Further Up, Further In (Part 2)
Note: Some language and themes in this story are not suitable for younger readers.
The doctor inhaled as he bent and kissed the crown of the head in front of him. The head was facing away from him so it could stare at the hospital bed in front of them both. The doctor’s lips felt the soft give of brown hair. His nose sensed the familiar scent of her scalp oil mixed with the hint of coconut given off by her current go-to de-frizzing crème.
As the doctor pressed his face into the part of her head where the different sections of her hair joined together, his hands found her shoulders and squeezed them in time to his kissing. Her hands popped up to squeeze his hands, even as her eyes continued to stare at the bed.
This being a hospital, the bed area looked predictable – the mechanically adjustable bed ringed by little clear hoses, blippy electronic displays, a stack of get well cards, symbolically supportive gifts of living greenery, which were – if you were one to seek after bad omens – turning brittle and semi-dead, despite the regular ministrations of dependable nurses.
This being a hospital, there was, at the center of this eruption ring of the medical and spiritual detritus of caregiving, a body, a patient of forty-six years of age who had not been awake since his forty-third year, a man whose body had internally farted some sort of blood clot which had taken an epic road trip throughout the entirety his body until buying property and putting down roots in the man’s brain.
So the man now slept while his wife and his friend the doctor waited hopefully for him to awake. As well as being in a coma, the man was sick right now, an infection of some sort, and so he was hooked up to a couple more pieces of equipment for a while.
When nurses spoke to the doctor, they called him Dr. Bostick. When his friends yelled at him during softball games, they called him James. Since his middle name was Liam, when the woman who was right now focused on her husband in the hospital bed was instead focused on him, drifting off to sleep in his bed, she called him LeeLee.
It was a name she’d created. No one had ever called him that before and, now that the name existed, if anyone else ever tried to use it, he would not allow it. The name was hers alone because she’d coined it and because she’d given it life by filling it with the relaxed energy of late night comfort.
And beyond all this, deep at the heart of why no one else would ever call him LeeLee, was that he hated the name, but he loved her, and so he loved the name even more than he hated it. Therefore, under the mysterious rules of the human heart, this meant she could use the pet name, but no one else ever could.
The doctor released the woman’s shoulders and retreated to the door. She mumbled some soft words and turned to look at him once as he backed away, but she quickly turned again to the bed. The doctor reached the door, entered the hallway, and pulled the door most of the way closed, but he couldn’t bring himself to finish closing it.
Instead, he craned his neck into the open space and stared at the woman and her husband, taking the whole scene in at once. The doctor noted that the bedside plants definitely needed to be read their last rites and tossed.
The doctor also noted how freakish human lives could become as they bent-back over one another again and again and crisscrossed again and again, stretching and intersecting and weaving their loves, losses, and longings too numerous into over-tall superstructures of pencil-lead-thin glass that should collapse into stars and shards at the slightest breeze – but don’t – and instead prove stout enough to bear the weight of the kingdom of God.
He’d known Andrew Peter Evans, the man in the bed, for thirteen years (if you could count the last three years, that is – ten, if you couldn’t). He’d known the woman, Rebekah, for nine years, as long as the APE had known her. APE was Andrew’s nickname among his friends, an obvious abuse of the unfortunate initials Andrew’s parents had bestowed upon him.
For six of those years the doctor had known the woman sitting by the APE’s bedside as his friend’s girlfriend, fiancée, and then wife. For the next two he’d known her as all of that, but also as some sort of pre-widow to a pre-dead man. This past year she had continued to be every one of those things, but she’d also become the singular someone who could call him LeeLee. She was a lot of people, at least to him. Perhaps they all were many people, in one way or another.
As the doctor watched Rebekah watch her husband, the impossible happened. He saw Andrew Peter’s head move and eyes blink. The doctor saw Rebekah start to shudder with sobs and say she couldn’t believe it. He heard a croaking voice emerge from the bed and speak of thirst. The doctor saw Rebekah offer her water cup.
Then the doctor saw Rebekah reach out and touch her husband’s forehead. Her fingers went to smooth back his bangs, but when she touched him, Andrew Peter popped like a bubble, and all that occupied the bed was a fog of smoke that gathered itself with great rapidity into a funnel cloud and entered Rebekah by every orifice in her head – ears and nose and mouth.
It happened so fast, the doctor had no time to move, actually no time to doubt it was actually happening, which he now did because who wouldn’t. At last the doctor was able to move, to react, and he shoved open the door and rushed the few paces to Rebekah’s back, which was turned from him but, nonetheless, communicated shock and stun through its over-straight posture.
The doctor reached for her left shoulder. He needed to steady her, care for her, help her to know she wasn’t going crazy so she could help him know he wasn’t going crazy.
As he reached for her, he noticed he was going to place his index finger on the birthmark on her shoulder near the base of her neck. When he did, it was like pushing an ignition button. Rebekah’s flesh became a pillar of lava before him and poured into him like a purifying flame. And then everything in his world melted and entered him until all was himself and then he winked out.
*********
Rachel put the book back down on her family's dining table. She'd never seen it before – not during the day, and certainly not during her nightly pilgrimages to her parents’ bedroom.
Being eleven, part of her despised feeling drawn to finish her sleep among the smells and skins of her sleeping parents. It struck her as babyish, and she knew it struck her parents that way too. All of this had been made quite clear when the three of them occasionally spoke about her habit in the light of day.
But a deeper part of Rachel – the part of her in control when she awoke because her room was too warm or her dreams too cold – craved sleeping with her parents in a way more compelling than reason and the “expected levels of maturation” for someone her age. And so, far more nights that not, Rachel made her pilgrimage across the living room and dining room to her parents’ bedroom door.
But never before had she seen the book. Never before the book with its great weight, creaking black leather cover, and pages the size of small wall posters. Never before had she seen the book lying just so on the dining table, its angle of placement perfect to pique the curiosity of her half-awake mind as she shuffled from her origin to her destination.
And never before had an accountant's desk lamp been placed by the book’s side, its pull chain waving to her ever so gently, its presence taking space where Rachel had only before seen the paper junk piles of school assignments and supermarket mailers.
All of this was a surprise, to put it mildly, but what was not surprising for Rachel were all the people she’d read within the book's pages – friends who fit into one another who fit into an unfaithful, grieving wife who fit into a physician whose whole hospital and world fit into him as an extension of his unwell self.
Rachel had sensed them all before she’d read them all, and the notknowingatallbutknowingitall made her feel queasy and giddy inside her guts. So she closed the book, and turned from it to her parents closed door. She spun on her right heel planning to move on and finish her journey and forget the words she’d read.
But then Rachel turned back to face the book again, her change of direction powered by a sudden decision to feel the book's cover once more. This she did.
She traced a wrinkle in the cover with her index finger, and when her finger reached the cover’s center, Rachel pressed softly, the way you might press a sleeping baby's cheek. But the book did not support Rachel’s finger.
Her finger sunk, its tip disappearing into the blackness, and Rachel’s eyes perceived nearly invisible ripples emanating out from the point of contact like you might just see ripples on a lake's skin during the night of a new moon.
Then the book that now seemed composed of thick, viscous water became a swelling wave, rising up from the table to reach the ceiling, misting before her, and entering her through her nose and ears and shock-opened mouth.
In the wonder of it all, Rachel noted that the lamp was gone as well. For some reason this registered in her mind. “I have a light within me,” she formed with her lips although the breath necessary for voice eluded her.
Rachel slid into her parents' bedroom. Literally. She slid her feet along the polished hardwood to minimize her noise and maximize her chance of success. She became a nocturnal figure skater, not driven by the desire for a perfect figure eight but by the hope of finding some rest in the warmth of her skin pressed against the skin of her mother's dreaming body.
Like Rachel herself, the moonlight slid into the bedroom along paths of smoothness. In the moon's case it wasn’t sanded-slick wood underfoot, but the unblemished plane of window glass up and to Rachel’s right. Also like Rachel, the moonlight was subtle, faint; it seemed to strain under the tension of desperately wanting to be in the room near her parents, and yet not wishing to be present enough to wake them by accident and risk banishment.
The furtive, humble moonlight guided Rachel's silent sliding, and Rachel thanked her fellow traveler the moon, as she always did on such occasions.
Rachel always entered the bed from her mother's side, which, in addition to being the less potentially grumpy side, also happened to be closer to the door, an important point when each extra movement of her four foot body was another chance for detection and rejection.
Typically Rachel tried to invade her mother's bed without touching her mother until Rachel was fully ensconced within the sheets, her mother's breathing deep and even, and all things green light go for spooning and feasting on her mother's heat and smell.
But tonight was different. Never before had she encountered the book on the table and had it enter her. What else might dissolve under her touch and fill her in just such a way? Could her mother vaporize under Rachel’s fingertip?
Rachel supposed it was possible, maybe even likely. As Rachel stood there in the midnight dark almost eye-to-eye with her prone, sleeping mother, Rachel instantly developed an entire argument in favor of her mother's imminent dissolution under her daughter's touch.
The theory was simple and elegant. Rachel did not yet know all the technical details of her birth, at least not in her conscious mind, the voice that narrated her days and told her she liked cheese pizza but not hamburgers. However, Rachel did know in some mysterious, epic, and shocking way her body had, at some point in the past, emerged from her mother's prone, overwhelmed flesh.
So Rachel’s argument suggested that perhaps right now was the moment of full circle arrival back at beginning, or an arrival at a new beginning, the passing of the power of encompassment from one generation to the next. Rachel had emerged from her mother eleven years ago, and now her mother would submerge into her.
The prospect confused but excited Rachel, and even if it hadn't, she knew she would still reach out and touch her mother as she had touched the book. She had to. How could she not? So Rachel reached out and poked the back of her mother's bare left shoulder. One. Two. Three times.
And nothing. Her mother's blood and bones did not become powdered snow, swirl in a nonsensical updraft, and push itself into Rachel's nose. Her mother's flesh did not wetly divot under Rachel’s index finger and collapse into some amniotic pudding that then rushed at Rachel and pressed into her every pore.
No. Her mother continued to lay there on her stomach. Her father continued to snore. The only change was that a moment later Rachel’s mother adjusted herself so now she was sleeping on her left side, her back facing her unblinking daughter.
So Rachel finished her pilgrimage with an even greater satisfaction than normal. But, oddly, the great satisfaction was mixed with just a pinch of disappointment.
Rachel climbed in and locked her kneecaps into the hollows of her mother's knees and enjoyed the touch of her forehead upon her mother’s mid back. It was a successful docking, a well-accomplished back to front, left side sleeping spoon.
Rachel draped a long, spaghetti thin arm over and up her mother's side. Rachel's hand found rest on the oddly shaped rise of her mother's right breast which, loosened by age and pulled by gravity, reached down for the mattress.
Rachel felt tears leak from her eyes, fight that same gravity, and cleave to her left temple and the ledge of her nose’s bridge. At last the drops gave into the pull, departed her, and wetted her parents’ bed sheets.
They were not tears of grief or loss, or of burdens unbearable but inescapable. They were tears of an embryonic joy, an oceanic sense emanating from the sudden realization that multitudes danced and divined and divorced within her, and she held them together, alive, and whole.
They were all her and yet not her and she spoke both beatitude and benediction upon every last one of them. And, if this were so, perhaps the life of Rachel and of her mother and of the moon (and of father too, though he farted too much) just as truly spun within yet another who spoke blessing upon them all. And maybe that other blessed them in an angelic tongue rumbling at a frequency too high for the mortal ear to hear, except only so often, in the still deadness of the house at night, when books of nearly infinite pages dissolve into mist and taste sweet on the tongue.
As the doctor pressed his face into the part of her head where the different sections of her hair joined together, his hands found her shoulders and squeezed them in time to his kissing. Her hands popped up to squeeze his hands, even as her eyes continued to stare at the bed.
This being a hospital, the bed area looked predictable – the mechanically adjustable bed ringed by little clear hoses, blippy electronic displays, a stack of get well cards, symbolically supportive gifts of living greenery, which were – if you were one to seek after bad omens – turning brittle and semi-dead, despite the regular ministrations of dependable nurses.
This being a hospital, there was, at the center of this eruption ring of the medical and spiritual detritus of caregiving, a body, a patient of forty-six years of age who had not been awake since his forty-third year, a man whose body had internally farted some sort of blood clot which had taken an epic road trip throughout the entirety his body until buying property and putting down roots in the man’s brain.
So the man now slept while his wife and his friend the doctor waited hopefully for him to awake. As well as being in a coma, the man was sick right now, an infection of some sort, and so he was hooked up to a couple more pieces of equipment for a while.
When nurses spoke to the doctor, they called him Dr. Bostick. When his friends yelled at him during softball games, they called him James. Since his middle name was Liam, when the woman who was right now focused on her husband in the hospital bed was instead focused on him, drifting off to sleep in his bed, she called him LeeLee.
It was a name she’d created. No one had ever called him that before and, now that the name existed, if anyone else ever tried to use it, he would not allow it. The name was hers alone because she’d coined it and because she’d given it life by filling it with the relaxed energy of late night comfort.
And beyond all this, deep at the heart of why no one else would ever call him LeeLee, was that he hated the name, but he loved her, and so he loved the name even more than he hated it. Therefore, under the mysterious rules of the human heart, this meant she could use the pet name, but no one else ever could.
The doctor released the woman’s shoulders and retreated to the door. She mumbled some soft words and turned to look at him once as he backed away, but she quickly turned again to the bed. The doctor reached the door, entered the hallway, and pulled the door most of the way closed, but he couldn’t bring himself to finish closing it.
Instead, he craned his neck into the open space and stared at the woman and her husband, taking the whole scene in at once. The doctor noted that the bedside plants definitely needed to be read their last rites and tossed.
The doctor also noted how freakish human lives could become as they bent-back over one another again and again and crisscrossed again and again, stretching and intersecting and weaving their loves, losses, and longings too numerous into over-tall superstructures of pencil-lead-thin glass that should collapse into stars and shards at the slightest breeze – but don’t – and instead prove stout enough to bear the weight of the kingdom of God.
He’d known Andrew Peter Evans, the man in the bed, for thirteen years (if you could count the last three years, that is – ten, if you couldn’t). He’d known the woman, Rebekah, for nine years, as long as the APE had known her. APE was Andrew’s nickname among his friends, an obvious abuse of the unfortunate initials Andrew’s parents had bestowed upon him.
For six of those years the doctor had known the woman sitting by the APE’s bedside as his friend’s girlfriend, fiancée, and then wife. For the next two he’d known her as all of that, but also as some sort of pre-widow to a pre-dead man. This past year she had continued to be every one of those things, but she’d also become the singular someone who could call him LeeLee. She was a lot of people, at least to him. Perhaps they all were many people, in one way or another.
As the doctor watched Rebekah watch her husband, the impossible happened. He saw Andrew Peter’s head move and eyes blink. The doctor saw Rebekah start to shudder with sobs and say she couldn’t believe it. He heard a croaking voice emerge from the bed and speak of thirst. The doctor saw Rebekah offer her water cup.
Then the doctor saw Rebekah reach out and touch her husband’s forehead. Her fingers went to smooth back his bangs, but when she touched him, Andrew Peter popped like a bubble, and all that occupied the bed was a fog of smoke that gathered itself with great rapidity into a funnel cloud and entered Rebekah by every orifice in her head – ears and nose and mouth.
It happened so fast, the doctor had no time to move, actually no time to doubt it was actually happening, which he now did because who wouldn’t. At last the doctor was able to move, to react, and he shoved open the door and rushed the few paces to Rebekah’s back, which was turned from him but, nonetheless, communicated shock and stun through its over-straight posture.
The doctor reached for her left shoulder. He needed to steady her, care for her, help her to know she wasn’t going crazy so she could help him know he wasn’t going crazy.
As he reached for her, he noticed he was going to place his index finger on the birthmark on her shoulder near the base of her neck. When he did, it was like pushing an ignition button. Rebekah’s flesh became a pillar of lava before him and poured into him like a purifying flame. And then everything in his world melted and entered him until all was himself and then he winked out.
*********
Rachel put the book back down on her family's dining table. She'd never seen it before – not during the day, and certainly not during her nightly pilgrimages to her parents’ bedroom.
Being eleven, part of her despised feeling drawn to finish her sleep among the smells and skins of her sleeping parents. It struck her as babyish, and she knew it struck her parents that way too. All of this had been made quite clear when the three of them occasionally spoke about her habit in the light of day.
But a deeper part of Rachel – the part of her in control when she awoke because her room was too warm or her dreams too cold – craved sleeping with her parents in a way more compelling than reason and the “expected levels of maturation” for someone her age. And so, far more nights that not, Rachel made her pilgrimage across the living room and dining room to her parents’ bedroom door.
But never before had she seen the book. Never before the book with its great weight, creaking black leather cover, and pages the size of small wall posters. Never before had she seen the book lying just so on the dining table, its angle of placement perfect to pique the curiosity of her half-awake mind as she shuffled from her origin to her destination.
And never before had an accountant's desk lamp been placed by the book’s side, its pull chain waving to her ever so gently, its presence taking space where Rachel had only before seen the paper junk piles of school assignments and supermarket mailers.
All of this was a surprise, to put it mildly, but what was not surprising for Rachel were all the people she’d read within the book's pages – friends who fit into one another who fit into an unfaithful, grieving wife who fit into a physician whose whole hospital and world fit into him as an extension of his unwell self.
Rachel had sensed them all before she’d read them all, and the notknowingatallbutknowingitall made her feel queasy and giddy inside her guts. So she closed the book, and turned from it to her parents closed door. She spun on her right heel planning to move on and finish her journey and forget the words she’d read.
But then Rachel turned back to face the book again, her change of direction powered by a sudden decision to feel the book's cover once more. This she did.
She traced a wrinkle in the cover with her index finger, and when her finger reached the cover’s center, Rachel pressed softly, the way you might press a sleeping baby's cheek. But the book did not support Rachel’s finger.
Her finger sunk, its tip disappearing into the blackness, and Rachel’s eyes perceived nearly invisible ripples emanating out from the point of contact like you might just see ripples on a lake's skin during the night of a new moon.
Then the book that now seemed composed of thick, viscous water became a swelling wave, rising up from the table to reach the ceiling, misting before her, and entering her through her nose and ears and shock-opened mouth.
In the wonder of it all, Rachel noted that the lamp was gone as well. For some reason this registered in her mind. “I have a light within me,” she formed with her lips although the breath necessary for voice eluded her.
Rachel slid into her parents' bedroom. Literally. She slid her feet along the polished hardwood to minimize her noise and maximize her chance of success. She became a nocturnal figure skater, not driven by the desire for a perfect figure eight but by the hope of finding some rest in the warmth of her skin pressed against the skin of her mother's dreaming body.
Like Rachel herself, the moonlight slid into the bedroom along paths of smoothness. In the moon's case it wasn’t sanded-slick wood underfoot, but the unblemished plane of window glass up and to Rachel’s right. Also like Rachel, the moonlight was subtle, faint; it seemed to strain under the tension of desperately wanting to be in the room near her parents, and yet not wishing to be present enough to wake them by accident and risk banishment.
The furtive, humble moonlight guided Rachel's silent sliding, and Rachel thanked her fellow traveler the moon, as she always did on such occasions.
Rachel always entered the bed from her mother's side, which, in addition to being the less potentially grumpy side, also happened to be closer to the door, an important point when each extra movement of her four foot body was another chance for detection and rejection.
Typically Rachel tried to invade her mother's bed without touching her mother until Rachel was fully ensconced within the sheets, her mother's breathing deep and even, and all things green light go for spooning and feasting on her mother's heat and smell.
But tonight was different. Never before had she encountered the book on the table and had it enter her. What else might dissolve under her touch and fill her in just such a way? Could her mother vaporize under Rachel’s fingertip?
Rachel supposed it was possible, maybe even likely. As Rachel stood there in the midnight dark almost eye-to-eye with her prone, sleeping mother, Rachel instantly developed an entire argument in favor of her mother's imminent dissolution under her daughter's touch.
The theory was simple and elegant. Rachel did not yet know all the technical details of her birth, at least not in her conscious mind, the voice that narrated her days and told her she liked cheese pizza but not hamburgers. However, Rachel did know in some mysterious, epic, and shocking way her body had, at some point in the past, emerged from her mother's prone, overwhelmed flesh.
So Rachel’s argument suggested that perhaps right now was the moment of full circle arrival back at beginning, or an arrival at a new beginning, the passing of the power of encompassment from one generation to the next. Rachel had emerged from her mother eleven years ago, and now her mother would submerge into her.
The prospect confused but excited Rachel, and even if it hadn't, she knew she would still reach out and touch her mother as she had touched the book. She had to. How could she not? So Rachel reached out and poked the back of her mother's bare left shoulder. One. Two. Three times.
And nothing. Her mother's blood and bones did not become powdered snow, swirl in a nonsensical updraft, and push itself into Rachel's nose. Her mother's flesh did not wetly divot under Rachel’s index finger and collapse into some amniotic pudding that then rushed at Rachel and pressed into her every pore.
No. Her mother continued to lay there on her stomach. Her father continued to snore. The only change was that a moment later Rachel’s mother adjusted herself so now she was sleeping on her left side, her back facing her unblinking daughter.
So Rachel finished her pilgrimage with an even greater satisfaction than normal. But, oddly, the great satisfaction was mixed with just a pinch of disappointment.
Rachel climbed in and locked her kneecaps into the hollows of her mother's knees and enjoyed the touch of her forehead upon her mother’s mid back. It was a successful docking, a well-accomplished back to front, left side sleeping spoon.
Rachel draped a long, spaghetti thin arm over and up her mother's side. Rachel's hand found rest on the oddly shaped rise of her mother's right breast which, loosened by age and pulled by gravity, reached down for the mattress.
Rachel felt tears leak from her eyes, fight that same gravity, and cleave to her left temple and the ledge of her nose’s bridge. At last the drops gave into the pull, departed her, and wetted her parents’ bed sheets.
They were not tears of grief or loss, or of burdens unbearable but inescapable. They were tears of an embryonic joy, an oceanic sense emanating from the sudden realization that multitudes danced and divined and divorced within her, and she held them together, alive, and whole.
They were all her and yet not her and she spoke both beatitude and benediction upon every last one of them. And, if this were so, perhaps the life of Rachel and of her mother and of the moon (and of father too, though he farted too much) just as truly spun within yet another who spoke blessing upon them all. And maybe that other blessed them in an angelic tongue rumbling at a frequency too high for the mortal ear to hear, except only so often, in the still deadness of the house at night, when books of nearly infinite pages dissolve into mist and taste sweet on the tongue.