The Door to the Clouds

Airplanes are spaces I reserve for daydreaming. The time we spend aloft is too short: I can’t get through all the amusements I’ve packed, colored pencils and activity books and cards, in order to satisfy the self who packed them. And what I really want to is to sit at the window and look out. I like when we’re above the clouds, drifting through a slow-motion screen-saver. I imagine a person—another one of my selves, or just a projection—skating over the hills, skidding as though on powder-snow, gliding like flying across the endless cotton white.

I imagine what would happen if someone fell from the plane. How they would drop—how the clouds are not really there—and sail down, in a straight line, right through the clouds, leaving only puffs of distortion as evidence that they were ever really there. Past the cloud, I wouldn’t be able to see them from my window in the plane, but it is a long way down

Bookending these daydreams are my brothers’ unwieldy bodies. Henry, still a baby, spits up during takeoff, soaking both of us in rancid white cream, and a gag keeps tugging at my throat. Charlie takes many hands—my mother’s and mine, and the flight attendants’—to lift into a seat, the stress of it making his muscles go rigid, while we try to press and beg and shape him into the angles the seat demands. I’m so mad to be soaked in spit-up that my inner thighs ache and my eyes sting, and I try to breathe and crane my neck for the window. I shut down my ears; I refuse to listen when my mother speaks my name to ask for help. I can withdraw myself, selfishly, and I do. I pocket myself away on the wings of the plane.

I don’t look back as I do this. I open a door amid the noise and pain and reek. I pass through it and close it behind me. There has always been the chance that I am my father’s daughter.

*

My father’s door is actually a series of doors, one after another down a hallway, steps down a mirrored hole. The first door is our half-door to the basement. Beyond it, down wool loop carpeted stairs, is another door at the feet of the basement landing, white with glass panes. From that landing, there is a terrifying rush to get to him, through a maze of cement corners, and cellar rooms that get darker the farther into the dank, musty-smelling basement they lay.

There’s a dark patch, just between the stairs and the first light switch, and I dash across to it with a zing of thrill and fear. Sometimes I imagine a bubble around me, which—even if they chase me—no monster will be able to penetrate. Sometimes I whisper, Jesus is with me, over and over, as fear crowds in. When I reach the light I slap it on and keep moving. It only illuminates the next room on: a so-called playroom where I never feel too safe when my back’s not against a wall.

Then I come to my father’s door, a step up into an office space he’s built at the very back of the basement: an elevated nook nestled on a flood-proof platform, set with a large, dark- red oriental rug. He studies there with books, piles of books, anatomy and medical terminology. First for the MCAT, then for medical school. At forty, he is the oldest in his class, but never mind. It is the first door he finds that leads out of our house.

*

I have always believed in doors. I tap at the back wall of the front door coat closet, hoping for a line that will be a crack, which will turn out to be the edge of a hidden slab of wood on hinges. I imagine how my fingers will travel across the crack to the right, finding its corner. I’ll seek out its vertical drop. I’ll press my fingers into the space between wood and wall, and pull it towards me. It will be sticky from disuse, but with a crack—a kind of pop—it will come open, swinging into the lines of our winter boots. I will feel my way into the dark.

*

When Charlie was born, my father was a poet. A handful of the poems he wrote around this time record my brother’s birth and the first few years of his life. He describes the reed crib they bought during my mother’s pregnancy, the incongruous September heat, the absence of birds. My father loves birds.

Charlie was born quickly. My father saw doctors passing around tools, calling out for a more specialized doctor. He kept waiting “for someone to turn, to stop trying,” to say to him the words, “He’s dead.”

Then a breath from the blue infant. My father slept.

When he woke, he learned by phone that Charlie had, as he wrote, “flown south in a carton of oxygen.”

Certainties
shelled in, hard and white: transfusions, hard
drugs, brain damage. And, as it was put,
seizure activity. I had signed nothing.
Around me, thin stiff creatures were moving.
I filtered into intensive care,

purified by questions and chemical drips.
Taken in blind, it could have been
a video-game arcade, a room of measured chants.

My father drifted through the NICU, over-sensitized, until he found my brother in a corner. “On a warm lilypad,” he wrote,

Unfamiliar
as an amphibian, on your back,
legs lax, exposed as a dissection,
you gave life to pinches of light. Your face

swallowed tube after tube, your chest
stamped with sensors wired to lamps;
a needle tapped your navel, each finger
and toe-tip scabbed by a frequent routine.

He stood over him, watching Charlie’s breath, watching machinery interact with a child who had been dead two minutes into life. Leaning over, he said,

“Charles, I believe we’ve never been properly introduced.”

Every night, my father drove out to the NICU to see him. When my mother was allowed home, they took tentative walks together. At the hospital, Charlie moved to a new room where he breathed without tubes. My parents were finally allowed to hold him. And then, the first note of a tune I would later know as my lullaby, my brother cried—

a thin, serrated, song.[1]

Everyone knows it takes more than one exit to disappear. It’s too easy to pull someone back in over a single threshold; to escape, you need a path so littered with doorways and arches that once you pass through and keep walking, there’s no going back. And no one can find you.

Take one step to study for the MCAT. It takes up time. Your family understands. Your daughter visits you in your basement study. Your wife shoulders more work at home: the child in preschool, the boy who can’t walk or speak, the looming tuition of medical school. This is something everyone can understand; in this country we sacrifice for education, for a different, future self. You can still look back through this door to see them: the children, the house and yard, the self-contained world. Moving, doing anything, feels good; it staves off the stress and tempers the mornings you puke up blood.

When you use doors, exits, thresholds, steps to disappear, you tell yourself you are not disappearing. You increase distance, but you say to yourself that it is only distance. It is a small hurdle. They are still your children. He is still your son, and you love him, and you still love your daughter and your other child. They mean so much to you. You still love her like family, even if you don’t love her anymore. Your good intent oils the hinges, so the doors don’t scream on your way out. Everything is peaceful and amicable, because you didn’t do anything wrong. You just stepped through a door, and it led to another one. And another. The incremental changes and their logical trajectory protect you from your guilt. By the time you look back, you will see nothing.

* 

There is a tree in the dog woods, near our house, whose base has a large, triangular patch bare of bark. Someone has affixed a tiny door handle and knocker to the patch, and it captivates me. I picture knocking on the door, or touching the handle and feeling it swing open to some tiny other world; the living room of a gnome.

*

The next door my father finds comes on the heels of his graduation gown, an internship in a Wisconsin city two and a half hours away. He lets us choose sheets for beds we might have there. Henry stays overnight once; I never do. My sheets go unused, false breadcrumbs on a path I can’t travel.

*

I dream of doors and tunnels. I imagine putting my hand on the handle in the back of the wardrobe and turning it, then pushing the door back, and seeing, for the first time, a new world. I don’t think about being missed, or about leaving anything behind. I envision blinding white and the pungent smell of pine.

*

“The damage showed later,” my father writes, “in fits and false starts, as a geography of death, met halfway, hardened.”

We hold him against instinct,
therapeutically, a twisted child
symmetrical only feature by feature—
eyes, smile, and the rest:
hand to hand, hand to mouth, don’t coordinate
Child, remember, your mother and I
are still learning to love,
even as we love,
as we bend our dissonant parts.[2]

At five years old Charlie was twenty-five pounds. His strangeness haunted my father’s poetry. How he was “blue for two hours, couldn’t cry for weeks,” and later, at five years old, could not walk. My parents tried: There are pictures of Charlie’s walking practice, him with a hinge-jawed grin, my father’s hands under his armpits, his feet over-articulated and balancing atop my father’s leather shoes. While Charlie was growing, there were still things that did not seem impossible.

Doctors taught them how to push a tube down Charlie’s throat. The diagnosis built up steadily: He had lost oxygen during birth, motor nerve cells had died. Presumably, messages could make their way to his brain, but his brain would have a harder time commanding his body to move. He could touch the flame; he could feel that it was hot but he couldn’t compel his hand to move. My father’s poetry shows him puzzling over his son: “mute, drooling and handsome,” grieving a boy he’d imagined. “I’ll promise lies I can keep—

Charlie, you’ll fly.
I’ll grab your shoulders
And spin til we whoop
Like cranes.[3]

*

You open the next door: a residency. Everyone has to do a residency. It is the next logical, inescapable step, and this one is six hours away in St. Louis. The kids don’t choose bedsheets this time. It’s hard to notice such small, incremental change; how you can walk backwards steadily, step by step, until you are just a speck in the distance, and it is nearly impossible to differentiate a speck from nothing at all. The divorce is finalized, but you still have ties to the family that is yours. When you come to town, you sleep on the living room couch. When you remark that you’re broke enough that food is tight, your ex-wife buys you a bag of rice the size of a sandbag and laughs her head off.

*

When it comes to Charlie, I hover in the doorway. I’m dying to run off to adventures but wary to go too far. I want to be at Charlie’s side, but I want to leave. I want to be us but I want to be myself.

Because the fun part about the door—the really great part—is when it opens and you are in a world alone.

When Charlie and my mother wait in a recovery room at the big UW hospital hub, in a maze of white hallways I know like the veins in my own arm, and my grandmother sits in an outpatient clinic a half-mile away with Henry who is sick, I find freedom in the space between their sickbeds. I run a clandestine path between the two medical spaces. I cut the fastest course through the giant hospital halls, exit its brick and sprint across the helicopter pad, skid down a grassy hill and pick a short-cut between a fence and a backyard, across a parking lot. I run a messenger service: telling my grandmother what’s going on with Charlie at the hospital; delivering Henry’s pneumonia diagnosis to my mother on the run back.

I barely register how her face drops. I’m gorged on the drama of it: Can you imagine? Two boys, in two hospitals? There’s a glee in it, a thrill severed from my brothers’ ability to breathe. I’ve heard it called “survivor’s thrill,” the emotional privilege of being separate from, while watching, a disaster; detachment cinematizing devastation. I’m not, actually, caring—I’m curious. The problem, most of the time, is that there is nothing to be curious about in the life I already know.

*

When he lived with us, my father and Charlie did house projects together. One sat between the other’s legs, hand-over-hand hammering nails into two-by-fours, building a wheelchair ramp leading up to the front door of our house. Child-Charlie perched, legs like a stick insect, atop my father’s shoulders, one grinning head over another.

My father built a pond in our backyard and filled it with calico koi the colors of Swiss cheese. Each fall after the first frost, we have to drain the pond by hand, scooping its sloshing, icy water out with ten-gallon paint buckets. We dump the wobbly buckets into the flowerbeds, looking for koi to save from a bitter Wisconsin winter. The first scoops are clear, and any fish caught is easily visible in my bucket, swiftly rescued into a giant blue pail.

But these first scoops stir up water in the pond, and our meddling begins to tease away at its clay bottom. Each consecutive bucketful gets murkier and greyer, until, after pouring, we have to sift through the dumped silt with our fingers, searching for the glitter of an orange fin or a silver-white scale, fingertips feeling for the slick of a tissue-thin tail.

Each year we do this, and each year I wear a pair of shredded blue jeans and retired pair of sneakers. I dread and love this task. By its end, my fingers are as numb and white as the koi we call Queen Frostine.

We inevitably miss some of the fish. We try to count them, knowing that raccoons might have eaten some of them over the course of the summer, and that we therefore can’t rely on the number we released into the pond that spring. After searching and abandoning some bucketsful of watery clay, we move on to another bucketful, only to notice later a desperate, wobbling, flopping bit of shiny mail in the grass. Those instances – when I give up on a bucketful, only to realize later I have missed a fish – wrack my nerves. How many fish did I miss? How many didn’t I see? How many will slowly choke to death in clay, where I unknowingly poured them out over fall leaves in our garden?

I shouldn’t be trusted with the life of a fish. Not when clay can clog their gills and strangle them. Not with mortal eyes that can miss the scales in the leaves. Not when I have an ultimately selfish heart, a heart that bends towards pity for my own blanched and frozen fingers, that sulks over muddy running shoes, that watches the horizon for the end of a day’s hard work. A heart that always has an eye on the exit sign.

*

My father fades until he is gone. We realize it in a staggered progression: my mother first, crying for months at night alone. Henry and I calcify into spiky-edged things with ferocious and easily bruised pride. As for Charlie, I can’t say.

Later, I will look for ways out when I can’t say goodbye. I will flee cities to escape messy romances. I will ghost. In lieu of breaking someone’s heart directly, I will board planes that take me halfway across the world, always looking for the away, the way out, the door to the clouds. I will run from anyone and anything that depends on me.

With Charlie, this will be complicated: I can’t tell if he needs me, or if I’m supposed to be where he is. I crave nearness to him but fear expectation.

But I know to fear commitments. I sign up for clubs then never show up. I break things off the moment someone calls me theirs. I know that it is in me to run.

*

The one certainty we have is that each fall, my father comes back to our house on a cold weekend day to drain the pond. When we are finished catching fish, we bring the huge blue bucket to our basement, fill it with tap water, and hope the remaining, rescued koi will survive the winter. About half of them, for no reason I can understand, jump out of the bucket throughout the winter and die drying up on our forest green concrete floor. It’s like they can’t stand the confines of the bucket and the dark of the basement. We cover the bucket with window screens but, still, we find them throughout the cold months: dried glitter-scaled fish-husks, so desperate to get out they didn’t care what it took.

Once, in the middle of winter, I find the massive, regal Queen Frostine, not yet dead, flopping on the green floor and thrashing against the dust. When I scoop her out and put her back in the bucket, I feel the smallest bit guilty at thwarting her escape. But, come on: Hasn’t she seen other fish jump over the years, and know that they don’t come back? How bad could it be in there? Where did she think she was going?

Didn’t she know? It is a long way down. 

[1] Whitehead, Jeffrey. “The Blind.” College English, Vol. 49, No. 3 (March 1987), pp.285-287.

[2] Whitehead, Jeffrey. “Twisted Child.” College English, Vol. 49, No. 3 (March 1987), p. 284

[3] Whitehead, Jeffrey. “Marshside.” Unpublished.