I heard angels and saw demons in the MRI machine
It’s a tough world these days. On the day of the October No Kings rallies, I had an MRI to see if we could get any goddamn information about all these fucking concussions I keep getting. The machine reminded me of the Maine State Museum before its renovation, the dark rooms and the creepy wax guys frozen in mid-life.
Or rather, it reminded me of a similar museum at the edge of my mind’s eye’s vision, one that had a little hut in the middle of it within which you could stand and look out the fake windows covered in fake snow and listen to recordings of blistering, whistling winds from Mount Washington or Everest or Katahdin or somewhere and imagine yourself an early settler, a Paul Bunyan, a mountain man harshing out a good old-fashioned New England nor’easter.
People who have the sharpest visual picturing skills, those with hyperphantasia who can imagine a person in front of them or an apple in their hand so red and shiny and crisp they could bite into it and its juice would drip all the way down their chin, past their jugular, creeping under their collar — apparently those people are more likely to experience psychosis. Personally, I can only see an image in my mind for the briefest moment, and only like a picture, like the flash of a camera. But boy, can I imagine.
Maybe I should have been thinking of my poor head laying stock-still in the MRI, bandaged down like I was in bed with a bundling board during a chaste opposite-sex sleepover. Maybe I should’ve been wondering, Will this always be my life? Will the faintest bump always lay me up for days? Will it always be this fucking hard?
Instead, to the cacophony of bangs and thumps and whistles, I thought of a chorus. I thought of angels. I heard them sing to me. They called my name. They hummed. Maybe they prayed, if they were so inclined.
And on the roof of the machine, inches away, a white plastic horizon forever and ever, I saw demons dancing in the visual fuzz. I shut my eyes tight. I thought of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” of the tortuous execution apparatus that delicately carves the sentence into a prisoner’s skin until they die. The apparatus must have been like an MRI, like a morgue drawer, something you must slide into. It must have a gentle embrace in some ways. It must flip the prisoner over like you would move a sleeping child.
Life is hard, and sometimes I want to be the sparkling sand at the bottom of a clear, cold spring-melt stream.
Life is hard, and sometimes I want to unravel like a tugged knit. Or pour myself from one vessel into a bigger one, like from a pitcher into a glass, but the opposite. If my mother poured me from her body and soul as a pitcher’s contents pour into a glass, if we were each a pail of water pulled from the same primordial well, I often want to be embraced by it again. To be one of many. I want to be a tributary, to be a trickle joining a stream becoming brackish on its way to the ocean.
Life is hard and always will be, and sometimes everyone wallows in it. Sometimes you wonder, What did I do in a past life to deserve this? Or maybe, What did I do in this life to deserve this?
Life is hard and only getting harder. But I’ve always liked beautiful things. Maybe that’s why I’m a lesbian. When I was a kid it was sparkles and the satin collar and golden buttons on my dress, Ms. Mary Mack and a Civil War soldier all in one. Now, I like lupines and lilacs and hydrangeas and oak seeds. The color blue. Acorns and fabric swatches. Beads. Expanses of ice. I like landscapes. I like heat and the cold. I like the sky at any time of day.
Life is so hard, the world is so hard, America and Trump are so hard. But I love beautiful things and so I write. I love words, beautiful and vulgar and descriptive. I love stories. I love stories that help you find meaning in nothing. That is the writer’s greatest gift, to excise beauty from the dull or painful or benign. I like to hear angels in rhythmic clunking even if I must also see demons.
