There is nothing truly good and decent in this world. It is easy enough thing to believe, sometimes, and I am skilled in drifting in and out of believing it myself, during the dark times when I forget within myself the implications of such a pronouncement, the utter declaration of death that it summons, and wraps itself in, and wears as spectral cape. There is only one sure death for this world, and that is when the last spark of the last light dies from it, finally flickers from the white hot blue of collective hope (is that it, truly, the meaning of the color?) and alters hue to the fainter ones; orange for despair, yellow for sickness, red for hatred, before losing what warmth it once had for good, and fading into the unseen place beyond the simple blackness of absence.
It is dark outside, midnight, that time of night when the world outside the house simply ceases to be. Outside the house, the landscape has rolled up and gone for the night; in the moonlit fog, there is nothing but a void, a silver-grey ether that condenses on the windows. A single barren tree outside the window remains, providing a tenuous and floating anchor for the house, now drifting on an unseen sea. As the night wears on and the moon sinks, the tree casts imprints of itself on the windowshade. First the upper branches, sparse but tangled; then the more upright main, multiple trunks of the tree, projecting themselves as a pattern of imposing bars; finally, shadows of the lower branches appear, each arcing download as if weary, impossibly weary of their burdens, weighed down as if by the force of unseen hangmen's nooses, one on each branch, colorless fruits of unremembered nights now long past.
Inside the house, at the moment, the only light is from a strand of Christmas lights hung as decoration in December, and now left in the hall as an impromptu night lite for my daughter. This is a miracle light set; all the others from Christmas gave up the ghost not long after being put up, losing multiple bulbs almost immediately, like happens every year. This strand, we have had for years, and not one bulb has gone out. Admittedly, hardly as impressive as the miracle of the lamp, but perhaps as close to a miracle as will ever come from Sears Roebuck.
The world rolls up, at night, and becomes not simply distant, but gone. A television, an internet connection, provide blurred and odd images of what claims, itself, to still exist. But it is as if looking through a long, long pipe. You can see light, and the other end, and sometimes glimpses of movement or the faintest echoes of speech. But there is no one on the other side of the pipe, looking back. It is the world as memory, replaying itself as if to remember where it left off, when the night fell and the lights turned off, one by one, so it will be able to pick up at the appropriate moment, when the sun bursts forth again.
I am sitting in my bedroom, and the only sound is of my own breathing. It is labored, and rapid, and shallow, and ancient. One mississip -- and there it moves from in to out -- two mississippi, thr -- the push out, slightly slower, a lot harder. Each breath feels like it contains the air contained only in an eggshell; with forty or so a minute, it gets the job done, though inartfully. Now I practice the routine, moving the count out. The inflow, nothing much can be done about. The breath out, I try to hold longer. Can I slow it down, draw it out, make it three seconds? Four? Five, between the first shove of outbound air and the incoming breath to follow?
The goal is to try to breathe deeper, and not simply as a gasping marathon. In truth, it is easy to do, at least for short stretches. There comes a point in which breathing is no longer controlled by involuntary twitches, but is planned and executed with a keen and direct mind for sucking whatever can be had from the surrounding air. So I focus my concentration on that, and have some success, until the next coughing fit smashes it to hell again. I am too tired to start over, so I let my lungs do whatever the hell they will for the next ten minutes or so.
Because in truth, the coughing hurts like hell. Like breathing shattered glass, at the moment. Not real into that. I'll take the asthma, for now.
I went to the doctor two days ago, in the midst of the second full day of this asthma attack and whatever miserable, bitter, evolution-fucking virus or whatever launched itself and the asthma alongside it this time. (Asthma is a goddamn opportunist; not willing to start a real fight, often times, but simply hovering in some unseen corner to slide behind your knees and help something else push you over, if it has the chance.) A few mutterings about the dangers of bronchitis and pneumonia; yes, been there. The prednisone, I begrudgingly accept, knowing full well it will help -- though over the course of a few weeks of treatment, at the price of my nerves. They also arrange for a home nebulizer, a small but noisy machine that allows the asthma "rescue" medicine to be more efficiently atomized and breathed in. I use it on and off, but in truth, it helps only for about twenty minutes, and the medicine can only be taken every four hours, so I ignore what seems to be in increasingly pointless chore except for those times when it seems... especially imprudent... to tempt fate.
Tomorrow I will call the doctor back - the office called me, yesterday, for a status check, and there will be another tomorrow - and answer their questions. Am I coughing anything up? Yes. What color? I dunno, just yellow goo.
But I will also tell them the difference between today and yesterday. Today, it tastes like blood.
It is not blood, mind you - I spit it into the sink to check. But it is the same thick, sweet taste. It tastes and smells, now, where the day before it didn't: a faint, sick taste that I am swallowing plenty off, and is now making me nauseous.
And unlike every other visit to the doctor for the last twenty years, I will surrender. Whatever they want to do, I will let them do. I can handle the asthma. I can handle asthma plus whatever. It is an ongoing, predictable, event, as sure as the change of seasons or repairing he car. It just is.
But this - this taste, I cannot handle. I remember it from too many times before. Suddenly, with this slightly sweet, slightly foul, too-thick taste in my mouth, I am nine years old again, and I cannot handle it.
I realize now that I have not one good memory from those few years, that town, that apartment, that bedroom. Not one. I remember the elementary school, where I attended first and second grades. I remember walking home each day past the junior high school next to it, a mere second grader studiously lowering my eyes to avoid eye contact with any of the things on the other side of the chain link fence. Children like me, yes, but impossibly big, seemingly adult-sized big, but not like adults. Adults were safe, by and large - these were almost-dangerous creatures, with crude bodies not even remotely in tune with their own brains, and looking for a momentary, diversional fight with anything that would make eye contact and be less than half their size.
I remember school itself only barely. I remember my first grade teacher there, an Iranian woman who had immigrated to southern California in the years before the Shah fell. She taught her charges - us - a few snippets here and there of Farsi. I learned a few words, now long since forgotten, but I could count with pride. Then the hostage crisis happened, and she became hated, by the parents, and her olive complexion a liability, and the Farsi, especially, was looked at as a sign of something sinister. I don't know what happened to her in the end, if she eventually left the school or not. She did, though, stop teaching any of us Farsi.
I remember the cafeteria where we ate our lunches, a seemingly vast space, filled with orange, fold-up, roll away tables so they would be out of the way for some unnamed ceremonies we never seemed to have. There was one child, in some other class, transferred from another school, who had some unnamed disease, the sole seeming symptom was an uncomfortably strong, overpowering smell. Not body odor, or gas, or urine, but a musk, indecipherable now. We were told to be nice to him, which in the context of eight and nine years old meant ignoring him as best case scenario. One of the lunch tables in the room, the third one from the end, every day, contained him and no one else, no matter how crowded and strained the other orange tables around him became.
One day my mother, who volunteered at the school as a recess monitor on some random days, told me at recess to go play with him. I did, sort of, and begrudgingly. The effect was striking, and merciless - by the end of recess, he was walking back up the ramp to the upper classrooms with an arm around my shoulder, gigantic smile on his face. "We're friends," he kept saying, and meant it. I caught my mother's eye, passing her on the ramp, and she had tears in both eyes, and more than a few. I'm so proud of you, she said later. By the next day, the whole thing was almost forgotten. He sat alone in the cafeteria; I avoided him dutifully at recess. We never, to my remembrance, spoke again.
I remember defending my little sister from a young black child in our apartment complex, younger than us, who was throwing rocks at her and her tricycle. "Cut it out!", I kept yelling, but also taking some hidden delight in how easy it was to dodge them. Then I looked down for a moment to try to push her tricycle forward, her having caught one wheel off the sidewalk, and I felt a sharp pop on my forehead. I looked up, and the boy was looking at me in horror; a second later, blood was running down my face and shirt, and he was running, and I was running into the house. While my mother was leaning me over the sink, wet washcloth dabbing at the cut, I used the word n-gger in the first and only context of sheer hatred in my entire life. Injured or not, my mother was unimpressed with my word, and hit me with one hand while holding the oozing washcloth firm with the other. The scar from the rock I carried for years, and is still present in a hard lump above one eye.
I remember my Cub Scout uniform, and the blistering pride of wearing something with so many pictures and badges and patches on it. The uniform, I loved, especially the patch with a wolf head in big, raised colors. The Cub Scouts themselves, I found inexplicable, probably due to missing over half the meetings. Building cars out of wood? Tying knots that, no matter what instructions I followed, always came out looking like the same tangle of cord? But were there some really, truly outside-worthy things going to happen, worthy of the dramatic, well-ironed uniform, or were the merest trickles of secret, no-doubt-clever Scout knowledge going to be dripped into us, tediously and interminably, under the cool trellised concrete patio of our sleepy-voiced Den Mother and her collection of empty egg cartons, string, glue, popsicle sticks, and other detritus of childhood afternoons?
I remember our purple station wagon. It was 1970s ugly, in a way that the era celebrated with a driven self-consciousness. But it was a deep, dark purple, and I loved it.
I remember the pepper tree in the vacant lot outside our back window, one of our constant play spots, and the one summer day I stepped on a rusty nail in a board hidden in the grass underneath it, stepped on it with my left foot, and it didn't hurt, not until I tried to pick the foot up for the next step and it wouldn't move, and I looked to see why I was stuck, and screamed as only a nine-year-old can.
I remember most, of course, the asthma. I remember it as constant presence - a force with a consciousness, and a will, and a subhuman malice impenetrable to me. Those were the years in which it was worst, and the emergency room began to know me and my parents by sight. They were kind, and sent us away with more medicines then they were supposed to, each time. We attempted to pay the bills as we could, and tried either as point of pride or necessity to get each bill paid off at some point before the next inevitable visit took place. I knew my parents were terrified that, perhaps one night, they would refuse us treatment. They never did, but a half-week stay for pneumonia put us over the edge of being able to even pretend we could afford it, and our family sunk into a thick but unspoken depression with every new bout of the asthma, after that.
The asthma only came at night. I remember my bedroom, in our apartment. But I only remember it in the dark; what it looked like in daytime, I have no recollection, now. Sitting in the room in the dark, struggling to breathe, my mother at my side watching me or setting up the rescue inhaler, my father making rustling noises in the other bedroom while getting dressed and going to warm up the car - that is how I remember the room. The room could have been painted black - the bedspread and carpet too, for all I remember. I only remember the bed, and my sisters crib along the other wall, and the hallway light leaving a bright yellow rail of light on the bedroom floor.
I remember the time I woke up to see a giant spider, a tarantula in size and shape, in my bed with me. My mother didn't believe me, then took a look and summoned my father, her courage failed. My father didn't believe either of us, then took a look, and flipped on the bedroom light with concern. It was merely the top of a plastic palm tree, fronds splayed out like legs, one of the pieces of my cherished - and I do mean, cherished -- plastic dinosaur playset, the pride of my young life. My father was angry for having to have gotten up. My mother, having fallen for the dark and ominous "spider" too, suggested he shut up, and reminded him that if he hadn't, months ago, brought a tarantula home in a peanut butter jar and forgotten to secure the lid - tarantulas can unscrew slightly loose peanut butter jar lids, as it turns out - we wouldn't any of us be worried about whether or not we were going to find tarantulas in our beds.
I remember nightmares.
One I remember to this day, a nightmare in which, in my dark room, all the toys I had left out began to creep to life, on the floor, while I watched. Toy cars motored silently around the room; child's-fist-sized dinosaurs migrated purposely from one side to another. A green plastic frog that jumped when you pumped an air bulb on its leash hopped and croaked, stopping in front of the bed to stare at me. Eventually I became aware of a sound, and a glow, from under the bed. A red glow, and a thumping sound... as I looked down, a human heart, glowing, beating, moved from under the bed, into the middle of the floor and the toys, and became the exact, iconographic instant in which the nightmare was not just terrifying, but sleep-shattering.
I have no true idea as to the meaning of the nightmare. Was it an unwelcome visit from the Poe story, which even at that age I was certain to have known? Or did it have more to do with the extremely Catholic image of Jesus which hung, alongside a similar picture of Mary, in our living room? In my mother's prized picture, a (very white) brown-eyed, long-haired, bearded Jesus looks up towards His halo with a look of peace, one hand offering a sign of blessing, His other hand almost cradling a visible, glowing heart, His heart, held in front of him, the Sacred Heart of Our Lord, as the caption said? It is an image that terrified and baffled me as a child, and unnerves me in its macabre nature even today. What the hell?, I will have to someday ask someone, at the same time admitting freely to my being completely, comically stumped by this one particular, peculiar, alarming and omnipresent icon of my Roman Catholic upbringing and heritage.
Poe, or Christ, then? Or was it my own heart I was more worried for, and which I saw crawling, thumping, away from me on a dark bedroom rug, in the middle of the night? A child constantly in the emergency room, constantly at battle with a monstrous, hateful, cruel entity hidden in his own chest, ready to come out every night, if need be, and drain childhood from the very blood of his being, night after night? I remember, above all, that. I remember that, every night of it.
And all of this - the whole thing, every memory, every vision and smell nearly thirty years distant -- I am remembering simply based on a new, old taste in my mouth. And I am resigned, because we do not truly ever grow up. The nine year old me is still here, buried not at all well in this larger frame. There is a point, somewhere, when growing up in which we are consciously aware that while we have become used to the notion of growing into something else, every few years, the years eventually pass far quicker, and the changes between them, far more fogged over. And we are stuck, at wherever we ended up, never quite believing that we are not ten, or sixteen, or twenty five, or whatever that magic age happens to be, for some certain, primitive part of our own shuffling and incomplete self-awareness.
I will tell them, tomorrow, that I taste this taste that reminds me of blood, though it isn't blood, and we shall see what happens.
This post will never be read widely. Pundits will never quote from it on the radio, newspapermen will never titter knowingly about what it may or may not mean for Daily Kos. It will not land blows in the battle between pundits, or find a vein that could lead to an artery that could lead to an injustice exposed. It will pass unseen, except for in that brief glimmer of daylight between the passing nights, a spark of an unknown color, depending on where, exactly, it catches the eye. And then, that will be that.
I wrote before of my experiences back then, back in those days of childhood. I am content with the words I chose, proud of them, at least the first half of it, before I devolved into explaining, pleading in a subtle post-pie-fight diary for a momentary understanding of smaller, more personal truths, and motives drawn from each of us, in some fashion, from memories of blood. Now, I am perhaps a little embarrassed of the pleading. What was there to plead for? Why should I care whether or not I am understood? And what godforsaken shells of consciousness are we, are we all, on this entire bereft, and cowardly, and godforsaken planet, that throughout the entire world find more dark pools of common blood in arguments than in agreements?
There are deeper things, in politics, than the snufflings of pundits, or the peacock-clever dances of senators striking poses of fake anger and conveniently timed moralities of the moment. Politics, religion, all of it works from a deeper place. From a place hidden deep in the blood, a place that understands pain, and injustice, and the foul taste of things that we as humans fear. And some come out from that place in anger, or fear, or frustration, and a few chosen voices harness it, put a vial under it, and capture the essence of the truth it springs from. That where there is suffering, we should seek to alleviate it. Where there is infamy, we should seek to rip up the rotted things and sow new seeds. Where there are children in the quiet terror of lives missing their central pieces, we are damned forever if we will not help. And these things happen here, every day, in the voices not but hundreds of feet around where our very souls have themselves anchored, and still, it is a rare ear that ever hears any of it.
I pass by the Christmas lights hanging in the hall, acting as the sole light in the darkness, now that the moon has drifted down below the hills entirely and even the fog, itself, has melted into the dark ocean of black outside the cold windows, and I notice that for the first time one of them has burnt out.