Driving Backward
by Melissa Wiley
A car doesn’t have a nervous system. It has valves, pistons, an engine. Typically for most cars filling our roads and highways gasoline replaces the sacred energy streaming through our spinal columns. A car doesn’t have a nervous system but, given enough speed, still assumes momentum, still blurs its boundaries. And movement is as close as any of us ever come to dissolving our edges, to breaking briefly free of our skins, to bleeding into something else that we may find more attractive. No one knows this better than someone whose car has fallen in a ditch, someone left stranded.
Each winter, this used to happen to me. More times than I really care to remember, my tires skidded across the ice before falling off the shoulder of another southern Indiana road. Years before cell phones came into existence, I was all too familiar with the dangers presented by rural thoroughfares, which the county rarely bothered salting. Had I been born in a city with public transportation, I doubt looking back that I would have ever gone to the trouble of getting my driver’s license. Given the option, I would have chosen to avoid all those hours spent waiting for passing strangers to take me to their houses, from which I would then call my parents, telling them that once again my truck had fallen in a ditch. Had I any choice in the matter, I would have been born instead in a city, somewhere with more than books and TV for escaping my aloneness, somewhere with more bodies amid less wide and empty spaces.
There was never anywhere to go from where I lived, not really. Though I always knew this at bottom, I still longed for the only civilization available to me. I still wasted a lot of time trying to be part of it, a waste that largely stemmed from my unconscious assumption that the world outside me was where real life happened. Especially during my adolescence, life seemed to grow more real the closer I came to school, to those subdivisions in the town ten miles north of my home. Ever since I had started school in the building attached to where I also went to church on Sundays, I had felt less real than those around me for living farther away from the school than everyone else in my class.
I continued making this same mistake time and again, defining myself through my degree of isolation, even though the town itself amounted to little more than a string of fast food restaurants off a highway exit. Little else here proliferated other than gas stations, a couple churches, cheap housing. There was likewise rampant philistinism as well as boys who smoked weed in the backs of station wagons. Having no alternatives in terms of where I may have gone except to stay home with my parents, as soon as I had the means to do it, I drove myself to basketball or soccer games most weekends, where I sat on bleachers clapping only once everyone else started shouting. I drove myself home again, twenty miles or more past the speed limit, which was never a problem as no police ever patrolled those roads leading to my house and others scattered at similarly far a distance.
If there was beauty in the landscape, back then I rarely noticed. To my eyes especially after I had started high school, the space between the town and farm where I lived didn’t amount to much, to anything. Only now do those ten miles of next to nothing seem to have been almost holy, an abstract beauty I am no longer there to witness. Decades on, and those cornfields seeming to stretch beyond the horizon line now seem to have actually been a mercy, the only reality I should have needed. The ample time I was given by virtue of my isolation alone to absorb all the emptiness hovering between storage sheds and fences now seems essential, seems necessary. To create more of this inside my body also remains my nervous system’s best hope of healing. To more fully inhabit the space between muscle and bone, between vertebrae, as I have long since realized, is to come closer to where all real life happens. To summon a stream of energy through inner wilderness and wastelands is to move what I now think of as gracefully.
More than likely, I never once changed lanes with any smoothness, never once accelerated without a little lurching. The first time that I drove the pickup once belonging to my dad’s younger brother, Nelson, was along the rural road outside our driveway. The road lay open, and I was driving slowly. No other cars could be heard or glimpsed in the distance. Drumming his fingers against the vinyl beside me, my dad was growing impatient and soon told me to pick up speed. Once I did, the truck went crooked. It started moving farther to the right, seemingly on its own, the faster I kept going. As I accelerated, it came closer to those telephone poles closest, only feet away from my dad as he sat shotgun. Seeing I wasn’t turning the truck straight again, he immediately started yelling, and in response my grip on the wheel only further loosened. My first time driving, and I nearly surrendered to the truck’s momentum completely.
Had my dad not put his hands on the wheel and turned the truck to the left without overcorrecting, we would have crashed and died or sustained some serious kind of injury. My mom would have found us lying dead or immobilized in a ditch not far from the mailbox at the end of our driveway. From all other cars’ absence, from the placid look of everything otherwise, the accident would have resembled a suicidal mission. As it was, my dad turned to me with his eyes wild and reddened after I turned off the ignition in the middle of the road, long before we reached a stop sign. Horror stricken, he asked me if I had a death wish. I didn’t know, and I don’t believe I gave him an answer. We sat instead for a while and listened to the silence once he repeated the question. He had meant the question to be rhetorical, but already I doubted whether I wanted to keep going on if life was going to always want to turn me in its own direction, not allow me to travel straight ahead, proceeding as expected.
My dad’s younger brother and only sibling, Nelson, whose truck I drove until I left for college, had shot himself with a rifle meant for pigeons when I was in kindergarten. Even though I couldn’t remember learning this at the time, it also seemed by the time I was a teenager as if I had always known the story. He had committed unthinkable carnage less than three miles from where my dad and I were sitting once I stopped the engine. Other than the fact he had spent his whole life in a place where real life never happened, I knew nothing about him personally, none of his talents or hobbies or interests or endearing idiosyncrasies. More than likely, because of how he ended things, he had, like myself at that time and for decades after, never thought to look for a deeper reality in himself alone, inside his own body, having never grown old enough or had enough experiences to know this was an option.
A truck may not have a nervous system, but my private suspicion even back then was this particular truck had absorbed some of its previous owner’s depression. Its inner workings had stayed sympathetic to Nelson’s intensive pitch of emotional pain, which in life never had found real expression except through the final firing of a bullet. To my adolescent way of thinking, Nelson’s truck still preferred an easy death to the protracted pain of living. If nothing else, to me it was clear this truck preferred resting in the shadows of my dad’s tractors, growing dusty beside the grain bins, to traveling long distances, all of them too long to ever reach any real civilization.
This faded blue pickup was so clearly tired of trying to be someplace other than it was, tired of further escape attempts, all of them destined to be fruitless. I was only fifteen then, only practicing for my driver’s test, but in my own way felt deeply tired as this machine must have been. Part of me must have known, no matter where I went, I would never arrive anyplace different. I would always be stranded amid my own inner wastelands, and these were without trace of civilizing influences altogether. However much I might have denied it to myself, already I could sense the inevitability of never driving anywhere I was not, of never escaping my own feeling of isolation as easily as this. The part of me that realized this truth must have also been the part that was willing to let a machine drive me where it wanted.
Were my dad still alive to hear this theory, of course he would tell me it’s nonsense. Unlike his oldest daughter, he was someone who dismissed the suffering that arises from ordinary circumstances, from next to nothing. If a theory or explanation to his mind lacked logic, it could never be true for him. For his entire life, for as long as I knew him, he failed to recognize the power of paradoxes. That the strangest things are also often the truest never dissuaded him from believing there were sensible solutions to most problems, despite his only brother having died a death defying sense and reason. My dad always maintained, for instance, I had willed my neurological condition into existence. He always assumed I could easily turn my neck and face straight ahead, holding my neck still if I only wanted. He believed until his death I could stop the muscle spasms, ushering a smoother flow of energy through my nervous system, if I were to summon more resolve, becoming a more practical person.
Though he never said this explicitly, he must have thought I had made my body invent its own peculiar reason to quit driving once I moved to a city for college, where I could rely on public transportation. He must have believed this was my way of justifying my preference for sitting in the backs of trains and buses, remaining in this as in other ways wholly passive, rather than navigating my own way through traffic. Feeling I was taking the easier way, finding his own strength through sheer exertion, he probably had as equally little understanding of cervical dystonia in the end as he did of clinical depression. Because his own body never betrayed him until the very end, he had the luxury of believing everyone else who looked healthy on the surface could assert his same autonomy. Because him being right would mean there would be clearer solutions, sometimes I allow myself to believe he was right about me and right about Nelson. All our suffering may have been and, in concerning my neurological condition, may still be self-inflicted.
For as long as I drove the only vehicle that ever became familiar to me, whenever I took my hands off the wheel, for even a second, it would immediately start turning to the right on its own. From the beginning for me, Nelson’s truck had a clear aversion for staring ahead, a stubborn resistance to turning toward its left. I know now the truck’s wheels were only out of alignment. I know now too someone could have fixed this—had my dad not, wanting to save money on a mechanic, felt I could simply grip the wheel a little harder instead. Though it would be ridiculous to say the truck was laying a blueprint, training me in some ways to adapt to changes in my body, within four years, by my second year of college, my neck started to chronically mimic the truck’s same tendency. Certain muscles started to replicate the tendencies of a machine whose original owner decided not to live past age thirty. Beginning when I was nineteen, my head would turn itself to the right even when there was no need, when this wasn’t desirable, when looking straight ahead was all I wanted. Unable to keep its own muscles at rest, more and more my neck started shaking, especially when I felt people were watching me, whenever I grew self-conscious. After I eventually went to a neurologist, I received my diagnosis. No theory as to what had led to this strange blockage between brain and body was ever given.
To drive a car seems to require very little of the body, which remains mostly stationary in the driver’s seat. Your legs can be in the poorest of physical condition—you could be in such poor shape you grow winded from only minor exertions—and still you can travel the same speed as anyone else along a highway. It is only your neck whose movement needs to stay fluid to automatic. It is these muscles alone that have to turn your head from right to left and then back again when crossing intersections, when changing lanes, avoiding collision. From age sixteen to eighteen, when I did most of my driving, no one seemed to notice anything was wrong with me, probably because for the most part it still wasn’t. The sacred energy whose internal movement through the body’s pathways—the movement that I have since come to define as life itself in essence—was still in the process of getting itself stuck, still becoming stagnant in my cervical spine, perhaps the body’s most important highway. By the time I moved into my first Chicago apartment, owing to this loss of space here, to these synaptic lanes being overcrowded, I felt more isolated than I ever had on our small farm five hours away. The empty spaces between muscle and bone, between my seven cervical vertebrae, seemed to vanish. Without me wanting this to happen, the emptiness that had perhaps allowed more energy to flow smoothly for most of my life until then, had begun contracting.
Only before this became my shame and the constant source of anxiety, before I had been given a medical reason to stop driving, I drove from my farm, back and forth to town again, spurred by desire alone—desire for a life with more reality as well as wanting to simply be closer to male bodies, simply to watch them. I almost always drove Nelson’s truck well past the speed limit, trying to shorten the ten miles between my real life of isolation and what I wanted it to be instead, speeding past all the emptiness that I never stopped to realize then might have been salvation. Beginning in my early teens, desire would wake me in the night and leave me writhing. Desire and desire alone kept doing this even as I ended up graduating high school without having had a single sexual experience in Nelson’s truck bed, in the back of any station wagon.
The evening I got my driver’s license, I drove immediately to where my best friend lived, which happened to be almost as far as my own home from any fast food places. We had gone to the same Catholic grammar school until we were both twelve, though not long after junior high started, her parents made the decision to homeschool Ella along with all her siblings. Her parents had consciously chosen to inhabit a more separate reality, exacerbating what I saw as the main problem of rural life, meaning my own life, from which I had no way as yet to tell the difference. As a result of her parents’ decision, since the age of twelve Ella had become more isolated than I was myself. In theory, she should have felt even lonelier than I did, and there were inevitably many times when she did so without telling me. She was also beautiful and outgoing. Blonde and lithe and funny. When she went somewhere in public, people noticed. Even when she was essentially stuck in the country, boys seemed to find her without her ever needing to look for them. They drove long distances to take her places where something closer to real life flourished. Meanwhile her parents often revoked her driving privileges for small infractions, but she still managed to leave her home at regular intervals, still managed to bridge the distance between herself and other bodies. Compared to my own awkwardness, she moved gracefully in a place where potholes were often never filled but with time only widened.
In addition to all her pleasure and all her challenges, she managed to also hold open a space for me, to make me feel as though I were really living even when we stayed where we were, not leaving our houses. To this day, she does this despite living in another city. Knowing her as I have done too now for decades, I have also come to believe that sometimes beauty springs from not only good genetics but an ease within the body, a willingness to fully inhabit its spaces. A lifetime of perhaps never wanting to leave her skin, never going absent from her life or body, has left Ella still sparkling, still radiant. Observing her throughout my life at different periods has taught me that you need to make yourself some kind of bed in the space between muscle and bone, between vertebrae. You must be home, be present, before you can invite someone else in. Busy as her life now is in Manhattan, she seems to bridge each distance, stepping onto crowded subways and waiting in line at any deli, with a subtle knowing that this too is living. I have often seen her move quickly but never in a panic. There are likely few to no real wastelands inside her body.
Before I ever drove the pickup truck that once belonged to Nelson, its bed alone had often been enough for me. For a few years at least, this hardest of all possible beds at times felt almost soft, spacious. By the time I got my driver’s license, I must have forgotten how once thinking of boys alone, desiring them without the boys themselves ever knowing, was its own fulfillment, even delicious. Before I started driving, I often lay in Nelson’s truck bed, wholly passive. I spread my limbs out across its steel rivets and filled some of its emptiness, not needing anyone to fill more of it beside me. In summer, this was where I preferred to sit or lie down and ride while my dad did the driving, especially on humid Sundays when we went to the manmade lake where my parents waterskied and sunbathed. Whatever else happened, whether any boys ever paid attention to me or didn’t, there was love in that bed, the only thing I knew about the truck that perhaps my uncle Nelson never had. There was desire there more than desire’s fulfillment. I used to lay a towel down against its steel mattress as the sun was setting, after I had swum for hours among skeins of seaweed.
For the hour’s drive back home from the lake as the cooler air smoothed my skin, I stretched my body supine and watched the clouds changing. This was one of the few times of my life at that period when I felt life was as it should be. Could I have only stayed there, inside that rusting truck bed until my life’s end, had there never been a need for me to learn to drive myself other places, that would have been close enough to real living had desire not changed me. Even as an adult, my nervous system has always been at its calmest when I have only observed life, when I have done little to no living, when I have become a child again in this way. Between the clouds and me there hovered a space that I knew to be holy as my dad drove home well past the speed limit, leaving me to fly upward for a second as we passed over potholes, the edge of rocky ditches.
Watching the sky turn pink then fade into darkness, my own boundaries would then grow fuzzy. A little in love with a couple different boys in my classes, each one hardly mattering, I projected them onto the faces of clouds. I fantasized about kissing them without caring whether any would ever do this. To come close enough to touch someone, to be touched by them—that wasn’t the point then. So long as I didn’t have to drive it myself, so long as I could lie in a hard bed with only sky for ceiling, Nelson’s truck was to me completely whole, completely private. It was an outer extension of my own inner vastness, a smoothly functioning nervous system whose strong preference for turning itself to the right I had no way yet of knowing.
The first time I drove down Ella’s driveway, she ran onto her front porch laughing. She later confessed she had seen me from inside her living room, driving a little crooked before I blared the horn to get her attention. After asking her parents if she could go into town with me, I played a Janis Joplin cassette tape, when we both sang then shouted all the lyrics to “Break Another Little Piece of My Heart,” even though the last thing in the world we wanted was to have our hearts broken.
The boy I thought I was in love with, someone I saw every weekday in two of my classes, worked weekends at a place best known for its roast beef sandwiches. Saturday afternoon, and neither of us were hungry, but Ella still agreed to come inside with me to order fries and a sandwich. Once I parked and left the truck with the keys inside my pocket, Ella stepped out and laughed at the terrible job I’d made of it. Unlike every other vehicle ordering fast food here, my truck was angled in the opposite direction of all those yellow lines drawn for parking spaces. The lines all tilted uniformly to the left, and Nelson’s truck was crossing them at a transverse angle, announcing its rebellion, though this had not been something I intended. The truck and I had both turned right without thinking about it, taking up two parking spaces.
As far as I knew, Ella never had a chance of meeting the boy I was in love with, except when she went with me to buy roast beef sandwiches, except when she instructed me how to flirt before I went in, before I realized I couldn’t. Being homeschooled, however, must have had its freedoms as well as its restrictions. A couple of times she commented how sensual she found his lips, his eyelids, his movements. He took long strides, she noticed, with a scooping motion of his arms that scooped nothing, even though whenever we ordered food from him he was always standing stationary. She must have seen him, then, I realized, other places, must have observed the same things I had only in the school hallways. She must have lived closer to reality than I did while still also living among cornfields stretching into what seemed to be an infinite distance. She must have gone places, probably parties, without me. She has always moved fluidly, always deftly negotiated boundaries at which I’ve jerked and hesitated.
I never knew how she met a girl in my geometry class named Kelly, with whom for a couple years I took oil painting classes on Wednesday evenings. I never knew how the two of them became friends, especially because they seemed to have met each other recently, not known each other like Ella and I had from grammar school when we were children. I no longer remember how the three of us started spending time together, though in truth we may not have done so much at all, come to think about it. The one time that stands out in my memory—the one time that may or may not have contributed to the development of my condition—may only make it seem as if there were more times than happened in reality. I know I never cared overmuch, though, for Kelly, not as much as I probably should have, given she was easygoing and pleasant. She and Ella obviously had much more in common. Both liked louder music, probably smoked some weed together. For a while, both wore similar tie-dyed dresses, while I wore the same style of sweaters and jeans that my mom wore herself in her later forties and early fifties.
Looking back, I can easily imagine how Kelly would have rather done without me. Ella had to have been the one to insist on asking me to come along at times, though sometimes I told her no, I wasn’t interested, trying to convince myself that to stay home reading or practicing the piano was enough for me. Though sometimes I tried pretending desire for touch without any touch coming in return was still delicious, my body knew by now I was lying. My body knew something now was missing, and so perhaps I began to also miss the healing that comes from inhabiting your own spaces, from being more inside your body than your head, allowing your whole organism to establish a balance. Maybe this was when all the real tension developed, when too much energy became locked in my mind alone, at a time when I also realized I wasn’t as fond as Ella and Kelly of the grunge music that was popular then, when I found myself unable to tolerate any form of smoking. Had there been someone to make love to me in the back of his station wagon, we would likely have done so quietly. In our painting classes on Wednesday evenings, I also thought Kelly’s paintings were sloppy and careless. In morning trigonometry, which was the only class we ever had in school together, she rarely answered any of our teacher’s questions. Her grades were probably poor to middling, though she never seemed to mind this. However unfair this may have been on my part, however motivated by jealousy, I assumed there was nothing about her capable of understanding all the space and emptiness I needed simply to function normally, to paint pictures that rendered their subjects with precision and earn good grades in all my classes.
The Saturday night I spent with Ella and Kelly that I now wish I hadn’t, Kelly was driving her own pickup truck, one that sat much lower to the ground than Nelson’s. Hers was painted the color of rust already, while Nelson’s was after all these years still only rusting at its edges. Though neither vehicle was a desirable one to drive for a teenage girl with the smallest pretensions to coolness, the trucks themselves in my mind could not have been more different. While the bed of Nelson’s had once been a place for dreaming, for almost broaching transcendence, Kelly’s felt too low to the ground, too far from any cloud faces, to ever allow for this kind of thinking. Kelly made her own hemp jewelry, baked pot brownies. From my perspective then, she was too close to the ground as well, too rife with earthiness, with too large of breasts for her frame, with no sense of urgency about doing well on tests or pop quizzes, no anxiety about earning a scholarship for college. She was much too at home in this world for me to feel comfortable in her presence. She also probably had too many of her own sexual dalliances to see the same sense, like myself at times and like Nelson obviously as well, of sometimes wanting to leave this realm entirely, of longing to leave your skin and blur into cloud bodies. Mostly, though, I resented her intrusion into my closest friendship. Kelly must have sensed this, however poor her grades, however careless her paintings.
There is so much that I do not remember about the evening except for its ending. I no longer remember where we were going, what we were doing exactly, though it could not have been anything important or exciting, nothing requiring money, because none of us ever had any. No one was smoking pot or drinking as far as I recall, but for some reason that I have likewise long forgotten Kelly had stopped her car in a vacant parking lot not far from our high school. The whole world by that time was darkness, and all the other parking spaces were filled only with the ghosts of cars that had since gone elsewhere. Kelly left the car and wandered off toward a row of bushes, probably to smoke a cigarette, though maybe just to pee. All I know for certain is that I had been sitting shotgun, with Ella sitting in the middle, for as long as we were driving, and my legs felt restless. I know that I took advantage of Kelly’s absence to leave the car as well and, after a little walk around the parking lot, felt drawn to her truck bed. The night was warm—it must have been summer or very close to it—and I decided to lie down against its steel rivets as if I were a child again, as if I had just finished swimming for hours among tangles of seaweed. As if my dad, not Kelly, were driving me home from a manmade lake again.
I have no idea now where we were planning to go next or if we even had a destination. I know I soon stood up, though, and started jumping. With my teenage languor having given way all too quickly to high spirits, I know I did this just as Kelly started walking back from the bushes. Because her truck was so much lower to the ground than Nelson’s, because now I was feeling free and giddy, I kept jumping as she and Ella were having their own private conversation. Kelly’s truck was meanwhile bouncing along with my body, springy as a mattress, and I felt no wish to slow my momentum as I bounced a little higher with each passing second. There is every possibility, I realize now, that I was doing this because I had convinced Kelly to drive to the fast food place where the boy I was in love with was working. On the pretext of buying another roast beef sandwich, I may have felt I was closer to seeing his face again, his lips and arms and eyelids. This may easily explain why I felt so buoyant, why I felt so free now testing Kelly’s truck springs, which were more responsive than Nelson’s. Some spark of sexual excitement might have been the reason, might not have been.
Once Ella slipped back inside the truck cab after stretching her own legs for a bit, Kelly joined her. She sat back behind the steering wheel, though I never heard her turn on the ignition. It never occurred to me that she might not wait for me to come and sit shotgun again. Were all her paintings not so messy, so lacking in precision, I still might be tempted to believe she did what came next on purpose. Even at the time, though, I knew she hadn’t. Kelly in her characteristic casualness must have assumed I was going to ride inside her truck bed. She must have thought I was lying down or sitting once she started driving while in truth I kept jumping. I have always felt that she did nothing more malicious than forget to look in her rearview mirror for someone she probably wished were not tagging along to begin with. Her indifference toward me may have made her carelessness a little easier, but the carelessness was there anyway. I doubt I ever jumped much higher than a couple inches, but her truck bed was too shallow to catch me. I jumped, and her truck left me behind once she pressed on the accelerator. I didn’t fall on my feet but directly on my head, my crown hitting the concrete. Midair, something turned my body, an energy that maybe had its own death wish.
I couldn’t see Ella once she ran to me. I had gone completely blind, though only for a couple minutes. My ears were ringing. The ringing was louder and more piercing than anything I have ever heard since. I could hear nothing except for a sustained high pitch that continued for hours later, until I fell asleep. Kelly put her hand on the small of my back, asking if I was alright when she must have known I wasn’t. I couldn’t hear or see then, but nothing seemed to be broken because I could move when the two of them helped me up from the ground and back inside the truck cab. Without any apparent injury, no one else would have to know this happened. We were in agreement. Ella helped me sit beside her again, and my vision gradually returned, though things stayed blurry at the edges. Once Kelly drove me home and I walked back inside my kitchen, my parents were sleeping already, all the lights in the house making way for nothing but darkness. Next morning, nothing appeared wrong to my dad or mom. As far as they knew, the night before had been little different from any other that I spent driving into town and back again, wasting money on gasoline.
I have had decades now to think about it, and I don’t believe this incident necessarily hastened on my neurological condition, which appeared too much in stages for this to be an overriding factor, whose symptoms did not become chronic until about four years later. The most this accident may have done was to weaken an already weakening connection between my brain and lower nervous system. The accident with Kelly may have only taken advantage of a growing pattern, of a vital energy now tending to get stuck in places, leaving other areas vacant. Of course, I can never know for certain. My neurologist has told me often enough this condition usually appears at random, without apparent external cause. I never jumped in the bed, however, of someone else’s truck again, never lay against another one’s steel rivets. As more time passed, desire became even more painful, less delicious.
Each winter, this used to happen to me. More times than I really care to remember, my tires skidded across the ice before falling off the shoulder of another southern Indiana road. Years before cell phones came into existence, I was all too familiar with the dangers presented by rural thoroughfares, which the county rarely bothered salting. Had I been born in a city with public transportation, I doubt looking back that I would have ever gone to the trouble of getting my driver’s license. Given the option, I would have chosen to avoid all those hours spent waiting for passing strangers to take me to their houses, from which I would then call my parents, telling them that once again my truck had fallen in a ditch. Had I any choice in the matter, I would have been born instead in a city, somewhere with more than books and TV for escaping my aloneness, somewhere with more bodies amid less wide and empty spaces.
There was never anywhere to go from where I lived, not really. Though I always knew this at bottom, I still longed for the only civilization available to me. I still wasted a lot of time trying to be part of it, a waste that largely stemmed from my unconscious assumption that the world outside me was where real life happened. Especially during my adolescence, life seemed to grow more real the closer I came to school, to those subdivisions in the town ten miles north of my home. Ever since I had started school in the building attached to where I also went to church on Sundays, I had felt less real than those around me for living farther away from the school than everyone else in my class.
I continued making this same mistake time and again, defining myself through my degree of isolation, even though the town itself amounted to little more than a string of fast food restaurants off a highway exit. Little else here proliferated other than gas stations, a couple churches, cheap housing. There was likewise rampant philistinism as well as boys who smoked weed in the backs of station wagons. Having no alternatives in terms of where I may have gone except to stay home with my parents, as soon as I had the means to do it, I drove myself to basketball or soccer games most weekends, where I sat on bleachers clapping only once everyone else started shouting. I drove myself home again, twenty miles or more past the speed limit, which was never a problem as no police ever patrolled those roads leading to my house and others scattered at similarly far a distance.
If there was beauty in the landscape, back then I rarely noticed. To my eyes especially after I had started high school, the space between the town and farm where I lived didn’t amount to much, to anything. Only now do those ten miles of next to nothing seem to have been almost holy, an abstract beauty I am no longer there to witness. Decades on, and those cornfields seeming to stretch beyond the horizon line now seem to have actually been a mercy, the only reality I should have needed. The ample time I was given by virtue of my isolation alone to absorb all the emptiness hovering between storage sheds and fences now seems essential, seems necessary. To create more of this inside my body also remains my nervous system’s best hope of healing. To more fully inhabit the space between muscle and bone, between vertebrae, as I have long since realized, is to come closer to where all real life happens. To summon a stream of energy through inner wilderness and wastelands is to move what I now think of as gracefully.
More than likely, I never once changed lanes with any smoothness, never once accelerated without a little lurching. The first time that I drove the pickup once belonging to my dad’s younger brother, Nelson, was along the rural road outside our driveway. The road lay open, and I was driving slowly. No other cars could be heard or glimpsed in the distance. Drumming his fingers against the vinyl beside me, my dad was growing impatient and soon told me to pick up speed. Once I did, the truck went crooked. It started moving farther to the right, seemingly on its own, the faster I kept going. As I accelerated, it came closer to those telephone poles closest, only feet away from my dad as he sat shotgun. Seeing I wasn’t turning the truck straight again, he immediately started yelling, and in response my grip on the wheel only further loosened. My first time driving, and I nearly surrendered to the truck’s momentum completely.
Had my dad not put his hands on the wheel and turned the truck to the left without overcorrecting, we would have crashed and died or sustained some serious kind of injury. My mom would have found us lying dead or immobilized in a ditch not far from the mailbox at the end of our driveway. From all other cars’ absence, from the placid look of everything otherwise, the accident would have resembled a suicidal mission. As it was, my dad turned to me with his eyes wild and reddened after I turned off the ignition in the middle of the road, long before we reached a stop sign. Horror stricken, he asked me if I had a death wish. I didn’t know, and I don’t believe I gave him an answer. We sat instead for a while and listened to the silence once he repeated the question. He had meant the question to be rhetorical, but already I doubted whether I wanted to keep going on if life was going to always want to turn me in its own direction, not allow me to travel straight ahead, proceeding as expected.
My dad’s younger brother and only sibling, Nelson, whose truck I drove until I left for college, had shot himself with a rifle meant for pigeons when I was in kindergarten. Even though I couldn’t remember learning this at the time, it also seemed by the time I was a teenager as if I had always known the story. He had committed unthinkable carnage less than three miles from where my dad and I were sitting once I stopped the engine. Other than the fact he had spent his whole life in a place where real life never happened, I knew nothing about him personally, none of his talents or hobbies or interests or endearing idiosyncrasies. More than likely, because of how he ended things, he had, like myself at that time and for decades after, never thought to look for a deeper reality in himself alone, inside his own body, having never grown old enough or had enough experiences to know this was an option.
A truck may not have a nervous system, but my private suspicion even back then was this particular truck had absorbed some of its previous owner’s depression. Its inner workings had stayed sympathetic to Nelson’s intensive pitch of emotional pain, which in life never had found real expression except through the final firing of a bullet. To my adolescent way of thinking, Nelson’s truck still preferred an easy death to the protracted pain of living. If nothing else, to me it was clear this truck preferred resting in the shadows of my dad’s tractors, growing dusty beside the grain bins, to traveling long distances, all of them too long to ever reach any real civilization.
This faded blue pickup was so clearly tired of trying to be someplace other than it was, tired of further escape attempts, all of them destined to be fruitless. I was only fifteen then, only practicing for my driver’s test, but in my own way felt deeply tired as this machine must have been. Part of me must have known, no matter where I went, I would never arrive anyplace different. I would always be stranded amid my own inner wastelands, and these were without trace of civilizing influences altogether. However much I might have denied it to myself, already I could sense the inevitability of never driving anywhere I was not, of never escaping my own feeling of isolation as easily as this. The part of me that realized this truth must have also been the part that was willing to let a machine drive me where it wanted.
Were my dad still alive to hear this theory, of course he would tell me it’s nonsense. Unlike his oldest daughter, he was someone who dismissed the suffering that arises from ordinary circumstances, from next to nothing. If a theory or explanation to his mind lacked logic, it could never be true for him. For his entire life, for as long as I knew him, he failed to recognize the power of paradoxes. That the strangest things are also often the truest never dissuaded him from believing there were sensible solutions to most problems, despite his only brother having died a death defying sense and reason. My dad always maintained, for instance, I had willed my neurological condition into existence. He always assumed I could easily turn my neck and face straight ahead, holding my neck still if I only wanted. He believed until his death I could stop the muscle spasms, ushering a smoother flow of energy through my nervous system, if I were to summon more resolve, becoming a more practical person.
Though he never said this explicitly, he must have thought I had made my body invent its own peculiar reason to quit driving once I moved to a city for college, where I could rely on public transportation. He must have believed this was my way of justifying my preference for sitting in the backs of trains and buses, remaining in this as in other ways wholly passive, rather than navigating my own way through traffic. Feeling I was taking the easier way, finding his own strength through sheer exertion, he probably had as equally little understanding of cervical dystonia in the end as he did of clinical depression. Because his own body never betrayed him until the very end, he had the luxury of believing everyone else who looked healthy on the surface could assert his same autonomy. Because him being right would mean there would be clearer solutions, sometimes I allow myself to believe he was right about me and right about Nelson. All our suffering may have been and, in concerning my neurological condition, may still be self-inflicted.
For as long as I drove the only vehicle that ever became familiar to me, whenever I took my hands off the wheel, for even a second, it would immediately start turning to the right on its own. From the beginning for me, Nelson’s truck had a clear aversion for staring ahead, a stubborn resistance to turning toward its left. I know now the truck’s wheels were only out of alignment. I know now too someone could have fixed this—had my dad not, wanting to save money on a mechanic, felt I could simply grip the wheel a little harder instead. Though it would be ridiculous to say the truck was laying a blueprint, training me in some ways to adapt to changes in my body, within four years, by my second year of college, my neck started to chronically mimic the truck’s same tendency. Certain muscles started to replicate the tendencies of a machine whose original owner decided not to live past age thirty. Beginning when I was nineteen, my head would turn itself to the right even when there was no need, when this wasn’t desirable, when looking straight ahead was all I wanted. Unable to keep its own muscles at rest, more and more my neck started shaking, especially when I felt people were watching me, whenever I grew self-conscious. After I eventually went to a neurologist, I received my diagnosis. No theory as to what had led to this strange blockage between brain and body was ever given.
To drive a car seems to require very little of the body, which remains mostly stationary in the driver’s seat. Your legs can be in the poorest of physical condition—you could be in such poor shape you grow winded from only minor exertions—and still you can travel the same speed as anyone else along a highway. It is only your neck whose movement needs to stay fluid to automatic. It is these muscles alone that have to turn your head from right to left and then back again when crossing intersections, when changing lanes, avoiding collision. From age sixteen to eighteen, when I did most of my driving, no one seemed to notice anything was wrong with me, probably because for the most part it still wasn’t. The sacred energy whose internal movement through the body’s pathways—the movement that I have since come to define as life itself in essence—was still in the process of getting itself stuck, still becoming stagnant in my cervical spine, perhaps the body’s most important highway. By the time I moved into my first Chicago apartment, owing to this loss of space here, to these synaptic lanes being overcrowded, I felt more isolated than I ever had on our small farm five hours away. The empty spaces between muscle and bone, between my seven cervical vertebrae, seemed to vanish. Without me wanting this to happen, the emptiness that had perhaps allowed more energy to flow smoothly for most of my life until then, had begun contracting.
Only before this became my shame and the constant source of anxiety, before I had been given a medical reason to stop driving, I drove from my farm, back and forth to town again, spurred by desire alone—desire for a life with more reality as well as wanting to simply be closer to male bodies, simply to watch them. I almost always drove Nelson’s truck well past the speed limit, trying to shorten the ten miles between my real life of isolation and what I wanted it to be instead, speeding past all the emptiness that I never stopped to realize then might have been salvation. Beginning in my early teens, desire would wake me in the night and leave me writhing. Desire and desire alone kept doing this even as I ended up graduating high school without having had a single sexual experience in Nelson’s truck bed, in the back of any station wagon.
The evening I got my driver’s license, I drove immediately to where my best friend lived, which happened to be almost as far as my own home from any fast food places. We had gone to the same Catholic grammar school until we were both twelve, though not long after junior high started, her parents made the decision to homeschool Ella along with all her siblings. Her parents had consciously chosen to inhabit a more separate reality, exacerbating what I saw as the main problem of rural life, meaning my own life, from which I had no way as yet to tell the difference. As a result of her parents’ decision, since the age of twelve Ella had become more isolated than I was myself. In theory, she should have felt even lonelier than I did, and there were inevitably many times when she did so without telling me. She was also beautiful and outgoing. Blonde and lithe and funny. When she went somewhere in public, people noticed. Even when she was essentially stuck in the country, boys seemed to find her without her ever needing to look for them. They drove long distances to take her places where something closer to real life flourished. Meanwhile her parents often revoked her driving privileges for small infractions, but she still managed to leave her home at regular intervals, still managed to bridge the distance between herself and other bodies. Compared to my own awkwardness, she moved gracefully in a place where potholes were often never filled but with time only widened.
In addition to all her pleasure and all her challenges, she managed to also hold open a space for me, to make me feel as though I were really living even when we stayed where we were, not leaving our houses. To this day, she does this despite living in another city. Knowing her as I have done too now for decades, I have also come to believe that sometimes beauty springs from not only good genetics but an ease within the body, a willingness to fully inhabit its spaces. A lifetime of perhaps never wanting to leave her skin, never going absent from her life or body, has left Ella still sparkling, still radiant. Observing her throughout my life at different periods has taught me that you need to make yourself some kind of bed in the space between muscle and bone, between vertebrae. You must be home, be present, before you can invite someone else in. Busy as her life now is in Manhattan, she seems to bridge each distance, stepping onto crowded subways and waiting in line at any deli, with a subtle knowing that this too is living. I have often seen her move quickly but never in a panic. There are likely few to no real wastelands inside her body.
Before I ever drove the pickup truck that once belonged to Nelson, its bed alone had often been enough for me. For a few years at least, this hardest of all possible beds at times felt almost soft, spacious. By the time I got my driver’s license, I must have forgotten how once thinking of boys alone, desiring them without the boys themselves ever knowing, was its own fulfillment, even delicious. Before I started driving, I often lay in Nelson’s truck bed, wholly passive. I spread my limbs out across its steel rivets and filled some of its emptiness, not needing anyone to fill more of it beside me. In summer, this was where I preferred to sit or lie down and ride while my dad did the driving, especially on humid Sundays when we went to the manmade lake where my parents waterskied and sunbathed. Whatever else happened, whether any boys ever paid attention to me or didn’t, there was love in that bed, the only thing I knew about the truck that perhaps my uncle Nelson never had. There was desire there more than desire’s fulfillment. I used to lay a towel down against its steel mattress as the sun was setting, after I had swum for hours among skeins of seaweed.
For the hour’s drive back home from the lake as the cooler air smoothed my skin, I stretched my body supine and watched the clouds changing. This was one of the few times of my life at that period when I felt life was as it should be. Could I have only stayed there, inside that rusting truck bed until my life’s end, had there never been a need for me to learn to drive myself other places, that would have been close enough to real living had desire not changed me. Even as an adult, my nervous system has always been at its calmest when I have only observed life, when I have done little to no living, when I have become a child again in this way. Between the clouds and me there hovered a space that I knew to be holy as my dad drove home well past the speed limit, leaving me to fly upward for a second as we passed over potholes, the edge of rocky ditches.
Watching the sky turn pink then fade into darkness, my own boundaries would then grow fuzzy. A little in love with a couple different boys in my classes, each one hardly mattering, I projected them onto the faces of clouds. I fantasized about kissing them without caring whether any would ever do this. To come close enough to touch someone, to be touched by them—that wasn’t the point then. So long as I didn’t have to drive it myself, so long as I could lie in a hard bed with only sky for ceiling, Nelson’s truck was to me completely whole, completely private. It was an outer extension of my own inner vastness, a smoothly functioning nervous system whose strong preference for turning itself to the right I had no way yet of knowing.
The first time I drove down Ella’s driveway, she ran onto her front porch laughing. She later confessed she had seen me from inside her living room, driving a little crooked before I blared the horn to get her attention. After asking her parents if she could go into town with me, I played a Janis Joplin cassette tape, when we both sang then shouted all the lyrics to “Break Another Little Piece of My Heart,” even though the last thing in the world we wanted was to have our hearts broken.
The boy I thought I was in love with, someone I saw every weekday in two of my classes, worked weekends at a place best known for its roast beef sandwiches. Saturday afternoon, and neither of us were hungry, but Ella still agreed to come inside with me to order fries and a sandwich. Once I parked and left the truck with the keys inside my pocket, Ella stepped out and laughed at the terrible job I’d made of it. Unlike every other vehicle ordering fast food here, my truck was angled in the opposite direction of all those yellow lines drawn for parking spaces. The lines all tilted uniformly to the left, and Nelson’s truck was crossing them at a transverse angle, announcing its rebellion, though this had not been something I intended. The truck and I had both turned right without thinking about it, taking up two parking spaces.
As far as I knew, Ella never had a chance of meeting the boy I was in love with, except when she went with me to buy roast beef sandwiches, except when she instructed me how to flirt before I went in, before I realized I couldn’t. Being homeschooled, however, must have had its freedoms as well as its restrictions. A couple of times she commented how sensual she found his lips, his eyelids, his movements. He took long strides, she noticed, with a scooping motion of his arms that scooped nothing, even though whenever we ordered food from him he was always standing stationary. She must have seen him, then, I realized, other places, must have observed the same things I had only in the school hallways. She must have lived closer to reality than I did while still also living among cornfields stretching into what seemed to be an infinite distance. She must have gone places, probably parties, without me. She has always moved fluidly, always deftly negotiated boundaries at which I’ve jerked and hesitated.
I never knew how she met a girl in my geometry class named Kelly, with whom for a couple years I took oil painting classes on Wednesday evenings. I never knew how the two of them became friends, especially because they seemed to have met each other recently, not known each other like Ella and I had from grammar school when we were children. I no longer remember how the three of us started spending time together, though in truth we may not have done so much at all, come to think about it. The one time that stands out in my memory—the one time that may or may not have contributed to the development of my condition—may only make it seem as if there were more times than happened in reality. I know I never cared overmuch, though, for Kelly, not as much as I probably should have, given she was easygoing and pleasant. She and Ella obviously had much more in common. Both liked louder music, probably smoked some weed together. For a while, both wore similar tie-dyed dresses, while I wore the same style of sweaters and jeans that my mom wore herself in her later forties and early fifties.
Looking back, I can easily imagine how Kelly would have rather done without me. Ella had to have been the one to insist on asking me to come along at times, though sometimes I told her no, I wasn’t interested, trying to convince myself that to stay home reading or practicing the piano was enough for me. Though sometimes I tried pretending desire for touch without any touch coming in return was still delicious, my body knew by now I was lying. My body knew something now was missing, and so perhaps I began to also miss the healing that comes from inhabiting your own spaces, from being more inside your body than your head, allowing your whole organism to establish a balance. Maybe this was when all the real tension developed, when too much energy became locked in my mind alone, at a time when I also realized I wasn’t as fond as Ella and Kelly of the grunge music that was popular then, when I found myself unable to tolerate any form of smoking. Had there been someone to make love to me in the back of his station wagon, we would likely have done so quietly. In our painting classes on Wednesday evenings, I also thought Kelly’s paintings were sloppy and careless. In morning trigonometry, which was the only class we ever had in school together, she rarely answered any of our teacher’s questions. Her grades were probably poor to middling, though she never seemed to mind this. However unfair this may have been on my part, however motivated by jealousy, I assumed there was nothing about her capable of understanding all the space and emptiness I needed simply to function normally, to paint pictures that rendered their subjects with precision and earn good grades in all my classes.
The Saturday night I spent with Ella and Kelly that I now wish I hadn’t, Kelly was driving her own pickup truck, one that sat much lower to the ground than Nelson’s. Hers was painted the color of rust already, while Nelson’s was after all these years still only rusting at its edges. Though neither vehicle was a desirable one to drive for a teenage girl with the smallest pretensions to coolness, the trucks themselves in my mind could not have been more different. While the bed of Nelson’s had once been a place for dreaming, for almost broaching transcendence, Kelly’s felt too low to the ground, too far from any cloud faces, to ever allow for this kind of thinking. Kelly made her own hemp jewelry, baked pot brownies. From my perspective then, she was too close to the ground as well, too rife with earthiness, with too large of breasts for her frame, with no sense of urgency about doing well on tests or pop quizzes, no anxiety about earning a scholarship for college. She was much too at home in this world for me to feel comfortable in her presence. She also probably had too many of her own sexual dalliances to see the same sense, like myself at times and like Nelson obviously as well, of sometimes wanting to leave this realm entirely, of longing to leave your skin and blur into cloud bodies. Mostly, though, I resented her intrusion into my closest friendship. Kelly must have sensed this, however poor her grades, however careless her paintings.
There is so much that I do not remember about the evening except for its ending. I no longer remember where we were going, what we were doing exactly, though it could not have been anything important or exciting, nothing requiring money, because none of us ever had any. No one was smoking pot or drinking as far as I recall, but for some reason that I have likewise long forgotten Kelly had stopped her car in a vacant parking lot not far from our high school. The whole world by that time was darkness, and all the other parking spaces were filled only with the ghosts of cars that had since gone elsewhere. Kelly left the car and wandered off toward a row of bushes, probably to smoke a cigarette, though maybe just to pee. All I know for certain is that I had been sitting shotgun, with Ella sitting in the middle, for as long as we were driving, and my legs felt restless. I know that I took advantage of Kelly’s absence to leave the car as well and, after a little walk around the parking lot, felt drawn to her truck bed. The night was warm—it must have been summer or very close to it—and I decided to lie down against its steel rivets as if I were a child again, as if I had just finished swimming for hours among tangles of seaweed. As if my dad, not Kelly, were driving me home from a manmade lake again.
I have no idea now where we were planning to go next or if we even had a destination. I know I soon stood up, though, and started jumping. With my teenage languor having given way all too quickly to high spirits, I know I did this just as Kelly started walking back from the bushes. Because her truck was so much lower to the ground than Nelson’s, because now I was feeling free and giddy, I kept jumping as she and Ella were having their own private conversation. Kelly’s truck was meanwhile bouncing along with my body, springy as a mattress, and I felt no wish to slow my momentum as I bounced a little higher with each passing second. There is every possibility, I realize now, that I was doing this because I had convinced Kelly to drive to the fast food place where the boy I was in love with was working. On the pretext of buying another roast beef sandwich, I may have felt I was closer to seeing his face again, his lips and arms and eyelids. This may easily explain why I felt so buoyant, why I felt so free now testing Kelly’s truck springs, which were more responsive than Nelson’s. Some spark of sexual excitement might have been the reason, might not have been.
Once Ella slipped back inside the truck cab after stretching her own legs for a bit, Kelly joined her. She sat back behind the steering wheel, though I never heard her turn on the ignition. It never occurred to me that she might not wait for me to come and sit shotgun again. Were all her paintings not so messy, so lacking in precision, I still might be tempted to believe she did what came next on purpose. Even at the time, though, I knew she hadn’t. Kelly in her characteristic casualness must have assumed I was going to ride inside her truck bed. She must have thought I was lying down or sitting once she started driving while in truth I kept jumping. I have always felt that she did nothing more malicious than forget to look in her rearview mirror for someone she probably wished were not tagging along to begin with. Her indifference toward me may have made her carelessness a little easier, but the carelessness was there anyway. I doubt I ever jumped much higher than a couple inches, but her truck bed was too shallow to catch me. I jumped, and her truck left me behind once she pressed on the accelerator. I didn’t fall on my feet but directly on my head, my crown hitting the concrete. Midair, something turned my body, an energy that maybe had its own death wish.
I couldn’t see Ella once she ran to me. I had gone completely blind, though only for a couple minutes. My ears were ringing. The ringing was louder and more piercing than anything I have ever heard since. I could hear nothing except for a sustained high pitch that continued for hours later, until I fell asleep. Kelly put her hand on the small of my back, asking if I was alright when she must have known I wasn’t. I couldn’t hear or see then, but nothing seemed to be broken because I could move when the two of them helped me up from the ground and back inside the truck cab. Without any apparent injury, no one else would have to know this happened. We were in agreement. Ella helped me sit beside her again, and my vision gradually returned, though things stayed blurry at the edges. Once Kelly drove me home and I walked back inside my kitchen, my parents were sleeping already, all the lights in the house making way for nothing but darkness. Next morning, nothing appeared wrong to my dad or mom. As far as they knew, the night before had been little different from any other that I spent driving into town and back again, wasting money on gasoline.
I have had decades now to think about it, and I don’t believe this incident necessarily hastened on my neurological condition, which appeared too much in stages for this to be an overriding factor, whose symptoms did not become chronic until about four years later. The most this accident may have done was to weaken an already weakening connection between my brain and lower nervous system. The accident with Kelly may have only taken advantage of a growing pattern, of a vital energy now tending to get stuck in places, leaving other areas vacant. Of course, I can never know for certain. My neurologist has told me often enough this condition usually appears at random, without apparent external cause. I never jumped in the bed, however, of someone else’s truck again, never lay against another one’s steel rivets. As more time passed, desire became even more painful, less delicious.