When he was five years old he lost the ability to speak. Months before this he destroyed his older sister’s bicycle. Related or not, the two things from there on existed in his memory as one, inseparable: the months of wordless thought, detached and lying in the window of his downstairs bedroom, seeing the clouds puff up and wheel by, no longer having words for them or their movement, or the movement of the tree shadows and branches—all things drifting, drifting—and the image of his sister’s bicycle at the bottom of the brook, handlebars warped to one side, grips gone, seat spun around and torn, spokes unmarried from rims, pedals gone. What had he done? Why? He pictured himself up to his knees in the water, possessed by something and banging down rocks on the frame of her bike for the dull ringing sound of stone on metal, and some other pleasure he couldn’t name. Like a reverse religious immersion, negative blessing, un-baptism. Later, he became convinced that there must be an answer—somewhere in the furthest back part of his mind, alongside the remembrance of how or why he forgot the ability to speak and form words, there must lie an explanation. And he was sure he would have apologized to his sister for his actions at some point. His parents would have made him. But he had no recollection of that either. Of this time in his life, he remembered only the bicycle, destroying it, and the months afterward of floating disconnect.
When the words returned they did not do so all at once and as if they’d never left him: no instant reawakening or sudden swing back to the real time world of the non-mute. He had to take things slowly, relearning words and associations, attaching and making them fit back to objects and meanings in ways which often felt to him arbitrary or just no good anymore. Aphasia, they called that. Synesthesia when he wanted a taste like the sound of water on stones or a sound like chocolate on bread. Dyslexia when he mixed up blocks and symbols or turned them around—blue for black, road for car, car for truck, cloud for sky, c for e, and e for o and a. Sometimes he felt a vague prickling in his fingers to accompany these misapprehensions, as if the weight of blood and the prickling sensation of his circulation had somehow gone outside him, inverted, and he could not say if his fingers were bloated pincushions or leathery and narrow as pincers. At times it was bad enough he’d have to hold his hands in the air minutes on end, waiting for the feeling to pass and for real sensation to return, trying not to let his fingers even brush one against the other. Until one day, driving with his father and sister to school it dawned on him that there was no going back. However he’d come to inhabit this misaligned world with its skewed meanings and not-quite-right words, its sky that didn’t match his notion of a sky, sister who was not like his “real” sister, bike that would never be fixed or brought back, and the forward momentum of his father’s car always too slow, too loud, just slipping aside its true path or trajectory—all of it, was in fact the only world he’d been given to know and to live in. The thought went something like: So it was all ruined to start with. There was never anything else. How come I only noticed now?
Twenty-five years later on a flight into Bakersfield he had to remember this all again—the failure to know words and speech, his sister’s wrecked bike at the bottom of the brook, de-tasseled and chipped, spokes undone—all of these things, and more, which he’d forgotten or pushed for years to the back of his mind, he revisited and with the sudden, heartbroken longing of one long estranged. Outside his window the familiar brown grey patchwork of farm land and roads. Mountains and scrubland. Wisps of cloud on the horizon. Thirty-six thousand feet up. Sky, after all, is not sky, even up close, inside it, he thought; it is only what you make of it looking up and dreaming of flight, or looking down and longing for home.
And for some time after the flight attendant’s announcement that they’d be attempting an emergency landing with no wing flap, and following her cataloguing of all related dangers on landing—nose gear crashing; tires exploding, igniting; brakes igniting; loss of control; slipping from the runway—he could do nothing but look out and study the distant, beloved ground. If, he told himself. If I make it back to that plain old ground I will never stop appreciating it. I will never come up here again. Ever. He knew it was a lie. Looked around the cabin—its narrowness and singularity, its well-constructed entrapment, bland blues and smoothly contoured, creaking plastic molding; nowhere to go and definitely nowhere you’d want to die; pressed his feet to the floor and gripped the armrests thinking still, If I make it down. If I make it down. Looked outside again and thought of his father’s favorite old car, the Saab bug with its domed roof and chipped paint—about as un-plane-like as any vehicle ever manufactured—and the time they’d driven north in it, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, him and his father, alone. Remembered the thing his father had said he loved best about that car: its freewheel transmission which allowed you to take the car out of gear and truly coast, not like a regular car in neutral, but really using no gas on any downhill. Freewheeling. No engine braking. Coasting down the Green Mountains and then revving back up them, on their way north for a full week of racing—good luck, triumph, money. He remembered the trophies on the winners’ platform too, one almost as big as his torso, and the ribbons and hundred dollar bills (his own, the first he’d ever seen—Benjamin Franklin smiling like he was stoned, and all the velvet-green design surrounding him that said yes! and you won! and first in your age group!), and the girl he’d met the night following the first race: Corrine. No last name. And on the way back home, stopping again in her town to see if he might find her, his father’s amazed words entering the same town from the other direction, southbound, in daylight, no race spectators, booths, cyclists, venders, road blocks, all of it gone: You never cross the same river twice. Remembered the spray of his own spit and toothpaste arcing out and flying straight back to hit him in the face and to cover the back panel and side window of the car, refusing to be let go, his father laughing at him for not knowing this simple fact about gravity and bodies in motion, as they freewheeled into town and he finished combing, spritzing, brushing, just in case he found her. Remembered last, the night months after this, with the same girl, scared for his life, and fumblingly (his first time) making love to her on the floor of her sister’s apartment, 4AM. Her words to him as he slipped inside her—Just don’t come-off in me. It’s OK.
Only as the ground rose closer, racing up on his left, trees warped by the terrifying speed, blurred but still in one piece, the woman beside him making a wordless noise in her throat that could only be called whimpering, head between her knees, only then with the flight attendant calmly intoning —brace, brace, brace, brace, brace—did the rest of it come back. He did not brace. Did not hide his face in his forearms or between his legs. He looked out at the ground rushing by, closer, closer still, and remembered why he’d lost the power to speak and why he’d been jealous enough of his sister to attempt to destroy the world by smashing her bicycle. They were one and the same thing after all—the mental freewheeling, the loss of speech, his jealousy, her, and all the subsequent years of his adolescence spent riding, riding, until his knees blew. The plane bumped down and back up and down again and this time stayed. Caught. Coasting, coasting, forever it seemed, an eternity—gravity weighing through his limbs and fingertips like love, pressing shut his eyelids, all that speed and deceleration thickening his senses until he felt sleepy and delirious, but for the terror. No fires, no blown out tires, no nose gear crashing. Yellow fire engines every twenty five yards down the tarmac. And still the words brace, brace, brace echoing through the cabin like a prayer, a chant to ward off danger or to cause the world to remain fixed in one place, true to all its given meanings.
GREGORY SPATZ is the author of the novels , FIDDLER’S DREAM and NO ONE BUT US, and of the story collections and WONDERFUL TRICKS. His stories have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Glimmer Train Stories, Shenandoah, Epoch, Kenyon Review and New England Review. The recipient of a Michener Fellowship, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Washington State Book Award, and an NEA Fellowship in literature, he teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. Spatz plays the fiddle in the twice Juno-nominated bluegrass band John Reischman and the Jaybirds. Read more at his website, www.gregoryspatz.com.
