paralyzed

chapter 26

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Between Thanksgiving and Christmas of that year, I woke up one morning and discovered I could not move the left side of my face.

The first sign of my condition was the lake of saliva accumulated under my left cheek upon the pillow. Drooling was not something I did with regularity. The second sign was that when I sat up in bed and looked across my room at the mirror over my dresser, my vision was impaired by a refusal of my left eye to open, and out of the right side I could see a face that was half-melted wax. I grazed my cheek, but there was no reception of the touch, just a numbness that couldn’t feel the wind of a hurricane.

Otherwise, I felt more or less fine, besides a general tiredness, but the only physical cause I knew for this sort of ailment was a stroke, which I was immediately convinced I had, and ran downstairs to my parents practically in tears, grateful for the first time since I graduated that I still lived with them. My mother was still there and had not left for work. I could barely explain my condition to her, so droopy and useless was the left side of my mouth.

We went to urgent care, and after some time in the waiting room watching coverage of the Ferguson protests on the TV, we had a doctor inspect me and tell me what I could have deduced from a Google search: I was suffering from a particularly acute case of something they called Bell’s Palsy, which was the inflammation or compression of the facial nerve, which controls the muscles of facial expression.

I felt Quasimodo-esque, although I was somewhat accustomed to dealing with such shame after my experience with acne. It was as though the universe knew I had struck down one challenge and needed to bring me back to Earth with another.

My mother began a series of speculations that would last for years as to where or how I had acquired this Bell’s Palsy. Doctors aren’t sure as to where the affliction comes from or how one acquires it, although there is reasonable certainty that it originates from a virus of some kind. I didn’t mention it to her, but I knew it had to do with some combination of the raw meat at work and the coldness of the conditions there, and with the many twelve-hour days I was putting in as the holidays arrived and The Big T Grocery got busier and busier.

I called out that day to preserve some sanity and spent the day in my room with the shades drawn, sitting in the glow of my laptop or Kindle and tapping the side of my drooping face, hoping to feel the faintest touch. The doctor said that there wasn’t really any other treatment besides time, and so time I would spend, in the most insular of ways possible.

When I told Tommy about my condition, he came over right away.

Tommy at my house was a rarity. Throughout our childhood, it was always me going to his place. My parents were very anti-visitor, the main reason for this being that our house was always kind of a mess, both in terms of clutter and hygiene. Even though my mother was by nature a hygienic and clean person, she was most often too exhausted from work to do anything about the house’s unkempt state and was therefore ashamed of it. My father was of minimal help in this regard, viewing his chores as those of the more traditionally masculine persuasions, like mowing the lawn or stopping the toilet from running. I helped by keeping my own room and the bathroom I used clean (I took after my mother), but in the course of my life as a teenager I rarely had the time to clean the entire house to the specifications my mother required in having casual visitors.

My mom was surprised when he appeared at our door that day with a tentative knock. She immediately apologized to him and frantically stacked the shoes that were cluttering our doorway back onto the shoe rack while explaining that the house smelled like bacon because we had just cooked some that morning, which, as far as I knew, was a lie. We could not be sure why the house smelled like bacon. Tommy took this in stride, and before my mom could yell to me that he was there, I was looking down at him from the top of the stairs. He saw me before I could say anything.

“Jude-dude, you look like Snow White’s eighth dwarf!” he said.

“What?”

“Droop-y!” he said, and I laughed. Even my laugh was a warped and mangled auditory exposition of my new (and hopefully temporary) deformity.

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s obvious, no? It sounded like you need some camaraderie. Or at least something to do. I have today off. Let’s hang out.”

What shocked me was that since I had made drinking, smoking, and general drug use verboten between us, Tommy and I never hung out anymore unless we were running. And though it was a shock to see him outside of this context, I was soon warmed with a gratitude I hadn’t felt toward Tommy in a long time.

He came up to my room, where he hadn’t been for years, and I could tell he was inspecting it with curiosity, particularly the posters on my wall, some of which had embarrassingly not been taken down (Green Day, My Chemical Romance, blink-182) since my tastes evolved from the middle school years.

“Ah Jude-dude, look at the synchronicity here,” he said, sitting on the edge of my bed and inspecting my face a bit more closely than I would have liked.

“What do you mean?”

“Is this new static rendition of your face not the perfect metaphor for our own paralysis?”

“Oh God, stop with this again.”

“It’s true! There’s perhaps nothing clearer. You’re stuck, Jude-dude. Paralyzed. This isn’t about your immune system, working in the meat room. No, this is a direct correlation to the state of your life, manifested on your face,” he said.

“And what about my life?”

“Our lives. We are still in the womb,” he explained.

I touched the affected side of my face.

“Maybe so,” I said. “It’s not like life is a narrative though. You can’t write it. We’re not like our Sims characters. Remember we used to play that?”

“Life is a narrative that you write, though. But perhaps not like a game,” Tommy said.

I looked at the dusty PlayStation3 that was beneath my TV. “For old time’s sake?”

We played the Sims 3 for hours that day, but we didn’t play like normal gamers. We played like we did in high school: creating detailed character sheets for our Sims, each one of them with backstories, phobias, traumas, desires, etched into some graph paper with pen or pencil. Then we’d build complex narrative networks of subplots and dramas that we would play out via the gameplay and in the conversations we had with each other as we played.

It was like the make-believe of the Whispering Pines Woods again, transplanted to our older selves and within the confines of a computer chip. For that first day of my Bell’s Palsy, our friendship went back in time to when the big questions had yet to be asked.

“So, when are you going to achieve terminus of relationship with Maggie?” he asked after his Sim lost their baby, a major plotline we had agreed to early on and which would end up signaling the end of his marriage with the comely Sim from down the block.

When I told Maggie about my Bell’s Palsy, she cooed sympathetically and said all the right things, but insisted she was too busy and stressed at school to visit or care for me at all. I could have taken this apathy to be the final straw, but I did not. Although Tommy apparently would not consider it a betrayal of his family to break up with her, I could not know if Maggie’s father and Tommy’s father would feel the same way, and Mr. Goodspeed was, after all, on the verge of giving me a promotion.

“Why do you ask that?” I said. My neck was starting to hurt from how I had to position my head to see the screen through my one good eye.

“Well, it’s painfully obvious that you don’t like her,” he said. “And, as you know, despite her being a Goodspeed and a cousin of mine, I don’t really have a high opinion of her either. She’ll never come out here to visit you.”

“I know, I know. But the thing is, what do I really have going for me besides her? Going to visit her is the only thing that gets me out of Veddersburgh. And where am I supposed to get another girlfriend? Have you ever been on Tinder here? It’s all just people we already know.”

“I would never deign to be on Tinder, Jude-dude. That is a black hole of romance,” he said. “If the problem is getting out of town and otherwise occupying yourself outside the boundaries of our great city, why not accompany me to The Torhaus?”

He was always trying to get me to go to The Torhaus. It was a new biergarten-styled place out east in Schenectady that opened early for breakfast and for watching Premier League soccer games. But I couldn’t acquiesce due to my previous rule established with him the summer before: no hanging out with alcohol or drugs. There would certainly be drinks at The Torhaus, big helpings of German beer.

Couldn’t I take the chance, this once, after he had come to see me at home? The Torhaus could be fun, anyway.

“Fine,” I said. “When my face is healed, let’s try out The Torhaus. You should drive, though.”

“Deal. And you’ll break up with my ignominious cousin?”

I considered it. “I really should, shouldn’t I?”

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next (you’ll sometimes walk alone)

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