Spring

That spring after the Lockerbie bombing, your friend Clay changes his name to Foe. He doesn’t say why, but he’ll stick with the weird name because he’s stubborn with his impulses. He’s there at his locker, closing the door, when you come up. A couple of weeks ago, he’d splashed hydrochloric acid on the enamel, and now the door looks bombed out, but as he points out, when you look closer, you can see the face of a shrouded Jesus in carbon burn streaks and bubbled paint. Like it’s funny, but also—you can see it and it’s eerie too; yeah, it’s Jesus.

You say, Hey, Clay. And he says back, Foe.

Foe what?

Yeah. From now on, he says: Foe. He closes the locker door. God’s son glares scorched and mystical.

You catch yourself pressing where the wound you believe will kill you is. The soft skin below your ribs. Lately, you’ve had annoying dreams in which a doctor uses confusing terms to explain where you’re going to die. The wound that will kill you. That it will be here soon, the wound. And so when you wake, anxiety wakes with you, and you get out of bed and the anxiety gets out of bed with you, and you live with it inside you the rest of the day, its quiet, profound little gasps. Whenever you are uncertain, you feel around for a location for the wound that will kill you. As if trying to know, to call it out, to preempt its appearance.

There was a girl who changed her name to Cherry. It was uncomfortable and sad because it didn’t improve her life the way she probably hoped it would. A new name, a change in life. But she was still just this nice person, kind of there, even though the name suggested changed expectations. Maybe she read advice in a magazine, an article about how to make your life better. That changing your name would reinvent your path. But nothing else really had changed about her, and so whatever she’d wanted Cherry to mean just made you think about how it wasn’t her name. But also, how strange it was that so many people’s names are taken from lists or from books on how to name your baby. That a word extracted from a flat page could grow into a living creature, that this imprint could solve or ruin their lives. Or that you could come to believe it would. And maybe that was part of the problem—that she was trying to gin up faith from a simple word.

 

That spring after the Lockerbie bombing, you learn that this Social Studies teacher you’d liked, Miss Kearns, was on the flight. The surprise news charges you with unexpected grief, grief you do not know how to discharge. You didn’t even realize you liked until you heard the news. The flight exploded and broke apart in the thin sky, closer to God, and now it’s strange to pass her classroom, to no longer see behind the desk, in how she isn’t there anymore—she’s a memory hardened into something solid and opaque beyond the open door. Grief, an overlay in the room of other students and the new teacher. Grief passing through you into the meaningless halls, giving the school a profound, quiet gasp of meaning. Many years later, you will see that meaning had always been there. But now it’s just the present. For now, that spring after the Lockerbie bombing, that open doorway of her room means something diffuse and faceted like a koan for as long as it takes to pass it, then a little beyond, a little longer. But you’ll get used to it, won’t you, the new class will be replaced by another and another, and she’ll get smaller and smaller and turn to nothing.

 

The pediatrician who hounds you in your sleep about the wound that will kill you sometimes wears your pink Flipper T-shirt with the torn sleeve. Or a gold sweater you don’t own in real life but do in the dream, and fucking dream-hate, but which your mom dream-loves for some reason. It’s true that you often forget the pediatrician’s explanations when you wake. But he keeps hounding you with different grim fates that vanish into each other, the myocardial tempus and the occlusion trenching the pronated hepatomegaly, which leave a slight fatigue you may feel, the slight nausea from the etoposide and cisplatin. This doctor, he points at you generally:

Right here, feel it?

And dream-persuaded, you say, Yes, I can, I mean, I guess?

That’s where you’re going to die, he says: Let’s break it down. He rolls down a scroll on a stand. Your Weaknesses, written at the top, where below he’s drawn dream-wounds. There’s a picture of you, but you’re a single-celled organism, like an amoeba or paramecium. Just a fluid circle of blobs and dots. This one, here, he says, and dabs on a blob.

Suddenly, you understand the gold sweater he wears was a gift from your mom, given to you on a holiday commemorating wild horses.

 

 

To read this story in its entirety, please purchase a copy of the print edition of Issue #23