The Best American Essays 2015 (9 page)

In the presence of another—even if the other is in the next room and otherwise occupied—the reality of the solitude pulls away, just as in the heart of the solitude that other reality takes on a character of unlikeliness.

Finally, of course, there is the night. It has become unfamiliar and phantasmal during this period—and for this I blame the discomfort, the drugs, the new sleeping arrangement in our daughter's old room. I can almost feel the different layers opening out one from the other, depending on the hour. Sleep, usually so ordinary, has become a kind of voyaging. I prepare for this even before I switch off the light. So many phases, intervals. At different points I feel myself come awake. Sometimes I look at my watch, press the tiny button and see the hour light up—but in that moment my location on that grid connects with very little. I will have far more connection when the first birds start up, which they always do right at the touch of the first faint trace of light. Their warbling is a fantastic thing to listen to. What an indescribable state to be in, lying there, adrift, slightly awake, but merged enough in sleep that the bird sounds can somehow blend with the meander of thoughts and images in my head.

The layers of the night are in fact the layers of the self; they offer the most random unfolding of the accumulations of experience—everything that happened and mattered and lapsed away as the next new thing claimed the attention. There is no way to guess what will suddenly surface in those hours. At times I need only to call to mind a specific person, place, or event and the images will rear up, imbued with a kind of radiance of meaningfulness—as if this moment of return had been the point all along. And then, granted a single flash of what I know is the extent of the past, I think,
There will never be time enough.
How to reckon it all? Right then I understand, as if I truly had forgotten, why we will always need art. Writing. The slow and greedy embrace of language.

Where else but in the dead of night do we encounter the extent of it all? Life—the sport of insomniacs. Because the soul needs the arching vastness of the night as well as the edgy hovering that sleeplessness delivers. It needs long unsettled hours in which to lay out the strands, one after the next, and then follow them out, letting the memories and meanings overlap and crosshatch until the full force of the uncanny comes sweeping in.

Awake in the dark, I engage with that other time—not the time of the sink's faucet dripping or the blue jays tyrannizing the yard but the long-term tangle of meanings and connections. This is a different world, not so often present to me in the light. Lying there, eyes open, I will feel that great swinging shift, foreground to background. The day world is obliterated: I find myself, as I did the other night, for no clear reason thinking of my old school friend Mark—of him, but really of his parents—how friendly they were: they would greet me so warmly every time I came by. On my back, eyes now closed again, I fix them with such a clarity, a distinctness, that it shocks me—after all, it's been forty years. I'm wondering, almost anxious, did I give any like response back then to their kindness and interest? I'm wondering, too, if they are still alive. I try to imagine what they might be like if they are (and why not, I ask,
my
parents are alive)—and then sensations, little details, arrive: like Mark's father's peculiar bent-back thumb, and his mother's amazing involvement with her cats, her way of whispering to them, fussing with them, even as she was talking to us, remembering along with that the looks Mark would give me as we walked out of the kitchen and headed to his room, the flick of the brows that said, “If only you knew” . . . All this so starkly real to me at three or four o'clock in the morning.

I've taken a pain pill. I'm lying here waiting to see if I can settle back into sleep. But now I have these people, and there is so much to remember about them. I realize I never gave them the thought they deserve. But have I given
anything
that thought? Because if there is so much here to do with these two people, what must there be of all the rest? I test myself. I cast around, I pick someone else, the manager of a bookstore where I once worked. And again, just like with Mark's parents, I find the images—so clear—and then the layers. How quickly and smoothly they lift off, one from the next, until I am in a state of excited distress, thinking of the complete impossibility of bringing back what needs to be brought back. But it
does
need to be—otherwise all these things are just left for dead. Proust, that cork-lined room, it all makes sense. What could be more worthy, and rewarding, I think, than to give over the second half of life to the recovery of the first?

Later, again, sleep—unsettling dreams; I'm with odd groups of others and we are all together caught up in premises that defy any summary, that make sense only in the dream, and even then only just. As the eye converts one thing into another, instantly—pile of rags to sleeping dog—so the mind makes its little scenes from the random images thrown up by the psyche.

The bird sounds wake me. I move the curtain by my head and see the faint light over the yards . . .

The convalescence—which is what I call it when talking to others, never to myself—has been its own period, distinct from all other periods, an island I will always remember having been marooned on. There will be times, I know already, when I'll find myself craving the intensity of so much uninterrupted self, for such looking and thinking. Don't we turn back with some nostalgia to those sickbed days from childhood? Not just because we were cared for, indulged, but also because of how in that widening eye of time the blankets became entire landscapes, and great cloud caravans moved so slowly outside the window.

But it's coming to an end, this interlude—I feel health gaining on me. There are a thousand little signs, from increased appetite to greater ease in making simple movements to, alas, less patience with the kind of daydreamy looking. Those lazy, horizontal meanderings, though I still indulge, are more and more trumped by the itch to be up and
doing
something. Another walk! I get my crutch—aware as I pick it up that soon I won't be needing it—and make my way up the street. It feels good, the spring air, so much activity I can hardly take it all in—from the neighbor up on the hill bending over his hedge clippers to the two squirrels winding in some strange figure eights around the trunk of the maple, and all that song coming down from the branches and wires.

The crutch tip makes a satisfying punctuation, feels almost like I'm saying
now, now, now . . .

TIFFANY BRIERE

FROM
Tin House

1.

F
OR THREE NIGHTS
my mother hasn't slept. Since her cousin died, his spirit has visited her each night, for hours at a time. He appears from the waist up on the north wall of her bedroom, facing her directly, blinking but not speaking. He doesn't frighten her; on the contrary, she hopes that one of these nights he will claim her, escort her to the other side, where he now resides. She prepares me for this possibility.

My mother suffers from more than one autoimmune disease. The pain—which plagues her joints and shoots throughout her back and legs—has outwitted medical intervention. When I hold her hand (its appearance is that of a claw, palm curled inward, digits at odd angles, the whole hand functioning as a single unit) I feel clusters of marbles all along her knuckles. To hold her hand is to let it rest in mine as I rub my thumb across her paper-thin skin. Her back painfully hunched, she walks only to get from one chair to another, her legs giving in to spasms.

We share an apartment, and on the morning after the third visitation, I make her a cup of tea, strong and sweet. I find her sitting up in bed, more distracted and distant than usual. When I hand her the tea, she looks at me with the kind of adoring expression you give a child who has done something unexpected and delightful. I bring my daughter into the room, and for the rest of the day we engage my mother with nursery rhymes, picture books, and puzzles.

In the evening my husband returns from work at the pharmaceutical company where he is a biologist. He brings my mother another cup of tea, chamomile, then sprawls across her bed to ask about her day.

No one has ever spoken to my husband about visions or the ubiquity of the dead. He is of German descent, not West Indian, but over time he's learned that this intimacy with the dead—for him, unimaginable and unreal—is woven into the fabric of my family. He's a scientist for a reason, drawn to black-and-white explanations of the world. But there, in my mother's bed, he holds her hand, willing to consider all things possible.

2.

I'm an undergraduate conducting research in a neurophysiology lab. We study diabetes and epilepsy in rodents, diseases we induce with drugs that kill off the pancreas and alter the brain's chemistry.

On this day I'm decapitating rats. “Rapid decap” is the preferred method. I use a rudimentary guillotine. I position the rat with one hand and bring down the angled blade with the other. The rats protest little. By this point they are obese and lethargic, side effects of the drugs. Their tails are thick and limp. They are soaked in their own urine, and the sugar they leak fills the small procedure room with a sweet, clingy odor. When the blade returns to its resting place, there is a satisfactory click that I feel rather than hear. I move quickly to isolate the brain and preserve its tissue. This is done with forceps, a process of removing skin and skull to expose the chestnutlike organ within. I discard the bodies in a red biohazard bag. Still innervated with electrical impulse, the bodies twitch, causing the bag to shape-shift, to crackle intermittently.

I'm not alone. There is a graduate student helping me, and if not for his presence, I may faint. I'm not cut out for this work, but this realization is years down the road. Now I'm the sole undergrad in a lab full of grad students, and I have something to prove.

The grad student is a muscular redhead with the neck of a football player and hazel eyes. He teaches the practical section of the physiology course I'm taking, and a group of us girls comment on his appearance: his long, curly hair tied down with a bandanna; his wholesome overalls; his rugged, midwestern good looks. The other girls are jealous of the long hours the grad student and I spend alone in the lab, the longer hours we spend at bars and on golf courses.

I'm isolating a brain, facing away from the grad student, when I feel a hand on my back. Fingers graze my skin, a firm palm presses against my shoulder blade. I take a deep breath and close my eyes, savoring the seconds that compromise the integrity of the organ I'm harvesting. I've anticipated this moment: the grad student and I acting on—in the midst of this gruesome study—our attraction for each other. He has seen me struggling with the day's work, and this hand on my back is a release. When I turn around, I'm ready for whatever he has in mind.

But he's across the room. And it's clear from his posture, the way he's settled in his chair, that he hasn't been on his feet for some time. The hand on my back remains a moment longer before setting me free. It will visit me again at dawn on the day of my wedding and at one astonishing moment on the morning I give birth.

What does the hand hope to show me? That is always the question. My unlikely career path? My growing anxiety over its moral implications? The grotesque nature of the work I do?

Or perhaps it hopes to reassure me, to gesture to this grad student—this gentle, enthusiastic man—whom, sooner than I could ever imagine, I will wed.

3.

My parents don't save photographs. There are very few from their childhoods—my father's in Guyana, my mother's in Jamaica. They don't believe, as I do, in the value of mementos. What they have, what they cling to, are stories that always begin with the words
Back home.

Three of my grandparents die before I'm born. The fourth, my maternal grandmother, at the end of her life, is locked away in religion. By the time I meet her, she is residing in the Jamaican countryside, at my uncle's house, and I am permitted to speak to her through a gate and only for a few minutes. A few years later, she too passes away.

I've been raised with the belief that the deceased are always with us, that their presence can be felt. Through stories, I have come to know my ancestors. In my dreams, they are very much alive. There are many guiding forces in life, many ways, genetic and otherwise, in which the past adheres to the present.

My paternal grandmother had a tattoo on her right arm, a mark placed on indentured servants who were shipped from India to work the sugarcane fields in Guyana. The tattoo was her name in Hindi. To me she is a mystery, a black-and-white photograph that I had to borrow from an aunt. My grandmother was “coolie,” as the Guyanese say, East Indian. She wore saris and bangles and parted her hair down the middle to sweep it back in a low bun. I have her eyes.

Now when I see my own arm, the tattoo that on my eighteenth birthday marked my freedom, I think only of the tattoo that marked her servitude. Through this ink, I feel the connectivity of flesh.

4.

I'm a child, impressionable, and my mother's explanations of the world are bigger than skyscrapers and dinosaurs. She says that our ancestors are always with us, that our dead relatives inhabit our lives. They are disappointed when I misbehave, pleased when I'm obedient. I can speak to them, aloud or silently, and they will hear me. Eternity, she says, is fluid.

I'm haunted by her words, never quite able to behave naturally because of this omniscient audience. My mother says I shouldn't feel disconnected from the dead but, rather, bound to them. She says the fabric of humanity is ancient and unfathomable. She says life is infinite and eternal. She says when I meet my ancestors, I will recognize their faces and know them by name.