Where Earth Meets Water Page 16

  There is a small park around the corner from my office that I sit in during my self-allotted lunch hour. The park is divided into two halves—one where adults would bring their lunches to unwrap while they chatted or shouted into cell phones or tapped away at BlackBerry devices. But the other part of the park is a children’s playground, and it was here that I often balanced my sandwich on my knees and watched the children slip down the well-worn slides or chase one another through the sputtery sprinkler on the muggy summer days. I always brought a book and pretended to read from it lest nannies and parents worry about a childless woman watching toddlers romp about; one could never be too careful these days.

  But I watched them play, growing increasingly anxious and tensing my whole body when I predicted a fall or a shove or push that would render ear-piercing screams. I’d watch as the smallest gesture from a larger child could coax a smile to transform into a meltdown. I was more vigilant than the babysitters or the mothers because I was ready and poised for it, while the caretakers were only hoping in the backs of their minds that their charges might pick their feet up that extra millimeter so they didn’t trip on the rubber matting or hold their head cocked just so under the monkey bars. I could anticipate disaster here; I could watch as it crept around me. This was one place I was in charge, where at any moment, I could spring up and put my hand over a head to protect it from clanking into a metal ladder rung, or step between a fight ready to happen, distracting the contenders with a game of tag, or mediate to return a sand bucket to its rightful owner. I wasn’t surprised here. I wasn’t taken aback or shocked. Children were so delightfully easy to read. Had I been a parent here, my child would never have returned home with bruises or scrapes or even a dusty, tear-stained face from petty proprietary fights.

  I told Karom about this place, how playgrounds were a place to anticipate failure, and I urged him to join me one day during his lunch hour to watch the children at play.

  “It’s fascinating,” I said. “If you just watch children, you can figure out their every move. They really aren’t that surprising. I can see danger coming whole minutes before it occurs.”

  Karom watched me as I spoke energetically, his eyebrows raised in bemusement. He put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me into him.

  “My girlfriend, the playground naturalist. Just don’t take binoculars with you to the park. That’s a quick way to get arrested.”

  “I’m serious, Karom. I feel in control at the playground. I can tell. I know what’s going to happen, and if I had to, I could stop it. It’s so empowering.” In my head, I likened it to our situation—that I could see what was coming before a child decided to veer out and sway over the subway platform or play chicken with oncoming traffic. I wanted Karom to draw the parallel in his mind that I’d already drawn in mine.

  But instead he said, “Geets, your child is going to be so spoiled if you do that for them. They aren’t going to understand the glory of winning a playground fight or that there are consequences to not ducking when the tire swing comes their way if their skin is pristine and not covered with bruises. They’re not going to learn how to be a kid. You have to let them be. It’s unnatural otherwise.”

  * * *

  Karom suffered from nightmares and night sweats. From time to time, I’d hold him at night as he shuddered, convulsing sometimes from some apparition that he claimed he couldn’t remember in the morning. He never awoke during these episodes, just clung to me with sticky fingers, croons emanating from the back of his throat. We talked about them from time to time, commenting on how they would dissipate in the summer months and peak around Christmas. I’d urged him to see one of the psychologists in my office, but like a typical Indian male, he was too proud.

  “I don’t need one of those shrinks. I know exactly what’s wrong with me, and for what I don’t know, I have you to tell me,” he’d joke.

  I did know; he had told me one night six months after we’d first met. But he’d been taciturn at first. He’d told me he’d lost both his parents, and he’d tell me the whole thing when the right time arose. The right time was during a Pedro Almodóvar movie. We’d both been moved by it, crying silently next to one another, streams of tears forging down our faces, feeling the shudder of the other’s shoulders as they trembled with emotion just before he’d collapsed, sobbing without abandon into my arms. He told me the grisly details of his story then, and I finally understood his initial reticence around me. But he was still haunted by it, had been for nearly ten years. On that same night, I’d held him and told him that I would help him, whatever it took, however it happened. I would be his strength; I would help exorcise those demons at any cost. He couldn’t continue like this; it wasn’t safe or healthy or normal. It wasn’t right, to be constantly pursued by something that you couldn’t describe when you woke up in the morning. It wasn’t even physical or tangible. It didn’t have a face or a texture or a smell. The closest he had come to explaining it to me was that it was a cloud, a fog, a ghostly miasma that followed him no matter where he went, under thresholds, through cracks in the ceiling, in air vents. It was very easy to tell him that I would help him, that I would be there for him to hold him in the night, to hold his hand when these visions came to life on busy thoroughfares, on subway platforms, on high buildings, and he toyed with himself when he toyed with me. But the truth was, I didn’t know how I was going to help him.

  But that was one of my strengths; I knew how to help myself, even when it wasn’t easy. But now, like Karom with his nightly visions, I lived in fear. The change in the unknown, of who was out there looking for Karom, the shifting of what the earth knew as gospel. It was the fear of removing everything I knew up until now, everything that I stood for, everything that characterized him and, therefore, everything that stabilized me. It was like pulling the curtain up when the stagehands were running around placing sets and pulling down sheets of scenery; everything was exposed, raw.

  The article kept me up at night, so I was prepared when Karom began his nightly ritual. It was a feeling I’d never be able to share with him, but I realized I found it interesting to watch the whole thing from beginning to end. He’d be sleeping peacefully when his upper lip would begin to twitch rhythmically. Then his fingers, and I could feel his toes flexing and releasing under the sheets. He’d begin his soft, gentle moaning and I could hear his tongue flapping about in his mouth. The twitch would follow up his legs, up his arms, until it took hold of his shoulders and hips. Finally, it would crescendo into one big aria, where it would overtake him and he would flop in the bed, writhing from his right to his left side until I’d grab him with all my strength and he’d awaken, soggy with sweat that bled Rorschach patterns into the sheets.

  * * *

  That evening, as I balanced on my crutches to lock my door, I looked around the vacant waiting area. It was a depressing place to wait for a psychologist. There was a white-noise machine in the corner that radiated a ghostly hum of secrecy, issues of Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker from years past on the table, their corners curling from humidity or boredom. The walls were stark white and the carpet was the same one that had previously extended into my office before I’d ripped it out. I’d felt awkward adding to the shared decor; I felt as though there was a hierarchy here and I was the newcomer. I’d wanted badly to redesign the reception area, but on my entry to the office, I’d certainly be overstepping my boundaries. These people had been here for years and I was the new kid, not to mention the entirely new profession in the back office. The psychologists had conferred upon allowing me to join them, wondering whether a nonshrink would disrupt their balance. I wondered if they liked the drabness of the reception area; it allowed patients to consider their lives, their problems, their issues, without further distraction.

  I looked about the room at the nameplates on each door. There were two women and a man. The woman whose office was adjacent to mine seemed constantly harried.
I’d met her only a few times as she rushed in and out, balancing bags or an umbrella or stacks of magazines that she’d brought from home. She was in her mid-fifties and she had tightly wound hair. She was always polite but never friendly. The man had a deep rumbling voice, and I could hear it over the noise machine when I stepped in and out of the office. It sounded like bowling balls being pitched down an alley, comforting and constant. I liked constants. But there was something about the other woman, the young mother who proudly displayed photos of her family in her office, unlike the other two, who pretended that they existed only as therapists and nothing more, without families or lives or interests. It made her more human somehow, and it made me gravitate toward her door, stumbling with my additional limbs, awkward as a baby giraffe. I leaned my head against the closed door but I couldn’t hear any mumbling, so I knocked against it softly with the nub of my crutch. There was silence for a moment or two and then a low female voice called out for me to come in.

  She was seated in an olive-green armchair next to a reading lamp. She looked up as I entered and then her eyes went wide.

  “My goodness,” she exclaimed. “What happened to you?”

  “I got overambitious on my run in the park this weekend. It’s a mild sprain, but I have to be on these for three weeks. I hope I’m not interrupting.” I gestured to her book.

  “Oh, not at all. It’s actually—” she showed me the cover “—a novel that I can’t put down. Somehow amidst all the chaos at home, I can’t get through enough of it, so sometimes I have to squirrel myself away in here and pretend to have patients. I know. I’m awful.” She grinned at me, her glasses slipping down her nose.

  “I completely understand,” I said, even though I didn’t understand what it might be like to have your life driven by children. “You need some ‘you’ time.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, then, this is the worst time to ask you...”

  “Not at all. Please. Sit.” She gestured toward a chair.

  “I just have a question. I was wondering if you were taking any additional clients? Patients? Clients. That’s what I call mine.”

  “Patients.” She smiled. “Sure. For yourself?” I nodded. “Absolutely. When would you like to come in?”

  “Tomorrow?” She consulted a small gray book next to the reading lamp.

  “Perfect. Shall we close out the day together? Six p.m.?”

  “Please.” We smiled at one another and I pivoted on my poles and negotiated my way out. I could hear the rustle of pages behind closed doors as she picked her book up where she’d left off.

  When I took the train home that night, a panhandler entered and stood directly in front of me where I sat holding my crutches between my legs. He held a Greek-style paper coffee cup that jingled with coins when he moved it and a few mangy dollar bills stuck up out of its mouth, but his clothes were fresh and pressed. The train was crowded and the man couldn’t move through the tight crowd of people linked together like chains.

  I can’t stand panhandlers—not because they’re needy or make me feel guilty—they don’t—but because they always invoke their age when begging for handouts. No age is ever acceptable; there’s always something you can hold on to when you’re asking for other people’s money. You’re so young; you’re a child; you’re with child; you have mouths to feed; you’re old; you’re crippled; you’re a veteran; you’re unemployed.

  This panhandler seemed to be the lazy type, because he hadn’t moved or recited his patter during the five stops it took me to reach Karom’s place. We’d decided that while I was injured, I would stay with him because it would be easier to get to the office, and he could take care of me while I healed. The tracks screeched beneath my feet as the train lurched to a stop, my signal to stand. The doors burst open and the passengers spilled out onto the platform like water gushing from a pipe, people passing together in streams toward the exit.

  I stood on my good foot and leaned my weight forward. Nothing happened. I tried again before I heard the peal of the “doors closing” bell, my crutches catching on the sticky floor from my panic. The panhandler grabbed me under my armpits and pulled me to my feet. At first, I flinched at being touched by the man, but I barely had time to think about it. The crowd cleared a space for him as he started to pitch backward holding me upright and I just managed to clear the doors before they slid closed behind me and the train pulled out of the station. It was going to be a long three weeks.

  * * *

  I decided not to tell Karom that I was seeing a shrink. In fact, I decided not to tell anyone. I couldn’t get over the idea that I was seeing a therapist, not because I was embarrassed to see one but because it wasn’t even my issue or problem that had driven me here. But somehow, in the safe haven behind the closed doors of Dr. Rhodes’s office, it all came tumbling out.

  “So tell me why you’re here.”

  “I’m here on behalf of my boyfriend, Karom. He suffers from this condition, a traumatic condition. He had a terrible experience a few years ago. Well, two, really. He’s okay, physically, I mean. But now he has these night terrors and they aren’t going away and he won’t see anyone about it.”

  “Why won’t he see anyone?”

  “Pride, I guess. Fear. Anger.”

  “Anger?”

  “That he thinks these things happened to him. That he had no control over them. That he couldn’t do anything to change it.”

  “Maybe you’d better tell me what happened.”

  So I did.

  She jotted something down in her notepad. “That’s quite a burden for someone to take on.”

  “I really want to help him,” I said, and chewed thoughtfully on the inside of my cheek. “I think I could if I understood what he’s going through and had some behavioral exercises that you think might help.”

  “Trauma isn’t an easy thing,” she said. “Especially for those not experiencing it, we can’t exactly see beyond that hazy curtain to the truth.”

  “But he won’t come here,” I said. “I don’t know how else to help.”

  “Have you ever thought about the idea that just being there for him and with him could be the best help he could ever get?”

  “Sure.”

  “And that your support might eventually be that guiding light for where he needs to go?”

  “But it’s not getting any better,” I said. “Nothing seems to work.” I told her about the man we’d read about, the man going through grief. Some time ago, on one of our lazy Sunday lolling-abouts in Karom’s apartment with coffee and the newspaper, I had read a feature of a man in Brighton Beach who had lost his mother 637 days ago. His grief was still palpable, because 637 days later he was still going through the motions of his process. Each morning, he would wake up, run six miles and then jump into the ocean and swim one mile. His mother had suffered from emphysema and was constantly gasping for oxygen, so the runs and swims were especially cathartic. “It’s like I am breathing for her,” the man said. December or August, he wore the same striped swimming trunks into the water and the same gray hooded sweatshirt as he ran the length of Neptune Avenue. The man wasn’t sure if he was still grieving, the article said, but he went through the motions nonetheless because at this point he didn’t know anything else.

  He couldn’t imagine his life without this ritual, having to wake up and make a cup of coffee instead of lacing up his running shoes, or turning on the morning news instead of feeling his sneakers pounding across the weathered slats of the boardwalk. In the winter months, he would run in the wake of the garbage trucks harnessed with snowplows as they carved a path in the snow. Even when the truck idled at corners, and the sanitation workers loaded trash bags and sparse-needled Christmas trees into the gaping mouth at the back, the man jogged in place, waiting patiently for the truck to guide the way. And after this run, his ice-crusted sneakers
would crunch across the frozen sand until he reached the waves that crested upon the shore, peeled off his gray Everlast sweatshirt and dove into the waters that claimed him every morning. He was a neighborhood celebrity. The old Russian ladies looked out for him on their walks back from buying pickled beets and cabbage and waved at him as he clambered back onto shore, his trunks dripping with saline pollution, where he air-dried on the boardwalk, slapping and shaking hands. He blew the mucus out of his nose—snot rockets, I called them when Karom blew them during the winter months when we ran together in Central Park, our mouths puffing soft white smoke into the still air. And this ritual, crazy though it seemed, was what had grounded him for 637 days.

  I’d pointed it out to Karom. “I’m not asking you to do something like this,” I’d said. “This is just insane. To swim in the ocean in January and follow garbage trucks. But if you had something, anything at all to channel into.”

  “I ran the marathon,” Karom pointed out. “Wasn’t that a channel?”

  “Sure, but the marathon is over. What are you doing to focus now?”

  “I’m surfing.”

  “Since when?”

  “Surfing. Flipping through channels. Channel surfing, Geets. I’m figuring it out.”