The Geology Of Me

The first time they gave me lithium I was sixteen.

Laurelwood.

It was a year after my mother died. The room smelled of bleach and lino too new. That cleanness that burns your nostrils and leaves your tongue dry. The sheets scraped. The light came from everywhere, flat, without angle, nowhere to hide. A washed-out white. The kind of white where shadow has no right to exist.

The nurse's name was Brenda. Or Glenda. A name that doesn't stick. She had dry hands. Cracked. And a wedding ring too tight. The band bit into the finger and the skin spilled over on each side, pressed, whitened, docile, like dough that's been pushed too hard. You saw that and you knew. It wasn't coming off without tearing something.

She took my jaw in her left hand. Neither rough nor gentle. Professional. The gesture of someone doing a thing she's already done a thousand times. With her right she placed the tablet on my tongue. Her index finger stayed one second too long. Not enough for anyone to call it an assault. Just enough for my body to remember. Just enough for my mouth to understand it could become a public place.

The latex. The hospital soap. And underneath. Under all the clean and all the craft. Something lukewarm.

Since then every morning I open my mouth. The gesture comes back on its own. No one calls it. It comes. The finger is there. It comes back to rest on the tongue right when I believe the day is beginning. The one where you still believe you're just a guy standing in his kitchen taking a pill.

Not this morning.

The blister packs were on the counter. Between the coffee maker and the toaster that only half works.

I stood there. Barefoot on the tile. Underwear. Four-something in the morning. The kitchen stank of yesterday's egg. Stuck to the plate. Hardened into a pale crust on the porcelain.

I took a fork and scraped. Metal against ceramic. A small dry screech. Dirty. Stubborn. The first sound of the day. A sound of something resisting. That only gives way in pieces. Only if you tear.

The blister packs were still there. I didn't touch them. But I could feel them. Their weight at the edge of my hand.

On lithium you cross the day the way you cross a hallway. Clean. Warm. Nothing spills over. The world doesn't look at you.

Off lithium the edges of objects become too sharp. Sounds thicken. Even silence has a texture. You feel it on your skin like fabric.

Manu pays for my medication.

The guy from the market. Sixty. Maybe more. A green apron washed so many times it's not green anymore. Forearms swollen from the crates. Arms made for lifting. Not for catching someone who falls. With Manu everything is counted. A kilo lost is an insult.

The lithium is zucchini money. Crates hauled up and down before dawn. A tablet I don't take is a wasted day. And at Manu's nothing goes to waste.

I know the smell of lithium. Something metallic. With something lean underneath. Sweet. Like blood.

I put the blister packs in the drawer.

The drawer swallowed the aluminum. The zucchinis. The money. Brenda or Glenda's finger.

The small dull sound of closing. After that there was silence. Not the good kind. The other kind. The kind that lets in everything you're trying not to hear.

I got dressed fast. Jeans. T-shirt. In the hall the basement stairwell was open. The handle had been ripped off and nobody replaced it and nobody will. In this building broken things stayed broken: it was a way of living.

Down below it was black.

The voice rose from there.

— Kyle. Come, sweetheart. I'm waiting for you. I've always been waiting.

Mom.

I stopped. One foot in. One foot out.

I didn't go down. My legs held. They held as if they knew something before I did.

I pushed the building door open. The air hit me in the face. But in my back it stayed. Between the shoulder blades. A hand laid flat. Not pressing. Not pushing. Just there.

The market is left. Seven minutes on foot.

I went right.

It's not that I chose. The decision was made down low. Somewhere between the marrow and the knee. My brain followed after. Like a guy who shows up late to a meeting where everyone's already voted.

The bum was sitting against the pharmacy wall. Sixty or a hundred. Dirty with an old dirt. A dirt that ends up becoming a material of the face. A cardboard cup in front of him.

I dug in my pocket. Coins. I dropped them in the cup. He said thank you. The word came out low. Gravelly. And in my stomach something gave way.

I came back. I pulled out the wallet. I put everything in the cup. Everything. Manu's bills. The zucchini money. The money that was supposed to pay for the lithium at the end of the month. Without counting. Without thinking.

We were two guys smiling at six in the morning in front of a closed pharmacy.

My legs started to pick up speed. The phone buzzed. Manu. WHERE ARE YOU. I didn't answer. KYLE THE CRATES ARE HERE. I put the phone away.

A taste rose from the back of my mouth.

This is it. This is where mom died.

The asphalt was new. They'd redone the whole thing. A smooth black. The kind of road that says move along. We've fixed it. Nothing left to see. Except the new is for those who didn't see the before.

I had seen. The bus. The glass shattering. The motor oil and the blood mixed together.

The pole was still there. At its base plastic flowers tied to wire. The petals had gone white. They'd been red. Maybe pink. Now they were the color of nothing at all.

The hand on my back had changed. It was pressing. Softly. An invitation with the patience of the dead.

The voice rose. Not from the building. From under the road. From the place where the new tar covers the old tar. Where the old covers the earth. And where the earth keeps everything that was left in it.

— Kyle. Come, sweetheart.

The cover. A manhole in the middle of the road. Round. It looked like it was watching me.

I breathed. I thought: is it her, or is it me wearing my voice down until I give it hers?

— Show me your hands.

She had the tone of a kitchen scolding.

— You don't wash enough anymore. I can tell.

That sentence froze me. Not because it was monstrous. Because it was domestic. The small tender tyranny.

My fingers found the edge of the cover. The metal was cold. Not the cold of morning. A lid cold. I pulled. It was heavy as a piece of city. The cover scraped the asphalt. The sound startled a pigeon and that ridiculous detail made me want to laugh, a laugh without sound.

It smelled. Old water. Iron. Something alive that had turned.

— You have your father's hands.

That was the first sentence that wasn't tender. A blade. And that truth scared me more than all the rest.

I put one foot in the opening. Then the other. And the dark took me.

The water caught me at the ankles. A cold that tells you right away you're in the wrong place and the wrong place doesn't keep hours.

I moved forward. The water made a sound of dishes. A kitchen sound. As if someone were rinsing something far ahead in the dark.

— Did you eat this morning?

I said no.

— You never eat in the morning. Even as a kid you didn't eat. We'd set the plate in front of you and wait. You'd stare at the wall and the plate would go cold.

After a while the voice changed. The words arrived with a delayed echo. As if the walls were taking her voice and chewing it and spitting it back in pieces.

I stopped. Water at mid-calf. Darkness everywhere. I pulled out the phone. No signal. The screen lit up the walls. Wet stone. Gray water. A real sewer under a real city. No mother. No promise. Just a pipe.

I spoke out loud, in a flat voice, like reading a grocery list. I'm going back up. I'm going to find the cover. I'm going home. I'm going to open the drawer. I'm going to take the lithium. I'm going to call Manu. Manu won't say anything. He'll hand me a crate and the day will start over.

The tunnel forked. The water rose. Knees. Thighs. I pulled the phone out again. The same walls. The same water. The same nothing.

I sat down in the water.

I'm going to die here. I'm in a sewer under the road where my mother died and nobody knows I'm here.

A low thought slapped me: Manu is going to kill me.

The voice came back. Clear. Sharp. As if the walls had parted to let it through.

— Kyle. Get up. Your pants are soaked. You'll catch your death.

Catch your death. She used to say that when I was eight and I stayed out in the rain. As if death were a cold. A thing you catch by not paying attention.

I got up. I walked. The water dropped. The air changed. Wider. Colder. A current from somewhere.

My foot hit something. In the water. Something hard. Round.

A stone. Not rubble. A polished stone. It fit in my hand. And it was warm, as if someone had held it a long time in their palm.

The light arrived. Not the dry circle of the manhole. A wide light. The end of the tunnel. The sewer opened onto a ditch at the edge of town. Grass. Sky. Morning full in the face.

I came out. Soaked. Dirty. Far from the market. Far from Manu. Far from the drawer.

I opened my hand. The stone was there. Smooth. Warm.

And inside. Very low. Very small. As if the voice had shrunk to fit in my palm. Something was breathing.

The bridge was there. As if it had been waiting for me.

Below, cars passed. The noise rose in waves. The breathing of a huge animal lying under the concrete.

I looked down. All that speed. People going somewhere and knowing where.

I thought: I can still turn back. I can reopen the drawer.

I was a soaked guy on a bridge. A warm stone in my hand. My mother's breath in my palm.

The railing was cold. The metal painted gray was flaking in spots. Underneath an older gray. Underneath that another. Layers over layers. And beneath it all the original thing.

I looked at the stone. I looked down.

— Kyle. Sweetheart.

I don't know if I let go. I don't know if my hand opened or if it gave way.

I know the gesture: the fingers loosening, the palm releasing.

I know the sound. The screech of tires. The glass shattering. Then the metal. Then the horn.

I went down. The wet embankment. I slipped. My hands in the grass and the dirt. And below the road. And on the road the car stopped sideways.

The windshield had a round hole. Clean. Around it cracks in a star. A horrible and perfect flower.

The woman was inside. Head back. Eyes closed. Blood on her forehead. A thin thread running down along the temple. Her hands still on the wheel. Clenched. Knuckles white.

I opened the door. The smell hit me. Blood. Hot plastic. Deflated airbag. And underneath. Motor oil.

I slipped my arms under hers. I pulled. She was lighter than I thought. Or it was something else carrying in my place.

— What hap— — It's okay. Don't move. You've been in an accident. — Who are you? — Nobody. A guy passing by. — You're shaking.

I was shaking. The arms. The hands. The jaw. Maybe the body was shaking because it had nothing left to hold.

— You look worse off than me.

A small laugh. A breath. Not a movie laugh.

The stone was gone. On the road. In the hole in the windshield. In the city that swallows. Everywhere and nowhere.

— Kyle. Thank you, Kyle.

The sirens were still far off. I was holding her. Her head in my hands. The blood on my wrist.

— What's your name.

She touched her forehead. Looked at the blood on her fingers.

— Joan.

And in her eyes there was no fear. There was only the calm. A hard calm, like an unbroken pane of glass.

Joan didn't remember. Any of it. The doctor talked about concussion. It comes back sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't.

And me standing at the foot of the bed I was thinking it was the most beautiful gift anyone had ever given me. That you could live with a hole. That you could not know where you came from.

I came back with daisies. White. Not roses. Because they looked simple. Joan set them on the nightstand between the water cup and the remote. Living flowers. Not like the ones on the pole.

I reopened the drawer. The tablet on the tongue. Brenda or Glenda's finger. Faithful. Exact.

Manu said nothing. He pushed a crate toward me. I lifted. We worked. At Manu's, crises were fixed with the same tools as everything else. Work. Silence. A crate.

One morning he talked more than usual.

— What'd you do, Kyle?

He wiped his hands on his apron, a gesture that erases nothing but says: we go on.

— I don't wanna know everything. But I wanna know if you're working.

His morality in one sentence.

Joan asked the way she asked everything. Calmly. Leaving a space after.

— Do you remember that morning. The accident. — Yes. — I don't remember anything. I remember the night before. And after that it's you. Wet. With your cold hands. — But you were there. And that I remember.

The first time she touched me was in her kitchen. She passed behind me and her hand grazed my shoulder. Not placed. Grazed. A draft that has the shape of a hand.

The second time was deliberate. We were walking. Her fingers found mine. They slipped between without asking. As if her hands knew before she did.

She was falling in love with a steady man. A man who carries crates. A man who says I'm here and is here.

And I watched her fall, and sometimes I'd have a dirty thought: if she knew, she'd leave, and I'd be alone with it.

We got married in March. Joan wanted daisies. Bouquets everywhere. She said these are our flowers. I smiled. Because it was true and false at the same time.

Manu came. He'd put on a shirt. First time I'd seen him without the apron. He looked like a guy who'd laid a clean garment on a body made of crates. He shook my hand. Hard. Didn't say a word. Manu never says anything when it matters.

Joan wore a simple dress. A straight white. And that white had nothing to do with Laurelwood. It was a chosen white. A white that accepted shadow.

We lived. Months. Years. The drawer. The lithium on the tongue. The market in the morning.

The scar above her eyebrow had gone white. The skin had done its work. Laid a new layer. And yet when I looked closely I could still see the shape of the impact in the way the skin creased when she smiled.

Sometimes at night I stayed awake. Joan breathing beside me. The breath of a body that trusts the dark.

A body I had pulled from a car.

Joan never talked about the accident. Not from pain. From absence. The hole was the hole. Joan lived around it. And I lived inside it.

It happened on a Thursday. Three in the morning.

The scream before being awake. Not a loud scream. A scream of organ. The sound the body makes when it finds something it had lost and would have preferred never to see again.

Joan was sitting up in bed. Straight. Eyes open. Hands on the sheets. Knuckles white. Like on the steering wheel.

She got up. She walked to the bathroom. The door closed. The lock turned.

I waited.

From the other side no sound. Joan's silence. Her hard calm.

I felt my throat tighten. Not because I was afraid of losing her. Because I knew a hole was about to close and what was inside was going to come back up. And I hated myself for wanting the hole to stay.

The lock turned. The door opened.

Joan was standing in the frame. The light behind her. Her face in shadow. The scar above the eyebrow. White. Almost invisible. But there.

She looked at me. The look of someone who has gone back through the layers until they touched what's underneath. Not an abstract truth. An image. A hand that opens. A windshield that gives way.

I knew she knew.

I should have said something. I tried. I made a sound. Nothing came out that resembled a word.

Joan didn't say anything either.

She took a step. Then another. She came toward the bed. She sat beside me. Our shoulders touched. Her skin cold from the bathroom. My shoulder warm from the bed.

Her hand found mine. Her fingers slipped between mine. Without asking. Without hesitating. Like the first time. Except this time her fingers knew what my hands had done.

She squeezed my hand.

Joan fell asleep. Her head on my arm. Her breath steady. The hard calm.

She slept the way you sleep when you've seen and you decide anyway to close your eyes.

I stayed awake.

The ceiling was white. A nighttime white. Inhabited. A white where shadow had the right to exist.