Copyright 2014 by Cheryl Andrews. All rights reserved. No portion of this excerpt for brief review may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise - without the written permission of the author.
Stage 1 - Initial Decay: Cells self-digest
Something is always happening, but when it happens, people don't always see it, or understand it... or accept it.
Nicholas Kazan
I am invited to forget myself on purpose.
My mind is haunted. Raised on after school TV, Saturday morning cartoons, evenings of Adam – 12, Emergency!, and my favorite, Space 1999. Their flat moralism devoid of touch, taste, and scent patterned a black and white world. Dualistic. My head filled with 4X4 square fantasies in chunks of 60 minutes where I always know the exact right thing to say at the exact right time. A world where I change lives. Where I am loved.
My mind, its haunted. Created and recreated death. A sudden illness. Eyes closed, I listen to the ventilator. The compressed air pushed in. Then air draw out, inhale and exhale. The sound of the ground made hallow. Gage from Emergency screams, Lactated Ringers! His partner, Desoto, pops open a syringe and plunges it into my heart. My lungs harden from the echoed air’s push and pull. Then a sharp pain as my chest expands, brakes open, and I watch my heart fall further and further away. I flat line. I love you; I love you; I love you.
Its haunted, my mind. Over and over, I work and rework the scene never able to find its end. Unperfecting words handwritten on cards express a deep punctuationless love etched across empty 2X2 whiteness. Love you lots Get better soon Cardinals in long red robes circle my bed and chant. Their echoed churr, churr, churr flutter around my bed. Their red robes shrink into feathers. They fly high above deaths crisp white linen bleach scented room.
Haunted because even in my fantasy I am unable to find my own happy ending. Unable to imagine my one true love who crawls in bed next to me and pleads with me to come back to him. “Breathe for me.” What haunts me is the idea there has to be a reason to be loved. And sickness is the only one I can find.
My mind is haunted.
I look down and see the car falling further into the angry green.
My best friend laughs. What are you doing?
Breathing. I tell her.
Open your eyes. She whispers in my ear.
I turn my face toward her. Watch as she tucks a strain of hair behind her ear. She blinks. Whispers. Time to wake up.
***
The streams of Keanae Lookout lie hidden underneath the thick rainforest terrain, yet still they mark their flow down the mountain and through the valley below. Concentrated green arteries, two fresh clean veins vivify the water’s edges where the streams would otherwise be invisible. The sunlit landscape calls forth a universe so alive in being green it can be nothing else. My eyes follow the water’s path as it falls down the mountain teeming green. I try to track a single stream, but it breaks into too many byways, and I lose the original path. Travel at Your Own Risk.
Today, our third day of vacation, and already I’m bored with the sloth like sunning of our Northern Californian white bodies. Today we traded the warm sand for a scenic joy ride. We are teenagers again, defiant and invincible. We drive the rugged scenic route in Maui, named after the great chief Kahekili who built houses from the skulls of his enemies. Locals warn tourists by telling them about the road’s curse; how Kahekili will choose to rise and take the heads of travelers by any means possible. Challenge Kahekili on his one-lane road with its blind serpentine turns, minimal road reflectors and guardrails and you may lose your mind.
Cliffs on one side and sheer drops on the other force the two-way traffic to share a road laid down to accommodate a single car safely. And still locals brag about the views. “Nowhere else in the world can you see the ocean become the sky. And only if Kahekili likes you will he grant you access inside the bluest of blues.”
Our teenage state-of-mind ensures us of our entitlement. Kahekili will grant us access. How could he not? He’ll like us. Everyone does.
How amazing! To be deemed worthy to touch the space where the ocean becomes the sky. Touch their oneness and know it’s real. Alive.
My body fills with excitement, a childlike need to be out of the car and inside all the fresh air. I roll my window down; let the clean Hawaiian air fill the space inside the car as I breathe in all the floral green. A vague saltiness awakens inside my nose, as the air’s wildness settles on the back of my tongue, fermenting.
My best friend laughs. “What are you doing?”
“Breathing.” I open my mouth. Raise my face to the blue sky. Take the moment inside.
With each new breath, my mind slows. The muscles coiled around my bones lesson their grip. Wind rushes over my face, across my ears, and into my hair.
A space inside me widens. It expands outward beyond my fleshliness. There’s a lightness, a freedom from my own mind. Silence. Skin tingles as an awareness grows from my stomach throughout my body and out into the green greenness. Love. I am awake. In this moment, I am more alive than ever.
The sharp black obsidian rock wall becomes even more real as we enter another curve and drive into its shadow. I’ve never felt a shadow before. There’s an unexpected thickness to it, as if we entered the cliff itself.
“This is the best idea I’ve ever had,” she says.
I smile. Rub my stomach. “How long have we been planning this vacation?”
“Are you hungry?” she asks. “I’ve got an apple in my purse. Behind my seat.”
“No. I’m good.”
“Cramps? I have Tylenol in there too.”
I nod and look out the window into the slick black rock and the sheer drop beside the road.
“Ten years, three months, one and a half days, or three-hundred and twenty-two bottles of wine.”
My smile widens as she answers in her consistent exactness. “You know the exact time we first met too. Don’t you?” I reply.
She smiles. “That would make me a freak.”
I take in a deep breath. Exhale. “No. It makes you, you. How long did you live in the house next door before we met?” I look at her profile; watch her study the landscape.
She glances at me, smiles. “Two days, five hours, fifteen minutes and three seconds when I looked out the window and saw you pacing up and down the sidewalk. It was 12:11PM on Saturday, August 15, 1976. I came out the front door at 12:15, and we smiled at each other for the first time at 12:33. I told you I liked your hair.”
We come out of the cliff’s shadow and cross a narrow wooden bridge. The blackness continues to thicken. It encloses the open bridge around us. The tires shift it’s wood planks. They bend, creek and crack as we roll over them.
“I watched the movers carry your matching furniture and box after box into the house.” I look out the window. “I wanted to sit in one of your white rose upholstered chairs. I pictured all eight around your dining room table. All eight of them the same white wooden chairs.” I close my eyes as if protecting myself from the memories heat. “Shamed by the four-mismatched plastic dumpster-dive chairs, Mother called “Treasures,” we had around our table; it took me three and a half weeks to gather enough courage to knock on your door and introduce myself. Even then I was pretending I was confident and not feral.” I turn my head watch her hair blow in the wind.
She smiles. Her eyes twinkle. “I hated those chairs. Mother was always yelling – Don’t touch. Don’t you dare touch those or I’ll…” Together we finish her mother’s protest like we did as children… “beat you within an inch of your life!” She glances at me quickly and winks, returns her focus back onto the road. “And here we are. Hawaii!” She pulls a few strands of hair from her bottom lip, tucks them behind her ear, then moistens her lips with her tongue.
“When did you know you were beautiful?” I ask. Muscles re-tighten. Coil around my bones. The wide openness constricts back inside my stomach. Leaves me smaller than when I entered the car.
Without hesitation she says, “The moment my mother told me I was.”
I nod and force a smile. “Did you always believe her, your mother?”
She shrugs. “Yes and no. It’s not so much what she said or how she said it. It’s what I knew inside myself. How her words feel inside my own skin.”
“Did you always feel whole inside?”
“We’re on vacation. I’m not going to let you do this.”
“Do what?”
“This. What you always do.”
“What? Can’t you give me an honest answer? It’s a simple question.”
“No, No its not. Not when you use it to make yourself feel less than me. Not when you use me to beat up on yourself. I’m not going to let you. Not today I’m not going to let you do it to yourself.”
I stare out the windshield; stare through everything in front of the car. “Did you pack the purple dress with the white Hawaiian flowers?
“Yep. My pearl earrings with the new seashell necklace you bought yesterday would set it off perfectly.” She winks at me. “I’m wearing your white dress tonight for the lulaw. You know I love it.”
“Yeah, it looks better on you than it does on me.”
“What can I say? I’m cute as a button.” She laughs. “You look stunning in it. You don’t allow yourself to see how great you look in it. You don’t know how beautiful you are.”
“You’re probably right. Usually are.”
She smiles and nudges me with her shoulder. “What you see isn’t always what’s real.”
“How could it not be real. I see it therefore it exists.” I stretch my arms outward along the windshield. “I see the black rock. The next turn. The blue sky and the clouds. I see you.”
So you believe if you see it, its real?”
“Yes. Like everyone else.”
“Can you see yourself. Right now. In this car? Can you see yourself sitting in that seat in this car?”
“Yes.” I look down at my body sitting in the seat. “I see my body… arms, hands, fingers, chest, stomach, legs, feet….
“So you have X-Ray vision?”
“No.” I shake my head. “What are you talking about?”
“Do you really see your body? Arms? Chest? Stomach? Legs? Feet?”
“Yes.” I lift my arms and show her. Grab my thigh and shake them.
“But what are you REALLY seeing? Look at your legs. Do you see your legs?”
The car's pace across the final plank is too slow; we don't have enough momentum to move over the open lip between the bridge and the pavement. We roll backward. She shifts down into first. The car leaps forward.
“Yes.” I shake them harder. Anger and shame heat my checks and neck.
“Look again. What do you really see? What is the first thing you see?”
“My pants. I see my white pants.”
“Are pants legs?”
“What…” Heat flushes my face and chest. My inability to give her the correct answer fast enough frustrates my own sense of intelligence. I shrink with each word from her mouth. I want this over. This drive, this togetherness. All of it. Over. Give me the sand’s heat under my feet, the weight of my body in a lounge chair. The cool sharp crispness of iced tea over my tongue. I want her silence… to go back to enjoying the view.
“Do you see the pants or your legs?”
“The pants. The pants. Okay, I see the pants.”
“If you see the pants, and not your legs, how do you know you have legs?”
“What? Their right here.”
“You can’t see your legs. So how do you know they exist?”
“I feel them.”
A smile widens across her face. “Seeing isn’t always believing. How ‘bout this…when we get back to the hotel, we’ll put on the purple dress and take a selfie from the shoulders down.” She winks at me. “Then you can choose which one is you and which is me.”
I shrug. “Sure. Why not.” I think to myself let it be over. Just let it be over.
We round the curve and for a moment there it is… the ocean, the sky, in all their natural oneness spread across the windshield. I reach for it and I’m distracted by a contrasting glow of red and flashing yellow directly in front of me, our car rolling toward it. We move closer to it fast, a glint of metal and headlights. Through the oncoming windshield a head of black hair leans across the driver, a camera out the window. Their windshield flashes as the photo snaps off. I never see the driver’s face; never know if he sees us heading straight toward him, the blurry red and flashing yellow shifting into focus by the second.
Left! Turn Left! We swerve toward a streak of white, a bus, its horn blaring. Faces contort in fear, press against the bus windows, and watch in horror.
My eyes widen. My skin expands, hardens. We jerk right toward the steep drop into the blue oneness. My heart falls into my stomach, then falls from my body out of the car. I feel it bleed between my legs, feel it leak down through the pavement and back into the earth below. Lightheaded and dizzy, my mind refuses to believe what is happening.
The guardrail will stop us. It has to. The car accelerates. Metal shrieks as it crumples and glass shatters. My body thrust forward. A powerful white gust suspends my upper body. The road disappears. Tires leave the pavement.
Dizzy in dissociation, I view my body inside the car from a great distance above the car. Somehow, I believe I am able to press myself through the seat, step out through the back of the car, and back onto the pavement. And once on my feet, I can pull the car back. I can save us, all of us.
Heaved into the air, floating seeds from a maple tree, single winged insects twirling in the wind as we fall.
I’m a racing heart.
A pair of fists.
Paralyzed inside the car, I witness our falling from outside the action of falling.
A single thought over and over in my mind. I love you; I love you; I love you.
Folded deeper within the jungle green, weightless, we fall into the biting foliage, now more deeply green, more precisely textured and more jaggedly shaded. The green slices through the car, ever deeper into my skin. I try to lift my arms to shield my face, They are unresponsive, heavy, and seem far away from me. Unable to move, my body turns hot, weighted in pain. I love you; I love you; I love you. The car fills with the warm scent of cherry tobacco and fermenting wood. I close my eyes to the perturbing green and remember.
Stage 1 - Initial Decay: Cells self-digest
Something is always happening, but when it happens, people don't always see it, or understand it... or accept it.
Nicholas Kazan
I am invited to forget myself on purpose.
My mind is haunted. Raised on after school TV, Saturday morning cartoons, evenings of Adam – 12, Emergency!, and my favorite, Space 1999. Their flat moralism devoid of touch, taste, and scent patterned a black and white world. Dualistic. My head filled with 4X4 square fantasies in chunks of 60 minutes where I always know the exact right thing to say at the exact right time. A world where I change lives. Where I am loved.
My mind, its haunted. Created and recreated death. A sudden illness. Eyes closed, I listen to the ventilator. The compressed air pushed in. Then air draw out, inhale and exhale. The sound of the ground made hallow. Gage from Emergency screams, Lactated Ringers! His partner, Desoto, pops open a syringe and plunges it into my heart. My lungs harden from the echoed air’s push and pull. Then a sharp pain as my chest expands, brakes open, and I watch my heart fall further and further away. I flat line. I love you; I love you; I love you.
Its haunted, my mind. Over and over, I work and rework the scene never able to find its end. Unperfecting words handwritten on cards express a deep punctuationless love etched across empty 2X2 whiteness. Love you lots Get better soon Cardinals in long red robes circle my bed and chant. Their echoed churr, churr, churr flutter around my bed. Their red robes shrink into feathers. They fly high above deaths crisp white linen bleach scented room.
Haunted because even in my fantasy I am unable to find my own happy ending. Unable to imagine my one true love who crawls in bed next to me and pleads with me to come back to him. “Breathe for me.” What haunts me is the idea there has to be a reason to be loved. And sickness is the only one I can find.
My mind is haunted.
I look down and see the car falling further into the angry green.
My best friend laughs. What are you doing?
Breathing. I tell her.
Open your eyes. She whispers in my ear.
I turn my face toward her. Watch as she tucks a strain of hair behind her ear. She blinks. Whispers. Time to wake up.
***
The streams of Keanae Lookout lie hidden underneath the thick rainforest terrain, yet still they mark their flow down the mountain and through the valley below. Concentrated green arteries, two fresh clean veins vivify the water’s edges where the streams would otherwise be invisible. The sunlit landscape calls forth a universe so alive in being green it can be nothing else. My eyes follow the water’s path as it falls down the mountain teeming green. I try to track a single stream, but it breaks into too many byways, and I lose the original path. Travel at Your Own Risk.
Today, our third day of vacation, and already I’m bored with the sloth like sunning of our Northern Californian white bodies. Today we traded the warm sand for a scenic joy ride. We are teenagers again, defiant and invincible. We drive the rugged scenic route in Maui, named after the great chief Kahekili who built houses from the skulls of his enemies. Locals warn tourists by telling them about the road’s curse; how Kahekili will choose to rise and take the heads of travelers by any means possible. Challenge Kahekili on his one-lane road with its blind serpentine turns, minimal road reflectors and guardrails and you may lose your mind.
Cliffs on one side and sheer drops on the other force the two-way traffic to share a road laid down to accommodate a single car safely. And still locals brag about the views. “Nowhere else in the world can you see the ocean become the sky. And only if Kahekili likes you will he grant you access inside the bluest of blues.”
Our teenage state-of-mind ensures us of our entitlement. Kahekili will grant us access. How could he not? He’ll like us. Everyone does.
How amazing! To be deemed worthy to touch the space where the ocean becomes the sky. Touch their oneness and know it’s real. Alive.
My body fills with excitement, a childlike need to be out of the car and inside all the fresh air. I roll my window down; let the clean Hawaiian air fill the space inside the car as I breathe in all the floral green. A vague saltiness awakens inside my nose, as the air’s wildness settles on the back of my tongue, fermenting.
My best friend laughs. “What are you doing?”
“Breathing.” I open my mouth. Raise my face to the blue sky. Take the moment inside.
With each new breath, my mind slows. The muscles coiled around my bones lesson their grip. Wind rushes over my face, across my ears, and into my hair.
A space inside me widens. It expands outward beyond my fleshliness. There’s a lightness, a freedom from my own mind. Silence. Skin tingles as an awareness grows from my stomach throughout my body and out into the green greenness. Love. I am awake. In this moment, I am more alive than ever.
The sharp black obsidian rock wall becomes even more real as we enter another curve and drive into its shadow. I’ve never felt a shadow before. There’s an unexpected thickness to it, as if we entered the cliff itself.
“This is the best idea I’ve ever had,” she says.
I smile. Rub my stomach. “How long have we been planning this vacation?”
“Are you hungry?” she asks. “I’ve got an apple in my purse. Behind my seat.”
“No. I’m good.”
“Cramps? I have Tylenol in there too.”
I nod and look out the window into the slick black rock and the sheer drop beside the road.
“Ten years, three months, one and a half days, or three-hundred and twenty-two bottles of wine.”
My smile widens as she answers in her consistent exactness. “You know the exact time we first met too. Don’t you?” I reply.
She smiles. “That would make me a freak.”
I take in a deep breath. Exhale. “No. It makes you, you. How long did you live in the house next door before we met?” I look at her profile; watch her study the landscape.
She glances at me, smiles. “Two days, five hours, fifteen minutes and three seconds when I looked out the window and saw you pacing up and down the sidewalk. It was 12:11PM on Saturday, August 15, 1976. I came out the front door at 12:15, and we smiled at each other for the first time at 12:33. I told you I liked your hair.”
We come out of the cliff’s shadow and cross a narrow wooden bridge. The blackness continues to thicken. It encloses the open bridge around us. The tires shift it’s wood planks. They bend, creek and crack as we roll over them.
“I watched the movers carry your matching furniture and box after box into the house.” I look out the window. “I wanted to sit in one of your white rose upholstered chairs. I pictured all eight around your dining room table. All eight of them the same white wooden chairs.” I close my eyes as if protecting myself from the memories heat. “Shamed by the four-mismatched plastic dumpster-dive chairs, Mother called “Treasures,” we had around our table; it took me three and a half weeks to gather enough courage to knock on your door and introduce myself. Even then I was pretending I was confident and not feral.” I turn my head watch her hair blow in the wind.
She smiles. Her eyes twinkle. “I hated those chairs. Mother was always yelling – Don’t touch. Don’t you dare touch those or I’ll…” Together we finish her mother’s protest like we did as children… “beat you within an inch of your life!” She glances at me quickly and winks, returns her focus back onto the road. “And here we are. Hawaii!” She pulls a few strands of hair from her bottom lip, tucks them behind her ear, then moistens her lips with her tongue.
“When did you know you were beautiful?” I ask. Muscles re-tighten. Coil around my bones. The wide openness constricts back inside my stomach. Leaves me smaller than when I entered the car.
Without hesitation she says, “The moment my mother told me I was.”
I nod and force a smile. “Did you always believe her, your mother?”
She shrugs. “Yes and no. It’s not so much what she said or how she said it. It’s what I knew inside myself. How her words feel inside my own skin.”
“Did you always feel whole inside?”
“We’re on vacation. I’m not going to let you do this.”
“Do what?”
“This. What you always do.”
“What? Can’t you give me an honest answer? It’s a simple question.”
“No, No its not. Not when you use it to make yourself feel less than me. Not when you use me to beat up on yourself. I’m not going to let you. Not today I’m not going to let you do it to yourself.”
I stare out the windshield; stare through everything in front of the car. “Did you pack the purple dress with the white Hawaiian flowers?
“Yep. My pearl earrings with the new seashell necklace you bought yesterday would set it off perfectly.” She winks at me. “I’m wearing your white dress tonight for the lulaw. You know I love it.”
“Yeah, it looks better on you than it does on me.”
“What can I say? I’m cute as a button.” She laughs. “You look stunning in it. You don’t allow yourself to see how great you look in it. You don’t know how beautiful you are.”
“You’re probably right. Usually are.”
She smiles and nudges me with her shoulder. “What you see isn’t always what’s real.”
“How could it not be real. I see it therefore it exists.” I stretch my arms outward along the windshield. “I see the black rock. The next turn. The blue sky and the clouds. I see you.”
So you believe if you see it, its real?”
“Yes. Like everyone else.”
“Can you see yourself. Right now. In this car? Can you see yourself sitting in that seat in this car?”
“Yes.” I look down at my body sitting in the seat. “I see my body… arms, hands, fingers, chest, stomach, legs, feet….
“So you have X-Ray vision?”
“No.” I shake my head. “What are you talking about?”
“Do you really see your body? Arms? Chest? Stomach? Legs? Feet?”
“Yes.” I lift my arms and show her. Grab my thigh and shake them.
“But what are you REALLY seeing? Look at your legs. Do you see your legs?”
The car's pace across the final plank is too slow; we don't have enough momentum to move over the open lip between the bridge and the pavement. We roll backward. She shifts down into first. The car leaps forward.
“Yes.” I shake them harder. Anger and shame heat my checks and neck.
“Look again. What do you really see? What is the first thing you see?”
“My pants. I see my white pants.”
“Are pants legs?”
“What…” Heat flushes my face and chest. My inability to give her the correct answer fast enough frustrates my own sense of intelligence. I shrink with each word from her mouth. I want this over. This drive, this togetherness. All of it. Over. Give me the sand’s heat under my feet, the weight of my body in a lounge chair. The cool sharp crispness of iced tea over my tongue. I want her silence… to go back to enjoying the view.
“Do you see the pants or your legs?”
“The pants. The pants. Okay, I see the pants.”
“If you see the pants, and not your legs, how do you know you have legs?”
“What? Their right here.”
“You can’t see your legs. So how do you know they exist?”
“I feel them.”
A smile widens across her face. “Seeing isn’t always believing. How ‘bout this…when we get back to the hotel, we’ll put on the purple dress and take a selfie from the shoulders down.” She winks at me. “Then you can choose which one is you and which is me.”
I shrug. “Sure. Why not.” I think to myself let it be over. Just let it be over.
We round the curve and for a moment there it is… the ocean, the sky, in all their natural oneness spread across the windshield. I reach for it and I’m distracted by a contrasting glow of red and flashing yellow directly in front of me, our car rolling toward it. We move closer to it fast, a glint of metal and headlights. Through the oncoming windshield a head of black hair leans across the driver, a camera out the window. Their windshield flashes as the photo snaps off. I never see the driver’s face; never know if he sees us heading straight toward him, the blurry red and flashing yellow shifting into focus by the second.
Left! Turn Left! We swerve toward a streak of white, a bus, its horn blaring. Faces contort in fear, press against the bus windows, and watch in horror.
My eyes widen. My skin expands, hardens. We jerk right toward the steep drop into the blue oneness. My heart falls into my stomach, then falls from my body out of the car. I feel it bleed between my legs, feel it leak down through the pavement and back into the earth below. Lightheaded and dizzy, my mind refuses to believe what is happening.
The guardrail will stop us. It has to. The car accelerates. Metal shrieks as it crumples and glass shatters. My body thrust forward. A powerful white gust suspends my upper body. The road disappears. Tires leave the pavement.
Dizzy in dissociation, I view my body inside the car from a great distance above the car. Somehow, I believe I am able to press myself through the seat, step out through the back of the car, and back onto the pavement. And once on my feet, I can pull the car back. I can save us, all of us.
Heaved into the air, floating seeds from a maple tree, single winged insects twirling in the wind as we fall.
I’m a racing heart.
A pair of fists.
Paralyzed inside the car, I witness our falling from outside the action of falling.
A single thought over and over in my mind. I love you; I love you; I love you.
Folded deeper within the jungle green, weightless, we fall into the biting foliage, now more deeply green, more precisely textured and more jaggedly shaded. The green slices through the car, ever deeper into my skin. I try to lift my arms to shield my face, They are unresponsive, heavy, and seem far away from me. Unable to move, my body turns hot, weighted in pain. I love you; I love you; I love you. The car fills with the warm scent of cherry tobacco and fermenting wood. I close my eyes to the perturbing green and remember.