Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

We were on the porch.

Uncle Stephen had decided that the best way to get over his health problems was to ignore them.

We were on the porch, in the cane bottom chairs that both needed to be re-caned, tilted back, the wooden chairs creaking as we shifted our weight and watched the yard, newly green, and the road, where a car might, it being Spring, drive by.

“Anything’s possible in Spring,” Uncle Stephen said.

He had been saying it all morning, while I installed him on the porch, with the cooler, a handful of Pay-Day candy bars he had decided would save his life by giving him the calories he needed, and an old quilt he pulled to him with a hand that was punched through the sewn together end of a sweater, with holes left for his fingers and thumb.

The sweater was a left-over from one of his inventions: footed pajamas for grown-ups. The feet had each had individual toes, which he was proud to point out that he wasn’t taking credit for, but the fingerless tops and tops with gloves were all his.

I had a pair of the tops. The bottoms made my toes miss each other.

It was close to seventy degrees. The oak in the yard had sprouted its red curlings that would become green leaves. And then red again in the Fall. It was Uncle Stephen who had pointed them out to me, unfurling and curlicued as the shell of a hermit crab.

“They’re kind of like a hermit crab,” I said.

He knew what I was talking about because I had thanked him for pointing out the buds. Every year I had sworn to see their first appearance and every year there was an explosion of tiny green leaves of every shade I could imagine and I had somehow missed it again.

Not this year. It turns out I always missed the start of Spring because I was looking for green and some of them were red, or white, or brown.

“A hermit crab?” Uncle Stephen said.

“Sure,” I said, “like, the way the shell curls up on itself.”

“Because leaves, they spend their time in the ocean, being used as shelter by multi-legged creatures who are very shy and smell bad if left too long in a jar forgotten by one particular boy.”

“OK. Not a hermit crab,” I said, “and the car never smelled the same again.”

“No,” Uncle Stephen drank from his coke, “it didn’t. That’s how you can tell ma’s aged, if that’d been me, she would have had me get out and hitch the rest of the way back from the coast.”

I was about to call bull-shit on that story, as he had crushed my metaphor, but then I remembered a time when my cousin Tim had been carrying-on in the car and grandmother had warned him, once, she said, you get one warning, and next word out of your mouth and I’m putting you out beside the road.

He got back to the house eight hours later, at night, one foot so blistered he still has the scars.

“You still happy?” Uncle Stephen said.

“Yup.” And I smiled. I couldn’t help myself. She was suffering. The girl I was so broken up over, my insides so shattered and sharp and scraped and muffled and…

“Why, again?” Uncle Stephen said.

“Because she and her new guy are still having problems,” I said.

A hawk sailed through the yard and shifted into the pine forest. As it passed I heard the feathers in its wings push against each other. And then there was a breeze following, as if the hawk was the future of air.

“I thought you loved this girl,” Uncle Stephen said.

My chair fell to the cement of the porch. The trick was to balance on its back two legs. I had seen Uncle Stephen sit motionless for minutes, balanced on those two legs. I needed the wall.

My chair went forward. And back. And forward, and then, for a moment, I had it, balance, and then it was gone again.

“I’ve been seeing a new girl,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Uncle Stephen said.

Uh-huh. As if this weren’t news. I wanted to shock him. And I opened my mouth but ended up taking a sip. I had seen the circles under his eyes. The way his chest rose with each breath taking too long. He had insisted I buy him a scale at Target and so we learned that he weighed a hundred and thirty-three pounds. Six feet two inches.
“You want another candy bar?” I said.

“You made her a mix CD, right?” Uncle Stephen said, “Drove up special to see her in the middle of the night. Knocked on her window.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Didn’t you do the same thing with what’s her name?” Uncle Stephen said.

“Whatever works,” I said, but I knew I was fucked as soon as I’d said it.

Uncle Stephen looked at me, and then there was that breeze again. But this time it was as if his eyes had pulled it. His eyes echoed the gray sky, the iris deep black. He looked at me and pinned me to my chair, leaned against the wall, a bug in a museum, a curiosity for him to see, then put away.

Close the case.

“Don’t be stupid,” Uncle Stephen said, “I hate it when you’re stupid, and I haven’t been trying to unstupid you all these years to have you start all over again over girls.”

The worst part about dealing with Uncle Stephen was that he was always right. Even when he was wrong, it was as if he was wrong on purpose. His wrongness made the few times I was right that much clearer and sharper, so that win or lose, I felt chided.

But the clarity was worth it. And long ago I had learned to recognize my own pride. Not enough to be free of it, but at least to recognize it, and know it for what it was.

To try and set aside its yammering.

“I know,” I said, “every woman is different.”

“No,” Uncle Stephen said, “you don’t.”

He didn’t say, Or I wouldn’t have done what I did, but it was there.

“Every human is a human first, right?” Uncle Stephen said.

“And a gender second,” I said.

“And every human uniquely expresses his or her gender,” Uncle Stephen said.

“Yeah,” I said. I looked at the yard.

There were leaves from last Fall scattered there, while in the trees the new leaves were forming.

Uncle Stephen had been too sick to rake.

And I had school.

Uncle Stephen had said something and I had missed it.

And he had seen me miss it.

“Whatever,” Uncle Stephen said.

My eyes teared up. I looked away, towards the scraggling line of trees opposite the pines.

I had never heard that tone in his voice. There was nothing defiant there, nothing trying to convince me I was wrong. There was only exhaustion, hours of days of weeks of months of years of fighting freighted into one word and shoved out.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not even sure what I was apologizing for. The girls didn’t care. Or didn’t seem to.

I wasn’t sure I cared, the way Uncle Stephen defined caring.

Or that I didn’t care.

Shit. I wasn’t sure of anything.

“I had a girlfriend,” Uncle Stephen said, “who used to tell me, when I had done something that she didn’t like, that she hoped one day I would learn what a woman likes. Needs.”

I didn’t say anything. I had decided today was one of those days that I would be better off not saying anything.

“It never occurred to her that maybe I was paying attention to her needs, as best I could, but that every woman was different, every single one. And so she was unique.”

He looked at me again. He smiled.

“Buck-up,” Uncle Stephen said. And when he turned away, I tried to stop it but one damned tear escaped and made it halfway down my cheek.

I left it to dry in the wind.

“It’s what sucked,” Uncle Stephen said, “she kept claiming that she wanted to be special to me, that she wanted to be unique, when there was no other way for her to be. No other way for anyone to be. But she didn’t believe me when I told her there was only one her, because she didn’t even know it herself.”

“And I knew, would watch,” Uncle Stephen said, “when she’d try attitudes or games on me she’d used on other guys. I don’t think she meant any harm. Sometimes I’d play along, sometimes I’d call her out.”

“It’s hard,” Uncle Stephen said, “to learn the person you love, to not try and short-hand it and expect him or her to be like all the rest. Because there are, of course, similarities. But don’t ever mistake the being similar for the being the same.”

“Don’t ever treat any woman as if she were interchangeable,” Uncle Stephen said, “and try to shrug off the roles you’re going to be given by your women.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

“Love,” Uncle Stephen said, and his sharp shoulders shifted under the quilt.

“You’re the one who said you loved her,” Uncle Stephen said, “that’s easy. I’m just the guy with an inkling what that means.”

***

For the first time in months, that night, I tore open one of his envelopes, I Miss You, was typed on the outside, and this was on the inside:

We thought we understood each other.
Did we?

***

I put the envelope and its letter under the bed, under the Mississippi State Bulldog blanket.

He had been writing to a her. But she never got any of the letters.

She never knew of his questions.

And he, for how long, pondered the answers?

For how long being both sides of a conversation?

Uncle Stephen had given the questions to time and the silence of the page, and I had stolen them.

When he had wanted them burned.

Do we understand each other?

The obvious answer was that no, they hadn’t understood each other, because then they would have been together, unless they understood each other so well that they knew they weren’t supposed to be together. Or one of them knew that while the other one didn’t.

Christ. And I wasn’t cursing. I was praying. Help me, I thought up and into the world, help me.

It was dark enough in my room that I could look at the ceiling and see nothing.

I was sure I didn’t understand myself.

Could anyone else?

Damn Uncle Stephen.

The ceiling remained dark.

Uncle Stephen had been up and about for a few days.

“I’m still green around the gills,” he said, “but if gill green is it then gill green it is.”
But he was bored. And I knew he was frightened that waiting to get well might mean never getting well, and only waiting, and then all of his ideas would be betrayed.

“My ideas,” Uncle Stephen had said, “are gifts. But they are voiced gifts, they speak of attention, of needing to be. Seen. Heard. Felt.”

The fact of the idea itself, he suggested, wasn’t important.

He was hunched over his work table, clutching a soldering iron, using one hand to steady the hand holding the iron. Small snakes of smoke rose above the iron as he pecked at his idea, a drop of silver at a time, the rosin smoking the air sweet.

The idea was born of a simple enough hate: Uncle Stephen couldn’t stand the ring of the phone. Ever since the operation, each noise had to earn its right to be in his life, and though he tolerated the sound of the phone, he was on the lookout for a way to replace it.

The best lead he had had so far was the phone systems that rang his phone by blinking his lights. It was built for deaf people. Uncle Stephen loved it, but he took afternoon naps, and the light wasn’t bright enough to wake him.

*

“Think your grandmother will miss them?” Uncle Stephen asked.

I had taken two masks, one she wore to bed to block the early morning light, and the other mask she put in the fridge to cool her forehead and ease her occasional headaches.

He had glued them together, to make one mask to operate on, to add lights to. The tiny current from his land line he had wired to a series of low voltage l.e.d.’s and glued them to the sides of the mask.

“The gel spreads the light around, and the other mask is hollow, it only needs holes,” Uncle Stephen said.

He held up the contraption, one wire dragging from an edge.

“Call me,” Uncle Stephen said.

“You know I don’t have a cell phone.”

“Here,” Uncle Stephen tossed one toward me, and it landed next to me on the couch.

“Where did you get that?”

Uncle Stephen’s face was pale, and the skin around his eyes was dark. The tips of his eyelashes caught the light from his worktable lamp.

I called him.

The main house phone flickered, but the mask didn’t do anything and Uncle Stephen said, “Fuck.”

He turned back to the table and picked up the soldering iron, watching it waiver until he brought his other hand up to steady it.

“If you pop that gel, grandmother is going to kill you.” I said. I was thinking of how I was going to have to stop by the drug store tomorrow, after school, before catching the bus, to buy new masks.

“We’re in bigger trouble than that,” Uncle Stephen said, “she’s had this one mask for years, worn it in like a hat band, but for the face.”

I sank into the couch cushions. Uncle Stephen’s ideas dragged me along. I was worried, too.

Was that idea the last? Was that?

I watched the soldering hover over the masks and how thin his wrist looked, as if he were to touch it with the iron it would melt straight through, like the soldiers Uncle Stephen had shown me how to melt with a lighter, until grandmother had caught him at it. And at the memory, the tang of the plastic death’s of those green men filled my head. Their guns folding up and their knees buckling. Uncle Stephen would heat them with the lighter and then mold them with his fingers, his eyes reflecting both the lighter and the green of the soldier’s bodies.

But when I tried to mold them, the plastic burned my fingertips.

“You get used to it,” Uncle Stephen had said.

*

“Call me,” Uncle Stephen said. He turned the mask so its interior faced me. I pressed the buttons for his number, and again the other phone flickered with light. I was about to say something when the mask lit up.

Tiny dots flickered inside each socket. As current ran into the lights, sometimes one would grow brighter. A lighthouse. A supernova.

“Oh,” Uncle Stephen said, “I had to use another one of your kits. I’ll get you a new one.”

Uncle Stephen was always buying me the kits from Radio Shack, hoping I would learn something about electronics. I wanted to, and I could follow the instructions and make the Randomizer, and the Buzzer. But how they worked, I couldn’t fathom.

Uncle Stephen cannibalized each one and then bought me another.

“Shit.” Uncle Stephen said, and there was a new smell. He had tipped the soldering iron and it had landed on his forearm.

He smiled at me, with the tips of his teeth biting his lip.

“Remember,” Uncle Stephen said, “it’s always when you’re cleaning up that you make the mistake. You get careless when you think you’re done.” He set the soldering iron down in its cradle and picked up the mask and went into the bedroom.

The phone cord trailed across the floor. Uncle Stephen hated cell phones. I looked at the one in my hand. It was grandmother’s.

“I’m going to lie down,” Uncle Stephen said, “Call me in an hour or so.”

I heard the rattle of the pill bottles and the scrape of the bottom of the plastic bucket on the wooden floor. He would be in position, his arm over his head, the bucket within easy reach in case his stomach rebelled, the blanket over his head with a new wire trailing out, as the tubes had when had been in the hospital.

So many tubes vanishing beneath blankets.

The fan he had turned on kicked into life.

I had a book to read, one of the anthologies of ghost stories that Uncle Stephen collected.

On the cover of the book, there was darkness, and Death in his hooded robe, skeletal face, towering over a ruined town.

But even that town had its sky, and even that sky had its stars. The pin pricks between this life and the next. And I waited to make the call, hoping the masks and lights would work, that he would wake-up.

Uncle Stephen’s asleep.

The rotating fan struggles at the top of its pole, old, greasy.

The fan’s wire-guard flaps dust. I keep meaning to clean it, and I keep forgetting.

Uncle Stephen has been without a couple of medications for a few weeks.

I’m not sure how long. What medications.

It’s all very complicated, and when he feels well enough to talk about it, he doesn’t want to, because it’s depressing, and when he’s sick, well, he doesn’t want to talk about it because he feels sick.

Sickness, I think, is a handy excuse.

Not that I don’t believe in it. There’s the orange bucket beside the bed. The one Uncle Stephen keeps double bagged with plastic bags in case the first bag leaks.

I brought a book to read. Grandmother’s still at school.

When I was younger, Uncle Stephen was my babysitter, and now, after the school bus drops me off, grandmother has me walk to his house to check on him. I watch him.

Sickness, I think, is a handy way of keeping people occupied. Busy. Focused. Centered.

Since the medication ran out, I’ve been emptying the bucket, when I can, when I get home from school. Mostly Uncle Stephen does for himself. As they say.

But now, the medication, magical, healing, stupefying, and Uncle Stephen sleeps without waking to vomit.

Before he went to sleep, Uncle Stephen talked to me from under the blanket, his voice issuing from a small shadow he keeps open for air.

It’s winter. And cold. The cold lessens the nausea. The fan keeps the air moving. And also masks any of my slight noises: the creak of my chair, the slide of my fingers across the pages of my book. My breathing.

All of which Uncle Stephen hears, he says, amplified, with the result being the urge to barf.

He was already under the blanket when I walked in and sat down. On the floor was the bag from the pharmacy, that grandmother must’ve dropped off on her lunch break.

Years ago, back when all of this started, I had asked Uncle Stephen what it was like, what it felt like, his headaches, and he’s been describing them to me ever since. Even though I have long since decided that I won’t ever understand, and sometimes the descriptions are harrowing.

But it seems to help him to talk about it, sometimes. And sometimes asking is the only way to find out he’s even hurting, somewhere inside his skull.

Today, though, he was talking as I sat down. The room looked like it had the day before, the fan, the dust, but the bucket was empty, the only smell the plastic of the bags themselves.

Having Uncle Stephen dissect the smells and sounds of the room enough times has led me to believe I can smell and hear what he does, albeit muted.

“A giant spider,” Uncle Stephen said, “inside, at the base of my skull. Black.”

There was an open can of soda on the floor. The bottles of pills. The empty bottles of pills. The full bottles of pills.

“With a web throughout,” Uncle Stephen said, “its spun lines like the dust on the fan.”

I promise myself I’ll clean the fan.

“The important part,” Uncle Stephen paused.

I know he’s been waiting for this medicine. But it will be days before it takes full effect.

Days when he sleeps. Wakes. Takes medications, and then sleeps again. It’s my job to try and sneak some food or water in during the moments of wakefulness.

“This spider, this spider doesn’t have to move,” Uncle Stephen said, “because it’s the web, and the web is it.”

In biology we learned of parasites. Of bacterias. But the books are thin about the effects. The books leave out what each suffering feels like.

Is our suffering that unique?

“Each strand sucks up nutrients for the spider, this pain,” Uncle Stephen said.

I had offered to make him a sandwich. Some crackers to go with the soda.

“Why feed the spider?” Uncle Stephen had said.

Genetics is on the pediatrics floor.

One nurse laughed and told me that if I were good I could get a sticker.

The walls were thin, and I was left alone in the room for a long time.

Next room over, some doctor discussed with some patient getting a driver’s license.

I would’ve rummaged in the cabinets, but they were locked.

In deference to the children, I guess, the usual hospital examination bed was purple plastic instead of hospital green, and instead of plain white crinkly paper, it was clown covered crinkly paper.

We were on the fourth floor, and while I was waiting I took a nap.

And when I couldn’t nap anymore, I watched a man inside a building a block away, several floors up, like me, climbing up and down a ladder, painting the window frames.

I wanted to know what color, but I couldn’t see his brush from so far away.

The geneticists measured the circumference of my skull with a measuring tape: 58cm.