Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,67

happens, but I end up gasping for air. Out on the fire escape I do some clenching. It’s the only thing that helps. I clench my fists or press my knees together or squeeze my stomach muscles all at once. Sometimes I start with my face and work down my whole body, tightening each muscle one by one for as long as I can stand it, then letting go and moving on to the next. It’s enough to get me back into the dining room. After a few nights of this Marcus figures out where I’m going and finds me there midclench and drags me back. Sometimes, standing over a six-top and reciting the specials, I feel like I’m breaking up in tiny fragments, and I don’t understand how phrases like ‘with a cranberry cognac glaze’ are still coming out of my mouth or why my customers watching me don’t signal to someone that I need help. There’s some thin covering over me that hides it all. If someone saw inside and called an ambulance, I would go off willingly. It’s my biggest fantasy at these terrifying moments, two EMTs in the doorway with a stretcher for me to lie down on.

The next Saturday night is particularly bad. When it’s over I tip out and settle up and leave as soon as I can. I don’t even say goodbye to Harry. My body is ringing. I can’t feel my fingers. The only way I know I’m still breathing is that I’m still moving. Outside the cold feels good. I want colder. I want ice and snow, something to numb the panic. Two Harvard boys in tuxes come out of the building across the street and go into another. A group of old people, crumpled and slow moving, get into a Volvo near my bike. I hate old people. I hate anyone older than my mother, who didn’t get to become old. At the top of the street there is a guy walking on Mass. Ave. toward Central Square, loping, hands in his pockets. It isn’t him. It isn’t Silas, but the slope from neck to base of the spine is similar. Something awful rises up in me, and I have to get out. I have to get out. I have to get out of this body right now.

I crouch down on the pavement and raw terror overtakes me. I don’t know if I’m making sounds. I’m like that boy in second grade who had an epileptic fit on the classroom floor, shuddering like a machine, only it’s all inside my head, everything in my mind juddering like a hydraulic drill that I cannot stop. There seems to be no way to survive it or to make it end.

I don’t know how long it lasts. Time frays. When the worst of it has passed I’m still crouched on the ground, my forehead pressed to my knee. I raise my head and see my backpack, house key, and wad of cash tips spread out all around me on the pavement. I stand up, worried that someone from Iris will come out and find me crumpled there. It takes me a while to unlock my bike. My body is still trembling, just like Toby Cadamonte’s after his seizure.

I pedal slowly home, spent, but when I lie down on the futon after a warm shower and some muscle squeezing I feel like my body has been plugged into an outlet. More slow breathing. More clenching.

I try to pray. I kiss my mother’s ring, and I pray for her, for her soul and for peace in her soul. I pray for my father and Ann and Caleb and Phil and Muriel and Harry. I pray for the earth and everyone on it. I pray we can all come together and live without fear. And at the end I pray for sleep. I beg to have back the ability to fall asleep. I was once so good at it. I pray hard and yet I’m aware that I have no sense of what or whom I am praying to. I went to church until my mother went to Phoenix, but I never believed the stories in church any more or less than I believed in Pinocchio or the Three Little Pigs.

The panic feels loud as hell in my head, like being next to a speaker at a concert. I turn back on the light and try to read. The words remain words. I can’t hear them.