[[I was asleep]]
//I can't dance//\n\nWe are preteens too smart for our own good dancing in a conga line -- a [[conga line]], really, truly --\n\n//I [[can't dance]]//
"You're either a pothead or really boring," an intern at work once told me. And -- I still cannot shake that.\n\n<<back>>
There was a new nurse now who introduced herself. She was nice; there is no other word for it. She was happy to see me. She smiled. She asked me more questions, ones that I had been asked before, but she did it quickly, and told me I reminded her of her son. Then she began attaching electrodes all over my body.\n\nThey were thin pieces of adhesive connected to wires -- friendlier, somehow, than you would imagine of something named //[[electrode]]//. She explained that she was giving me an EKG but did not elaborate on how she chose to place each electrode. Ankles, chest, forearms: they grew uncountable. I stared at the ceiling and thought of long-ago things. It was important to stay calm. You had to stay calm during the tests or else you'd mess them up. I had never been to the hospital before but I knew this anyway.\n\n[[I freaked out]].\n\nI looked down at my chest which was rising and falling much too fast. I could feel my breaths coming too fast. I didn't have any reason to freak out. I told myself this. //There is nothing wrong//-- except perhaps there was, so I thought instead, //[[no one is going to hurt you]]// but it didn't help. //No one is going to hurt you. No one is going to hurt you.//\n\n//He's artifacting,// the nurse said to another one who had come to assist with the EKG. //If these are right he wouldn't be just [[lying there]].//
The millennium had just come and gone; it was 3 am and we were at someone's house I barely knew. I was sitting on the couch watching Las Vegas light up with fountains or something weird like that. She came in from the porch, asked me if I wanted to [[smoke some weed]].\n\nI said no without really thinking about it. I still would have said no if I had stopped to think -- but it was funny, how it happened automatically. I wonder if the U.S. public educational system really does know how to grind an anti-drug message into your mind.\n\nShe disappeared back onto the porch and I disappeared into a dreamless sleep.\n\n<<back>>
''fine'' //n.// A state in which you cannot remember being hungry, at least not painfully so; a state in which you have not cried in more than six months; a state in which time seems to disappear, in which you cannot recall how old you are without performing arithmetic in your head.\n\n<<back>>
//I love this song,// she said to no one, least of all me, and headed toward the [[dance]] floor alone, not looking back, not towards me who was already thinking what this moment would feel like when I remembered it
Leftovers from my previous night's experiments. Pad thai is easy to make -- sort of the fried rice of Thai cuisine in that it's simple, and when people don't know what to order at a [[Thai restaurant]], they always go for it. But it also tastes really good, too.\n\nMy supermarket just added a bunch of stuff to their international foods aisle and I decided to try to make my own. There were little boxed kits of the stuff that was expensive, but on the bottom shelf were packages of noodles labeled only in Thai. Add some chicken, crush some peanuts -- it seemed easy.\n\nI hadn't gotten it completely right yet, though.\n\n<<back>>
[[so wake up]]
''syncope'' //n.// A brief loss of consciousness caused by a temporary deficiency of oxygen in the brain; [[a swoon]].
[[Stop thinking]] so much\n\nYou think too much and it screws everything up
A friend of mine in high school worked as a waitress in her family's restaurant. Pimpila told me stories about it -- mostly about assholes who tried to order egg rolls or French fries. She told me one secret: pad thai is really meant to be pronounced with a //pat// instead of a //pad//. But it's become Americanized to the point that no one will know what it is on a menu if you label it correctly.\n\nEverything feels so inevitable sometimes.\n\n<<back>>
There were construction paper bird silhouettes taped to the windows. Pink ones, wings spread as if they had just taken flight. Maybe starlings.\n\n<<back>>
Syncope
"I had a [[seizure]] at lunch," I told the nurse at the admittance desk.\n\nShe was pretty: blue eyes and blonde hair carefully parted down the middle. She did not react at all when I told her this. She did not avert her eyes downward, to the clipboard where she was filling out a form with all of my information, as I would if I were wearing her shoes, if I had somehow decided to become a nurse instead of the [[nebulous Web worker]] I was then. She just watched me. She only listened.\n\nWhen I was done telling her everything I needed to, she handed me [[a pager]] and asked me to wait. [[Thirty minutes later]], the [[tests began]].
[[at work]]
They were strange to me then -- and honestly this was not that long ago. They seemed annoying and stupid. Who wants to get phone calls in movie theaters and restaurants? Who wants to blare out a crappy rendition of Mozart in a silent room?\n\nI have come around. I only have a cellphone now. No wires at all. The second I leave my apartment I set it so that it will only [[vibrate]], never ring.\n\n<<back>>
I had seen pictures of people's brains playing Tetris -- something about the game turned their brains bright red and yellow in the false-color imagery. Something about the way they were thinking.\n\n<<back>>
//Ice hockey, the [[prince]] of sports,// my dad always said
I wanted to be a magician when I was growing up -- a stage magician, since there were no books to explain how to a real one, anyhow. There are three basic components that magic tricks are made of: [[forcing|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_force]], where you make the audience do what you want them to without them realizing it; misdirection, where you make the audience look where you want them to; and sleight of hand, where you accomplish the trick without anyone noticing. \n\n<<back>>
I think it was the first time that day anyone had said [[the word]]. Yet it was obvious. I had been thinking it for a while now. It felt pointed as I said it. Dangerous. I had a seizure and I could have another one any moment. Anything was possible.\n\n<<back>>
I have to have metaphors for everything, you see -- I have to understand things --\n\n<<back>>
a rush of air\n\npeople [[talking]] in space to no one
//This is the last time you'll dream of me,// she said\n\nAnd we kissed then.\n\nIt was just [[a dream]] but it made me happy and I'm sorry I have to keep this a secret
Mysteries are always better than secrets.\n\n<<back>>
safer that way\n\nlike telling a girl you dreamed of kissing her --\n\n(It was only [[a dream]], I promise)
my head used to be full of [[stories that weren't true]]
You always read about sort of thing in the newspaper but you never care quite enough to want it to change -- and when you are affected by it, it's too late by far to even complain. You have to take it as fact, unbendable, and change your life. How can a hospital stop taking ambulances? It just does. It is.\n\n<<back>>
Sometimes I wrote [[copy]]. Sometimes I would lay out pages with HTML and CSS. Sometimes I would work with ~ColdFusion code and databases. I never did a lot of one thing. It was -- sort of empty, in a strange sort of way.\n\n<<back>>
The main highway that connects Baltimore City with the rest of the world. 95 goes there too, but that highway's for tourists going to the Inner Harbor, to watch the Orioles, to spend gobs and gobs of money. Workaday people drive down 83; loners speed down it late at night.\n\nI always think of this story when I drive it. A certain valley that has no landmarks, really. Nothing to make it memorable -- except then I starting to consider what it had really happened. Had begun to think of [[the possibilities]]. To wonder what this meant. Where this story would end. Because it wasn't over -- that's what I realized along this highway.\n\n<<back>>
//God how lame//
I was still trying to calm myself but somehow hearing her talking about me freaking out made it worse. I closed my eyes and tried to find [[a specific memory to escape into]]. Or my mother would always ask us to tell her what we'd do with a million dollars when we were little kids and couldn't sleep. Our stories would grow so elaborate.\n\nFinally the original nurse left and it was just me and a middle-aged black woman tending the machine. She said nothing to me. She had never said anything before. But then she began singing -- maybe not even to me. The song had no words, barely a melody. The way songs turn when you are about to fall asleep. I thought of sleeping. I thought of dreaming.\n\nThe test was over. In another hour it was time for a [[CAT scan]].
I could tell you how I found a new job in a new city -- how it took a year, even, to re-place myself -- or I could tell you how even my apartment began to feel new though I hadn't changed a single thing about it. But these are only details, signposts. Changes can only really be understood long after you have changed, and maybe you can never really find the words to express it. Dreams really only make sense once you wake up.\n\n<html><b>∴</b></html>
The funny thing is that it no longer matters who she was, because I was not really in love with her and I never was. But I wanted her -- the idea of her. I could make myself happy with her in my head. I imagined us together. Blissfully. Silently. I could feel her hand in mine. There was a machine whirring above me, shooting me full of rays of who-knows-what, but I was lying in a field and the sun was so warm. Spring had come; March was only a bad memory. We were together. I had forgotten her name and her body was only barely there. She was only memory, only what I felt about her. It was a dream. The machine clicked. I could feel the plastic bench I was lying on move forward but it was a distant motion, like waves rumbling at the horizon. It was happening to me thirty days ago. We were together. I was safe.\n\nWhen [[I opened my eyes]], I was alone again but [[I was not afraid]].
They wheeled me down the hospital hallway -- they put me in a wheelchair for this test for reasons I could not begin to guess -- and returned me to my room. It took another hour maybe for the doctor to come. He spoke in a thick Indian accent, so there was a mental two-second delay as I parsed what he said.\n\n-- He was asking me questions. //Have you done any drugs? Have you smoked any hashish?//\n\nI laughed and said no. Who smokes hashish these days? And [[I have never done drugs]].\n\nHe said: //Nothing is wrong with you.//\n\nI had a [[syncope]].
I was standing on a hill with a girl who I wanted to love, but she would not let me -- and my sister, too. We were looking towards the city lights. A perfect yellow glow. There were fireworks just visible there. We lifted the pots and pans we brought with us, pilfered from my parents' kitchen, banged on them and screamed --\n\n//It's everyone's birthday,// I told her.\n\n<<back>>
There were two; a skinny middle-aged man with glasses who took my blood pressure while the other, a tubby guy my age, interrogated me. I don't remember most of the questions. They were normal ones, designed to eliminate obvious causes of problems.\n\n//What happened to you?//\n\n//I don't know,// I said. I don't know why I laughed a little here. //You have to ask her.// Liz told the story again, a shorter version this time, less scary.\n\n//[[What did you eat for breakfast this morning?]]//
In this story the young narrator recounts an episode in which he is [[in]] no danger but believes himself to be\n\nIn this story the young narrator recounts an episode in which he is no danger but believes himself to be
It is not as hard you might think to listen to a story like this, because when you first hear it it is not really happening to you. It happens to some other version of yourself, a disconnected one. You do not think about the story could mean for you -- this version of you ends as soon as she finishes the telling. You are safe now. You feel fine.\n\nBut -- [[the paramedics]] are talking to you --
I have an [[alarm]] now for every day of the week I live\na number to take to heart\nto feel [[grown-up]]
It looked exactly the same as the one the [[Cheesecake Factory]] handed to me once. The same block of plastic designed to prevent casual theft; the same way it would [[vibrate]] and flash red lights when the time came.\n\nHow... odd... to have a sense of deja vu about a pager.\n\n<<back>>
It sounds poetic but it isn't. Something strange happens in your body -- its causes include not getting enough to eat or drink, being stressed, and sleep deprivation -- and the blood pressure in the arteries leading to your brain plummets. You lose consciousness. You fall over. In extreme cases, your limbs may twitch.\n\nI did all of these things.\n\nI was fine but [[really I wasn't]].
//What happens if I swerve off this off ramp?//\n\n//What happens if I cross this double yellow line?//\n\n[[Stop thinking]] like that, I tell myself
It started as just a simple sort of pain. An ice cream headache grown backwards. A feeling that starts in the roof of your mouth and grows to fill your head until you close your eyes in some effort to make it pass, to feel it less, to get to that other side faster than fast -- but it didn't really hurt. Not... really. It didn't feel anything was going wrong, like the moment before your car smashes into another. \n\nMy [[eyes were closed]]. It would pass soon. [[Like an ice cream headache]] --
My mother's nature, too. She worries so much; always warns me to be careful driving. Thinks every snowfall will be a blizzard. Bought [[MREs|http://www.ki4u.com/mre.htm]] for the [[millennium]] -- just in case.\n\n<<back>>
!!Syncope\n!!!by <<pop 'chris' 'Chris Klimas'>>\nIt was March and spring was already here, though I wasn't really paying attention to the weather those days -- we had [[two days left]]. I was eating in the break room, just [[Liz]] and me at the table next to the [[window]]. I had just eaten the first bite of my [[pad thai]], and I felt [[weird]].
Not electric -- that word's almost archaic now. The dream of a thousand [[vacuum]] tubes
<<mymacro>>
I love having things vibrate instead of beeping. They're easier to ignore and when you do, you get to feel a little like a [[secret]] agent. Keep drinking your beer. Don't look down; these are the first rules of [[misdirection]].\n\n<<back>>
Secrets are always better than mysteries.\n\n<<back>>
''seizure'' //n.// A sudden onset or sensation of feeling or emotion.\n\n<<back>>
[[you're not allowed to sleep]]
[[no]]
//I don't want to grow up//\n\n//I don't want to grow up//\n\n//but I already have//
We built a fire instead of going to our junior prom\n\nonly it was too cold and too wet so we just sat together in the dark\n\n[[talking]]
And I am oblivious by nature anyway. I only see the things I want to, I think. And even then I miss so much.\n\n<<back>>
waking up with a sense of dread\nfeeling like I've been exiled from [[a dream]]
//Oh, this is different than what I thought it would be,// I told the technician. She sat all the way across the room from me -- a good distance, perhaps to protect her from radiation. //I thought I would have to go into a tube.//\n\n//That's an MRI,// she said. //Are you claustrophobic?//\n\n//I'm not sure,// I said. //I've never really had [[the chance to find out]].// -- Which is probably a //yes// sort of answer.\n\nThe machine was placid. There was a ring that rotated and moved across my body -- taking pictures of my brain somehow. The technician asked me to be very still, which I am bad at when people ask me to do it. I tried not to blink, or even breathe too heavily. Who knows how precise they need to be?\n\nI closed my eyes and thought of [[everything beautiful I could]]. I wanted my brain to [[glow and flower]] on the charts. I wanted them to be astonished.
Not words; not text; not stories.\n\n<<back>>
[[premises]]\n\n[[dreams]]\n\n[[buildings]]
There was a woman at the front desk, pestering the admitting nurse, trying to get someone to see her. She told she had been waiting for two hours. She had a cough and who knows what else wrong with her. Her eyes were sickly, accusative. The nurse who looked so benevolently and indifferently at me hated her; that much was plain to see. She would never be seen. She would die right here in the emergency room, waiting. She was forsaken.\n\nShe gave me a dirty look as they ushered me in. //I'm just doing what I'm told,// I told her. It is the safest explanation you can ever give a stranger. She did not seem to believe me. I hated her too. I was rich and young and who knows what else. She would die very soon now.\n\n<<back>>
And moreover that there could be all kinds of things I could not envision -- terrible things --\n\n<<back>>
The old man in front of me wakes up when they take the stage and begins applauding\n\nI laugh and my grandfather beside looks at me -- //ah//, he says, //you like them?//\n\nyes but no wasn't what I said
The nurses had told me nothing, but while I was gone they had informed my mother that there was the possibility that I had a brain tumor. I do not know how they broached the subject with her, whether they told her it was likely or just a remote possibility. I do not know what she thought. We only talked pleasantly when we were together. The kind of talk you have in waiting rooms.\n\nShe must have been worried sick inside. My mother worries about things so much -- and this, this could really happen. Everything would change afterwards. The rest of my life would be doomed. People don't live with tumors. It just doesn't happen. Her son would die. It was unimaginable but she must have thought it. She was so brave. She told me nothing. She let me [[be unaware]].\n\n<<back>>
I didn't know what to think -- couldn't imagine what had happened. I must have fallen asleep. I must have fallen.\n\nPeople start to come into the break room, one by one, and sat with me. -- I had found a couch to sit on by then and it felt a little like being a king receiving visitors. I was sweating, [[shaken up]], but felt normal otherwise. They asked me questions, roundabout ones. They were trying to find something out without letting me figure out what it was, exactly.\n\nI asked them what had happened but they wouldn't tell me. It wasn't until just before [[the paramedics]] that [[Liz explained]].
//What are you thinking?// we ask when we don't have anything to say\n\nWe're always [[thinking]]
[[a dream]]
I didn't eat anything -- I didn't say this, though. Instead: //I had a glass of orange juice.//\n\n//That's not breakfast,// the paramedic said.\n\nThe skinny one pronounced that I seemed fine, but I should go to the hospital for more tests. Sinai, the best one in the area, was [[no longer taking ambulances]], but they would take me if I walked in myself. So my mom drove me there. We stopped for [[lunch at Burger King]] -- like we had all the time in the world.\n\nThe paramedics said I was fine, after all. There was nothing wrong with me at all. The story Liz told was just a story.
Liz was my coworker back then. We were sort of close, in the sense that we were both twenty-four and everyone else there seemed at least forty. They had families, wives, houses; we didn't have a clue what we were doing.\n\n<<back>>
My mother still has the bracelet the hospital gave her when I was born. But I lost mine almost immediately.\n\n<<back>>
I keep repeating the word.\n\nI am sitting in the high school guidance counselor's office explaining that I do not plan to kill myself even though I wrote a story about a man who does. I am making up the words because I have never even thought about killing myself, not even in a [[distant, intellectual]] way.\n\nThe counselor is looking at me [[kindly]]
''electrode'' //n.// A solid electric conductor through which an electric current enters or leaves an electrolytic cell or other medium.\n\n<<back>>
It's almost impossible to get in; they don't take reservations and everyone wants to go there. The wait is at best forty-five minutes -- and really, who can stand to wait that long for a slice of cheesecake?\n\nI finally made it after years and years of just dropping by, to check that the wait time was as bad as I expected it would be. There was a plan in effect. And -- it was really good, after all. No wonder people fought so hard to get in. But I never went back. Once was enough. The [[mystery]] was gone.\n\n<<back>>
''Joel:'' I really need to go. I should catch my ride.\n''Clementine:'' So go.\n''Joel:'' I did. I walked out the door. I was too nervous. I thought, maybe you were a nut. But you were exciting. I felt like I was a scared little kid.\n''Clementine:'' You were scared?\n''Joel:'' Yeah. I thought you knew that about me. I ran back to the bonfire, trying to outrun my humiliation.\n''Clementine:'' Was it something I said?\n''Joel:'' Yeah, you said //so go//. Said it with such disdain, you know?\n''Clementine:'' Oh, I'm sorry.\n''Joel:'' It's okay.\n''Clementine:'' I wish you had stayed.\n''Joel:'' I wish I had stayed, too. I swear to God I wish I had stayed. I wish I had done a lot of things. I wish... I wish I had stayed.\n''Clementine:'' Joely? What if you stayed this time?\n''Joel:'' I walked out the door. There's no memory left.\n''Clementine:'' Come back and make up a good-bye at least. Pretend we had one. \n\n([[Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind|http://imdb.com/title/tt0338013/]])\n\n<<back>>
Before I had thought that //shaken up// was just one of those phrases that bad writers used, that didn't really correspond to anything in real life. But I really was shaken up. It's hard to find other words for it. I was sweating faintly. My hands trembled -- again, faintly. Something had happened to me -- it was over now, but something //had// happened. I did not know what and maybe it was fear that I felt. A feeling that my body had broken down, was breaking down.\n\n<<back>>
It was eight o'clock by the time we had checked out of the hospital. We stopped to get dinner together, though I did not feel hungry. I snipped [[the bracelet]] from my wrist as soon as I got home and called my boss, arranged to take off the next day. I could not think of a reason to take off any more days than that. I had a nagging feeling that there was more I needed to do though I could not decide exactly what.\n\nI went to sleep alone that night, the same as I always have. But [[my head was full]]. I could not sleep well.
We get promised this when we're little kids, you know.\n\n<<back>>
I've read stories about cavers who get stuck in tight passages, and just the idea of it is unnerving. So much rock pressing down on you.\n\n<<back>>
I've only been to New York City once, when my grandfather took me to see the [[Rockettes]], and really all I remember was how cold it was in the streets, how the buildings channeled the wind, how my face felt almost numb.\n\n//and yet I wanted to go there again, because even the absence of warmth can be [[a dream]]//
I could have thought of beaches, dandelions, cotton candy, sunsets, falling snow, faint breezes, fallen branches --\n\nBut instead I thought of a girl. [[Just one]].
She was watching the news. She heard me grunt, thought I was making fun of what was on the screen. She laughed. (I do not blame her.) I grunted again and she turned to look at me. My eyes had rolled up into the back of my head, my arm was twitching, and, [[she said]], I had begun to drool a little when I fell over.\n\nShe rushed to her feet. I was awake when she looked down at me. I asked: //What happened?//
''Archaic Torso of Apollo''\n\nWe never knew his fantastic head,\nwhere eyes like apples ripened. Yet\nhis torso, like a lamp, still glows\nwith his gaze which, although turned down low,\n\nlingers and shines. Else the prow of his breast\ncouldn't dazzle you, nor in the slight twist\nof his loins could a smile run free\nthrough that center which held fertility.\n\nElse this stone would stand defaced and squat\nunder the shoulders' diaphanous dive\nand not glisten like a predator's coat;\n\nand not from every edge explode\nlike starlight: for there's not one spot\nthat doesn't see you. [[You must change your life]].\n\n([[Rainer Maria Rilke|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rilke%2C_Rainer_Maria]])
I was on the ground, lying on my back. Looking at Liz sitting looking at me too.\n\n//What happened?// I asked.\n\n//You don't remember?// she asked.\n\n//No,// I said.\n\nShe got up and [[ran away]].
She taught at a college for nursing -- was head of the department, even. She asked me questions just as the paramedics did, but there was a sense of direction to them though I couldn't fathom it. She told me that I probably had a //uvuvuvuvu uvuvuvu//. I could not hear her voice anymore. We had lost reception and it didn't matter anymore. [[I knew what had happened]].
The project's deadline had been typed out in some Word document years ago. We were nowhere close to being finished but there was no getting around it. No way to delay it. Too many things had been set in motion. It was not my fault. It was maybe no one's fault, not exactly -- the only thing left to do was to work as hard as you could and leave worrying about it for later.\n\nBut I worried, anyway. It is [[in my nature]].\n\n<<back>>
and windows with the shades open\nso the sun will keep me\nfrom [[oversleeping]]
I had a dream once that I was seeing the world as I always do except there was a strange [[buzzing]] sort of sound and it was like I was seeing the world through blinds. Little slats of vision. The buzzing sound was [[electronic]], like when I messed up putting the cartridge in my dad's [[Atari 2600]] and it would make this awful sound like it was about to catch [[fire]].\n\nBut nothing in the dream hurt -- not the sound, not the seeing.
I was on stage for the first time. I had a monologue to speak to the audience. I would soon fall in love with the young lady opposite me on the stage. In the script, that is -- though I nursed a long, dim crush on her, and I could never tell whether it was part script or part real that made me fall into it.\n\nI was on stage and I did not remember what line I was supposed to say next. I was on stage and looking out into the audience, seeing their faces (though you are not supposed to -- the lights should be too bright to let that happen). Wondering what they were thinking as I thought of the next line. I could not remember it.\n\n//If you don't remember what the next line is supposed to be, go to the next one you remember.//\n\nSo I did, and the moment was over. We finished both our monologues, sat down at a table. I failed the job interview; we fell in love.\n\nI wish now that I could have that back. I don't know what I would do differently but I wish I could be on stage again, with thirty or forty pairs of eyes focused on me. I would be silent. We would wait together forever.\n\n<<back>>
It felt strange, asking for no onions but onion rings, please. Like we were just out for a little daytrip. The food felt like mush. Not even fast-food mush -- I just forgot it as soon as I crumpled up the wrapper.\n\nWe drove down [[83]] and I talked to [[my aunt]] on a [[cellphone]].
It seemed, thinking about it the next day, that maybe what had happened was not as serious as I had felt before. I had fainted, gone to the hospital, but so what? There was nothing wrong with me. The doctor had said so. I was perfectly [[fine]].\n\n-- Except he hadn't said that part. I just filled it in for him in my head.\n\nWas I fine? It seemed complicated at first, trying to answer that. But then it [[became simpler]].