shine

everything 

“wait,” greg says when he sees the medical center card on the fridge, “his name is Nickel Noe?” it’s tacked there via the mysterious attraction between a colorful octopus-drinking a-cup-of-coffee magnet and my new refrigerator. “wow, that’s a weird name. i like it.”  

these are weird times, i think. i actually own that refrigerator? i own a refrigerator? we’re still in our sock-feet and pajamas and suddenly i feel like holding hands. “i think he’s german,” i say. “maybe french? he does the thing where you say one sound like another.” 

greg turns away from the card and smiles at me. his face is soft and bright. everything is going to be okay, the smile says. it always says that.  

“what if it isn’t?”  

“what?” he says, collapsing a little at the corners. “what if what isn’t?” 

“everything,” i say.

the beginning 

“your wision,” he says. “how is your wision?” 

“my what?”  

“your wision.” 

QUICK, his pen says, posing, poised, possibly annoyed to be pausing. he is writing down  everything i say. he is my strange new stenographer, i think. stenographer of my body. topographer? these enemy camps. sunken ships. how long have they been there? nobody  knows. he is my oceanographer. 

“your WISION,” he repeats, as if my ears might not be working. his eyes are dark and watching, his face is face-colored, long, unfamiliar. he wears a sharp collar, midnight tie and a lab coat. it’s noon. the coat is starched white as a wall. i imagine his family back home, whatever home is, how proud they must be, his academic office, fancy desk, the professor, neurologist, scientist, all the right (wrong) questions shimmering under the surface of his inky eyes like plankton. or maybe he’s the black sheep, the oddball, maybe he was supposed to be an artist or a plumber or a priest, draped or drenched or singing, a color-wheel. or maybe he’s an orphan. bravely sailing the deeps of other families’ brain scans, a wheel of trembling strangers forever in his waiting room, wringing its hands. “your vision, Sis,” my dad says in a low voice beside me. “he’s asking about your vision.” 

“oh, my vision,” i say. the plankton drift nimbly in all directions, easily escaping my big, dumb whale. “my vision is fine.”

physiology picnic  

my brain attaches to stories. i read about it. all the various lobes seem to be involved. i look at the article’s illustration of my brain, which looks like everyone’s brain (or so these kinds of illustrations seem to imply) but i happen to know now that mine has patches, little sequins of light where some of it has worn away. i spend time wondering if maybe the whole thing is made of light, actually, underneath, like a star with a sea cave around it. where the cave wears away in high tide, those little patches, and then you can see through with all the luminous fishes. remember how leonard cohen said it? there’s a crack in everything—that’s how the light gets through. i wonder. greg’s favorite old corduroy pants have bare spots like this, where you can’t see the velvety stripes anymore—i wonder if it’s something like that. there are shooting stars in my brain, i think. ping! i remember something about the corpus coliseum, that it’s like a muscled bridge that connects one side to the other. maybe brain sides are like parallel universes...i like this idea—ping!—so i write it down. i sometimes think (with one or both sides) of the whole thing as a galaxy. like the milky way. because it shines like that.  

i climbed into a giant magnet so they could take pictures of it, kind of like how we send satellites into space and take pictures of the earth from that galactic perspective. everything is backwards, though: instead of going way outside, the magnet knows how to go way inside. a light-miner. this is how gems are dug up, i think, sitting in the waiting area, amber-bright autumn sun draping its way in through the tall windows full of an evergreen hedge and the shimmery/hard morning street beyond it. imagine a little miner, drawn as if magnetically, finding a subterranean roomful of herkimer diamonds, icicle-white, or amethyst points, sparkling like a bed of glass irises from the walls, bellflower, anemone, all glittering eerily like planets in a secret dark, reflecting the stage-managed light of the miner’s humble headlamp. imagine they were there all along! right under our feet? the earth is made of crystals and mud and flowers. they fill up my heart and chase everything around in there for a while, in the soft identical upholstered wooden chairs, one of which i am sitting on the edge of. in my cool jittery heart where a rabble of tiny terrified baby bunnies seem to be hopping in all directions, looking for something warm and familiar, looking for deliverance from an undefined trap. 

i had to take my nose ring out in the little locker room closet. “don’t let me forget it!” i said, carefully bending the little wire hoop askew so i could slip it off. “i won’t,” greg said, and took up the whole doorway like a raised drawbridge when he said it. it was the first thing i did when i got to college. the man who pierced it was covered head to toe in tattoos, a million shining little hoops lining his boot-colored earlobes all the way up in a silver fringe; it was a small second story smudged window parlor of an old colonial building in a hip little cityful of them, a colorful speckle on the tiny coastline of new hampshire. i think it was raining. it was probably late september. the room smelled like rain and the orange Dial antibacterial liquid soap that he told me to rinse it with for two weeks after he’d plunged the long needle through my nostril, shown me my own needled face in a little plastic hand mirror, and slipped into the hole a single shining hoop: mine. i still love the smell of that soap, antiseptic and musical like controlled recklessness, pained pleasure, shiny new self government, wonder. 

into the magnet i brought nothing but my nakedness under soft cotton clothing. no buckles or snaps allowed, nothing shiny. no adornments or autonomy, even though i climbed in alone— just me and the magnet. greg sat in a chair off to the side (i could kind of see him out of the corner of my eye) and probably had on those old corduroys and we both were wearing squishy rubber earplugs the nurse gave us. i thought he’d like the weird sounds we’d heard the magnet makes. mostly it sounded like a siren, a tsunami warning, a monstrous industrial alarm clock. wake up! wake up! wake up! i tried to harmonize with the tones so i could make friends with it because i was naked under my clothes and it had me surrounded, but it was mostly like offering a handful of berries to a thousand-pound bear, knowing you’re alone in the woods with him and that’s all you have. mostly i brought breathing. 

i brought humming and breathing and complete stillness. mostly i brought humming, breathing, complete stillness, and my imagination. i had to. and where can i ever go without it anyway? i didn’t imagine the sequins in my corpus coliseum just yet, the smudges of starlight that were shining inside the cage of my skull, because i didn’t know they were there. but the magnet found them: i’d brought them with me.

beauty

there are so many things that can go wrong with the head. then again, it’s astonishing what the head does on its own, how many things are going right all the time in there in order for us to function. whoever you are, you should have your head examined. 

the first time i saw the inside of my head, i was astonished. it almost didn’t even matter that there were weird little planets of light polka-dotting it like some disorganized constellation, and at first—utterly unlike myself—i didn’t even wonder what the constellation was picturing (a crystal tree? a hunter’s bell? a starfish of misshapen, huddled birds?), because it was so beautiful and strange. 

i pointed, lightening-fingered. “that’s my brain?”  

“yes,” dr. Noe said, both his eyes and mouth smiling warmly. “this is your brain.” i cocked my head this way and that way, bewildered, beholding. my brain. “you see here,” he said, growing serious. he waved his fingertips over the constellation. “the brain, it has been attacked.” i know, i know, i thought, but there it is! all of it felt so sci-fi. greg, sitting beside me, was leaning forward in his chair, looking dazzled himself, which is not a common look for him (he does not usually lean forward in his chair). his dazzle was contained though, his face still serious and relaxed, his surprise cloistered in the eyes and in the leaning. this is a major difference between us. the capacity to contain a dazzle. judging by the look i was getting from dr. Noe, i imagine my face (the outermost expression of my head and its galaxies), as usual, betrayed me. 

i think he keeps talking and greg keeps listening.  

i don’t take my eyes off the brain.  

“scientists are buffoons,” i sigh. “not because they’re rational, but because the cosmos is irrational.” 

greg looks at me like suddenly a sunflower has sprouted out of my ear. dr. Noe stops and smiles this knowing smile, which spreads across his face like a rainbow, beaming at me like a lightsaber. 

“she’s fast enough for you, old man,” i say. 

i don’t take my eyes off the brain. 

“the stars are sighing through their scaffolding,” i say, “on which beads of wonder build but do not drip.” 

greg closes his eyes and seems to fall down into a very deep well of something. i can feel the emptiness of the bucket on its way down, the cracks and fissures along its outer edge. 

dr. Noe looks out the window longingly, and all the trees let go their leaves in a sudden september gust, a wild ochre flourish and swirl. 

i don’t take me eyes off the brain. 

“are we still trying to electrocute flies?” i demand. “do you know if a fly is an electrical conductor?” 

greg reaches out and zaps my arm with the cling peach tip of his index finger, then holds my hand resolvedly like we’re about to jump off of something together. dr. Noe spins the computer screen away from me and begins typing furiously, which makes all the star-spots rearrange into the shape (which i can’t see) of a butterfly startling up from its flower. 

i don’t take my eyes off the brain. 

everyone’s been asking me all these questions, about The Episode, about what my face did. since i’m not totally sure who i am or who i love or how i arrived, not exactly (“good writing is about telling the TRUTH!”), i challenge the doctor to a duel. 

greg, who opposes the idea of dueling, stares straight ahead as if pretending he doesn’t know me. maybe he doesn’t! i think, getting hysterical. 

“everybody can relax,” says the doctor, who seems to know all of the answers to everything and none of the answers to everything at the same time. he straightens the row of pens in his breast pocket importantly, which look like shark teeth.  

“i’ll duel,” says the shark, in a very throaty/raspy (classic) shark voice. the words sound garbled, as if from a mouth with too many teeth inside. as if from a million miles underwater. the bottom, maybe, where only the blind ones circle, their bellies brushing the sand like an endless mandala. i remember reading about sand mandalas, and especially that the last thing is the dismantling ceremony. that you can put the sand on your altar and /or sprinkle it on the head of someone who is dying. is my brain dying? “is my brain dying?” i say. 

greg shifts uncomfortably in his chair. 

dr. Noe closes his eyes and lifts his chin skyward, as if in prayer. 

“yes,” he says. “and no.” 

“that’s a non-answer,” i point out.  

when he opens them a tiny crab scuttles by. its legs make cartoon crab-scuttling sounds, like it’s wearing tap-shoes. click/clack. 

“it’s maybe, how to say this,” he murmurs, narrowing the eyes at me, “too alive.” 

i don’t take my eyes off the brain, and the room goes quiet around me for a long moment. greg and dr. Noe are talking but i don’t really hear them. the leaves outside make a little 

ruffle of sound around what feels like floating. i want to clear my throat, but cannot. what are all those spots? i want to ask. what do they mean? and most importantly: are they so, so strange and beautiful? or is it me who is strange—and they’re not beautiful at all? 

drop 

he poked a hole in my back and now my spine is trying to stitch itself back together again. 

i saw my spinal fluid. he held it up to the light.  

“very clear,” he said. 

“hi, mom,” i said. i couldn’t see her from where i was laying but could feel her cringe. “hi, sweetheart,” she squeaked. 

i imagined it glittering like the fluid inside a snowglobe, a little bird or house or flower growing inside. when he shook the vial, it played music. a tinkling, plinking tune, tiny, that everyone both recognizes and can’t remember, but associates with starry things and times. this is the stuff that keeps me upright, and quiet, that lubricates my body’s journey through all the mundane and whimsical windows of living. 

“it looked like water,” she said afterward, shell-shocked. 

“it did,” i agreed, keeping as much to myself as i could under the circumstances.

__ 

i wake up late and dizzy. i don’t tell about it, except a couple quietly-times when nobody hears me and i don’t really want them to anyway. “i’m dizzy,” i say to the coffeepot, as if testing it out to see what happens when i push it off the ledge of my mouth. my dad has already been out and has returned with bottles of painkillers. the name brand bottles are colorful and definite, lined up on the kitchen table like circus performers. i always buy the generic ones, they’re cheaper. the bottles are white and plain and they wait plainly in the hush of the cupboard, indifferent, their yawns catching on. my mom bustles back and forth making toast, for which i am not hungry. everything on the kitchen counter wobbles and waves mildly when i turn my head, like we’re all underwater, but i don’t want anything else to be removed or examined so i say nothing at all. 

__ 

picture me: curled on my side like a baby animal, my sky-blue gown open in the back, spine exposed, zigzagging in peachy divots, all its little hills and valleys naked and lit up on the table. i don’t know what to do with my hands. the nurse is in jeans and a hot pink sweater (why is she wearing jeans?) and she holds me with slight pressure, bracing me at the hip and the shoulder for the impending puncture. 

“a little prick,” she says. “deep breath.” 

i breathe in in a whoosh, like an ocean my breath inflates me, is a little inflatable life boat that i follow as i am stung by a strange, silent bee. 

that’s just the first thing. 

when the big sting comes it’s not a stinger at all, but a needle.

i feel something vital and secret and precious leaking, like light being siphoned. “now it comes, drop by drop,” he says quietly. i like his rich accent, the music the edges of the words play. i am being drained like a swimming pool. it hurts. i breathe as slowly as my lungs will allow. i am a hot air balloon sailing on my breath. i cut through clouds, diaphanous, a shred of a dream of a bird. 

“try to relax,” the nurse says. “relax.” 

i soften my wings and plummet, then right myself again, afraid. my body doesn’t want to give this up. 

dream

my dreams have been getting progressively weirder. 

last night, for example, there were hundreds of goats who lived on a ski mountain. it was springtime, green and true. the goats, when they died, just collapsed in piles, strung around the grassy slopes like jewelry. the other goats ran in small herds, faster than anything, and when they ran over the piles of bodies, the bones turned to dust and evaporated. this was how they completed the cycle.  

see what i mean? what the hell kind of dream is that? 

mine

everything in the woods is getting wavy. i don’t know how else exactly to say this. “like you’re off-balance?” greg says, watching my face with his waterlily eyes. “no,” i say. “like everything is moving but when i pause to catch it in the act, it stops.” a little frog of worry leaps off and lands in the pond with a tiny splash. he kisses my head, wordless, but i can hear the ripples. 

when i’m walking alone with the dog, i stop every few steps on the flat part of the trail to test it. i land on one foot and look around, my other foot dangling in space behind me, or in front, or on the side. sometimes i hop around, test myself turning. perfect landing, i stick it every time like a wilderness gymnast. in the wilderness of the wooded park by my house, i test my body to test my brain. with the trees, the puddles, the million yellow leaves having fallen. the leaves in their rustling applaud my grace, my perfect stops, my starts and leaps and ability to balance even when the whole world is waving at me. 

they tested my brain with a giant magnet in a cold, metal room and my brain failed the test. 

because my burglar heart and i stole it, and leapt out with it backwards. because we fall through space with it, hollering, drop stars as we go plummeting by. 

because it all might be backwards—imagine!—because of what i brought with me. because it played that song when they shook it.  

because it shines like that.