Like Wings Your Hands Read online

  When Kali walked up the aisle to return to her seat, she squeezed past the woman who had been sitting next to her headed in the opposite direction, looking uncomfortable. Marko must have over-shared something with her, Kali thought, then laughed to herself. She returned to her seat to find her son, face upturned and illuminated by the sunlight streaming in through the window, hands carving elegant arches and angles in the space before his face.

  3. December 13, 2014: Cambridge, MA

  Marko sat in his room and stared at the wall to think. It had been a year since his dad moved out and went to California. Marko didn’t mind that his dad was gone. In fact, he preferred it to when they had all lived together. His mom and dad had fought a lot. And Marko didn’t get as much one-on-one attention from his mom when they all lived together. Sometimes he acted like he did mind because that would get him more attention, but he only did that a very few times when he was feeling extra lonely (number eleven) or extra uncomfortable (number fourteen). In fact, he didn’t even want as much one-on-one attention from his mom anymore. What he wanted was to know her—to know her 100 percent, or at least 80 percent. He knew her only 17 percent. His mom never talked to him about what she felt for anyone but him. She never talked about what made her afraid or lonely or what she wanted out of life. Marko knew that wasn’t malicious. She was doing it to protect him. She wanted him to feel safe, and if he knew she was fallible (which he knew she was), she worried he would not trust her.

  Because he wanted to know her more, he started asking her questions. He would ask about her friends and if she was dating anyone, but she would answer with short, meaningless phrases like “so and so is a good person” or “I’m not interested in dating.” When his questioning didn’t lead anywhere, he decided he would have to be a detective and find out for himself.

  One practice his mom had started since he turned fourteen was leaving him home alone sometimes. He could create this alone time if he asked her to go and get him something.

  “Mom, can you please get me a smoothie from that health food store? I really have been craving one,” he said that second Saturday afternoon in January when it all started.

  “When was the last time you had one, honey?”

  “It’s been weeks,” he said. He felt a little bad because he knew that they were expensive and that his mom never had a lot of money. She never told him she couldn’t afford something, but he knew.

  “I’ll pay you back,” he said, knowing he could not. Still, he liked to think that eventually he would find a way to earn money and be able to not only pay his parents back for taking such good care of him, but also help to take care of them.

  “It’s not about the money, babe,” she said, “I just don’t know about going out in this weather.”

  “You go without me. I’ll wait here,” Marko said and smiled. His mom smiled, too. She knew he was proud to be trusted on his own for a little while.

  “Okay, I’ll go get you a Green Goddess, how about that?”

  “Yes! Yay!” Marko pumped the air with his fist, which she loved and which always made her laugh and hug him.

  As soon as she closed and locked the door, Marko wheeled himself into her bedroom. He looked inside her drawers and opened the various small containers on her dresser, but all he found were earrings and hair barrettes and clothes and underwear. He went to the small bookcase just behind the wall inside her room and scanned the spines. He was familiar with the books his mom kept next to her bed. He’d read most of the English ones, but not the ones in Russian, Bulgarian, and French. His mother’s fluency in four languages was something he admired and envied, but he’d never had the patience to learn other languages. There was too much to learn and to think about in English. He recognized a new book on the shelf and he picked it up. It was a hardback book with a gray cover and the words:

  THE

  UNBEARABLE

  LIGHTNESS

  OF BEING

  A NOVEL BY

  MILAN KUNDERA

  He opened it and flipped through it. There was some writing that was highlighted on a page: What does this mad math signify?

  This was how Marko first read the line, and he was so excited to find his own latent, burning question in print in a book under his eyes that he nearly threw the book to the floor. Was this author writing about the mad math in his head? Did he have the mad math, too? Marko had never considered this phrase before exactly, but he thought it was an excellent name for the numbers and shapes that operated in his mind: the mad math.

  But when he reread the line, he saw that he’d misread it.

  “To think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that this recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?”

  Myth. A much different word than math.

  Still, she had highlighted it, so it must mean something to her. Or had someone else highlighted it?

  He turned back to the front of the book and saw an inscription on the title page. It read: “To Kalina, my firstborn: this will help you perfect your English and heighten your thinking. Let it make you smarter, and more interesting! All my love, Papa.”

  Marko’s heartbeat quickened. His mom never talked about her father and Marko had never met him. All he knew was that he lived alone in Bulgaria and was a sad man. Marko’s mom had a brother who died, also named Marko, and she talked all about him, but never their father. The inscription in the book was dated January of 1985. A quick calculation. His mom would have been eleven years old. If she could read it when she was eleven, then Marko, being fourteen, could certainly read it.

  Marko replaced the book on the shelf and picked up another book, a journal. Its cover was blank yellow fabric, worn and a little dirty. Was this her diary? Even handling it made him feel guilty. He knew that diaries were for secrets, and not for anyone else to read. Still, he needed to know her better. It was important, more so than he could explain. It was like there was a deep well inside of him and he was stuck at the bottom. Knowledge about his mother was a rope that he could hold onto, one that could possibly lift him out.

  He opened the journal. Inside, every page was filled with his mom’s tiny print handwriting. At first, he avoided reading it, feeling ashamed. In the back was a stack of papers. He unfolded one and saw that it was a letter to his mom from his grandfather. He knew that she rarely spoke to his grandfather—they’d been estranged for most of Marko’s life. He couldn’t resist. He read the letter and then replaced it. He then read several pages of the journal, careful not to lose track of time and read for too long.

  Satisfied, feeling that he did know his mom just a bit better, he closed the journal and returned it to the shelf. He wheeled out of the room just in time to hear the key unlocking the door. His heart pounded and he felt lightheaded. He glanced back toward her room to check for evidence that he’d been there. He saw none. The door opened and his mom stepped inside. She had a brown paper bag and two plastic cups filled with green sludge.

  “I got us scones, too,” she said, smiling. But then her smile fell off. Her mouth was a straight line and her forehead crinkled.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing, why?”

  “You look guilty. Did you do something?”

  “Uh, no. I just have to poop, I think.”

  “Oh, ok, let me get you on the toilet,” she said, and put down the cups and the bag. She crossed the room, lifted him out of his chair, and carried him to the bathroom. She grunted when she put him down.

  “You’re getting too big for me to carry,” she said. Marko knew she was trying to make him feel better. Even with the growth hormones he’d been taking, he hadn’t gained much weight. While the hormones had caused him finally to start puberty, and while his legs and arms seemed somewhat longer, he was still only 65 pounds.

  On the toilet, he helped her pull his pants down and remove his diaper and he was embarrassed to see an erection there, between his legs. Where had that come from? He felt his face he
at up and he started stuttering.

  “It’s okay, it’s fine,” she said. “It happens, no big deal.”

  But it was too late. Marko was crying and covering his penis. The feeling it produced in him was unbearable and insatiable.

  “Honey, why are you sad?”

  But Marko wasn’t sad. Whatever he was, he didn’t understand, and it was overwhelming enough to make him have to cry. His mother said nothing more. She looked at the wall over his head and bounced him on the toilet seat, waiting for poop to come out.

  4. December 13, 2014: Cambridge, MA

  Kalina sat in the office of the shrink. She couldn’t believe she had actually shown up this time. The shrink, clad in gray tights and a form-fitting skirt, came out through the plain white door and welcomed her in. The room was furnished from Ikea. Kali knew this because she loved IKEA. It was her favorite thing about America, even though it was from Sweden.

  The shrink was not ugly and not pretty. Perfect for a shrink, Kali thought. She sat on a simple green loveseat couch unadorned with pillows, across from the shrink. The shrink asked Kali about when she came to America, so Kali told her about how she didn’t have money back home in Bulgaria, and how she got a job at the American Embassy taking care of military children. She learned about rice crisps and milk in a carton. One family adopted her as a nanny. When the mother’s sister had newborn twins, they sent her to the U.S. to help take care of them. January, 1999.

  She landed in New York City. The age she had on her ID was 23. She felt nine.

  The dumpy hotel she stayed in had a view of a brick wall. She marveled at the city surrounding that brick wall, vibrating with life and stinking of piss.

  She lived in Swampscott and took care of the twin babies.

  She stayed for eighteen months until she went to school. She received a scholarship for being foreign and smart and got a degree in psychoanalysis.

  She got a job and made two hundred dollars per week.

  In school, she met her ex-husband. They had similar values. Children, society, family, money. They were married when she was 26. He was 24. She got her papers.

  She had an abortion after the first pregnancy and that destroyed the marriage. The second pregnancy was an attempt to save it. She didn’t show up for her 20-week ultrasound because she thought she was on top of the world. She gave birth on December 12th.

  She remembered the midwife looking between her legs with a look on her face like she had just watched a car wreck. The midwife wouldn’t look at Kali. It was early in the morning. The baby was taken away from her. It felt like hours they were gone. She was left alone in the room. She delivered the placenta and lay there. Finally, she got up, even though she wasn’t supposed to. She had to find her baby and hold him. She made it to the hall and saw five people in white coats coming toward her. As soon as they approached, her legs collapsed. She fell against the wall and slid down to the floor. She stayed on the floor while they told her everything that was wrong. It wasn’t just one thing. It was five or six things.

  Major spinal, brain, and heart surgery. Because of all the surgery and recovery, the baby had to be on morphine for six straight weeks and developed an addiction. He was then on methadone for morphine withdrawal symptoms. The shrink listened patiently. Kali stopped talking. The shrink blinked her eyes. Her brown hair, cropped short to chin length, moved slightly. Otherwise, the shrink was very still.

  5. December 13, 2014: Cambridge, MA

  Journal entry dated September 27, 2005

  My favorite place in the city is a cemetery. I visit every Sunday but my favorite season to visit is autumn. The tops of the trees are burnt orange and flame red, the leaves are curling and coloring and letting go to blanket the graves to crunch underfoot. Nowhere else in nature is dying so beautiful.

  There is a still, green pool in the valley formed by the connecting of several hills. A sloping path surrounds it and winds through grassy plateaus, perfect for sitting and not being seen. When I sit at the banks of the pool at dusk, I watch the dragonflies being born. There are two important observations:

  First, the buzzing of this new, exotic life stands in stark contrast to the stillness offered by the surrounding dead people. In the cemetery an essential fact emerges in sharp relief: life is perpetuated by death.

  Second, the new dragonflies emerge from within the pond on the stems of foliage. Another important fact: life supports life. Also, things rise to the surface and the world decides to let them in or not.

  They climb up and out of the water as nymphs, their larval stage of development. They have hatched from eggs lain in the water. In the right temperature of water, larvae will hatch from eggs in less than a month. The larva or nymph will grow quickly, feeding on small bacteria in the water. Some nymphs are passive growers, sitting and waiting for prey bacteria to come within reach. Others hunt.

  Tetralogy of Fallot causes low oxygen levels in the blood. This leads to blue baby syndrome. The classic form includes four defects of the heart and its major blood vessels: Ventricular septal defect (hole between the right and left ventricles); narrowing of the pulmonary outflow tract (the valve and artery that connect the heart with the lungs); shifted verriding aorta (the artery that carries oxygen-rich blood to the body) over the right ventricle instead of coming out only from the left ventricle; thickened wall of the right ventricle (right ventricular hypertrophy).

  Nymphs swim by forcing the leftover hydrogen from the chamber housing the gills, which acts like a jet to propel the nymph forward.

  Spina bifida, or SB, is a neural tube defect caused by the failure of the fetus’s spine to close properly during the first month of pregnancy. Infants born with SB sometimes have an open lesion on their spine where significant damage to the nerves and spinal cord has occurred. Although the spinal opening can be surgically repaired shortly after birth, the nerve damage is permanent, resulting in varying degrees of paralysis of the lower limbs.

  A nymph has a flexible lip that rapidly extends up to a third of the length of its body to help it capture prey. As the nymphs grow, they will switch to hunting larger insects, including mosquito larvae. Large nymphs can capture small tadpoles and fish. Nymphs will molt or shed their skin ten to fifteen times before they are mature.

  Hydrocephalus is a buildup of fluid inside the skull that leads to brain swelling. This fluid is called the cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF. It surrounds the brain and spinal cord and helps cushion the brain. Too much CSF puts pressure on the brain. This pushes the brain up against the skull and damages brain tissue. Hydrocephalus may begin while the baby is growing in the womb. It is common in babies who have a myelomeningocele, a birth defect in which the spinal column does not close properly.

  Dragonfly nymphs take up to five years to mature; years spent below the surface of the water, growing stronger.

  It is the only species I know of that remains so vulnerable for such a length of time—almost as long as the human animal.

  As the nymphs mature, the wing pads form and elongate. Colors gradually become visible through the translucent skin. When ready, they will move to the surface of the pond and start to breathe air. In the evening, nymphs climb up the stems of vegetation. Their first swallows of air cause their skin to split down the back. Gradually, the adult emerges. The wings slowly unfold as blood is pumped into them. Recently emerged adults are soft and exposed. They often don’t survive their first few hours as adults because they make such excellent prey. It will take most of the night for the wings to harden before the adult dragonfly is ready for flight.

  I watch them until I can’t hold my eyes open anymore, or until I get too cold. They’re so still, creeping out of the nymph skin almost imperceptibly.

  Sometimes I go in the morning, before sunrise. I like to see the first light of dawn reveal their shed skins, like abandoned outfits of clothes cast off from new lovers.

  The babies under glass in the NICU require more patience. No adult emerges overnight from an infant. These are the nymphs
just hatched from eggs. They are not the hunters. They take the longest to mature, the most care. They are the most delicate.

  That evening, Marko watched a cartoon where a monster was depicted dragging itself around by its hands with short, lifeless legs and no feet. Perhaps it was a ghost and not a monster because it seemed to float more than drag. It reminded Marko of the dark body—a part monster, part ghost—that floated inside him; occupying the space inside his despair with incredible gravity and mass. When the dark body pulled Marko in, it made him hit himself. Although it was Marko’s own fist punching his own face and head and chest, it was the dark body that was hurting him and leaving bruises. But the ghost-monster in the cartoon didn’t look at all like the dark body. It looked happy and harmless and light in its weightlessness.

  Marko believed that the black box warnings on all of the medications he had to take had a weight that pushed down on him and bent him forward. In real life, he had scoliosis, but as his mom said, there’s a metaphysical reason for all physical conditions. He took two medications for his heart condition; one medication for his hydrocephalus; and a couple of medications for complications of his SB. He spent a lot of time looking up information about the medications he took on the Internet. That’s where he saw the black box warnings, which gave him so much of feeling number one, fear, that he nearly lost himself to the dark body. Just a few of the weighty warnings he discovered inside of the heavy black boxes:

  •Cerebrovascular insufficiency

  •Cardiovascular disease

  •Hypertension

  •Diabetes mellitus

  •Thyroid disease

  •Prostatic hypertrophy

  •Addiction, abuse, and misuse

  •Life-threatening respiratory depression

  Of course, Marko spent time looking up each of these potential conditions as well. It all got heavier. There was too much weight tethered to Marko to ever be able to float. Marko envied the black-box-warning-free ghost-monster and its ability to float. Getting from one spot to another without his chair took up a lot of energy. One time, he caught his mom trying it out—to move across a room without using her legs. He woke up earlier than usual and dragged himself out of bed. He was trying to be extra quiet in case his mom was meditating or sleeping. He glimpsed her as soon as he hit the floor and nearly gasped. There she was, coming out of the living room into the small hallway and to her bedroom. She let her legs drag behind her and stood upright on her arms. Each step forward with her arms was like a new, one-armed push-up combined with the effort and weight of dragging her legs. She grunted but she managed it. She was strong and built small, so it was easier for her than it would be for someone else.