The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(68)

One of the forklift’s prongs is against the edge of the stake’s head, pressing with the full force of its machinery, trying to make a little space under which it can sneak and pull, but this stake will not budge. The driver tries different techniques, the fork’s side edge, the armpit, and finally the very tip. This is when he finally manages to insert a small edge under the metal. He is pressing harder on the throttle, and there is some excited chattering from the crew around the stake.

“Stand back a few feet,” Tommy says. “It might pop into the air.”

The forklift driver presses the throttle farther, and the giant metal fork begins to bow. It’s beautiful, the small arc, like a long slice of rusty melon.

All eyes are on the stake and the bent forklift, all voices exclaiming how amazing it is, to put that much force on something and for it to hold utterly still, and then, all at once, the tent stake is gone.

The sound it made.

That’s what people talked about after.

The quiet whoosh.

At the moment before it finally breaks free, I turn my attention back to the ropes in my hand. I see nothing, but hear, from every person within earshot, a collective gasp. I look quickly to those near the forklift and see all their faces turned to the air. See all the necks cranked all the way back, faces looking high, high in the air, like some form of group worship.

Of course, this is where we use phrases like “Time stands still,” and “Each second stretches to eternity,” because time extends here in ways it is hard to articulate.

Time stands still. Each second stretches to eternity. All those necks looking to the sky. I would move my neck to the sky, too, but before I can even begin, all the heads are moving, lowering, turning. The chins are coming back toward their chests and the necks are swiveling, and before I have a chance to look up I realize that all the faces I can see, each of them, are looking at me.

I feel a shadow.

No. I see a shadow.

Is that real?

I notice a suggestion of shadow.

The shadow comes from the stake, which blocks the sun for just a moment as it comes down upon me.

The stake’s sharpened tip scrapes the end of my nose.

This is where it is falling. Forty feet up into the air hurling through space and then down on me.

It grazes my nose and then falls past my mouth and chin. It whirs past the fragile pumping of my heart, inches from the skin.

My elbows have been tight against my body, my hands pulling the ropes into taut braids, my left hand covering the right as I tighten the knot.

The metal stake finally lands, the full force of its fall, on my hand.

How safe is your body right now?

The force knocks the rope from my hands, shoving them down to the ground, and the tent spike falls with an ear-splitting clang onto the asphalt below.

There is screaming.

It isn’t me.

Where is the worst moment of this story? Just after, with the havoc of pain? Or is it the moment before, the days, weeks, years before, before the illness sets in when there is still the possibility of learning the ingredients in her famous Moroccan carrots, about why she’d had that spell of zealous Christianity, and why she’d lost it, about what word I said first as a baby, if it was her name. When there is still a chance to make amends, but I don’t take it.

I look down at the stake for a second, two, the sounds from the rest of the world gone except for some distant buzz. I pick my hands up from my side to look at them, because I feel some sensation there, though I cannot tell what that sensation is. I look, thinking it’s possible that my hands won’t be there. I’m not sure why. I’m not sure what has happened at all.

But there they are. Both hands. Ten fingers. No exposed bones. A big smear of dirt where the stake hit my left hand.

I crouch down to pick up the rope and resume braiding.

As I stand, sound comes back. There is some loud human voice somewhere, or a few of them. There is the blur of bodies moving toward me very quickly.

Nothing that isn’t a complete catastrophe really matters at all.

“Are you okay? Jesus Christ, are you okay?” say the voices I hear.

I look up.

Cassie is standing right in front of me, taking the rope out of my hands.

“Stop, dummy, put this down,” she says.

Tommy is right beside me then, too. “Tessy? Are you okay?” he says.

“I’m fine,” I say.

“You’re fine?”

“I’m not even hurt,” I say, starting to shake.

He is staring at my face, studying it, shocked, it seems, that I am not covered in blood, that my brain isn’t sticking out of my skull.

“Where did it hit you?” he says.

I raise my hands from my side, and they float into the air between us like new balloons.

“Shit,” he says, gently grabbing my wrist. I can see it now, my left hand. There is no blood, no bone, but my knuckles are growing bigger and bigger, they are pink and going purple, a few fingers are doubling in size, and there is a lump like a marble sticking out from the bone. My right hand feels tingly, but the left was mostly shielding it.

“Move your fingers,” he says. “Can you move your fingers?”

I do, a little.

“Not broken,” I say.

I look at them, these hands, this non-catastrophe. I look at them, and more performers gather around and all the world’s sounds are back to their regular weird selves and there is the morning sky with clouds and there is the life that has happened so far and whatever else is ahead and everything is the same as it was before and maybe always will be. I start to cry.