A man walks down desperate streets when his mind fills with these thoughts.  My street, however desperate I pretend it is, has been emptied.  Whether my solitude this evening is caused by an obstacle of fate or the rain, it has afforded me time to dwell on these things alone…to make sense of life to myself – or to wrestle with the absolute lack of sense in it.

I’ve been walking for hours without much of a recollection of how I got here. Walking and thinking, hoping really, that somehow I can outpace the morning and stop tomorrow from coming.  It feels so much like a dream that it’s hard to convince myself that I‘m still awake.  Exhaustion has set in and makes my walking sluggish. The night is pitch black outside of the dim glow of the few streetlamps that mark my path. Rain is falling in constant, frigid sheets. It’s a distraction – the rain is – keeping me from succumbing to sleep and passing out on the sidewalk.  The buildings and storefronts lining the streets are dark as well. No doubt they’ve been closed for hours; their last patrons and employees hurrying home to beat the storm. And now I’m here, their solitary nocturnal patron, window shopping through darkened sales floors and ‘Sorry, we’re closed’ signs.

I’d like to retell all those stories to myself, turn them over in my mind as I walk, but I can’t remember any of them.  There’s these little blurs; bits of scenes here and there, but nothing solid to cling to. Nothing that would explain any of it away, at least.  Maybe I’ve just shut it all out; maybe it’s the stress, or the exhaustion.  Whatever it is, in a weird way I feel better just pretending that I’m walking away from it.  It’s as if the cold, the darkness, and the constant rain can slow time – suspend sins in raindrops.

The café ahead of me boasts an overhang above its outdoor dining area, so I decide to accept the slight refuge it offers from the rain.  I stop underneath and lean a wet shoulder on the wall.  The tables and chairs have been stacked and chained, rendering them a poor choice for seating, although I don’t know that I would want to sit in my rain-drenched pants anyway.  I sniff in an effort to restrain a slight drizzle from my nose, and look out across the street.  The road opens before me into a large cobblestone square lined on all sides with shops and lampposts similar to the ones I have been passing for hours.  The center of the square is monopolized by a magnificent, foreboding Catholic church; a gray and imposing monolith through a mask of rain and shadow.

I start to recall. Fragments fuse together like sediment in a pond stirred up, now settling back to the bed; clear water flowing again. They all return – the angels and devils do – phantoms of memories set to their extremes. You can’t have any moderates in memories. Only opposites. Good and evil. Black and white. We only pretend we dream in color to make it seem like there’s something in between, but it’s all really just monochrome. Illusions of colors; illusions of choice.

Yelling and crying and curses. You’re there, too, and all the things I’ve done – personified. Actions become characters in macabre vaudeville skits that replay all the terrible things. Hellish caricatures of me stealing time and love and hope and innocence. I become the sea and swallow you; pull you down and drown you – then I rescue you from myself, so I can be a hero. So you’ll need me. You’ll need me to save you from the floods I cause. You’ll need me to give you back the love and hope I took from you. “For God so loved the world that He decided to destroy it and bar mankind from paradise, only to conditionally forgive it back to him.” God and I, we’re not so different in that respect. We’re Florence Nightingale treating Stockholm Syndrome. False prophets and graven images.

I suddenly become very aware of the rain again as it seeps further through my jacket and into my skin.  A gust of wind blows up under the awning as if it, too, is trying to escape the rain. My teeth start chattering.  I sniff again, realizing that it’s probably in my best interest to head back home before I become frozen to the bistro wall; become another cold, stone fixture staring out into the street.  Pulling away,  I wrap my arms around myself, trying to afford some shelter from the cold as I start back. The raindrops are fewer and softer now – fate’s signal that her work is finished for the night. Home is where she wants me. Home is where I go. Another choice that destiny lets me pretend I’ve made.

This is how we remember…without clarity, without organization. But there is a subtle purpose in this chaos that is unappreciated in its eloquence and effectiveness: it forces us to dwell. It forces us to try pasting the smudges together; to make sense of what we can’t see, coaxing the ghosts out of the corners of our eyes, and convincing them they exist. And we do this for ourselves; for our own entertainment and misery, to relive and regret. To pretend we remember. Self-inflicted brainwashing that sharpens the faces, smooths the jagged parts, and fits the smudges together into shapes we recognize but can’t quite complete – puzzles with missing pieces, islands apart. We jump from one to the next, searching for edges that aren’t there – just more mirrors and more smudges. More snow on the wind.

And I think that’s what love is:
Pretending you’re scared of something really silly,
So that the person you’re with doesn’t feel alone,
Or ashamed,
Or embarrassed,
And you both feel scared together -
Two souls in one terrified lump,
Hiding under the bed,
Until you’re both ready to come out
And face the vacuum cleaner, together.

“Dog and Pony Show”

I was invited to the show; told to sit down and listen and watch as they paraded Learning in front of me in chains; displayed Learning like King Kong – some sort of foreign wonder that had been captured and domesticated to serve our purposes.

“This is what we do” they told me, “This is how it is.”

And I wanted to shout “No! that’s not how it is!” and it can’t be that way because Learning is a wild animal, and when you put it in a cage and make students look at it through the safety of bars and plate glass, the students yawn, and they poke it with sticks, and they say “it’s sleeping” or “it’s walking around in circles. Is that all it does?” But that is all it does in captivity: sleep and pace. And sometimes we demean Learning even further by teaching it to do silly tricks, like sit. And stay. And roll over.

“Good boy, Learning, good boy.”

We make it obedient and tame; we neuter Learning and make it sterile, unable to give birth to new generations, unable to breed with other species. But we brush its coat and bathe it and feed it scientifically formulated pellets, so we can put it on display and analyze it for flaws in shows where the best example of sterile, inbred Learning wins a ribbon and prize money; the audience clamors and fawns. All the while, the streets and alleys and forests outside the school are filled with mutts and strays – Learning that can’t be caught; Learning that dies in captivity, shunned and put down because it’s ugly and dirty and rabid.

I’m taken into a back room, given a whip and chair and made to tame Learning before I can let my students see it…take the wild out of the beast and put my head in its mouth, hoping it won’t bite down in retaliation for my disrespect. The other trainers threaten me:

“You won’t get a ribbon” they say;
and “Don’t you want them to praise you?”;
and “Look at the fine coat on my Learning! And she’s so well behaved! Yours could be too.”

Mine could be, too. Tame and pretty and sterile. I’ll be the zookeeper, the lion tamer, the human plate glass window keeping Learning at arm’s length from the public.

Or I’ll be the dissenter, dragging wild Learning in from the cold and setting it loose in a crowded room to bite and bark and spread its disease.

I can chain Learning to a post, subdue it with spray bottles and rolled up newspaper…

or I can go into the back alleys, and take in the strays…

It was in her bathroom, early in the morning.  Like it does, the chemotherapy was causing her to lose all her hair, but she decided to beat it to the punch.  I was terrified that I might slip and cut off her ear or something – it’s not like I’d ever held a razor before – and then instead of cancer, the cause of death might read “blood loss due to gross incompetence with a razor.”  My mother laughed genuinely at the reflection of our efforts in the bathroom mirror.  I pleaded with her to stop moving.  She laughed harder, and I couldn’t help laughing too.

I remember our church.  I remember going and singing and kneeling and praying – to nothing in particular, usually the crown molding or the big glass window behind the alter.  My mother wanted to go, and I always went with her…for moral support, I suppose.  And I remember thinking that she didn’t really buy all the hocus-pocus the priest was selling.  Maybe she felt unnecessarily obligated, like she was repaying a debt she never actually owed.  Or maybe she just wanted to cover all her bases, make a good faith effort.  All I know for sure is that few people understood the immediacy of mortality like my mother did, and when the reading was about life or death or strength in the face of adversity (as so much of the Bible is) I’d look around at worshippers paying lip-service to their deities of choice – in the walls or the floor or the backs of their own eyelids – and my mom would be looking at me.  She’d squeeze my hand.

I remember the funeral home and the maroon-sort-of-purple color scheme my mother had picked out.  I can’t imagine the surreal detachment of planning your own funeral, like a strange combination of submission and defiance.  I didn’t cry at first, but I felt like I was supposed to.  I thought that if I didn’t cry, then people would look at me funny and say to themselves: “what kind of little boy doesn’t cry after his mother dies?  He must not care.”  So I forced myself to cry because that’s what was expected.  I had to think of sad things – things that would make a little boy cry.

I remember becoming a hypochondriac when school started up every fall. I always felt feverish.  I had strep throat, or the flu, or phlebitis.  “I can’t go to school mom…I got kidney stones…no, I have impetigo…no?  Well, then my ovaries fell out…What? I don’t have ovaries?  Well no, not anymore!”  She’d put her hand to my forehead.

“You’re fine” she’d say with a smile, and send me off to school.

And then I remember my mom writing notes in my lunch.  Every one ended with that phrase: “you’re fine” – and she’d draw a smiley face.  And just like that, everything was all better.  My sore throat was soothed; my fever broke; my cancer went into remission.

“He doesn’t know he’s dying. It happens too gradually for him to notice” the teacher says.

I want to try it – the frog thing. I get home and I wander around my backyard looking for a victim. I yell “Hey, frogs!” but there’s no response. Maybe they’re not so dumb after all. I repeat the word “frog” to myself over and over in rhythm with my footsteps.

“Frog…frog…frog…frog, frog, frog, frog…frogfrogfrogfrogfrogfrogfrogfrog.”

If you repeat a word enough times, it loses meaning. Linguists call it semantic satiation, and it’s weird if you think about it. Words we use every day, important words, words with significance – life, death, love, hate – can be reduced to meaningless gibberish through nothing more than repetition. The opposite should be true. Like, the more you say a word, the more powerful its meaning should become. That’s how it ought to work  It’s like practicing a sport: the more you do it, the better you get. You should be able to practice a word, so when the right moment arrives, you’re ready to say it because you’ve been practicing, and it’s perfect and beautiful and meaningful. But that’s not the way it happens.

Third grade is before I know the word cancer…before Christina Rhodes moved to our school district from somewhere in Illinois to tell me about cancer – the astrological sign, not the disease. She was my first crush.

I joined chorus because of her. I dressed up as Abraham Lincoln because of her. I wore a sticky adhesive beard and fake eyebrows, and I memorized a monologue because of her.

“You’re right,” I say to my fuzzy reflection, “I bet my hero, Abraham Lincoln, never knew he’d grow up to be president!” It’s almost show time. I’m rehearsing my lines in my bathroom mirror before my mom takes me to the concert. I repeat the line again. Again. Again. The words lose meaning.  They’re just sounds that come out the way that I’ve practiced them.

Holding a stove pipe hat made out of cardboard, my mom comes in to tell me it’s time to go. She dug through arts and crafts bins for hours, looking for costume glue and fake facial hair to make me look the part. She does all this for my one line. She drops everything to come to my concert. She goes out to buy cardboard and construction paper at 6 in the evening because I wouldn’t be “Honest Abe” without the proper attire.

I can’t see my stupid reflection through my “honest” eyebrows. I hate my eyebrows. And my beard. I look stupid. Christina will think I look stupid.

My mom is hidden somewhere out in the crowd. I don’t know where my dad is – not here to see my sticky beard and hat…not here to listen to my line. When it’s my turn, I step up and deliver, just as I practiced, without perfection or beauty or meaning. Just a line. I never stop to think that Abraham Lincoln isn’t really my hero. I never tell the audience I’m just saying the line because that’s what was written in the script, and because I could say it better than Kevin Morrissey. Does the audience think it’s true? Do they believe I have a hero? Do they even notice me or my line or the work my mother did to turn me into someonewho isn’t even really my hero?

We sing a song called “You can grow up to be president.” I don’t think that’s true, either. I don’t want to be president. Unless Christina Rhodes is the First Lady. Then, maybe.

After the show, I run out into the hall and rip my eyebrows and beard off. It’s painful. I don’t want Christina to see me like this anymore. I’m embarrassed. I look stupid. My mom warned me not to rip the hair off. She said that she had special adhesive remover at home that would take it off quick and painless. I didn’t listen. Now I have red welts and white adhesive residue all over my face. I look like a lobster. A lobster who didn’t listen to his mother.

I make my way back out into a shifting forest of happy parents congratulating sons and daughters on wonderful performances. My mom has found my friends’ moms. She can’t see me when I come up behind her. She doesn’t know I hear ‘cancer.’ She doesn’t know that I’ve heard it before. Not just from Christina, but from other places. I know what it means, but I don’t know what it means. I hear practiced words from the other parents – practiced apologies for things they didn’t do…apologies practiced into meaningless gibberish. My mom turns to see my red welts and adhesive. She doesn’t congratulate me. She giggles and says “I told you so” instead. She calls me her little lobster.

Lobsters aren’t able to jump out of boiling water, so you don’t have to trick them like frogs. You just wait until the water boils and throw the lobster in. He can’t do anything about it. He was caught, unaware. He probably should have listened to his mother.

At home, my mom uses astringent to dissolve the glue on my face.  She gives me a cold compress to make the red welts go away.  She kisses me goodnight. I dream of Christina and lobsters and Abraham Lincoln and frogs…frogs…frogs…I dream of words that start to mean nothing if you say them enough.  Like ‘cancer’.

Cancer…cancer…cancer…

I cut left around the wall toward the upstairs half-bath, then switch right real fast to avoid hitting the little table with the stupid bowl that my mom bought because it matched the bathroom’s décor. I hate that stupid bowl. It’s completely useless. It just sits there in the middle of the hallway, taking up space and begging to be put to use. My mother won’t allow it. She says it’s for decoration. I don’t understand using useful things as decoration. That’s like finding a vaccine for some deadly disease, putting it in a syringe, and putting the syringe on a little table in your upstairs hall because it matches the décor.

So anyway, I coast past the stupid bowl on the little table without incident, and as I spin to start down the stairs, the world decides to shift twelve degrees to the left. My foot shifts with it, extending out over a deepening chasm of blue carpet and faux maple hardwood. It comes down, not on anything solid. It keeps falling, and I’m filled with a pang of terror and the tingly, fight-or-flight adrenaline rush that accompanies the thought of “I should be touching the next stair by now…”

I am a crumpled, fleshy mass of limbs rolling down an endless hill of sharpened Saxony. I’m like Sisyphus in reverse; or like Marcel Duchamp’s lesser-known work: Dumbass Kid Descending a Staircase.

In movies, all the really quick and exciting scenes slow way down so that the audience can savor every subtle nuance in a tragedy. The people in the theater, they watch their own shocked expressions reflected in the chrome grille of a tractor-trailer. It’s plowing into a busy intersection, spewing shards and bits of glass and rubber and smoke as it carves a shiny, dirty, bloody path that predictably ends in an impressive – if implausible – explosion of fire and expensive sound effects. It’s viewed and re-viewed from twelve different angles in slow motion and crystal-clear definition so the audience can savor its own distance from the pain, and so the special effects department can justify asking for an even bigger budget in the sequel.

That doesn’t happen in real life. You fall and you get hurt. No slow-motion. No HD. No distance from the pain.

I check myself for damage. I have rug burns on my arms and my pants are a little damp at the crotch. That’s embarrassing. My fight-or-flight defense mechanism appears to be peeing myself. My nose begins to bleed. Now the tears come.

It’s all that stupid bowl’s fault. If it wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have had to try to avoid it, and I could have made sure my footing was better. I hate that bowl. Stupid useless non-bowl.

I remember before it was there. It was a long time ago, back before I was falling down stairs all the time. It was when I was two.

I have only one memory from when I was two. I don’t think I remember back beyond that, and a lot of my current recollection comes from my mother’s recollection, so it’s twice removed from the source. I know the bowl wasn’t there. Instead, my mother put a little potty on the floor of the hall because I was toilet training. The potty was originally on the floor in the bathroom, but the tile in there was slick, and I already had a track record of being uncoordinated, so she moved it out onto the carpet to protect her sanity and my knees.

My mother was getting ready to go to the mall. I loved going to the mall with her. It was just about the most fun I had with my mom when I was two, but she said I couldn’t go this time. Not until I went. In the potty. I had to go to go. That was the deal. I couldn’t go because I couldn’t go. I looked down at the potty. Another stupid bowl I couldn’t put to use.

I tried really hard, but I didn’t know what to do. Peeing had come so naturally before; why was it so difficult now? Why won’t it just work? I couldn’t figure out what to do, so I sat on my potty in the middle of the upstairs hall and cried, hoping maybe my tears would fill up the bucket in the potty and let me go to the mall. I didn’t think she’d do it. Mom wouldn’t go to the mall without me – it’s what we did. We went to the mall together.

I could hear footsteps in the foyer. My mom was leaving. I was at the end of my rope, no options left, terrified that I might miss out on an outing with my mother (it’s amazing how such small things are blown out of proportion when you’re two). She reached the door – I could hear through the railing in the hall – the doorknob turned; the bolt clicked open with a “snick” that echoed through the house and struck me with a feeling of such unbridled terror that I peed. It was only a little bit, but I peed. Like a scared puppy facing a vacuum cleaner.

“MOM!”  I squealed in terror and delight – and odd mixture of emotions, considering I was still sitting on the potty. “I PEED!” My mother came running. She wasn’t outside; she wasn’t even at the front door. She had been in her room getting ready. I yanked my pants up (a little too early) and pointed proudly at the no-longer-empty bowl. My mother embraced me, wiped the tears from my red face, and showered me with praise. She didn’t say anything about the small bit of pee on my pants.

Four years later I’m sitting at the bottom of the stairs, nose bloody and pants wet. “MOM!” I yell in pain and embarrassment. She heard the commotion as I fell. She brought tissues for my nose. When I see her through my tears and blood and embarrassment, I see my own, pitiful reflection in her eyes – the motherly equivalent of a chrome tractor-trailer grille replaying my fall in slow motion. It makes me cry more. She holds a wad of fluff up to my face. She wipes away the tears. She doesn’t say anything about the small bit of pee on my pants.

My nostrils are flaring frantically – the only sign that I’m still alive.  Fuzz is being sucked up into my head, tickling my brain and making me want to sneeze.

It’s Halloween, and my mother wants a picture.  She worked for hours sewing this costume and now I have to model her work.  It’s inhumane, like the crazy lady down the street who dresses up her cats so they look like ducks or babies.  My mom wants to send this picture to my grandmother as a keepsake to remember her grandson’s tragic and untimely death.

I’m clutching the sides of my red Radio Flyer wagon for balance.  The mammoth mass of cotton and stuffed animal skin on my head is forcing my neck to wobble.  I’m trying in vain to compensate for its lopsidedness, but the load is slumping down over my eyes.  I’m being devoured. My palms are sweaty; I’m crying; I can’t breathe.  This is where claustrophobia comes from.

Between flashes of her camera, my mother asks my father if he’s ready to go.  He is, but only grudgingly.  In a moment, we’ll roll out of our garage like the little instant pictures from my mom’s camera – a picture of a family.  My father will lug me around the neighborhood, grunting and straining up the hills, but never complaining.  My mother will watch me intently, keeping me balanced.   This is how it is.  My father pulls the wagon, and my mother keeps me from falling out of it.  He will never look back, and she refuses to look forward.  I won’t notice.

Instead, I’m trapped inside this monstrous face – this adorable oven.  My hair is matted to my head with sweat, forcing little drips of perspiration to leak into my eyes.  My hands are coated in fur, so wiping my face only makes the irritation worse.  The tiny hairs under my nose are like fine strands of asbestos; they’re clogging my throat and giving me cancer.  There’s a reason people say “smile” before taking your picture – it’s because you’re not smiling beforehand.  My mother has her picture now.  I forced my teeth to show through the hair and sweat and tears and heat exhaustion so she’d think it was a smile.

My father grabs the wagon handle to lead us out into the street.  People will look at me and say “aww” and “how cute!” and other things that adults say when children are miserable.  My parents will nod.  They’ll argue without speaking.  “Which one is he?” some oblivious woman will ask.  My father will stare blankly and defer to my mother.  “He’s Tenderheart Bear” she’ll say with her Polaroid smile.  Tenderheat Bear was the one on the show who helped people express emotions and feel empathy.  This is irony, before I even know there’s a word for it.