I shouldn’t write the following, since I’m so utterly inebriated, but I started it this morning. And I have to finish it tonight. I’ll be honest. Most of my posts, I do spend inordinate time editing. Changing words. Changing sequence. Changing tense, usually pushing back towards the present.
But when the world starts spinning, it’s so hard to keep focused on form. I desperately want to write words with meaning, with weight.
Tonight, after work, I went to the Washington Museum of History, to see photos that have won the Pulitzer Prize.
And in that hour, my heart broke. Some of the photos you know. A naked Vietnamese girl burning from Napalm. The dead body of a black man, lynched from a tree. The photo of an Ethiopian child in starvation.
It depresses me to know that all the awards go to those who take photos of us at our suffering worst. We are fascinated with our own depravity. Even love. Think of every great romance. They all seem framed by a backdrop of tragedy or war or suffering. For every great kiss, a suicide. For every wedding, a funeral. For every happily ever after, a sacrifice.
* * *
He's learning to swim. I release his chest, and he sinks, but his head emerges this time, eyes opening wildly, mouth gasping for air. I mistake the gesture for panic, but before I can reach him, his head dips below again, and with a kick of his legs he darts forward. He divides the water with his long, white arms; he emerges.
* * *
1992
Alex’s uncle glides down the slopes, in control of the mountain. He cuts through ice and falls. Through the bitter cold, he feels burning. The sweat in the cold of winter takes a hold of his body. It’s his first break.
* * *
1995
I can speak Romanian well, but not in dialect. And her dialect is grief, and foreign words fall from her lips between sobs and chokes. The language of grief is like saltwater in my ears, and I have to ask Alex to explain.
'She says you remind her of my uncle.'
* * *
Halfway down the hill of this unfamiliar slope, I fall hard and violently. My leg catches, my knee turns, and I feel grinding and burning. I can move the leg, so I know there’s no break. It’s nothing but a reminder of all I had to lose when I stood at the top of the hill. I chose this course, and should have been prepared for the consequences. Instead, like most people, I simply got lucky. On this day, anyway, I won’t have to answer for my nearsightedness.
* * *
1995
He asks for a doctor. Something isn't right, and breathing is hard. The diaphragm gives and air moves through the lungs, but the air is empty of life. Air circulates through the chest, faster now, but still he grows dizzy, as though not breathing at all.
Please, hurry.
Pulmonary vessels that refuse to act as such, refuse to carry life from the air that circulates within, refuse to deliver life to a heart only inches away, refuse to consider flashes of children and a mother descending rapidly into grief.
What is it? What can I do?
* * *
One of the photos is of a child, already well into the next plane, limp, stiff perhaps, a useless gesture of artificial breathing, frozen for eternity by the lens of a camera. A Leica. 100 ISO. Stopped down to 8.0. It’s so bright outside. Underexposed at 1/250th of a second. But still, it captures the moment.
* * *
I no longer have any interest in rubbernecking. I used to, I’ll be honest. Lights and sirens were the only thing that could slow me down in those days. An immense curiosity, catching a glimpse of the dying. But after so many calls where I was the one responsible for applying C-collars and splints, traction and airway adjuncts, my greatest fear now is slowing down. When passing accidents, I am the one car who accelerates, head faced forward. I am afraid of looking, and of seeing a limb, a life, a loss. I am afraid of seeing limpness. I don’t want to see pain on the way to work.
* * *
Call the doctor! He’s not breathing!
Eternal frustration, breathing with no result. Trying your hardest to stay awake while your family screams around you. This is how Alex’s uncle died, his mother holding his hand, praying at first, then pleading, and finally striking him upon his chest. He died of an embolism, a clot, a medical mistake, an uncertainty. He was my age, with a wife and two kids. He was a man with a great heart, and a heart that suffocated in the end.
He lived a life unphotographed, like most of us. He reminded her of me.
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