The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(87)
I was beside the gurney, and her eyes were opening and closing—did she know what was going on? Was she in pain? Could she see the tiled ceiling and soft pastel bouquets lining the walls in this world?
There was one EMT standing at the head of the gurney, waiting for instructions. His hair was dirty blond and parted loosely in the middle like a teen heartthrob from the nineties. I stood by her shoulder, on the side, holding her unresponsive hand, which was cold and dry and had longer fingernails than I’d ever seen on her.
“She your grandma?” the EMT asked.
“Mom,” I shot back quickly. “My mom.” I was terrified that she’d heard that. The question would not have been well received in the past. But I also felt, shamefully, embarrassed for her, on some vain and irrelevant level, given the crisis at hand.
She did look old. The previous year and a half had put her body through so much that her skin sagged away from her bones. She was very skinny and frail, her hair gone further from gray toward white.
“She just … It has been hard lately,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “I bet. Sorry for your loss.”
I couldn’t believe he said that: my loss.
My loss.
It was a loss. Is. But nobody had said that word, would say it, or could—because she wasn’t technically lost. Here was her body, right here, alive, and to say loss would imply that she wasn’t working as hard as she was to remain here in this world. Which was hard. So. Fucking. Hard.
As long as she was alive, the conversation with medical staff and family had to remain firmly about recovery and progress, about indicators of forward-moving time without the recognition of the past—of who she had been to me, to my brother, to her husband.
“Has she made any progress?” the EMT asked. I thought about the first weeks when she was in a coma, of the following weeks when we first felt one hand squeeze, when she began, from time to time, to make eye contact with us, to breathe, to get to the point where she could sit propped up for ten whole minutes. To move the one leg, the one arm. To go through painful physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy. To get to the point where she could eat and drink on her own, where she could look us in the eye sometimes and laugh, touch our hair like it was nothing, where she was strong enough to be released from the hospital.
“No,” I said. I wanted more sympathy from him. I was desperate to hear someone talk more about the loss.
She punched me in the nose. No, I only wanted her to punch me. I wanted her eyelids to peel back, for her to look at me with condemnation and accusations, with disdain, but she didn’t move. I flooded with guilt.
The other EMTs gave a signal and we loaded into the ambulance.
*
Someone removed my eyeballs from their sockets and soaked them in hot sauce. They blew insulation in through one ear and it filled all the space in my head, forcing my brain out the other side. And my bones were replaced by the steel poles we used to build the tent, which were so heavy and hard to move that my whole body started scraping the ground every time I tried to walk anywhere.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept more than five or six hours. We’d been on the road two and a half months, though it felt like years. We were never more than a few feet from one another, even sleeping, with our bunks stacked vertically, and the thin boards that separated the beds horizontally thin enough to hear someone cracking their toes in their bed inches from your face. It was getting ugly. I was. Everyone was taking little stabs at one another to try to deflect some of the knives outward. Eyes were red. Little veins across the balls.
“I’ve never wondered how folks here get so into uppers,” Spif says. “I don’t do that shit, but I almost wish I did.”
So did I. There was weed around, and booze sometimes, but our crew, as far as I knew, stayed away from any harder drugs. But I wanted some. Something to cool the brain, to wake the body. I was too scared to ask around for it, but I looked longingly at the folks grinding their jaws and walking quickly between machinery fixes. There hadn’t been a drug test since that first fair, and the lack of regulation was obvious.
I’d been exhausted before—after long nights studying or worrying about my mom. I’d felt moments of this tiredness in fits and starts, but never as this total takeover, like some other being was creeping out from its shadowed cave and speaking for me, thinking for me.
*
It is late, and we’re on the jump to Kansas from Minnesota. We left the sunflower fields hours before. Motel for the night, cheapest thing we could find, because there was no suitable place for us to park and sleep in the bunkhouse and then go on to setup tomorrow. The few hours in the motel, though it is dirty and stained and noisy, is pure luxury. Warm showers. Bed. Even with four of us to a room, which we’d been sure the clerk couldn’t see, the space feels infinite. Though I want to slide into that bed the moment we check in and never emerge, it is 11:00 p.m. and most of the crew hasn’t eaten, and Tommy and Sunshine, the only other two who can drive the van, are quickly out of sight.
“I’m gonna teach you fire breathing in Hutch,” Short E tells me. “You know how to do everything else now, and even though fire breathing isn’t in the show, because the flame is too big for the tent, I’m gonna teach you.”
Unlike fire eating, where you extinguish a flame in your mouth or perform tricks with a torch, fire breathing involves spitting a mouthful of gasoline onto a torch in order to create a gigantic flame ball.