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Recovering. Right. As if the fracturing nightmares represent progress. Nightmares like the magic mirror in the bathroom. Or the microhells writhing in the corner of my room that suddenly take on color when I stare into the shadows. I don't think I'm recovering at all. I think the long slide in my life that began before November tenth has detoured through another dimension.
Like I said, when I had friends, they called me Bowie. I'm burning bridges, I guess, so I don't have friends anymore. Some of that happened before the accident, because I was cleaning up my act; some of it is happening now, because I refuse to see anyone or answer the phone. I don't want to hurt the people from my past, but I don't want to be seen like this.
If I look the same in the huge mirror in the bathroom, it's because what's changed is so deep it may never show on the surface. I remember my dad saying he changed suddenly. He just told me one day that he'd lost it. He knew his memory was going, and that he couldn't react the same, couldn't find the precedents and the links that held his life together. And more and more after that he spoke in a different tense. He didn't "want" things anymore; instead he had "wanted" them. He spoke so sadly that I knew he really had changed. His attitude went south, and that dulled his effort to live, and that made him age rapidly. I guess that's what I'm afraid of finding in the bathroom mirror at Mayo: the past tense.
This particular mirror is one of those incredibly clear silvered layers with very thick glass over it that make the world behind you look dimmer and deeper. You'd swear your image was a distinct and separate person. And you'd swear there were eyes glittering out of the gloom behind you. And there was this one time–perfectly explainable, I'm sure, when you consider the condition I was in–but this one time when it got very, very crowded in that glass.
It was maybe the second or third visit I made to the bathroom by myself. I was unsteady on my feet, and the nurse hung around the outer room, telling me to leave the door open a crack.
"Don't you be modest now; I seen everything you got. And you ain't ready to solo yet."
I closed it, because I was ready to solo, and they had to understand that I didn't belong in a hospital. It would have been okay, too, but the light in the mirror immediately began to fade and the air stopped moving. I'm very sensitive to moving air now, and at that moment I felt like someone had stuffed a rag down my throat. I fell forward, planting my hands on the edge of the sink. I "thought" I planted my hands, but it seemed like I was still rocking forward, my face continuing toward the glass. The light went rosy, a deeper red with each thud of my heart, as if my pulse were gushing into the mirror. The image–I can't call it "my" image–began to bunch at the throat and under the eyes and around the mouth. Veins throbbed at its temples. I tried to call out, but all I got was the gurgling of lungs filling with blood.
And then my forehead touched the mirror. In fact it passed through the mirror–passed through and met cool, moving air. My lungs filled with vital, healing oxygen and my vision suddenly cleared. I say it cleared, but what I saw was like broken glass picking up multiple images. I was inside the mirror–inside the image or inside myself–and I saw my face catenated in an endless chain.
If I tell you the aftermath, that the nurse heard the mirror crack and barged in to find me with a gash in my forehead flowing like a bloody cataract, you might logically conclude that what I saw were reflections in the broken shards that rippled from the wall. But the memory is vivid and nonnegotiable, and it wasn't just clone-perfect images–they weren't "exactly" the same. It was me in uncountable different moods and expressions.
What the hell was I looking at?
They sewed me up, but the wound isn't healing. A maintenance man came to replace the mirror, and I watched him take out the pieces of the old one.
"Man, how did you do that?" he wondered aloud. "It's jigsawed like it's been twisted. Must have been a flaw in the glass."
There was no spidering from a simple point of impact. Like he said, jigsawed. I've scrounged paper and pen from one of the orderlies, cheap reading glasses from the hospital pharmacy, and I'm writing this down. There's nothing else to do here. They tell me I'm convalescing great, while I choke down the upheavals.
So now you know why I don't want to see anyone who knew me before. I have to sort this out among strangers whom I can leave safely behind. Once upon a time, before divorce and booze and pills and unemployability and fatherhood interruptus, I liked me. Now I'd sell my soul to get back to being the cliche I was. Make that souls. Maybe I can hold an auction.
When Admissions caught up to me with the registration form a week out of the coma, I told them to put down "no living relatives," which is a triple-decker lie. I have three living relatives. My sister Laura works for a right-wing lobbyist on the left coast; my kids are seven and nine and live in the Twin Cities. I saw all three of them in September at Dad's funeral.
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