Like Wings, Your Hands - Elizabeth Earley

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Don’t mind the not knowing; never fear it

      3. Never deny any experience that comes to you; embrace everything to be total

      Marko took these directives 100 percent seriously. He understood intuitively rather than intellectually that what it equated to was neutrality. For as much as culture and society idealized hope, Marko recognized, it’s a limiting prospect. Investment in any specific outcome precluded openness to anything, to all things. It’s a tether that can easily become a prison. Marko had read something in his mom’s journal that he thought a lot about:

      Freedom is in the mind and spirit of the person who embraces the expanse of possibilities, including the great possibility of getting something other than what you think you want. Many times, people get what they think they don’t want and it turns out to be more of what they wanted than they even knew.

      The raw materials of the universe create thick webs: threads crisscrossing and connecting everything in complicated, indecipherable, shifting ways. A tug in one spot in one corner of a galaxy causes a shift a billion miles away—in a corner you’d never guess was related. Wide swaths of any life, the great majority, lie well beyond the influence of personal preferences. Yet there is an intricate design at work—there must be.

      Marko more than intuited this as fact; he knew it when he started seeing the math. Even though the math happened automatically and was triggered by physical, spatial interaction with the unsensing parts of his body, after a while just the anticipation of such interactions could trigger the calculations, effectively making Marko psychic. In other words, he sometimes knew what was going to happen before it happened. It had to do with the way his mind interpreted time spatially.

      From where Marko sat in the month of January in 2015, he could look back and to the left at the past decade. Each year of his life had been like a step in stairs. But the staircase was spiraled (not in a perfect circle, but rather long and narrow like a tall oval), with each rotation a decade, and now that he was fourteen, he was in the middle of a turn. The last thirteen years stretched out in a loop behind him: down and directly to the left, he saw the moment he was born. It was so close, he could almost touch it. Yet at the same moment he was rounding the corner to the next decade, up and to his right.

      This is why Marko hesitated in going back in the dream bed. As much as he wanted to be in an able body again and experience the nothingness of the in-between, he sensed something bad would happen to him there. It somehow made him more vulnerable to the dark body.

      Still, this psychic sense gave Marko feeling number one, fear—which was like pink sandpaper—because it seemed to directly contradict the three ‘nevers’ that his mom made him promise to follow. Marko had always kept his promises and he didn’t want to change that. As he wrestled with how to fit this psychic sense into a world governed by these three rules, he had an idea. The third ‘never’ was to never deny any experience that came to him but to embrace everything. The math and the shapes and the colors—they were an experience coming to him. When they foretold a series of events, this was also an experience coming to him. His embracing and not denying this experience meant that he should pay attention and intervene where he thought necessary.

      Besides, words, Marko understood, were open to interpretation and carried varying meanings. He remembered with a little bitterness when he had discovered this to be true. As a small child, Marko trusted language to be sturdy and consistent. His father had asked him: “Would you like to go on an adventure with me?” Marko didn’t know what the word “adventure” meant, but he deduced from his dad’s tone and the glint in his eye that it was something wonderful. Without much thought, Marko answered that yes, he did want to go on an adventure. So when the word “adventure” was first used to describe an outing he had with his father in his jogging stroller, where his dad had zoomed him off road, through the woods, over gravel and roots and around huge, looming trees, past people and dogs, around ponds with exotic, long-necked creatures that Marko had never seen before and that he learned that day were called ducks and swans, he associated that event with the word absolutely. The next time he heard the word, it was his grandmother speaking it. She wanted to know if Marko would like to go with her to the ashram. She said that it would be an adventure. Marko answered with a confident yes, knowing what was in store but skeptical that his grandmother was capable of delivering it the same way his father had done.

      The indignation he felt when it turned out to be a series of chores—sweeping floors and cleaning windows and lugging trash—something that was patently not the exciting, fast, and freeing encounter with nature he’d had with his dad but in fact exactly opposite, was his first experience of the hot flush of betrayal. It wasn’t his grandmother who’d betrayed him, but the word and its ability to blithely shed one meaning and slip into another at will. It was the beginning of his mistrust of language and its ability to never be precise in conveying intended meaning. It was why, as he grew older, he chose to talk less and less, especially about things that mattered.

      In no realm was this more applicable than that of Marko’s relationship with his mother. She was such a colossal mystery to him that he could never begin to know the myriad expectations she might have not only of him as he was in any given point in time, but of the him he used to be and the him he would become. Throughout his childhood, he had the sense that he was not doing something right by her, but there was no evidence to support this feeling. In fact, all the evidence pointed toward her bold and unconditional acceptance and love for him. Still, this evidence was built mostly of words, which Marko had come to understand were unreliable as evidence because they were so open to subjective interpretation. And because they were easy to utter. Observable actions were more reliable as evidence, and Marko had observed and memorized and catalogued a great variety of actions of his mother’s, which, taken as a whole, was rife with internal conflict, contradiction, and unfathomably infinite nuance. In fact, taken as a whole, this body of evidence made up of all her observable actions was as unreliable as language.

      This is why reading her diary was so important. After finding it for the first time, he knew he couldn’t risk taking it off her shelf again because she wrote in it almost every day. So instead, he took a picture of every page and of every one of the letters folded up in the back with his iPad. He made a password-protected PDF of them and saved it inside one of his homework folders where she would never find it.

       13. January 12, 2015: Cambridge, MA

      It was time to catheterize him. Every day at 8 a.m., 12 p.m., 4 p.m., and 8 p.m., someone drained his bladder. The task required fine motor skills that he didn’t have, so Kali or Lydia or a school nurse continued to do it for him. This morning, Marko woke and got himself out of bed. He dragged himself to his chair and got in it, then went to the bathroom to get his catheterization kit. He brought it to Kali in her room. She pretended to still be sleeping because she liked the way he had of waking her. He would slow down his chair and push the door open ahead of him, then inch in without letting the chair bump the door. The whole process was nearly silent. Kali loved the sweetness of it, because he intended to wake her up anyway; he just wanted to do it with a gentle kiss to her hand and a whispered, “Good morning, Mama.”

      That time, Kali’s hands were in front of her, tucked up against her chest in prayer pose. Kali couldn’t move them without betraying that she was awake. He was so quiet there behind her for what felt like a very long time. She wondered what he was doing. She pictured him sitting there looking at her, watching her sleep. He could have just as easily been zoned out, staring at the floor or wall, she knew. But Kali seemed to feel his gaze trained on the side of her face. Kali stirred and turned over. He was bent forward, looking under her bed. Kali shot up and dropped her blanked over the side of her bed. Her dream bed was under there, and she didn’t want him asking her about it.

      Marko smiled at Kali. He smelled like urine again and, in spite of trying to smile back, Kali frowned. The line instantly appeared between his eyes, and he frowned too.

      “What’s wrong?”

      Kali smiled as big a smile as she could make. “Nothing, my love. Good morning! How are you?” His face relaxed. He looked at her with one eye turned in, something that often happened in the

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