The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(69)

Not a lot. I’m not a goddamned baby. Just a little.

“You’re in shock,” Tommy says. “Jesus, Tessy. Poor Tessy. Here,” he says, pulling Cassie right into me, forcing her into a tight hug against my chest. “Take her to my trailer,” he says to her.

“I’ve got to keep working,” I say, reaching for the rope. My fingers won’t move much.

“Take a breather,” Tommy says.

“I’ve got to keep going or I won’t hold it together,” I snap back.

Sunshine appears beside us. “Tessa,” she says in her stage manager voice. “Come with me. Now.”

“There are frozen grapes in the freezer. Put them on her hand, sit her in the shade,” Tommy says.

Sunshine nods at him, takes the ropes I’d managed to pick up and drops them to the ground, and pushes my back until I start walking. She runs my hand under a cool spigot of water, rubs my back. Gives me frozen grapes.

Every day we put fire and swords and electricity into our bodies, throw knives at them, contort them, wrap them in snakes, and every day we wake up sure those things won’t harm us but also sure that there is so much else that will.

I start to feel a deep throbbing in my hand. I’m not sure if it’s a feeling I should care more about. Red catches my eye as I walk past. He holds it. Makes his mouth into a grimace and shakes his head, an acknowledgment of what has just occurred. Perhaps I’ve passed some test here, taking in pain and carrying on.

“Damn, Tessy,” Tommy says a little later. “In my nine seasons with this show, that right there, hands down, was the scariest thing that has ever happened.”

But isn’t this our collective deceit?

Can one moment, the happening of the event, be the worst mo ment of our lives? The truth is that the worst moment is always still waiting. The next fair. The next stake ripped from the earth. The next phone call from your stepdad where he’s crying and you’re telling him, Calm down calm down calm down just tell me, until he does, and then you are rocking and crying, too.

I don’t think our former working man Steve, the moment he came to after shooting himself in the stomach with a cannon, actually thought the worst was over, that he’d succeeded in reaching the most awful moment of his life. That from there, life would be easier. Or the carnie I met in Butler, who woke up from some dream to his toes chewed off and in the mouth of his Chihuahua, believed that he’d found the worst moment of his life. Or the junkie Drew, whose teeth fell past his lips and onto the dirt like magic beans each time he snapped awake. Or even when I learned about my mom’s stroke. That wasn’t the hardest part, that singular moment. There was always more.

This is one of our collective agreements. To tell each other how bad things could be, how bad something was—really shitty, awful—and move with the dimming sun toward night as if this is the truth, as if we’ve seen the worst even as we ignore the quietly waiting future stretched out ahead like a long, long tongue leading into an open mouth.

*

In the moments surrounding the tent stake incident, I wasn’t thinking, of course, about my mom. I wasn’t thinking about the way the stake must have looked at its apex, splitting the blue, blue sky in two like the hemispheres of a brain.

But here’s a story I learned:

In 1848, Phineas Gage was working for the railroad, blasting rock with a work gang in Cavendish, Vermont. The gang would bore down into the rock, fill it with blasting powder and a fuse, and then pack it in with a tamping rod before lighting. Distracted by something the men behind him said, Gage turned to look back at them over his right shoulder and, for reasons that have never been pinned down, a spark ignited the blasting powder and it exploded, shooting the big metal tamping stick directly into Gage’s head, point first.

Reports say that the rod whistled as it flew.

It entered just below his left cheekbone, scraped the back of his left eye and tore through his brain’s left frontal lobe, exiting near his front hairline. Three feet seven inches long. It passed through a man’s head and then sailed through the air, landing straight up like a fencepost twenty-five feet away. It was greasy, one of the other men there said, and had streaks of blood. The force of the blow knocked Gage over, but he never lost consciousness. He twitched a few times on the ground, then rose and continued chatting with his crew as if nothing had happened.

Can you imagine? I mean, triangular fragments of his skull were sticking out around the hole like a crown atop a head.

Gage lived for twelve more years, though Gage was “no longer Gage,” according to Dr. Harlow, who followed Gage’s case. This is the part of the story that has had lasting scientific impact and wildly different interpretations. Prior to Gage’s accident, nobody quite understood that different portions of the brain served different functions. There’s not very much direct evidence about what kinds of personality changes Gage underwent, but reports mostly suggest that he became much more profane, lost his ability to manage his money, was prone to changing his mind often and completely, and in general let his animal instincts, the papers reported, take over from his former civilized self. What were they? Humping? Howling at the moon?

This misunderstanding of neuroscience was the root of some real problems, like the use of lobotomies in the mid-twentieth century. And the belief, for example, that all our amoral behavior is housed in the frontal lobes. That anyone who has an injury there, a stroke, for instance, is necessarily going to revert to animalistic behavior. Untrue. But we have learned that there is some degree of our impulse control housed there. A person with a compromised frontal lobe may not know, for example, where it is or is not polite to scratch in public, or how one might or might not use a spoon when faced with a bowl of cereal.