This reactor of mine has gone still. The air hums like all is as it should be, but I cannot ease the feeling that I could cause the spontaneous fission of atoms in California at any time. I have come to insist that the impact of one consciousness against another may also abide by the laws Sir Isaac Newton penned.
I think human perception and the Geiger counter were produced by the same manufacturer.
It has crossed my mind that nuclear physics might just be simpler; there, you can solve for ‘Y’.
To study that seems like I’d be significantly less likely to be seated across from a person and still be calling from across state lines.
With that being said.
You are seated across from someone and the conversation is serious.
You’re both listening closely.
You say a sentence; they hear you clearly.
They then respond in a manner that does not at all answer what you just said.
This is the repeated failure that turned me into a writer.
_____
In Chiaroscuro, I described how my roommate’s violent husband had been released from jail and was showing up at the house despite a strict rule from both myself and the property owners against it. I had gone to them to determine what needed to be done about it, and they both expressed varying degrees of aggravation that I had “bothered them with roommate drama.”
One of them sat my roommate and I down in the living room, delivered a lecture, and proposed essentially no solution except for us to “deal with our issues.” When he again expressed his resentment for “roommate drama,” I asked him,
“Why is my safety concern being labelled as drama?”
It didn’t make any sense.
And I remember how his demeanor changed from annoyance to storm cloud. He looked at me from under his brows with a deepening, red face that arrested me in my chair as he said,
“Why don’t you just tell me how big of a piece of shit I am.”
And with the reflex to deescalate whatever the hell that was, I said, “I don’t think that,” and the storm turned out into the Atlantic.
That was the precise moment that my reliance on this individual began to feel dangerous to me. In the wake of that event, I called my best friend, walked down the street, and sat on a curb in the dark for a couple of hours trying to understand. I was briefly more distraught over that response than the felon freely showing up at my house. I had seen that face before in some of my worst memories of my parents, and I stayed stuck on the impossible equation that took us so dramatically somewhere else.
I did not know there was even an object there, much less that I had acted upon it.
Something about a hospital bed makes people easier to see.
In less than two months, my new little tech job has informed me that this not-a-people-person actually f***ing loves them when there isn’t a wall. A patient needs something from you that they cannot provide themselves. They’re removed from their daily comforts. They are to a more or less degree coping with their body functioning seperately from their mind.
Sometimes they’re accepting they will not be leaving.
When I started, I was in a welcome presentation where the presenter asked us to consider ways to bring our best to our jobs. I offered “look into how we can get the best from our jobs.” I’ve been shaken up since then because I can become disengaged quite quickly when work becomes too repetitive.
But every single room is a novel opportunity to learn something about how atoms in California respond.
_____
I have learned about a phenomenon called “elder speak” that is a sort of default amongst some medical staff when talking to patients. It functions to communicate “I am here to take care of you,” but I have resisted adopting it. Although I am a small part of that system, I want my tone to suggest “we are at eye-level.”
I am going to talk to you like we’re out to coffee. Ignore the weird device in my hands.
I’ll often crack jokes at my own expense. I referred to myself once as “just a sticker technician” (electrodes). Rather suddenly, a member of a patient’s family laughed heartily and abruptly said,
“If he was awake right now, he’d be telling you about how all women are b****es.”
Whoa. We’re not in Kansas anymore.
So I went down that little road with her and now I know all about who this sleeping man’s favorite family member is.
But more importantly to me, I was welcomed to Missouri by her. I was only there for five minutes.
_____
A sign on the door notified me that one patient was deaf in one ear and still very hard-of-hearing in the other. I talked to them from their better side, but we still struggled a little. So, automatically, I started to turn my face directly toward theirs every time I spoke and exaggerated my mouth movements so they could read me. I said something stupid and they joked back.
I was there for five minutes and already forgot about the sign.
_____
I was informed by a nurse that a patient was a little combative before I went in. I do not know what happened prior to my arrival.
I walked in and another staff member told the patient what I was there for, and they immediately started asking question after question. They were highly irritable, but physically calm. The staff member continued to repeat to them what we were doing and let the questions bounce.
They grew more verbally frustrated.
I started answering the questions they had to the extent that I knew answers, and admitted that I didn’t know when I truly didn’t. Most of what they were asking was not at all relevant to why I was in the room.
As this continued, for five minutes, this person started looking primarily at me and their voice became much less urgent.
I didn’t see combativeness, but I did see what I thought was I don’t know what’s happening to me.
_____
Final room.
A patient is in pain, delirious, and shaking underneath blankets. They are not forming sentences. I take my five minutes in three and as I am finishing up, I can see this person staring at me out of the corner of my eye. I look back at the only open, piercing blue eye, into their retracted pupil as they say,
“Please help me.”
We’re trying to.
My own hands start to shake as I hand off to a nurse in urgency.
The acceleration of the object is proportionate to its force.
And then I go back to my tasks as another patient, who is simply taking their IV for a walk, tells me they are training to try to keep up with me on my bike.
I smile widely.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, except for sometimes.
In my last relationship, he and I adopted a bit from Ted Lasso. In that series, Ted and his wife, Michelle, used “Oklahoma” as a request for how each really felt about something when they were otherwise acting stoic.
I would use it simply to request inside thoughts at random. Once I yelled it at him as he was racing because I can think of no more raw a place to spill beans.
Over time, I would invoke the state and receive “there’s really nothing there right now.” I don’t think he held anything back from me. We were more attuned than I’ve really experienced before. My own shows of stoicism were shot through at long range.
All the while I otherwise stopped being held to Oklahoma’s statues at all.
Suddenly I was all the way back in Indiana.
He didn’t ask me to write.
But… I’m a writer.
And right here, I have my bare hand in the reactor core– the thing I had already formed words for as the closed kid on the school bus. I found it then while watching the families and friendships I wanted seemingly exist without force for everyone else.
To be sought, but more importantly to me, to find others. To be allowed to.
But just the same as two objects cannot occupy the same space, neither can the human consciousness.
And everything I do is just a lifelong, futile effort to close the space between myself and those significant to me. All of it culminating into the realization that our words are just postcards.
Mere atoms in California.
Hey Chat, how is a reader likely to experience reading this one?
I will the machine. 