In a dark room at NYU Langone Hospital on First Avenue, the technician rolling you in squeezes your left hand, holding onto it for a moment. He’s from China, and moments before, he spoke Mandarin to your husband who only speaks Cantonese.
There was a moment of silence, in that dimly lit, sterile room, as each man regarded the other. The technician then wrapped you up in a blanket, tucking you in so you couldn’t move. You’re not supposed to move at all. You’ve done this before, and you do not know if you can do it again. But your husband smiled at you and said: The sooner you get it over with, the sooner we can go back.
Earlier in the ER, you were given Ativan for your claustrophobia, but it has not kicked in and you are completely aware. The technician holding your hands says: Didn’t I tell you this machine is wider than the one you were in before? And it is. A year ago, a doctor sent you to an MRI center, and it did not go well. It was a much narrower tube, and they had to put you completely inside. The technician there said: almost everyone I’ve seen is bigger than you and they do just fine. You know you are small. You are aware of it every day when you squeeze onto trains and elevators, through crowds at stores. Small-boned and five-two. But you don’t like closed spaces, even outdoor concerts where you can’t raise your head above the masses, can’t breathe at all. But you lay perfectly still for seventy minutes, without moving or making a sound, mostly out of guilt for the space you don’t take up, that which you’ve never needed at all.
This machine, however, is wider. The technician affixes a two-way mirror so it seems like you have more space than you do, so the outside seems closer than it is. You’ve been in the ER all night, and it’s around five in the morning. A call was made so you are the first to go in. Because you’ve ended up in the ER three times this month. Because the young neurologist who’s seen you twice, her pockets heavy with instruments, is as small as you. You felt comforted by this while she put you through a series of tests, as if her swift, efficient movements alone would heal you.
She says if you fall she’ll catch you, and you believe her, but your husband stands close by you just in case. She speaks softly, pushes up her glasses which keep falling down, and despite the pain and that you don’t know her really, really at all, she has become a familiar presence, and it gives you hope. Perhaps you are merely an unsolvable case, that’s the attraction, but she did call for a dark room in the ER, away from the fluorescent light, because of the headache that is not a headache or a migraine but a searing pain that travels down your neck and ends at your left arm, which is numb and then pulsates. Everything on your left side is faint, then fainter, then a vague sensation returns of what was once yours. The pain radiates on the left side of your head, its nucleus behind your eye.
The sooner you get it over, the sooner we can go back. Go back where? You have gone back. To the hospital. Yet you’ve heard these words before. In 2014, at a reading you organized near your home in Sunnyside, at Bliss on Bliss Studio and Jared Harel read “Go So You Can Come Back.”
He prefaced his poem by saying that each time he leaves home, his wife says these words to him. And it is the ending that is there in the machine with you now, even though you can’t remember the words exactly and will have to look it up when you do, in fact, return to your home:
and to love is to leave
room for longing, but come back
so that we might go out together, later,
in a perpetual rotation of goings and comings
which require nothing but patience
and faith that when we go
we remember where is home.
Nowhere else but in this machine that’s now whirling, warming up, have you ever longed more for your husband, even though he’s just outside, a matter of doors and walls separating you. And how well Harel understands the movement of distance itself, its everyday urgencies, that time is its sweetest when it’s now, the present, when “the snow isn’t snowing” and “before all the produce / turns soft and stringy.”
You realize you are the one who must come back, that it’s up to you, the togetherness and the tomorrows. You must go now, or there will be no home. For you and your husband have made a life together— each formerly itinerant and restless— and there is not a home to be remembered if not for the both of you.
But how do you tell someone that you are not you anymore—at least, not always? That something else keeps coming back, trying to take over you, throw you off balance? And from this, from the pain and numbness, a new self has sprung: she is in control now, there in the machine with you. And you are the old self, in the arms of this warrior carrying you through hell. It is not without sacrifice. She has come to replace the boundaries and laws of you. She challenges your God and the number of days you think you have. You do not trust her, and yet you are fiercely protective of her. And yet—
You want her gone.
She knows this. Everything you know, she knows. And she knows you want her to go so you can come back, as you once were. She knows you suspect she’s been making decisions for some time, over that “perpetual rotation of goings and comings,” that life once yours, now in her hands.
* * *
It began in 2012 while you were visiting your family in the Rio Grande Valley. On South D Street, in your Aunt Nena’s house, you were petting your uncle’s pitbull Tiger and lost your balance for a moment, and then felt a numbness radiate. Tiger, whom you had just met, sniffed your left arm and whined. For the rest of the visit, the dog sat at your feet, and followed you when you got up, wherever you went.
You forgot about the incident, returned to New York, only for it to happen again, when you were crossing Queens Boulevard, also known as the Boulevard of Death for its many lanes, for the drivers who treat it as a racetrack. You go to see a posh Fifth Avenue specialist, allegedly the best in her field, who listens without saying a word, hands you a paper to go to a lab to get your blood drawn. You learn later she is what they call a concierge doctor, and that people with insurance are sent to Quest Diagnostics and people who pay out of pocket get their blood drawn at her office. You marvel at the fact some people are so rich they don’t use insurance. You yourself are grateful that you have insurance. You go to the lab and pass out while they are drawing your blood. This will happen many times.
A week passes, and you go on a date. The date was to meet for a drink, but instead you go to another place for dinner and then to another for flan and then to Washington Square Park. You walk over a hundred blocks just to stay together, as long as possible. You don’t tell him anything about labs and the numbness. Another week passes, and you don’t hear from the doctor. Finally you call. She’s busy. You call every day that week, feeling like a nuisance. Late Friday afternoon, the posh doctor gets back to you. She’s very stern. The conversation takes less than two minutes. She begins talking as if she’s already explained everything, doesn’t mention anything about the tests: You need to see a neurologist who specializes in this; none of my referrals take insurance. You stop her, want to know what this is. You hear a rustle of papers and then: We suspect it’s lupus or MS. Or it could be something else. You really need to see someone. Okay? Okay. Have a good weekend.
You sit there for hours at your desk staring at pigeons that have gathered on the roof of the apartment buildings next door. That night, you write this poem. You cannot get her voice out of your head. Have a good weekend. Who is we? What is this? Why do they suspect?
And then you think: Is this where you just won’t come back?
* * *
You will lose that self that had been with you since you were eighteen. That self is not lost youth. You were never young like that, although people often think you are younger than you are. How you loved as her, how she loved so far and wide. And how you loved her. You really did. This self had been through a lot, and this she couldn’t face. You had to let her go. You felt bad for the man who had just met her, and only a month into your relationship, you have to let her go. A month into your relationship, you call him to say that you don’t want him to go through this with you. He asks if you are home. You hang up.
You’ve been wanting to say for some time: there is no love poem, no, there is no love poem at all, like Cornelius Eady’s “I’m a Fool to Love You.”
And there is nothing like listening to Eady read it. That night you held the computer close to your ear when he whispers: “How you going to do?” You remember playing this in a poetry workshop, and your students gasping and sighing throughout. You listen to it now because the poem is a prayer, in the way that prayers are stories of how we came to be, that Eady’s blues are a Genesis as they are some irreproachable hereafter in which entire lives are staked on:
This is the way the blues works
Its sorry wonders,
Makes trouble look like
A feather bed,
Makes the wrong man’s kisses
A healing.
When you were young, there was no prayer you loved more than the V’ahavta. You’d beat your chest when you recited it, which made your parents smile. You wanted to be loved more than anything else on earth by a force you could not see. You wanted to be in those arms.
And when you listen to Eady read his poem, you are in the arms of God.
And that night the man you’ve been dating comes over to your apartment anyway. You sleep next to each other. You won’t let him hold you. You wait for him to say: How you going to do? Instead he keeps waking up. You hear him, but pretend to sleep. In the morning, you have seven texts from him, each a paragraph. He makes coffee in your kitchen as you read them. You tell him he is a fool. You’ve only known each other for a month. You are sick. They don’t even know exactly what it is, how to treat it. There will be waiting, and waiting, to see what your body does next.
That morning, you begin your life together, although he knew he was going to marry you after your first date. That morning before sunrise, he carts a gallon container that holds your urine–which you had to collect for twenty-four hours for yet another series of tests–onto two different trains, and waits for you as they draw your blood. And you pass out again, the nurse waking you softly to ask if the man outside is with you, because they don’t feel comfortable sending you home alone, and in the haze of your unfocused vision, the words he wrote to you running through the softest parts of you head, you know he’s already staked his life on you, on the very broken you, and you answer: Yes.
* * *
Before you’re entirely in, the technician squeezes your hand again. You can only fifths-feel it. The hospital is doing everything it can so you do not need a spinal tap. You’ve heard about the blood patches, the headaches after. You realize your head always kind of hurts. You consider all the emails that you can’t answer piling up.
You remember that after the concierge doctor’s call, you went to see your regular PCP at NYU, who scolded you for not seeing her in the first place, for being taken in by a posh doctor, and for revealing this self-diagnosis a year later: your mixed genes have gone to war. Your ancestors on both sides, Mexican and Jewish, had traveled long distances in short spans of time. And now lines have been drawn, sides chosen, turf wars waged in vital organs. This is not illness, but a battle for your body, for autonomy, for its borders. There is real hunger. There is Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s “The City is a Body Broken.” You want to read your doctor this poem, so she’ll understand you, that now is when “clouds come, / monsoons flood freeways, trap / old tires against barbed wire.”
You, too, have internalized all the boundaries you’ve ever lived on: the U.S.-Mexican border, the invisible yet glaring Green Line separating East from West Jerusalem. The damages accrued from these experiences have soured arteries, blood vessels, the power lines running up and down inner highways. How many times did you, too, “jump from our chainlink / bridge and only break a foot?”
Two years later, you’ll meet the poet at your last CantoMundo retreat and realize she’s the same Natalie Scenters-Zapico. You will want to say to her: My Body is some City Broken. You will want to confess: There are more guns within me than bones. But you won’t be able to tell her this, or that you read this poem to your ever-patient doctor, scrolling through your phone in an examination gown of stiff blue paper, having already torn it in two different places, and your doctor listened because the two of you have known each other for a while now. That after you told her, There are more guns within me than bones, she said, You sound like a poetic version of WebMD.
And you said: I thought you didn’t like WebMD.
And she gave a half-smile: It’s time to get those tests done again.
* * *
The technician is speaking to you through a machine while you are in a machine. And though this machine you hear a future outside this world, or perhaps how this world and others like it are made. You close your eyes and the machine fills with the images and sounds of Logan’s Run and construction sites and sci-fi flicks that end in freaky synth. If nature were a synthesizer. Here, nature is a synthesizer. And love. Love is here. Love is in these sounds, taking photos of my brain with magnets. From time to time the technician calls to you and you are half-awake in your bed at home, bodies wrapping, the bodies of your selves and beloveds and the machine and images of your brain. In the curtain fluttering overhead, there is your brain on parade, under a magnifying class, pulsing like a heart. Does your brain want to be your heart? Does it wish to be something else? Or has it had enough of you? Is it trying to escape?
You hear yourself say silently: I don’t want to lose my left side. To the other side, to static and fuzz-first light.
Now you are feeling some other’s airless summer night.
You should have been more formal about all of this, damn it. You know, life and death. You could have recited “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” during this time, or invoked the gods and the muses and the canon. Or opted to listen to classical music during this journey to othersideness.
Instead, you are under the skylight in the main dining room at Beauty & Essex, which is hidden behind a pawnshop, its door surrounded by guitars. Someone wrote a love song on one of them, ripped up her fingers, calloused her thumb, and failed.
Expired airline miles, spoiled milk, all your electronics plugged in and raging, wasting, vengeful. They desire use and immediacy, these sorts of things, like “Your Lips are Copper Wire” by Darrel Alejandro Holnes. If your desire is ever taken out of you, if you forgot “how to play with matches in paradise / and not feel the flame’s wrath,” then you’d only need to return to the poet’s question: “What love, / where there’s no risk it burns you alive?” Perhaps your body is calling for self-immolation and you mistake the aftereffects for numbness. Perhaps this new self is asking you to “leave this world big banging into / the apocalypse no one, otherwise, will survive. “ Perhaps she and your husband will have a greater love story.
But she doesn’t want you to yield. She wants you to fight, and to fight her. Please let not the fight go on forever. Let it go away one day without coming back. You don’t know how long you can last. How far now is your sanctuary, tree-lined Skillman Avenue in Sunnyside. You fear one day its world, too, will disappear, while you go on believing the brontosaurus was a dinosaur, that Pluto is a planet, that the avenue’s trees aren’t old but ancient.
The technician stops the machine to say: Twenty more minutes. I’m right here. Just let me know if you need anything. Remember: I’m here.
You are crossing a quiet street in Sunnyside where, outside a school, a teenager is dressing up the base of a street lamp: I could tell by your face no-one’s been ever been rude to you. He’s pleased you want to take a photo of it, but asks you keep him out of it, for fear of police. His mother is a cop. He’s been suspended from school, this school, and digs his fingers into the wire fence, shaking it. He tells you he should be on TV, but doesn’t know how to get there. You like that he’s hyphenated no-one. You have a friend who writes to you often how hagard he looks, always leaving out a g. Whereas you want to put double letters in everything. You tend to add a double pp to words that only have one, like shapped and hypped. Your hairstylist loves the shape of your head, and gives you a scalp massage until you’re nearly asleep. These days you can sleep anywhere. At the concerige doctor’s office, you waited for nearly an hour, and you nodded off. She awakened you by shaking your shoulders without saying a word, her silence reproachful of your inappropriate behavior in her quiet, sterile room. Her reliable room in which you would not sleep and wake up on your own terms. All the ways we can’t get there. All the ways we fail. All the times we raise our spear heading into dark caverns when we can’t even see. What use are the spear and those guitars we make ornamental, expelling our young artists, robbing them of their desire?
He says: Ten more minutes. You’re doing great. Hang in there.
A week ago, you passed by your tailor’s shop, and he came out to tell you he’d read your book. You talked about what it meant for you to live in and then leave Jerusalem, that you failed to make a life there, but then stopped yourself because you thought it might trigger that something wicked inside you, the numbness and loss of balance, that you’d lose yourself again to the warrior self and rarely does she have time for this kind of talk. Your tailor was quiet, and then took you by the arm. He, too, is small-boned, and even shorter than you are. He takes you around the block to see a tree, a very strange tree that from a distance looks like one growing out of another. But up close, you see it’s one.
Your tailor says to you: It’s two worlds in one, like you.
In the machine you hear her say: You’ll never get rid of me.
You hear her now, as you lose focus, your vision blurred, the Ativan finally kicking in as the technician peels you from the machine, his hand/your forehead and the two hands of your husband holding you, holding her—and two of everything, waiting for you. Waiting. You are waiting for an Uber with your love, you are falling asleep in the back seat with the two of him, two of each of his hands taking yours— and hers. Because he loves all of you, the whole story of you, the uncertain present of you. And if there’s only this, the last sunlight breach in which you head home, if inevitably the future is calling time, and you must go, then no, no, never take you from this, from this leave-taking, if you don’t come back again, for she is keeping watch with him, she has only known him since she was born out of this, and it is the last thing you’ll know: that the only truth and trust left is that she loves, she loves him.