency. The different smells.
Except I can’t distinguish between the hospitals anymore; they’ve all blended into a big complex of all the hospitals I’ve visited in my life and all the hospitals I’ve imagined or seen in dreams. That last part: I’m on an upper floor of a yellow-painted hospital in a room with a window and the sun and a radio and there’s a gunman on a lower floor and I pull out the tubes and help everyone escape to the roof, the stairwells blood-soaked.
*
I don’t know whether the headaches are related, whether my whole skull was compressed in the fall or something, the sinuses compacted. There are only so many of the things in my life I can blame on the babysitter.
*
Though I am the only person I’ve known who had a childhood ENT.
*
Frankl also distinguishes between uncontrollable external stimuli like the ungodly inexpressible of life in a concentration camp and the interior life of the mind that, if you work at it, is impossibly impenetrable even at the butt-end strike of a machine gun.
He survived the concentration camps and went on to become a best-selling author. In 1985, the American Psychiatric Association awarded him the Oskar Pfister Award for important contributions to psychiatry and religion. He died in 1997 of heart failure.
I wonder if he would’ve instead called them death camps had he not survived. I wonder if he’d have been cited for his contributions to psychiatry and religion had he not survived. I wonder whether cause and effect is really a thing.
*
Sometimes I have difficulty concentrating, difficulty finishing things. For one, this essay, which is ostensibly about my life, is only half-finished. I wonder whether it would feel any more complete if I died tomorrow, whether death could be so impactful as to make a half-something full.
*
Science used to say people use only ten percent of their brains. Like the brain is an iceberg and consciousness is frigid air and most of what we know is under cold water. This understanding has since been disproven as laughably false. But still it’s nice to think there’s a whole life-ocean we haven’t yet explored. Or that we have the capacity to do so much, that there’s room to be better, to know more.
*
I don’t have much facility working with my hands, but I’ve known people who can take an engine apart and put it back together again blindfolded.
*
I was seven when the Challenger exploded. I remember I was at school, watched it all happen on a TV on a rolling cart they’d brought in so we could see Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher launched into space, watched her get in the elevator, walk out across the bridge onto the shuttle. Heard the countdown. Watched the thrust, the shuttle hovering there for an instant, floating, before the force of the engines pushed off against the earth. There was a slow arc over the ocean. And then there was nothing, just a splintery rain of debris.
At home that night, I watched President Reagan’s speech. He talked about the importance of exploration and about how the astronauts had slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God. I wondered whether it was right to still call them astronauts, to call them by what they couldn’t achieve, what stayed just outside their reach.
*
At some point before that, I had an imaginary friend named Dio. He and I would talk about things like religion and God. And later, we talked to God. I asked why I was still alive and the people on the Challenger weren’t. I asked how, if he’s all powerful, we have any power at all; if he’s all knowing, why he keeps us from knowing the things we need to know to keep from falling out of the sky.
*
My parents weren’t very religious, nominally Episcopalian, like occasional Easter Episcopalians. My father didn’t like to be preached to. He felt he’d done all that was required of him. And so church, when we went, was mostly an excuse to have lunch at the Sign of the Beefcarver, where they would keep small plates of things—buttered corn, Yorkshire pudding, Jell-O—under heat lamps and would carve roast beef to order at the end of the buffet line.
Many of my friends were Catholic and talked about things I didn’t know, like communion and singing in the choir, Sunday school. Later my mother took a job teaching at an Orthodox Jewish boys’ school. On days I was sick, I’d go with her. The hallways smelled starchy and austere. There were black hats and forelocks. I met rabbis, heard them read from the Torah. And I tried wearing a yarmulke. It felt like it didn’t want to stay on. But more than anything, I felt like there were entire vocabularies I didn’t have. That there were languages in which I couldn’t communicate, worlds in which I had no knowledge.
*
My mother kept back issues of National Enquirer in the bathroom and, after I finished the crossword puzzle, I’d read through the classifieds and get excited about the idea of sending away to become a priest.
*
When I feel unsettled, I rewatch the video of the Challenger and the speech. I cry every time.
*
I can’t remember whether it was before the disaster or after and I can’t remember her name, but Christa McAuliffe’s backup visited our school and told us that, no matter what, we had to reach for the stars, had to be explorers because that’s the ultimate mission of mankind, the ultimate purpose to life: to learn and to explore.
*
Every once in a while I come up on the edges of my ability to solve things. It feels like I’m out on a cliff or like I’ve come upon a precipice, one more step and I fall into a canyon. Or like I’m in a house on a hill in a cantilevered room.
*
Other times I think of it more like the entrance to a void—something and then something and then nothing—and I can look into this black nothing. It’s the size of a telephone call and gravity. That this black nothing could once have been something is frustrating.
*
I have to know where everything is. Whenever we’d stay in hotels as a kid, the first thing I’d do was take the hotel guide out of the desk drawer (or sometimes it was in the dresser), study all of the hotel services, and then walk through the hotel identifying where everything was. I still do this with hotels and I do this now, also, with cities, spend days exploring streets and storefronts and subways until I feel like I know how they work. Until I do this, hotels, cities, subways, anything unknown feels like it’s swirling, unstable, inside my head.
Maybe it’s a safety thing. But also, I think, it’s partly curiosity and partly my strange need to have some firm ground to stand on.
*
In their bedroom at home, my parents had a folding metal ladder they planned to use in case of fire so that we wouldn’t have to jump from the second story. None of the hotels had this feature. I imagined us in the middle of the night in a panic leaping through the hotel window and breaking against the ground below.
*
I’ve always been afraid of heights and have tried to overcome it by skydiving. The first time, we went up in a tiny old prop plane, just the pilot, the instructor, the video guy, and me. The plane was rusted metal and duct tape, instruments strapped to the dashboard. I tucked my legs into the tail. There was the firm lift of metal on air carrying us to an altitude from which we could jump without fear of dying, without drilling into the ground at terminal velocity. It’s the safest I’ve ever felt.
Once the parachute was open, it took us fifteen minutes to float back to earth over the ocean and the tidewater. I could smell the sea from five thousand feet. It was incredibly beautiful.
*
There’s a joke I retell more often than I should: “I used to think my brain was the most important part of my body. But then I thought, hey, look what’s telling me that.”
*
Once, I was in Paris, hungover and exhausted, and I walked through the gardens of the Rodin Museum and I realized that if I concentrated too hard, stared too deeply into the concave eyes of the green bronze sculptures, I could make them come alive in my mind, get them to explore with me through the garden. Later I walked along a canal and convinced myself that, if I moved fast enough, I could run to the other side without breaking the surface.
I like to think it’s all real, that there’s a world that exists in the half-second before imagination gives way to logic and reason—a world where sculptures can dance and we can carry ourselves light enough to walk across water.
*
I lived with a strong fear that my family was going to kill me and I’d sleep with my back against the wall because of it. One night I dreamed that my sister had poisoned my coffee with a banana. I woke up screaming and was even more upset and suspicious when my parents didn’t think it was a big deal.
*
And then, age eight: I found an unexploded pipe bomb under a mailbox. I didn’t know what it was. They said the design was faulty, that the wick failed and that any wrong friction would have leveled the neighborhood, that it was both dangerous and lucky that I’d picked it up and that we’d thought to call the police and that we’d done it all without triggering an explosion. Recently, I told this story to my girlfriend and my mother said I was remembering all the facts wrong.
*
Sometimes I think about how I fell, whether there was any grace to it. Whether I dove like a swan. Or whether I just tumbled end over end.
*
On 9/11, I was late for work and, walking to the office, noticed a plane flying low overhead along the river toward the Pentagon. My other memories: the phones didn’t work; I walked toward the Washington Monument to make sure it was still standing; there was quiet and still with occasional sirens; the floor of our office building felt suddenly slanted, like we might slip out.
The worst thing about the day for me, though, was that I could imagine jumping from the top floors of the towers, had dreamed it before, that desperation. One team of documentary filmmakers had recorded audio of bodies hitting the pavement outside the World Trade Center and played the sound over a black screen. That and the sound of the whistles, the alarms they attach to a fireman’s jacket to indicate he’s no longer moving. For days, I played these sounds over and over.
*
Sometimes when I get sad, I close my eyes and it feels like I’m falling. I can feel the wind against my face. The linoleum.
*
It was always a thing I was afraid to tell anyone. Like they’d look at me differently, treat me like an invalid. Like if I ever made a mistake or did something stupid or if there was an answer I didn’t know or couldn’t figure out. I didn’t want the babysitter, the counter, the fall, to be an excuse. Like everyone, there are some things I’ve learned and some things I’m still learning and some things I’m relearning and some things I just know. The pattern of the universe is that it expands and I like to believe that what might seem like an end, a finity, a half-finished tile of linoleum, a precipice to blank nothingness, is really just a surly bond that needs to be slipped, pushed past.
I’m still not particularly religious but all I’ve ever known or learned brings me to this: I have to think that—whatever he looks like, smells like, to the extent we can know, whether it’s anything more or less than a name for some unseen spirit or force that softens blows—God is somewhere in all of this. That there’s a little God in the give of linoleum. In the scar of sutured skull. In the force of friction that resists the deathpull of gravity, that releases us from it, keeps us from falling forever.
***
Rumpus original art by Mark Armstrong.
