Can you feel this?
You all twisted and knotted up, this is the mess Misty drives three hours to see in the hospital. And that doesn't count the ferry ride. You're the mess Misty's married to.
This is the worst part of her day, writing this. It was your mother, Grace, who had the bright idea about Misty keeping a coma diary. It's what sailors and their wives used to do, Grace said, keep a diary of every day they were apart. It's a treasured old seafaring tradition. A golden old Waytansea Island tradition. After all those months apart, when they come back together, the sailors and wives, they trade diaries and catch up on what they missed. How the kids grew up. What the weather did. A record of everything. Here's the everyday shit you and Misty would bore each other with over dinner. Your mother said it would be good for you, to help you process through your recovery. Someday, God willing, you'll open your eyes and take Misty in your arms and kiss her, your loving wife, and here will be all your lost years, written here in loving detail, all the details of your kid growing up and your wife longing for you, and you can sit under a tree with a nice lemonade and have a nice time catching up.
Your mother, Grace Wilmot, she needs to wake up from her own kind of coma.
Dear sweet Peter. Can you feel this?
Everyone's in their own personal coma.
What you'll remember from before, nobody knows. One possibility is all your memory is wiped out. Bermuda triangulated. You're brain-damaged. You'll be born a whole new person. Different, but the same. Reborn.
Just for the record, you and Misty met in art school. You got her pregnant, and you two moved back to live with your mother on Waytansea Island. If this is stuff you know already, just skip ahead. Skim over it.
What they don't teach you in art school is how your whole life can end when you get pregnant.
You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.
And just in case you forgot, you're one chicken-shit piece of work. You're a selfish, half-assed, lazy, spineless piece of crap. In case you don't remember, you ran the fucking car in the fucking garage and tried to suffocate your sorry ass with exhaust fumes, but no, you couldn't even do that right. It helps if you start with a full gas tank.
Just so you know how bad you look, any person in a coma longer than two weeks, doctors call this a persistent vegetative state. Your face swells and turns red. Your teeth start to drop out. If you're not turned every few hours, you get bedsores.
Today, your wife's writing this on your one hundredth day as a vegetable.
As for Misty's breasts looking like a couple dead carp, you should talk.
A surgeon implanted a feeding tube in your stomach. You've got a thin tube inserted into your arm to measure blood pressure. It measures oxygen and carbon dioxide in your arteries. You've got another tube inserted into your neck to measure blood pressure in the veins returning to your heart. You've got a catheter. A tube between your lungs and your rib cage drains any fluids that might collect. Little round electrodes stuck to your chest monitor your heart. Headphones over your ears send sound waves to stimulate your brain stem. A tube forced down your nose pumps air into you from a respirator. Another tube plugs into your veins, dripping fluids and medication. To keep them from drying out, your eyes are taped shut.
Just so you know how you're paying for this, Misty's promised the house to the Sisters of Care and Mercy. The big old house on Birch Street, all sixteen acres, the second you die the Catholic church gets the deed. A hundred years of your precious family history, and it goes right into their pocket.
The second you stop breathing, your family is homeless.
But don't sweat it, between the respirator and the feeding tube and the medication, you're not going to die. You couldn't die if you wanted to. They're going to keep you alive until you're a withered skeleton with machines just pumping air and vitamins through you.
Dear sweet stupid Peter. Can you feel this?
Besides, when people talk about pulling the plug, that's pretty much just a figure of speech. This stuff all looks to be hardwired. Plus there's the backup generators, the fail-safe alarms, the batteries, the ten-digit secret codes, the passwords. You'd need a special key to turn off the respirator. You'd need a court order, a malpractice liability waiver, five witnesses, the consent of three doctors.
So sit tight. Nobody's pulling any plugs until Misty figures a way out of this crappy mess you've left her in.
Just in case you don't remember, every time she comes to visit you, she wears one of those old junk jewelry brooches you gave her. Misty takes it off her coat and opens the pin of it. It's sterilized with rubbing alcohol, of course. God forbid you get any scars or staph infections. She pokes the pin of the hairy old brooch—real, real slow—through the meat of your hand or your foot or arm. Until she hits a bone or it pokes out the other side. When there's any blood, Misty cleans it up.
It's so nostalgic.
Some visits, she sticks the needle in you, stabbing again and again. And she whispers, “Can you feel this?”
It's not as if you've never been stuck with a pin.
She whispers, “You're still alive, Peter. How about this?”
You sipping your lemonade, reading this under a tree a dozen years from now, a hundred years from now, you need to know that the best part of each visit is sticking in that pin.
Misty, she gave you the best years of her life. Misty owes you nothing but a big fat divorce. Stupid, cheap fuck that you were, you were going to leave her with an empty gas tank like you always do. Plus, you left your hate messages inside everyone's walls. You promised to love, honor, and cherish. You said you'd make Misty Marie Kleinman into a famous artist, but you left her poor and hated and alone.
Can you feel this?
You dear sweet stupid liar. Your Tabbi sends her daddy hugs and kisses. She turns thirteen in two weeks. A teenager.
Today's weather is partly furious with occasional fits of rage.
In case you don't remember, Misty brought you lambskin boots to keep your feet warm. You wear tight orthopedic stockings to force the blood back up to your heart. She's saving your teeth as they fall out.
Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn't bother to torture you if she didn't.
You fucker. Can you feel this?
July 2
OKAY, OKAY. FUCK.
Just for the record, a big part of this mess is Misty's fault. Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman. The little latchkey product of divorce with no parent at home most days.
Everybody in college, all her friends in the fine arts program, they told her:
Don't.
No, her friends said. Not Peter Wilmot. Not “the walking peter.”
The Eastern School of Art, the Meadows Academy of Fine Arts, the Wilson Art Institute, rumor was Peter Wilmot had flunked out of them all.
You'd flunked out.
Every art school in eleven states, Peter went there and didn't go to class. He never spent any time in his studio. The Wilmots had to be rich because he'd been in school almost five years and his portfolio was still empty. Peter just flirted with young women full-time. Peter Wilmot, he had long black hair, and he wore these stretched-out cable-knit sweaters the color of blue dirt. The seam was always coming open in one shoulder, and the hem hung down below his crotch.
Fat, thin, young, or old women, Peter wore his ratty blue sweater and slouched around campus all day, flirting with every girl student. Creepy Peter Wilmot. Misty's girlfriends, they pointed him out one day, his sweater unraveling at the elbows and along the bottom.
Your sweater.
Stitches had broken and holes were hanging open in the back, showing Peter's black T-shirt underneath.
Your black T-shirt.
The only difference between Peter and a homeless mental outpatient with limited access to soap was his jewelry. Or maybe not. It was just weird cruddy old brooches and necklaces made from rhinestones. Crusted with fake pearls and rhinestones, these are big scratchy o
ld wads of colored glass that hang off the front of Peter's sweater. Big grandma brooches. A different brooch every day. Some days, it was a big pinwheel of fake emeralds. Then it would be a snowflake made of chipped glass diamonds and rubies, the wire parts turned green from his sweat.
From your sweat.
Junk jewelry.
For the record, the first time Misty met Peter was at a freshman art exhibit where some friends and her were looking at a painting of a craggy stone house. On one side, the house opened into a big glass room, a conservatory full of palm trees. In through the windows, you could see a piano. You could see a man reading a book. A private little paradise. Her friends were saying how nice it looked, the colors and everything, and then somebody said, “Don't turn around, but the walking peter is headed over here.”
Misty said, “The what?”
And somebody said, “Peter Wilmot.”
Someone else said, “Do not make eye contact.”
All her girlfriends said, Misty, do not even encourage him. Anytime Peter came into the room, every woman remembered a reason to leave. He didn't really stink, but you still tried to hide behind your hands. He didn't stare at your breasts, but most women still folded their arms. Watching any woman talk to Peter Wilmot, you could see how her frontalis muscle lifted her forehead into wrinkles, proof she was scared. Peter's top eyelids would be half shut, more like someone angry than looking to fall in love.
Then Misty's friends, in the gallery that night, they scattered.
Then she was standing alone with Peter in his greasy hair and the sweater and the old junk jewelry, who rocked back on his heels, his hands on his hips, and looking at the painting, he said, “So?”
Not looking at her, he said, “You going to be a chicken and run away with your little friends?”
He said this with his chest stuck out. His upper eyelids were half closed, and his jaw worked back and forth. His teeth ground together. He turned and fell back against the wall so hard the painting beside him went crooked. He leaned back, his shoulders squared against the wall, his hands shoved into the front pockets of his jeans. Peter shut his eyes and took a deep breath. He let it out, slow, opened his eyes to stare at her, and said, “So? What do you think?”
“About the painting?” Misty said. The craggy stone house. She reached out and turned it straight again.
And Peter looked sideways without turning his head. His eyes rolled to see the painting just past his shoulder, and he said, “I grew up next door to that house. The guy with the book, that's Brett Petersen.” Then loud, he said, too loud, “I want to know if you'll marry me.”
That's how Peter proposed.
How you proposed. The first time.
He was from the island, everybody said. The whole wax museum of Waytansea Island, all those fine old island families going back to the Mayflower Compact. Those fine old family trees where everybody was everybody's cousin once removed. Where nobody's had to buy any silverware since two hundred years ago. They ate something meat with every meal, and all the sons seemed to wear the same shabby old jewelry. Their kind-of regional fashion statement. Their old shingle and stone family houses towered along Elm Street, Juniper Street, Hornbeam Street, weathered just so by the salt air.
Even all their golden retrievers were inbred cousins to each other.
People said everything on Waytansea Island was just-so museum quality. The funky old ferryboat that held six cars. The three blocks of red brick buildings along Merchant Street, the grocer, the old library clock tower, the shops. The white clapboards and wraparound porches of the closed old Waytansea Hotel. The Waytansea church, all granite and stained glass.
There in the art school gallery, Peter was wearing a brooch made from a circle of dirty blue rhinestones. Inside that was a circle of fake pearls. Some blue stones were gone, and the empty fittings looked sharp with ragged little teeth. The metal was silver, but bent and turning black. The point of the long pin, it stuck out from under one edge and looked pimpled with rust.
Peter held a big plastic mug of beer with some sports team stenciled on the side, and he took a drink. He said, “If you'd never consider marrying me, there's no point in me taking you to dinner, is there?” He looked at the ceiling and then at her and said, “I find this approach saves everybody a shitload of time.”
“Just for the record,” Misty told him, “that house doesn't exist. I made it up.”
Misty told you.
And you said, “You remember that house because it's still in your heart.”
And Misty said, “How the fuck do you know what's in my goddamn heart?”
The big stone houses. Moss on the trees. Ocean waves that hiss and burst below cliffs of brown rock. All that was in her little white trash heart.
Maybe because Misty was still standing here, maybe because you thought she was fat and lonely and she hadn't run away, you looked down at the brooch on your chest and smiled. You looked at her and said, “You like it?”
And Misty said, “How old is it?”
And you said, “Old.”
“What kind of stones are those?” she said.
And you said, “Blue.”
Just for the record, it wasn't easy to fall in love with Peter Wilmot. With you.
Misty said, “Where did it come from?”
And Peter shook his head a little bit, grinning at the floor. He chewed his bottom lip. He looked around at the few people left in the gallery, his eyes narrow, and he looked at Misty and said, “You promise you won't be grossed out if I show you something?”
She looked back over her shoulder at her friends; they were off by a picture across the room, but they were watching.
And Peter whispered, his butt still against the wall, he leaned forward toward her and whispered, “You'll need to suffer to make any real art.”
Just for the record, Peter once asked Misty if she knew why she liked the art she liked. Why is it a terrible battle scene like Picasso's Guernica can be beautiful, while a painting of two unicorns kissing in a flower garden can look like crap.
Does anybody really know why they like anything?
Why people do anything?
There in the gallery, with her friends spying, one of the paintings had to be Peter's, so Misty said, “Yeah. Show me some real art.”
And Peter chugged some of his beer and handed her the plastic mug. He said, “Remember. You promised.” With both hands, he grabbed the ragged hem of his sweater and pulled it up. A theater curtain lifting. An unveiling. The sweater showed his skinny belly with a little hair going up the middle. Then his navel. The hair spread out sideways around two pink nipples starting to show.
The sweater stopped, Peter's face hidden behind it, and one nipple lifted up in a long point off his chest, red and scabbed, sticking to the inside of the old sweater.
“Look,” Peter's voice said from behind, “the brooch pins through my nipple.”
Somebody let out a little scream, and Misty spun around to look at her friends. The plastic mug dropped out of her hands, hitting the floor with an explosion of beer.
Peter dropped his sweater and said, “You promised.”
It was her. The rusted pin was sunk in under one edge of the nipple, jabbed all the way under and coming out the other edge. The skin around it, smeared with blood. The hair pasted down flat with dried blood. It was Misty. She screamed.
“I make a different hole every day,” Peter said, and he stooped to pick up the mug. He said, “It's so every day I feel new pain.”
Looking now, the sweater around the brooch was crusted stiff and darker with bloodstain. Still, this was art school. She'd seen worse. Maybe she hadn't.
“You,” Misty said, “you're crazy.” For no reason, maybe shock, she laughed and said, “I mean it. You are vile.” Her feet in sandals, sticky and splashed with beer.
Who knows why we like what we like?
And Peter said, “You ever hear of the painter Maura Kincaid?” He twisted the brooch, pinned through his che
st, to make it glitter in the white gallery light. To make it bleed. “Or the Waytansea school of painters?” he said.
Why do we do what we do?
Misty looked back at her friends, and they looked at her, their eyebrows raised, ready to come to the rescue.
And she looked at Peter and said, “My name's Misty,” and she held out her hand.
And slow, Peter's eyes still on hers, he reached up and opened the clasp behind the brooch. His face winced, every muscle pulled tight for a second. His eyes sewed shut with wrinkles, he pulled the long pin out of his sweater. Out of his chest.
Out of your chest. Smeared with your blood.
He snapped the pin closed and put the brooch in her palm.
He said, “So, you want to marry me?”
He said this like a challenge, like he was picking a fight, like a gauntlet thrown down at her feet. Like a dare. A duel. His eyes handled her all over, her hair, her breasts, her legs, her arms and hands, like Misty Kleinman was the rest of his life.
Dear sweet Peter, can you feel this?
And the little trailer park idiot, she took the brooch.
July 3
ANGEL SAYS TO MAKE a fist. He says, “Hold out your index finger as if you're about to pick your nose.”
He takes Misty's hand, her finger pointed straight, and he holds it so her fingertip just touches the black paint on the wall. He moves her finger so it traces the trail of black spray paint, the sentence fragments and doodles, the drips and smears, and Angel says, “Can you feel anything?”
Just for the record, they're a man and a woman standing close together in a small dark room. They've crawled in through a hole in the wall, and the homeowner's waiting outside. Just so you know this in the future, Angel's wearing these tight brown leather pants that smell the way shoe polish smells. The way leather car seats smell. The way your wallet smells, soaked with sweat after it's in your back pocket while you're driving on a hot summer day. That smell Misty used to pretend to hate, that's how Angel's leather pants smell pressed up against her.