Lid Locking Into Place

Eleanor couldn’t suppress the feeling that her teeth were too big to fit inside her mouth. The disturbance began at breakfast when she took a look at her oatmeal, the pat of butter melting across pale lumps. Her appetite was replaced with suspicion. There was the food, and her mouth, and her teeth, but the proportions were off. It wasn’t going to work. Eleanor ran her tongue across the small ditches between each tooth, the ridges of her upper palate. Wide flat bone flaps. It’s not true, Eleanor thought, but she didn’t dare eat. She imagined slits tearing through her lips. She twisted her mouth. Stop. 

Across the table, her grandmother Sue clinked the rim of her mug with a spoon and hummed a string of notes. The sounds unsettled Eleanor’s teeth, like anchors rattled loose in deep sea sand. Eleanor slipped one finger over her gums to separate her lip, unable to meet Sue’s eyes. “Was it too hot?” Sue said.

Eleanor shook her head.

“You’re not hungry?”

She turned away.

Sue took a sip of coffee and placed the mug on the table. “Why don’t I block out the light?” 

The two women sat in the darkened kitchen, hoping what was coming wouldn’t come. The coffee pot sizzled on the burner. Outside, a group of startled birds rose up in a clatter, and another sound Eleanor didn’t understand. She started.

“Just a car peeling out,” said Sue. “Probably the delinquent in the red Chevy.”

“You know his name,” Eleanor said. In junior high they walked home together, sometimes stopping to buy Fun Dips at the gas station. She hadn’t spoken to him since she withdrew from school the year before. 

“He drives too fast,” Sue said. “All boys do.” She tapped a cigarette from the box of Salem’s on the table and handed it to Eleanor, who took a long closed-eye drag as though containing something that wanted to escape. “Thank you,” she said. 

Sue wasn’t proud of hooking her granddaughter on smoking, but it had helped calm her son James, Eleanor’s father. Smoking was quite possibly the one thing in his life he truly loved. Sue also found solace in the company of a dense haze. To quit would extinguish the very ghost of her son. She lit one of her own and stood to guide Eleanor up the stairs.  

“No, I’ll make it,” Eleanor said. “You sit. There’s time. So much for going to Sear’s today.”

 “The sale goes till Sunday,” Sue said. 

As an epileptic, Eleanor was a veteran of the unreal, but she had no more mastery of herself or her perceptions now, at fourteen, than she had when she first seized at age eleven in the baby goat petting corral in a pumpkin patch. She remembered her first aura clearly—the inaudible whispering, a funnel of fear spinning in her chest, and after she collapsed, the fade-to-black vision that transformed the clouds and the faces above her into distant cartoons, her entire body wracked with cold. The signals were not always the same, and as the time between each seizure shortened, their impact worsened, Eleanor had more difficulty remembering what she’d experienced, yet she clung to the scraps, read them like the wisps of a prophetic dream.

Eleanor told a doctor about the disturbing perceptions once, years ago. “That’s great,” the doctor said. “That means your mind wants to give you warning to help you be safe.” He tried to convince Eleanor that she should embrace these alarms for what they were and recognize she need not be afraid.

“But it sounds like the feelings are telling me that I should be afraid,” Eleanor said.

“But not of things around you. They’re not telling you to be afraid of the world,” the doctor said. “They’re telling you to be afraid of yourself. Your brain.” He swiveled away in his chair, swiveled back. “Perhaps we should say ‘of the event.’” 

Eleanor threw the lollipop in the trash after the appointment and stood by the lobby windows, waiting for her grandma to warm up the car. She reached out to touch the moisture on the glass, then turned the finger to point at her face. Drew it closer toward her nose until her eyes softly blurred. She could not see the face at which she was pointing. She could believe for a moment that she didn’t have a head at all. 

Eleanor took out her earrings and sat on the edge of her bed. She pulled back the curtains for a view of the backyard, sat again. She made sucking motions, wrangling in the weirdness in her teeth.

In many ways, waiting was the worst part—worse than the claps of pain, the foggy days of recovery, the sense of having been ripped from her body and crammed back inside the wrong way, the disappointment. Already, her desk seemed distant, unfamiliar. The curtains fluttered with an ominous resonance. The lampshade was wrong, the illustrated poster of wildflowers was wrong, the hamper with the blouse slumped over the side made her want to puke. 

She steadied her breath and set her focus on the tree beyond the window. A serene, leafless elm. This was a suggestion from Dr. Montague—to pick a spot and make peace with the inevitable. Resistance could heighten the damage. She could not recall if this had helped the last time; she had no memory of anything at all. 

The tree stood on the top of a hill between her house and the Super Saver Food Mart. A young man in an apron smoked under the tree’s shade, the top of his head streaked with light. He stomped the butt of his cigarette and disappeared down the hill. 

Without interference, the tree communicated directly with Eleanor. 

“Oh, leave me alone,” she said, but she didn’t look away.

The longer Eleanor stared at it, the stronger its message and greater its menace. It became a scar splitting the sky. Broken fingers gesturing danger. An angry child thrust through the cold crust of dirt, the mother of this child being Earth, where all living things go to die. It was the most disgusting thing she’d ever seen. It beckoned through a dimming tunnel.

Eleanor pushed the tree away with her mind, and at the same time, tried to see it clearly, to understand what it wanted her to know. It was a personal communication from the darkness that encircles death, protects it like the shell of a bean. She sensed a figure nearby. She could not recall her father’s face. “Lie down,” said a voice. “Eleanor—lean back. Onto your side.” She jerked from the hands pressing her shoulders, slate shadows grinding under her skull. Each moment she endured, she could burrow closer to the truth. The tree signaled once more before the storm hit. The tree would preside over her annihilation. This one and all the others. 

The doctors spoke in metaphor, as this was their job: to translate the battle of the body to the patient who could be armed to protect, battle, win. Tumors were enemies, blood clots: traffic jams, cancer: colonization. In the late 1970s, the very-ill were personified as victims of an attack, or moral perverts deserving punishment. If a patient succumbed, it was said she fought till the end and surrendered with dignity; another soldier down on the side of mortality. Medicine drew lines in the sand.

The doctors had trouble with Eleanor. The brain-person relationship did not lend itself to comforting figuration. Not any stories you’d want to tell. The brain was a deep black sea inhabited by twitchy, interdependent and undiscovered species. The brain was a cipher printed on a delicate and infinite scroll. The brain was a sparkling, metaphysical pocket of the universe. It was God’s dirty whisper. All the brains in the world couldn’t figure out the brain. And if the brain was the enemy, what, then, was Eleanor? 

“Think of it,” a neurosurgeon ventured, “as an apartment building. And there’s a tenant causing trouble. 

Eleanor frowned, but Sue nodded encouragingly. “What kind of trouble?”

“All sorts of ruckus. Dancing late, shaking the building. Making everyone else very ill and upset. And he won’t accept the…” The doctor trailed off. “The fruit baskets we’ve been sending. That’s the medicine. But the good news is that we know where he lives. We can’t evict him because he’s too powerful, but we can remove the entire apartment. Surgically.”

“What about the pills? Have we given them enough time?” Sue said, her hand on Eleanor’s shoulder.

“We could try another month,” the doctor said. He believed if Eleanor’s seizures persisted at the same frequency, they had no other option.  

Eleanor watched the talking of the adults, thinking that if the building was her brain, she also lived in one of the apartments. She owned the building. Instead of taking out an entire unit, that could, say, be occupied by a more likable tenant, running the risk of compromising the entire structure, she could find a way from the inside to knock on the tenant’s door and ask him nicely to leave. She could talk to him, hear him out. There was something he wanted from her. If he didn’t comply,  she could crawl into the apartment through the air vents, sniff the food in his fridge, read his notes to learn the truth, or she would smother him with a pillow in the night.

Eleanor woke to darkness, rain pattering the windows—some night or another. All around her, gloom. There was the hill, the tree out the window; she looked away. She heard footsteps on the stairs and sniffed the air: meat. Eleanor didn't want any more animal fat, even if was supposed to help with the seizures. She pictured Sue plodding closer in her nightgown, her shoulders hunched into the weight of the tray. 

Every single person on the planet except Eleanor had advanced into strength and light—they held hands in neon shopping malls and ate strawberry shaved ice on the beach. She took the pill and glass of water on the nightstand and curled back into sleep. The door opened, closed. This time, she did dream. At the end of a long hallway, a phone rang. She ran for it, determined to pick up before the machine clicked on. She answered. “Who is this?” the voice said. It sounded urgent.

“Who is this?” Eleanor replied. She both heard this and said it.

“Who is this?” she said.

Unsure, she whispered, “Who is this?”

This went on and on, question and answer echoing in each breath. She needed the answer; she couldn’t say. The call shifted her deeper and deeper down a curling spiral until she was no longer the person who’d first answered the phone, but the person who’d called and was desperate to know to whom she found herself speaking. 

Eleanor had one memory of her father. She is lowered into the opposite end of the bathtub where he reclines, submerged to his chest in murky water. Her rump settles on his shins. He rubs his knuckles into his eyes and stares at her. His head is thin, his ears wide. “Ma,” he says, “get her out of here.” 

They heard of his death by phone, received his things by mail. One parcel: a belt, coins, a Polaroid of a handsome Cadillac Coupe de Ville. A letter addressed to Eleanor was found in his room at the medical facility. They’d expected it to be a farewell. Daughter, it began. My dreams are the recorded messages of Christ. 

The recording device, planted in his prenatal brain was responsible for his illness, his fits, the sour smell of his skin. James’s opinion of the Lord was not favorable for this reason. He wanted Jesus out, and he needed to become divine himself, an energetic conduit between heaven and earth. The more powerful he became and the closer he got to celestial mastery, the harder God worked to thwart him. There were other malevolent players in his narrative, those who interfered with his intense schedule of “practices”: the head psychiatrist, the sessions they made James attend all day, the weather. His medication weakened his defenses and pursuit of transfiguration. Eleanor is just as vulnerable to interference, he warned. His notes continued in a series of self-directives, as if he’d forgotten he was writing to her at all. Ignore distractions. Stay off the bed. Convince Margie to bring back the alarm. Fifty middle pillars every day. Eheieh Yhvh Elohim Yhvh Eloah Va Daath Shaddai El Chai Adonai Ha Aretz, written over and over until there was no more space. 

The letter was dated after his second induced insulin coma but before the lobectomy. It was written on the backs of weekly cafeteria menus. 

Sue permitted Eleanor to read the first page. Eleanor, confused and unable to register the loss of someone she didn’t know, put her lips to the paper, a goodbye kiss. A year later she had her first seizure.

Eleanor woke in the grass under the elm, swallowed by sunlight. The face of a young man appeared above her, sweating and terrified. “Hey!” he shouted, as though she were at the bottom of a well. “Hey, wake up! I think you need some medical assistance—do you need medical assistance? Okay. Are you sure, because it’s really likely that you’re hurt. Okay. But I was really thinking that you were probably dead. Where do you live?”

Eleanor rolled to one side, the bare skin of her legs prickling against the grass.

“I didn’t take off your dress.”

Eleanor grasped for her jumper.

“You were marching up to the tree, but then you stopped, you took off your dress, you balled it up under your head. And then you…” He wasn’t sure how to say it. “Something was happening to you.” 

“Yeah,” Eleanor said. She could only briefly open her eyes. “I’ve seen you before.” She was both repulsed by and drawn to his face.

“Probably. I’m at the meat counter.” He jabbed his thumb down the hill to the Super Saver and lit a cigarette that did not smell like one. He looked away while Eleanor pulled her clothes on. The back of her head bled into her hair.

“Do you need me to go get someone?” he said.

“I’m thinking.” Eleanor had seen more this time, gotten closer. A cord reached through the tree, a silver spiral extending down through the earth and up into the cosmos. But it was guarded. “I hate that tree,” she said, and threw a rock. She rolled onto her stomach and grabbed a handful of weeds to drag herself through the grass toward home. The man reached out his hands, but Eleanor was fine, fine, I’m fine. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “Especially not my grandma.” 

Eleanor had two seizures that week, plus the one she hid from Sue. She obediently chewed the hunks of pork fat, took her pills on time, and dreamed she was eating her grandmother. Everything she did in her dreams was with urgency, a race to barrel through some obstruction, finish a task, escape. The clock ticking. 

“We have to conclude that the anti-convulsants will not suffice as a means of treatment,” the neurosurgeon said. “Given your family history—”

“We told you what happened to her father after surgery.”

“It’s 1977; it’s a whole new world. The procedure is effective.”

The older woman twisted her hat. 

“Eleanor is a very sufficient candidate. We can schedule a date right now, complete the rest of the pre-surgical evaluation, but  I’m confident we’ll pass. We could have the surgery in May, and you might even be able to go to school next year.

“What about  June?” Eleanor finally spoke. “Give me till June.”

“Give you till June to do what?”

Doctor and grandmother exchanged a glance, and Eleanor retreated back into herself. It had been a mistake to come out.

As Eleanor suspected, Sue kept James’s things in the cedar chest at the bottom of the coat closet with the other family documents. His letters were buried at the bottom, cinched with a rubber band. Once Sue was busy with dinner, Eleanor unwrapped the wad of pages and spread them out across her bed, her eyes captured by the familiar image of a tree. Next to it, a human figure was bisected with levels of energy, names in a language Eleanor didn’t know. A duplicate man rose higher on the page, lifted or floating, tied with a cord to the first man, and to the tree. The figure was surrounded with jagged lines, like lightning bolts or sparks of excitement. The Body of Light, Eleanor read. Passage to the astral realm. 

Eleanor practiced that night, following the instructions as closely as she could, feeling the strange words vibrate in her throat. She had no magical garments or weapons, no incense or candles, but neither had her father. 

She trickled water, the most magical element she could think of, over her arms and chest, in her hair, and stood tall. She shivered. Her room—lights out, not to alarm Sue—gave off a quiet vibrancy. It was like stepping into an empty room recently occupied, an assurance that something was there for her, waiting. An open palm. She blinked. The moonlight traced the contours of her bed, shaped the pillows. How different things looked in the dark, yet to the things themselves, nothing changed. A wild thought rose in Eleanor’s mind, that she, that all humans, were always groping in the dark, sensing only what they had invented to see. Her brain had revealed the edge of the curtain on the stage of perception. In that way, her suffering was a gift, the gift of sight. Though no one else saw it that way.  

She closed her eyes and focused on building a mental picture of a body beside her, a body that was both her and not her. A container. A shapeless presence that gained definition—torso, arms, neck, head. A figure cut with sharp white light. She could hold it only briefly, her eyes flying open at each small creak in the house, the image dissolving. Three weeks, she admonished herself. Crunching her fingernails into her palms. There was not enough time to be afraid.  

Eleanor stopped swallowing her medication, as it made her tired, sometimes dizzy. Returning to her true state could speed her progress, and if she didn’t succeed, it wouldn’t matter anyway—as the doctor said, that part of her brain would soon be gone. 

Despite two seizures that week—in one she bit clean through the side of her tongue, reopening an old slit—Eleanor continued her nightly efforts. Once she could keep the body of light whole in her mind, she worked on moving herself into it, transferring her consciousness, like pouring water from one glass to another. Inside, she turned the eyes in the body to the back of the room, an exercise that switched from recollection to present awareness early one morning after a long, frantic night. She was too exhausted to try too hard but gave one final effort—and suddenly, the eyes opened. They were not hers, yet she could see. She woke on the floor hours later, Sue’s face concerned in the doorway. 

Eleanor slept late and stayed in bed until dinner, watching the light fade behind the tree on the hill. She twiddled her fingers in a wave. The sheets were damp. She’d urinated again, which she did more often unconscious than conscious. Eleanor thought of a vast, swirling ocean, which she had never swam in. She would never drive a car. She couldn’t take a bath unsupervised. Her teeth weren’t fitting right, not feeling right. She pursed her lips, ran her tongue over her gums. Her teeth were too heavy—they were going to fall out. 

After the seizure, Eleanor woke, slept, woke, slept. Getting out of bed and falling back into it. Opening her eyes, opening her eyes, not in her head, but in her dream. The window, the tree. The body. Vessel. At some point, her sleep fell deeper, and she dreamt she snapped off the front part of her head—as though her face were a mask—and held it out in front of her with one hand. It wasn't fleshy or bloody as she expected, but hard and thin, brittle bone with a disgusting bark-like quality she examined from the backside, peeling calcified flakes. Eleanor’s teeth had come out with the mask, and she examined the rows, rotted with cavities, gaping holes filled with bulbous barnacle gunk. Horrified, she put the mask back on, a lid locking into place, yet now it made her claustrophobic to see through holes. Face off, the perspective widened—her viewpoint flooded the entire area. Face on, her peripheral vision darkened. Off, on, Off, on. Dark, light, dark. How small and cramped it was inside her face. She left it off and became a wall of seeing. Light feeling itself. 

The next day, over sausage and cigarettes, Sue told Eleanor they’d moved up the surgery to the day after the next. 

Rising on the planes beyond the physical earth in pursuit of knowledge was a violation, her father’s notes cautioned, and a traveler could expect hostile figures to approach over the horizon. Push higher and higher above them. Sign a pentagram to make them wither, he wrote. Test any truth you find and beware of deceptions—a discouraging warning for Eleanor, who was tired of codes. There were guides one could invoke—angels, he called them—to draw you up faster and protect you during the journey, but he’d written only the initials of their names with no further explanation, and Eleanor was wary. She did not know what those things were or where she’d be calling them from. 

“Rest up, now,” Sue said, leaving the warm milk at Eleanor’s bedside. All Eleanor wanted to do was sleep, rest her body and her head, wrought with flinty clouds of pain, but at midnight she planted her feet on the carpet and shuffled into place. 

She used a four-count breath to guide herself into a soft state of focus, one with purpose but not effort, her mind energized emptiness. Sensation in her teeth, her gums, called to her briefly, but she shepherded it away. 

With her consciousness inside the body of light, Eleanor turned the eyes in all directions and softly pushed upward, expecting buoyancy, for the feet to lift off the floor and carry her through the ceiling, like a spirit ascending to heaven, but there were no feet, no legs, no wings, no locomotive machinery. With each part of her breath, the inhale, the exhale—the call to know, the offer to receive—she billowed further from herself and the room, but not through space. Somewhere else. To the tip of a vast process. There were no human figures, no symbols or words. Something was coming to her, but she had to transform to meet it. 

One by one the remote tremor of her senses fizzled to a faraway murmur. She could hear her heart pumping—she knew her heart pumping. She expanded, opened in a painful ripping, but the pain was impartial. The space between her cells shook free, reorganized with assurance as though they’d done this millions of times before. Her physical body sank nearby, walled up. That was the container, she realized. Eleanor alone. She could return to it and its aches, its defects, which were not defects at all, but necessary expressions. A drip of a secretion. A reaching. An attempt. A bit broken off of something more. 

A hesitation before she proceeded, but it passed. A sadness without object. Relief from a far off struggle. Released from everything, connected to nothing. She caught a flash of Eleanor, a skittering texture—that battle to know, to fix, to heal. Her body, her bed, her brain, a voice, a tree. But that world belonged to the body, its small, spinning wheel, its blind gullet. There was no more desire. There was nothing to know. She let go of it: insect, instrument, grain of rice.