STILLBORN

Lou Gehrig's Disease.

The familiar man in the long and pretentious white coat, who also wore thick and comical spectacles, used what I assumed to be his most measured voice to tell me that I had Lou Gehrig's Disease. It was a voice that could have just as easily been used to discuss the outcome of a lackluster baseball game.

"The son of a b***h lost his team the pennant because he was too cocky to swing with his goddamn heart," he might have said. His big hand rested on my shoulder.

Dad came to live with me. He insisted.

"I'm doing it, you proud little b*****d, so drop it," he said to me on the drive away from my doctor's horrid and pitying stare.

A month later, my left hand began to turn against me. My thoughts had become too wild and oppressed to remain trapped within their birthplace, my skull, a gulag of bone. This led to me placing them in the container of a journal with a brown leather surface as a top. Words nudged each other on the page, as if written by a man who didn't notice that he was writing with a utensil that was too large for him to reasonably use.

I'd be writing a particularly perfect sentence and my hand would start to tremble. In the beginning, I ignored this. I took it as an indication that the electrical impulses that ran a relay race through the blob of my brain were pressing against the monster of my ambition, making it impossible to be completely stable.

Two weeks after the (actual) initial onset, the word Stationary had exited my body's physical memory.

On the morning of the 3rd of May, 1998, I discovered that the process of shoveling cereal into my mouth had become impossible. The spoon would approach my mouth and my hand would start to seize up, as if cell movement was being blocked by an evil multitude of tiny walls. Then again, perhaps the hand had developed a mind of its own.

More often than not, cereal and milk would end up in my lap.

To me, this was a reason to learn how to walk through life with my left hand as the dominant paw.

That didn't last for very long. The left hand would freeze while I washed myself. It would crumple like paper assaulted by fire while I zipped myself away from the world. It would refuse to grasp the pen as I wrote words into a container that had cost me twenty bucks.

Typing became my outlet, although I never was a wizard with the keyboard. The sequence of letters with specific fingers resting over them? I never cottoned onto that little trick of the trade. Besides, my new fingers had made this impossible for me to do.

Tap by tap, I managed to loose the words you're reading now.

Not long after my hands told me to piss off, my tongue began to hate the control that my brain had always had over it. While I searched for sleep in the wee hours, it would twist and turn and push against the roof of my mouth, a grotesque worm struggling against a lifetime of imprisonment. How is sleep possible with an alien object filling the mouth?

Eventually, the tongue in my head refused to allow me to speak.

Strange vowels of my own inarticulate invention shoved past my lips and out into the world as spit coated darts that threatened the eardrums and understanding of anyone close enough to listen.

This was when I met my wheelchair.

At this stage, my entire body staged a mutiny against me. I'd see something funny on TV and laugh. The laugh would be generous at first, but then it would become overly hearty. After that, it would become a thing of rage and false inner light and terror.

Do you understand what I'm telling you?

I'm telling you that there came a time when I my own laughter sought to harm me. In the end, I learned to kill laughter stone dead out of fear of paralyzing stomach cramps.

Crying for nothing at all, that came next. One minute, I'd be smiling at Dad's sweet potato garden from my bedroom window; the next, I'd feel idiot moans cross my lips. On the heels of the moans would come torrents of tears that puddled in the corners of my mouth and soaked my beard.

Dad ended up shaving the perpetually wet promise of continued manhood from my face. I'd miss it, but in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn't be the most important thing to frown over.

One evening, as my seventy-three year old dad tried his best to shovel baby food into my mouth, which often caused me to vomit against my will, I understood that it would be best to write all of it down. I'd write until I no longer could.

He didn't know that I could hear him in the guest room, but I did. I often heard Dad weakly crying into his whithered, yet strong hands. His son would die before him, a shivering spastic in a wheelchair with the stuff of irritable bowels staining his forever-seat.

This morning, a visit to Doctor Harris brought me the best news of my life.

"You have pneumonia, Jack," he said. He's been my doctor for twenty-three years, but I never expected to ever hear his voice tremble the way it did this morning. I never expected to see the film of saltwater that slowly covered each eye as he spoke his diagnosis to me under the too-bright lights of his too-white office.

A few minutes ago, Dad agreed to wipe the splatter of my brain from my bedroom wall. He agreed with a dull, pulsing rage in his voice. He agreed with disgust saturating every line of his sweet and ancient face. He agreed with terror hanging from every word he spoke.

But he did agree, and that's what counts to me.

My dad. The best friend I ever had.

His hands tremble as the barrel of the Smith & Wesson presses against my right temple. His hands tremble as he stares at the thing between his hands and where it is, as if he cannot grasp his actions or the circumstances that make such actions right. Trembling hands, but hands with the sort of steadiness that counts when all is said and done.

Right?

"I love you, son," an old man says to a thing that is no longer human. A hunched and useless thing in a steel cage on wheels.

I cannot tell him that I love him too; it's a physically impossible act for me. Maybe he'll be able to read the thanks in the strange and chaotic patterns that my exploded brain will make on the wall.

Mine is a wall covered with fighter plane wallpaper.

It is time for me to leave the stillness behind.

Reviews

[Dms]

Amazing man. If I were a sensitive guy, I think there would be saltwater film in my eyes as well. I've actually never read up on Lou Gehrig's Disease before. Beautiful description when you're talking about the father's strong old hands. I'm still at a bit of a loss as to the best news of his life being pnemonia, but otherwise this was a beautifully crafted dramatic story.

[Inda Lauryn]

Wow! I'm used to you writing tales of the macabre or strange, so I wasn't prepared for this. It's a powerful story, artfully told. There's still the element of terror there as you see someone's body betray him and imagine how horrifying it would actually be. This is a an awesome read.