Haven

Every square foot of pavement in Manhattan has seen blood at some time.  You can smell the layers and layers of lives in the earth that’s dug up when they excavate buildings to make room for the new.  My bloodshed began with the smack of metal on metal, the swerve of the struck car spinning and whooshing me up like a rag doll flying.  It began with a dislocation from my body.  When I flew, I felt time stop.  Life became a slide show: everything in slow motion, then black. When I woke up I was looking up at a strange man’s face, his eyes, his voice asking, are you okay?

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Goldwater hospital was my refuge, my haven.  I remember my first day, walking in to the state run long-term care facility.  The first patient I saw was a woman in her 40s who was dressed in a faded housecoat, and who sat in a wheelchair in the corridor.  Her legs were the size of tree trunks, her eyes were as vacant as an abandoned building.  The Goldwater writers workshop was a core part of the New York University Writing Program.  Just weeks before, when I sat across from Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell at the interview I wanted the job, but I had no idea what I was asking for.
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Just weeks after the accident, I taught my first workshop at Goldwater.  I was still awkward on crutches, still black and blue.  I rode the flying trolley across the East river not knowing what to expect.

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The ambulance arrived quickly.  We were strapped down to backboards.  I was thinking to myself, I know how to do this, this is just like lifeguarding.  Even our hands were bound.  The EMTs were chatty.  I remember feeling no pain.  Not yet.  I remember being funny, even laughing during the short ride to Bellevue hospital about how exciting it was to go to the same hospital as Sylvia Plath, or being wheeled into the ER on the gurney next to my friend and hearing her exclaim, “Well if we’re in the ER, where’s George Clooney?”  Then, we were separated and time became less inflated and joyous.  I remember hours lying in the ER, curtain closed, alone.  I remember eavesdropping on conversations around me in order to pass time, then looking down at my broken body and seeing my knee had grown to cartoonish size.  Then, suddenly being wheeled into a room, pain rising in me like the crescendo of cicadas and the doctor’s matter-of-fact tone, “We have to try to get the fluid out” as she squeezed and milked my knee.

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By second semester, the cane and the limp gave me stature.  I could hail cabs with ease.  I had a common, threatening barrier between me and the outer world.  My class at Goldwater consisted of 6 -8 regular students in class plus 1:1 teaching sessions with bedridden patients.  Each day I hobbled in and they would ask (with just the right words) how is your leg?  How are you healing? And there was knowing in their eyes—They knew what it was like to be unhealable.

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Deep in the night and still no pain meds.  When I ask, crying, the nurses say, we have to wait to see if we’ll need to operate.  More x-rays, wheeled into the hall to wait, more x-rays, my I-V catches and backs up, blood blossoming all over the cool, metal x-ray table.  Oh man, look what she’s done! Scolds a technician.  Finally, a bed, a room, the sweet swollen sleep of morphine.  Then, in and out of sleep.  Each time a different cast of characters, a different frieze. A gaggle of young doctors looking at me, but not talking to me.  Yes, this is an interesting case.  I’m here!  I shout as if under water. But the doctors turn around and leave.  I feel undone.  Alone. Unfixable.

Seven days I sat in the bed under morphine drip – dislocated from reality, painting it back as if by a paint-by-number kit.  Trading jellos for ginger ales with the other residents, the homeless who had checked themselves in to escape the cold, the convicts who were strapped to their beds.

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Every day we wrote.  I taught writing.  The city swelled and receded, swelled and receded and I followed my course.  Walking to and from the train.  Taking the bus to work or riding the flying trolley like a god to Roosevelt Island.  There is something about islands.  They are healing places. So isolated, than on them, things look different.  Somehow on an island someone can find words to say or solve for what is unfixable.  I entered the wounded island every week by air, oscillating like a seagull.  Like some sweet Odysseus, trying to find passage back to the home of my own body.

It was a ritual, we’d fly in, enter the hospital and head straight to the cafeteria—gorging on the institutional food.  Then, footsteps echoing down the long corridor, around the bend to the meeting space.  An open room where residents already sat in their wheelchairs, waiting.  And we wrote.  We were two trains passing each other.  We were two trains – one obscuring the other, one becoming the other as they passed.  Josephine, her hands shaking from her disease, but her anger shaking her deeper.  In her poems, her anger became a car, she slowly ate.  The tiny air balloons of Tamika’s voice, the breathless rasp of her ventilator, and her childish joy.  And Ester, who clung to her sexuality like a desperate, madwoman, while at the same time she longed to sit in her kitchen in Brooklyn.  We all sat in the wooden room and talked poetry in our broken bodies and each knew they would never return.  They knew, that home would linger on the horizon, some distant light at the edge of the cliff across the river or across the sea.  And somehow in this shipwreck we found healing.

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Island for an island – begin again – letting go.

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So how is it now, so many years later, my knee broken again, my knee still unfixable, that I yearn for an island again?  That I want to depart on a long journey in a deep, wooden boat that smells of the knowledge and time it contains.  That carries the souls, all those lost faces, of the wounded away toward a place of remembrance.  A haven where hope is a clear blue sea that meets the horizon.

© 2012 Iris Jamahl Dunkle