You're Fine

Before Lisa. Before any of them, really. This one runs underneath all of them. I damn near turned the page right past it, and I think it might be the biggest wire in the whole box.

The first time I died I was on my knees in a stranger's basement with my head inside a dryer.

Nice house, good side of town. Lady's dryer wouldn't heat. An easy call, probably the element, I had it half apart already, panel off, lint smell in my nose. And then, no warning, no reason, reasonless, which as you know by now is the one thing I do not believe in, my heart took off like it meant to climb up out through my collar. Chest cinched down tight as a drum head. My left arm went strange and far away, like it belonged to some other fella. I could not pull a full breath to save my life, and I knelt there on that cold cement with a screwdriver still in my hand and thought, clear and calm and dead certain: well. Here it is. Not thirty years old yet and I'm going to die in a basement I've been standing in for twenty minutes, next to a dryer I never finished.

I got myself up the stairs somehow, one hand walking up the rail, and the lady took one look at my face and called the ambulance, and they came, sirens and the whole circus down that quiet street, and they hooked me to their tape and read it. And the young fella crouched down in front of me and did the thing with his face I'd see a hundred times after and never once get used to. It went soft for half a second, then clicked over into something flatter, something that had already filed me and moved on. Half kindness and half already bored. Sir, he said, your heart is fine. You're having a panic attack.

A panic attack. Like I'd been spooked by a spider. I wanted to deck him, right there on the good side of town with the neighbors watching from their porches. I was dying, I could feel it in the meat of me, and feeling's not nothing, and here's this kid barely old enough to shave telling me my own body was a liar. I'd have believed a bad valve or a stopped line. I could not believe nothing, because nothing is not what it felt like. It felt like the biggest something there ever was.

But it wasn't the last time. That's the whole trouble. It came again, and again, always out of a clear sky. In the truck at a green light with nobody moving. In a pew with the organ going and no place to run to. Once in the cereal aisle at the Smith's with a box of shredded wheat in my hand, and I set that box down on the shelf real gentle, the way you'd set down something that might go off, and walked out to the lot and stood by my truck breathing like I'd run there. The whole show every time, the runaway heart and the drum-tight chest and the bone-deep certainty that this one, finally, was the end of me. And every single time, some doctor would run the same tape and give me the same tired look and hand me the same three words. You are fine. Years of it. Years of dying in public and getting a clean bill and a pat on the arm for my trouble.

And here's the part that'd make you laugh if it didn't turn your stomach: on the outside, nobody knew a thing. I was the loud one. Life of the party. The fella who could strike up a conversation with a fence post and get a good one going. I held the whole room at a barbecue, plate in one hand, holding forth, and folks laughed and I glowed. And I never once noticed, I have truly only this second noticed, sitting here with the pencil, that a fair half of any room I ever held was quietly backing toward the door. Edging away. Getting up for another drink they didn't want, trying with everything they had to get loose of a man who could not, would not, stop talking. Because the talking was the one thing that kept the floor from swinging open under me. Quiet was where the dying lived. You keep the party roaring so you never have to sit alone in the quiet with your own heart trying to do you in. That was the machinery of me, and I hid it in plain sight the rest of my life, dressed it up as charm, and nobody ever saw the wire. Not even me, and I was the one holding it.

It got bad enough, for one stretch there, that I decided to stop it myself.

I'm going to set this down plain, there's nobody to spare here, no feelings to manage but my own, and mine are well past managing now, because I've come to believe a good many people carry this exact stone in their pocket in secret, and the secret never once helped a soul. There came a winter I couldn't sleep and couldn't get warm and couldn't get right, and somewhere in the middle of it I quit wanting to outrun the thing and started wanting, bad, to just be done. I didn't want to be dead, exactly, I want to be careful how I say it, even here, even to a page. I wanted the terror dead. And it had wound itself so tight around the rest of me that I'd plumb lost the seam between the two. When a man can't tell his own life apart from the thing that's torturing him, he'll reach for the switch on both at once.

So I built myself a way out. A handy man builds. It was the only tool I ever had for anything, grief and terror right along with dryers. A heater, a leaking waterbed, a thermostat, a window cracked to a cold night. I won't draw you the diagram, and it doesn't matter anyhow; what matters is I built it careful, the way I built everything, and I knew exactly what it was for. It was no fool accident and it was no cry for somebody to come running. It was a plan. It's the most patient, particular attention I ever paid a thing I only meant to have work the once.

And the single reason I got thirty more years, the only reason there's a notebook here at all, last pages and all, is that before it came to that, by nothing on this earth but dumb luck, I finally landed in front of a doctor who took one look and said the word nobody'd ever bothered to say right. Panic disorder. He said it like a diagnosis and not like a scolding, and something in me came unclenched just at the hearing. And he set a little pill in my hand, Klonopin, and the floor came up solid under me for the first time since that basement. I could breathe. I could sit in a quiet room and not feel the cold hand laid flat on my sternum. That man didn't just hand me my life back. He handed it back to a fella who'd already made up his mind to give it away, and he talked me, never once knowing he was doing it, into staying in the room. I want his name in this notebook worse than I want almost anything, and I cannot for the afterlife of me dredge it up. Wherever you are, doc: you caught a man on his way out the door. He stayed thirty more years on account of you. Some of them were even good ones.

Now. Why is this the biggest wire in the box? Sit with it a second, because I only just got here myself and it's put a chill in what's left of me.

I spent a lifetime feeling like I was dying and being told I was fine. The pill quieted the storm, but it never once changed my reputation. I was the anxious one, the hypochondriac, the fella who thought every twinge was the big one, who cried wolf so many times the whole valley quit turning its head. That never washed off. Not in thirty years.

So what do you suppose happened at the very end, the real one, the tub, the water, the night I finally, actually, no-fooling was dying? When the sickness had me and I couldn't breathe and my heart was going off like a fire bell, the same bell it had rung a hundred false times before?

Who was going to believe me?

Not the doctors. They'd spent my whole life telling me I was fine. Not me, likely. I'd trained myself the hard way to talk myself down off that ledge, to breathe it out, to say you're fine, John, you're always fine, it's just the nerves. And not...

not Sarah.

Especially not Sarah. Who'd sat beside that panic the whole length of our marriage. Who knew better than a living soul that when John says he's dying, John is fine. Who could stand in a bathroom doorway and listen to a man fight for the air and tell herself, and tell every officer and every neighbor after, oh, that's just his anxiety, that's just his nerves, he does this, he'll be fine.

He does this. He'll be fine.

You could kill a man that way. You wouldn't even have to raise a hand. You'd only have to have spent a lifetime being taught, by every doctor in the valley, and then by the man himself, that his dying was a thing you were allowed to ignore.

I'm going to have to sit with that one a good while.

Lisa's next. But I had to get the heart thing down first, because I see now that everything that came after it, every wife, every room I slipped out of, and maybe the water at the finish, runs straight back to a young man on his knees in a basement, not yet thirty, certain he was dying, and a kid with a clipboard telling him he was fine.