"I much prefer the kind of story where the reader is left wondering
who's to blame until it begins to dawn on him (the reader) that he
himself must bear some of the responsibility because he's human and
therefore infinitely fallible."

-Richard Yates, 1972

.

ESCAPE FROM DREAMLAND

1.

            Because my parents are both devout Christian Scientists, I’ve been living with a crippled leg for the past eleven years. 
            The incident happened when I was twelve.  Lenny Timmons and I were throwing a football around in my backyard.  Lenny and I had never been great friends but for a while he lived right across the street from me.   Norton Road separated both of our modest brick homes by just fifteen feet or so, cutting curvy lines between the one-car garages like a snaky black meadow. When I picture him now I see clumsy sport goggles, shaggy hair, and the lean svelte arms of a girl.  We were throwing high rocket-style bombs straight up into the sky.  The idea was to see who could throw the highest and who could catch it the best when it came shooting back down hard out of the clouds.  The sun was bright orange and every time I looked up to find the ball’s arch my eyes would get all damp and my vision would start to blur.  I remember it being so hot that the football started feeling like warm putty as it hit your hands. 
            Lenny kept backing up to get a running start.  He backed up all the way to the asphalt where Norton Road broke off and made a sharp bend over the stream, then he came charging forward across the grass, leapt off one foot, and let it go.  At first I took a few steps back.  It was tricky.  The ball would disappear inside the sun, and when you least expected it, it would come tumbling out the other side, all reflective and awkward as a falling rock.  I caught a glimpse of its trajectory and started sprinting forward.  My eyes stayed up and trained.  I was laughing.  I could hear Lenny giggling in that shrill falsetto way of his.  At some point, sometime around the moment when I had worked up my greatest speed, I stepped in a shallow ditch and lost my balance.  I remember a sharp burst of air leaving my lungs, and then a loud snap coming from my foot.  I remember lying face down on the lawn with my arms spread out in front of me. 
            The shock kept me from feeling any immediate pain.  I don’t remember Lenny saying anything, but he must have said something before running off to find my mom inside the house.  Before long I heard the screen door slam up on the porch and then the sound of my mother stumbling down the stairs and racing out to meet me.  She kept repeating, “Oh my God.  Oh my God.” 
            The first thing she did was roll me over and start pressing my hand into hers.  She looked deep into my eyes and squeezed my fingers tight.  I remember watching her face turn ferocious with determination.    “Noah,” she said, “Noah, child, everything’s going to be all right.  Just try to relax.”  She was wearing a white terrycloth robe that kept coming undone, and the pink skin above her chest was covered in the kind of freckles that result from frequent sunburns.  When she rocked forward I could tell that she was naked underneath—her bare feet already stained lime green around the heels.
            She wrapped both her hands around my ankle, and that’s when I know I started screaming.  “Shhhhh,” my mom kept saying, “I know it hurts.  Try not to think about the pain.  Think about the beach.”  For a short time Lenny was squatted next to me on the other side, and I remember trying to calm myself by focusing on his trembling mouth and whatever other aspect of innocence that I wanted to see about his face.
            She untied my shoe and slipped it off over my toes in one quick move.  She pushed my sock down, then gripped my right ankle and started twisting.  Sweat kept dripping from her calloused palms and drizzling down my leg.  My screaming would have been unbearable to anyone else.  “Just a massage, baby.  Just a little massage…”  She wouldn’t stop talking.  It went on like this without her pausing to take a breath, and then I saw her lower her head and close her eyes.
            Her rambling speeches quickly turned into chanting.  Never once did she remove her palms from the fleshy part of my wound.  What happened next is hard to explain to someone who has never heard anyone speak in tongues before.  What my mom did then, right in the middle of our backyard, was hum.  It starts out sort of like that.  She began the ceremony by raising her eyes straight up at the clouds, very slowly and deliberately in tiny increments.  By the time her head was all the way back, and her chin was pointing skyward, she was starting to shake.  “Ahhh buh la, ahhh buh la, ahhhhhh bu la bu la bu la…” I remember seeing Lenny fumble to his feet and haul for home as fast as his legs would take him.  His eyes were wide and wild with confusion.  My mother didn’t seem to notice.  Her shoulders were bouncing up and down and her chest was heaving.  She knelt there on both knees and then she howled.  “La la Lordy Lord!” she barked.  “Lord I beseech you… ah Lord… ah Lord… ah Lordy Lord!  Ahhh bu la bu la, ahhh ahummmmmmm.  Lord heal this boy.  Make the pain recede and vanish, Lord.  Oh, Lord!”  Her eyelids were fluttering and jumping all over the place.  From time to time the chanting would dissolve back into humming.  Bumble bees.  It reminded me of angry bumble bees.  At some point I stopped screaming.  I gave up.  I let my head lay flat on the grass and started staring at the sun for as long as I could stand it.  I’m not sure how long it took, but eventually I blacked out.
When I woke up I was lying on the sofa in the family room.  The room was frozen in silence and somehow that made it harder to come around.  I remember watching the blades of the ceiling fan go rattling steadily along above my head for a long time.  After much blinking and rotating of various limbs, it was that fan that helped me realize where I was and what had happened.  My head was propped on three folded pillows at one end, and at the other, my right leg was resting atop five or six more pillows that had been stacked like logs against the armrest.  The foot had been wrapped in paper towels—mounds of them clumped around my ankle and taped together with Ace bandages.  The entire foot had been strapped down and bundled so completely that I couldn’t even see a single toe.  I tried moving it just a little bit, and it hurt so badly that my eyes filled with tears.  I could feel that a bag of ice had been sandwiched inside the packing somewhere.  It felt slimy and loose like cold jelly.  I started whimpering just then, and soon after I heard footsteps coming closer.
My father walked around the corner from the hallway and came to a stop a few inches away from the foot.  His shirt was untucked halfway and his hair was a mess.  There were large pools of sweat beneath his armpits and lining the pockets of his shirt; his face was covered with the stuff, too.  I could see the remains of reddish handprints stamped across his forehead.  He raked both hands through his hair, itching with one of them at something knotted above his temple.
“You took a pretty good spill,” he said.  “How does it feel?”  He stuck his chin out and pointed at my foot with the bottom of it. 
“It hurts a lot.” I said.   I hadn’t had much practice at playing brave.
He didn’t say anything back, just shook his head a little bit, sucked in his lips.
“What’s going to happen?” I said.
“You’re mother’s upstairs sleeping right now.  We talked it over and we think you’ll be good as new in a couple of weeks.”  He paused for a moment, lowered his head and started talking to the carpet.  “With a lot of praying and rest, you’ll pull through this.  Your mom and I both think so.” 
“But dad,” I said, “I don’t think I’ve been hurt like this before.  I’m not sure it’ll work this time.”
He moved around the couch and sat beside me on the coffee table.  “You’ve got to have faith, Noah,” he said.  He put his palm on top of my head like he was about to bless me.  “You’re the most important part of this heeling process.  You have to believe.”
I remember feeling powerless, scared and betrayed.
“But Dad.  Dad?  Please?” I started crying then.  There was no use holding it back anymore.
The picture I have of him sitting there with his big hairy hand spread out on top of my head, tears welling up inside his eyes, is something that I’ll never forget.
“Please,” he said, “Please Noah, it’s for the best.”
I used to close my eyes, see my father there in my mind, and mouth the word gutless over and over again until I felt better.  Even as I had been lying there in the middle of the lawn with my mom perched over me, I had known what would happen.  I knew she wouldn’t know how to handle the situation and that I’d have to rely on my father for a clear head.  This time he wouldn’t be able to deny anything.  The foot would be right there in front of him, mocking him, challenging him to do something about it.  I couldn’t wait until he got home and told my mother how foolish she was being.  In my dream he would come home and start yelling, “You’ve lost your god damn mind, Alice!”  He’d grab her by the shoulders and shake as hard as he could.  “I’m taking my son to the emergency room and you can’t stop me!”  I’d had those thoughts many times before, ones where he would barge in, take control and save me, but things always ended up the same.  My mother was the enforcer.
My mom was always that one in every group who took her faith far too seriously.  My father attended her church, kneeled with her on Sunday afternoons, and read scripture with her at the dining room table before dinner, but I always knew deep down that he was only doing it to keep her happy.  Before they got married my father didn’t have a religion.  I used to think their wedding pictures told the whole story.  In one of them my dad is at the front of the church with his arm around my mother’s waist.  They are standing next to a piano, just in front of the lectern, and directly beneath an enormous cross where an ivory replica of Jesus lies stretched and bleeding for all the congregation to see.  My mother has tears rolling down her cheeks and I can tell by the way my dad’s suit is being sucked in against his chest that she’s squeezing him very hard.  My father is standing there—a thrity-three-year-old newly wed, forty pounds overweight in his skintight suit, balding and husky with glasses too round and thick for his chubby face—and he looks overwhelmed.  His eyes are squinted shut and his shoulders are pinched up close to his ears.  He’s slightly off balance, and if you look really close, his mouth is all wormy and crooked at the corners.  He might have understood right then what he was getting himself into.  That in the following years his wife would refuse to take their pet dog to the vet when his nose got trapped in a thicket of barbed wire, that she would often wake up from a bad dream in the middle of the night and start screaming the Lord’s name, and that every time she drove by a car accident she would pull over and drop to her knees at the side of the road.  I’ll never forget how one summer she got it in her head that she could help God bring an end to the draught in Lancaster County.  For thirty straight days in August she prayed almost without end.  She’d be making dinner, stirring the spaghetti in the pot and praying at the same time.  When August came and went without a single drop of rain, she continued the routine, and on the thirty-eighth day when it finally started raining, she went around telling everyone who would listen that her prayers had been answered.  “Ask and you shall receive,” she told Lenny Timmons’ mom the next afternoon when they bumped into each other at the mailboxes.  “God is great.  Just ask, and you’ll see for yourself.”  She’s one of those special believers who never stop to question the previous thirty-seven attempts.
For the next four weeks I only left the sofa when I had to go to the bathroom.  My parents would have to help me with everything.  One of them, whoever’s turn it was to stay home from work, would drape my arm over their shoulders and drag my limp body into the can.  I took all my meals there on the sofa and even slept there at night.  I’d fall asleep with a comic book open on my stomach—usually Superman or Silver Surfer.  The room became so familiar over time that to this day I can still recall the exact number of tiles on the ceiling; I can retrace the walls to find out how many horses are painted on the wallpaper. 
Every Sunday and Wednesday after evening services, members from my parents’ church would come by to say a prayer for me and pay their regards.  They’d line up single file outside the family room waiting their turn, and then my parents would usher them one by one up next to me where they would sit on folding chairs that my mom had set out.  Most of them only stayed a few seconds—just long enough to bow their heads and make like they were concentrating really hard.  Some of them would bring gifts.  Mr. and Mrs. Hoover brought me a donut every Sunday; Tony Paul, a meat packer from Gettysburg, would always bring me a pack of baseball cards, and Gloria Mandell once gave me an official police badge that she got from her older brother.  Sometimes they’d light candles on the coffee table and wait for them to start crackling before they left.  And then another one would come around the corner and take their place—my mom and dad flanking on either side like prison guards.  Just about every flower imaginable was setting somewhere around the room.  Pastor Floyd brought pink and yellow tulips from his garden, and a lady named Barbara kept toting in vases full of roses and setting them on the mantelshelf.  Lenny’s mom came around one night and was forced to wait in line with the others.  When it came her turn to come in, she set a chocolate cake down in the center of the table and smiled.  She wiped her hands off on her shorts and then played with the toes on my good leg a little bit.  “Hope you feel better real soon, Noah.”  She turned around quickly, her face red with panic, and swam her way through the crowd.  It took her a while to reach the door.  “Excuse me,” I kept hearing her say, “Excuse me, please.  Let me out!” 
The event lasted about two hours each time and always consisted of the same twenty or so people.  They had to be the gravest, most pensive looking people I had ever seen.  As the days and weeks went by I became more comfortable with the process.  At first I felt horrible anxiety and pressure to react, but more and more I began noticing something about the nature of the course.  They weren’t treating me like some tragic freak on display at a biblical art exhibit like I had first imagined, they weren’t really paying much attention at all.  At the same time, every time, each participant would bow their head and begin praying.  My parents, standing by the entranceway, would also join hands and close their eyes.  I was alone then for as long as it took them to come out of their trance, and I was the only one present with my eyes open.  Suddenly they were the ones being watched and judged.  The premise was flipped for those brief moments and I was the one who couldn’t help feeling sorry for them.  Sorry for the way they postured and twitched throughout their petitions for hope, sorry for the wishes they were forced to come up with on the spot, sorry for poor Ms. Carradine who always looked too big for her dresses and couldn’t seem to lose any weight, and sorry for the fantasies of redemption that they all carried around with them everywhere they went. 
Somewhere around the six week mark, my parents forced me back into school.  My uncle Robert pulled an old pair of crutches out from his basement and wrapped dishrags around the foam parts.  They were too long for me and every time I swung forward the wooden legs would lift me off my feet and bring me back down hard with a thud against the tiled hallways.  It gets harder to believe as the years go by, but my father’s only idea for stability had something to do with left over chunks of firewood.  He had broken down pieces of kindling and tried duct taping them around my shin and calf for a splint, but they kept sliding crooked and rubbing against my foot.  The sock would come loose underneath and everything would shift until no part of it retained any useful purpose whatsoever.  When my mom realized this, she asked my father to shave some of the hair off around my knee and wrap more duct tape around the top of the sock to keep the whole thing from going anywhere.  We did that together every morning before school.  My father and I would go into the bathroom and he would sit me down on the edge of the bathtub while he wrapped thick layers of the stuff all around my leg until he was satisfied.  For the rest of the year I wore a regular shoe on my left foot and an extra long sock on my right that never stopped dragging on the ground and was always smattered with dirt and debris from the classroom floors. 
A couple days before school ended for the year, Mrs. Tarkington pulled me out of study hall to come visit with her in the nurse’s office.  She was an unnaturally tall woman with sad eyes and greasy black hair that she kept coiled and pinned beneath a stiff hairnet. As we walked down the hall together she kept close beside me.  Her starched white outfit smelled of laundry detergent, and her orthopedic sneakers made wet little squeaks against the tiles.  When we got to her office she asked me to sit down across from her on a steel table that was covered by a white sheet of butcher’s paper.  She sat facing me on the edge of a footstool.  Her stout legs were covered in sheer white pantyhose and her knees came pointing out at me like jaws.  There were a pair of bifocals hanging around her neck and she put those on.  She wondered if I might be nice enough to put my foot up on her lap, and I agreed to.  She rolled my pants up and stopped when she got to the brace.  She bent closer to take a look and then raised her eyes to meet mine.  When I didn’t give her an answer one way or the other, she made a funny face and expelled some air through her nose.  There was a small counter to her right and she leaned over to it and grabbed some surgical scissors in her fist.  She looked at me again, shook her head, and began cutting through the tape as carefully as she could.  The small pieces of kindling fell away, making a hollow clinking sound on the floor. 
I watched her bite down on the bottom half of her lower lip, then lick away something from the corner of her mouth.  “I’m going to touch your ankle,” she said. 
As soon as she touched the ankle I flinched and pulled away.  She let go and then asked if she could take my sock off.  When she had the sock all the way off and she could get a good look at the way my foot was all lumps and swollen blue scar tissue, she took a deep breath and then lifted my whole leg up by the bottom of my heel.  She had it hoisted there in one strong hand, and she seemed to be checking underneath for something hidden—the way a mechanic pops a hood and fishes around inside for a loose gasket.  My foot was starting to burn and I could feel my toes start throbbing.
“This hurt?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said through my teeth, “a little bit.”  I hated looking at the foot.  The last time I had dared to look at it the whole thing was purple and twisted, cockeyed like a hockey stick.  It just seemed to dangle there like that, begging for someone to pay attention.
Mrs. Tarkington gently lowered my leg back down into the divot her dress made between her thighs.  She took her glasses off and let them hang loose atop her breasts.
“This is serious, Noah.”  She started poking some skin around the middle of my shin with her fingernail.  “This ankle is broken.  It’s broken in more than one place.”
“I figured that.” I couldn’t look her in the eye.
“Have you been to the doctor?”
“No.”
“Why not?  What do your parents say about this?”
“They don’t believe in medical intervention,” I said, repeating the exact words my mother had said to me millions of times.
Mrs. Tarkington started to smile, then turned serious.  “That’s foolish.  Now, come on, this isn’t something silly to play around about.  You’re sick, Noah.  You need help.  Why wouldn’t your family want you to get better?”
“They think God will take care of it.”
“Well, now…”