A crack in the foundation

30

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I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought;

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing

- T.S. Eliot (from the Four Quartets)

After two fentanyl-filled days at the hospital, I return home with a five-inch pelvic fracture and six weeks of bed rest ahead. But prescribed stillness for bone healing can’t stabilize a dangerous fault line that begins to carve through my identity.

The over-stuffed living room sofa becomes my bed. Cushions sag and curdle under my body. Days mush into one another. Horror vacui inspires obnoxious, Sharpie-red circles in my calendar marking time with X-rays and follow-ups. I can’t sit, only recline—any weight on my pelvic bone could shift the non-displaced fracture and send me into surgery. Plus, it kills to sit. Time doesn’t care how many brushstrokes she takes to complete her painting. I am either an irritable bystander watching her sweeping gestures. Or I can choose to become the gesture. I give in. I eat, sleep and stare at the safety-orange chandelier on the ceiling. Once upon a time, I thought this homemade light fixture was cool, an emblem of my budding interest in visual arts. It takes only a few horizontal days to realize it’s not cool. Or art.

Ceiling-scape photography from sofa level. Plaster and paint, fixtures and art, and the occasional flying cat.

During the first few weeks, I think about Charlie. A lot. I have more than enough time now to bloodhound his mystery. I want to confirm what I feel, but the hunt unsettles me. I try to go slowly but am haunted by the scent of my own blood near. When I receive an email from Wisconsin Public Television—a response to a dozen random inquiries sent and forgotten—I open a link titled, “Hunters on Wings, with host Charles Brauer” and watch the twelve minute segment. Tectonic plates shift within my psyche; a thin fissure grows in size. The timbre in his voice, familiar. His stature, my own. I dismiss what I see (I must!) as confirmation bias: a mind seeking to confirm what it already suspects. But then there it is, and as unsentimental as it gets. Charlie crouches on the ground, a close-up of his hands pointing at meadow vole droppings. Those. Are. Undeniably. My. Hands. Mom, dad and Eric all have stubby nail beds, average-length and straight-as-an-arrow fingers. I have long nail beds, long fingers and crooked pinkies. So does Charlie.

Fear compresses my ego’s geology. The fault widens and I teeter on its edge. To save myself, I put the bloodhound down.

Instead, I cling to the known, to a narrative with more answers than questions. Bone fracture healing occurs in three distinct but overlapping stages: the early inflammatory stage (first 2 weeks), the repair stage (6 weeks), and the late remodeling stage in which the healing bone is restored to its original shape, structure, and mechanical strength. Fibroblasts and osteoblasts in my pelvis are already connecting broken ends and forming new bone. I will be walking again before summer’s end. That’s a nice, tidy timeline. It feels good to know, to sturdy myself with understanding and finitude.

When I look at my x-rays, I see a lightning bolt crack through nearly the entire length of my foundation. I grasp to metaphor: a crack of magic leads to other realities, beyond earthly boundaries, as through a crack in time. Or the reverse, as the light in Georgia O'Keeffe’s Dark Abstraction suggests, spirit enters the dense world of matter through a crack. The new day arrives at the crack of dawn with all its potential—a gateway between night and day where mythic heroes descend into the underworld or when prayers travel up to heaven. Or as the great Leonard Cohen sings, “There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.” This narrative I can get behind.

So with time on my side, I devote hours to an inward, anatomical gaze. And more specifically, the pelvis. What an elegant and expressive mass of bone! The reaching span of iliac wings! The bowl shaped acetabulum that allows the femur head to rotate with less than one-tenth the friction of ice on ice! The sacral bone that whimsically joins both wings into the caricature of a butterfly! I cling to a vision of my new wings brimming with magic—my own matter penetrated by light, a promise of renewal, a metamorphosis underway.

Magical thinking, dissociation—old friends and survival strategies when danger is near. Even a butterfly can sense early seismic activity. I steady myself with metaphor and meaning while an abyss readies to open, greedy and wide beneath my feet.

NEXT CHAPTER

Georgia O'Keeffe’s Dark Abstraction