BANG OUT

“As a rule, whenever conditions are such as to affect the organism harmfully, factors appear within the organism itself that protect it or restore its disturbed balance.”
-Walter B. Cannon, physiologist, on homeostasis.

On a recent June day I found myself cotton-headed in my living room, drains dangling like strange tentacles from beneath the binder squeezing my ribcage. My breasts–fatty tissue of my former self–were on the other side of the bay, in a neon biohazard bin at the San Francisco Surgery Center. My muscles sang sorely as I twisted toward the blaring summer light outside my living room window.

Painkillers and the remnants of anesthesia lent an idyllic quality to the old woman and her tennis-balled walker crossing the street toward the assisted living center. I admired her slow consistency and cheered for her as she held her ground against an approaching Toyota. I watched her disappear behind the leaves blocking the window. They waved a lazy greeting my way.

Meanwhile, tireless newborn clots at the site of two large smile-shaped incisions on my chest rang out a call for fiber and muscle cells. As I stared off drunkenly into the blaze, my loyal cells answered, knowingly as honey bees. The clots welcomed them and helped them grow, playing their kamikaze part in the mission to keep me alive.

Within minutes, I was asleep underneath a slow moving ceiling fan in Oakland, California; my whole universe shifted by the weight of what I’d just done. Of course, I mean the universe I can touch; the universe where air hugs my topmost, dead layer of skin-skin colored with ink tattoos of ships, oceans, text, children. This other universe, the one of clots and veins and cells, this universe never sleeps. This fragile fortress; this answer, this mystery, this container; this universe continued on with tenacity and flexibility, and, as always, worked to heal me.

The poetry of it is that the seawater-like substance that floats our cells also helps us maintain homeostasis, an endless and complex regulatory process. In every moment, we manage an unseen orchestra of information, emotion, and basic need. The ballet of biology required to deal with a simple paper cut is a lesson in inspiration, interdependency, and the body’s endless bulldog hope.

***

Three months later, the drains, binder and sutures are gone. Scar tissue has puffed, reddened, hardened. The double smile stretched across my rib cage is a reminder to archive, to never forget–memory upon memory, body upon body. I am my own x-ray, layered and transparent.

It is September, my first time at the Friends Meeting Hall on Vine Street. I am interested in communal silence because sometimes words are leaky ships. Outside, the leaves have turned blood red and burgundy.

We are seated, spotting the pews like birds on a rooftop. No one acknowledges anyone else. I watch a rumpled middle aged man screw his eyelids close. A stomach rumbles behind me.

I am here mostly because of my hypothalamus–grand holdover of the reptilian brain, regulator of homeostasis, and the architect of my overactive fight/flight response. I want to quiet its trigger finger, to release its paranoid aim.

I remind myself of this as the elderly woman diagonal to me falls deeper and deeper into uncontrolled tremors, ceases them completely, and then starts again. I wait for someone to speak, to be moved to share a mystical insight. No one does. I take a deep breath..

Noses are blown, cars idle. The tremor lady begins another cycle. I watch her for awhile, find myself admiring her commitment, her constant return to stillness.

Something shifts. My brain habituates to the quiet, de-amplifies it. My hypothalamus agrees–there is no threat here. My breathing slows. My blood vessels dilate and my blood buzzes, unobstructed, in and out of my cells. It is my own mind that tells me: We are all imperfect and deserving.

Thirty minutes pass, forty-five, maybe. I study the light cutting a quiet line across my dress pants. The squinting man relaxes his eyelids and I feel glad for him. Kindness, I think. My thoughts became more sparse, sparser still; a slowing drum beat.

At the end of meeting, I walk into the stirring hum of a Berkeley Sunday morning. I button my cardigan, let it hug my chest in the way clothes do now. The air smells like back east, like summer’s turn to fall. I think about how my sails were raised into a racket of wind, but I learned to adjust the lines. I have harnessed what once toppled me and with gentle precision, I am moved.

***

I know about endless, precarious imbalance; I know it is possible to reinforce shakiness for so long you forget what it’s like to go a night without cold, irrational fear creeping steadily toward your heart. Your body learns; your body adapts and compensates and never stops wanting to live, even if, in the confusion, you end up all tangled in on yourself, your sails flopped over like broken wings. The untangling, the restoration of balance, is profound. This is the surprising topography of beauty.

My guidepost has become the physicality of memory itself; the imprinted history that triggers loose cannonball adrenaline, inhibits breathing, and stores ancient electrical motor impulses-frozen holdovers-in witnessing tissue. I could illustrate this dark methodology of cruelty, of what it is to break the neck of an animal smaller and more tender than oneself.

I know about shipwrecks, but this is about sails.

This is about legacies resisted, ships righted, blood and guts and messy, endless faith. This is about a body stolen, a body recovered, and a day in June when I pulled my father’s flag out of my chest and finally planted my own.

Copyright © 2008, Page McBee.