This is the New Story of My Life

Last January, I made a new Word document called, “This is the new story of my life.” For inspiration, I opened a journal from when I lived and worked at L’Arche, a community for adults with intellectual disabilities. During my two years at L’Arche, every morning I would try and scribble down three “stream-of-consciousness” pages at 6 a.m. I would write as I drank coffee and waited for Isabelle’s 150 mL of Peptamen to descend from the bag hanging from a pole beside her bed through the squiggly tube that led to her stomach. Isabelle’s school bus arrived and left at 7:15 a.m. Cynthia the bus driver would not wait. At 6:27, once all the Peptamen had descended, I would unhook the feeding tube and it would be time to change Isabelle out of her pyjamas, wash her armpits and change her into her clothes. Then I would lift her into her wheelchair so that I could wash her face, and brush her teeth and hair. So many days, Isabelle would remain half asleep the whole time, smiling and laughing here and there. Despite this, rarely have I felt as connected to the rest of the world than during this hour of preparation that ended with me rolling Isabelle down the ramp to meet the school bus.

On April 27, 2007, I started a brand new journal. I had about three months to go at L’Arche. At the end of each day, I would make a big X on my calendar. On the beginning of each day, I would do a countdown. 91 days left. Then I would try to figure out what date was 91 days ago and whether it felt like a long time had passed or not. Usually it felt like a very long time had passed. I was twenty-one years old, and I’d already lived at L’Arche for twenty months.

Frog and Toad Are Friends. This what it says on the cover of the journal that I began on April 27, 2007. Underneath the words there’s a picture of a fat toad dressed in pants and a jacket, reading to a longer leaner frog, who is also wearing clothes. The frog has a finger on his lips and he’s listening intently.

Frog and Toad Are Friends

Who remembers the Frog and Toad stories? My father read me all of them. All I can remember is the story called The List. Toad decided that he would make a list of all the things he had to do throughout the day. Wake up, brush teeth, wash face. He didn’t have any hair to brush. Then there was breakfast, the newspaper, and other typical obligations of toads who wear clothes. After breakfast, Frog came over and asked Toad if he wanted to go for a walk. Frog wanted to search for mushrooms or something like that. Toad said no, because it wasn’t on his list. He went about his Toad errands. Sweeping, gardening, going to the store. Then his list blew away and he had no idea what to do with himself.

That’s the trouble with lists.

Toad was the uglier one and also the smarter one. Neither of them was particularly smart, or good-looking.

On the first page of the journal, I write about a conversation I had with the assistant Paul, one of L’Arche’s many virgin saints. Paul lived at L’Arche over ten years. After that, he volunteered at our house every Thursday, to help with baths and make us supper. Paul was an exquisite cook. He used to slice the carrots in such perfect long thin lines. And he always marinated tofu for me to ensure that I didn’t starve to death.

On April 26, 2007, we talked about a new planet the NASA people had found. It was light years away. The planet can apparently sustain life. Paul thought that humans should be able to find a way to get there efficiently before the sun dies. But in the meantime, we can build bubble like structures to shelter us when we leave the earth. Kind of like the moon hotel in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Charlie flew to the moon with Mr. Wonka and his parents and four grandparents. I think all of Charlie’s grandparents became obnoxious in outer space. They were nicer when all four of them shared a bed in a tiny shack. I never finished that book.

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

A few pages later, I wrote about a picnic on Mont-Royal. I remember getting ready in the morning. It wasn’t my turn to give Isabelle her Peptamen and get her dressed. But that would mean that I would have to make sandwiches which I wasn’t very good at. Talia, my boss switched with me. “Il faut aller où sont nos forces,” she said. We must go where our strengths are. For me, this meant not making sandwiches. Talia made better sandwiches than I did, and there was something so earnest and beautiful about her. She remains one of the great people of my life. A guru of sorts. L’Arche was full of earnest and loveable Catholics. Virgin Saints, and Nun Friends.

About halfway through the Frog and Toad journal, I learn about someone else’s spinal cord injury. One Saturday, Isabelle’s teacher Elizabeth went for a bike ride. Then she hit a bump and went flying over the handlebars. She landed on her back and now she can’t feel or move her legs. I have been terrified of spinal cord injuries ever since I knew they existed. I felt so traumatized that someone who had spent her whole life working with kids in wheelchairs would end up in a wheelchair herself. Surely, it was just a matter of time before my spine endured the same fate. For weeks, all I could think about was Elizabeth and her spine. And my spine.

During a weekend off, I went to have beers with Tom, one of the volunteers. We both drank four delightful Keith’s in his bachelor pad near Guy Concordia metro. I had such a huge crush on him, not knowing that he had a girlfriend. As I left his apartment ready to bike home, I made a nervous joke about paralysis. He said that I would probably live until I was ninety-three years old, and none of the horrible things that I’d imagined will have happened to me. I’ll be jogging with all of my legs. On my death bed, I will count and feel all of my limbs, and it will be an immense relief. I wonder where Tom is now.

There were a bunch of cards inside the journal, and a photo.

The photo is of Simon, my ex-boyfriend who jumped off a building. When I started, “This is the new story of my life,” Simon was still alive. I used to think of Simon every time I started a new creative project, and it was going terribly. I still do. In the picture, Simon is smiling, posing for the back of his book cover, or for his application to be in some movie. His teeth look very large and his eyes seem kind of manic.

Simon thought I was really fucked up and hopeless, but that I had some talent for writing.

I’m pretty sure the Boatman doesn’t think I’m fucked up and hopeless.  He thinks I’m an okay writer.

Maybe one day all this will be an excellent novel. For now, it stays between the covers of my Frog and Toad journal, and here. One of the cards in my journal has a baby gorilla on it. I’ve always had a thing for primates, and this card is from my mother. She wrote it for me when I was in the psych ward in Kingston, having overdone it on the Ex-lax.

Let’s transcribe the whole card. My mom can have the last word.

“Dear Erica

                 You are a very special and

                Beautiful person.

                                I love you as do many many people.

 Remember to love yourself for all the wonderful little things that are you.

When you were a baby I could never get over the way you would lie on the bed with your feet and hands waving and how you would giggle and gurgle and laugh from deep in your little belly. You would have us all giggling.

Don’t forget that your smile can be no one else. You don’t have to do anything else but be our Erica.

Love Mom.”

The End.

Mother, Sister, Me.

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Lizzie

One night while my friend Lizzie was sleeping, a bookshelf fell on top of her, and she died. The bookshelf hung on top of her bed. When it fell down, Lizzie couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t escape. 

A few months after Lizzie died, her sister came over to my last shitty apartment in Montreal.  She brought a book and a lamp and a photo.  The lamp was blue and was given to Lizzie by the people with intellectual disabilities that Lizzie once worked with in France.  Lizzie used to work for people with disabilities until arthritis attacked the joints in her spine and she got a disability too.  Sometimes I worry about this happening to me. Like the lamp, the book Lizzie’s sister brought is also blue.  I’d lent it to Lizzie for some English course she had to take. Volume I of the Norton Anthology of English Literature.  From Beowulf to King Lear to Gulliver’s Travels. It stopped before “A Vindication of Rights for Women.”  They started vindicating women’s rights in the next volume.  The book was pretty heavy.  I hope it wasn’t one of the books that fell on her.  I wouldn’t be able to bear it.

In the photo, you can see that Lizzie is wearing a light turquoise button-up shirt with a collar.  She has pink cheeks and brown eyes.  Her eyes are just a little bit bigger than eyes you might call bird-like.  Lizzie used to complain about her nose being too big.  I guess it is a little big in proportion to the rest of her face.  You can’t see it in the picture, but at the back of her head, I know that her hair is scuffed and falling out from the friction between her head and her wheelchair.  You can’t see her wheelchair either. Sometimes Lizzie could stand up by holding onto her wheelchair or her walker.  Or a table, or a bookshelf. 

Maybe Lizzie is happy in the picture – I think they took it on her fiftieth birthday party. But to me, she looks worried and kind of uncomfortable.  Sometimes that happens when people smile with their teeth and the photographer takes too long to take the picture.

The professor that Lizzie and I had during our second year at Concordia was adamant that we shouldn’t write about what we knew or else we’d be in trouble.  He made Lizzie cry once.  She’d written a story about a little girl who’d found her grandmother’s vibrator and her mother, the grandma’s daughter-in-law, felt awkward.  The story wasn’t terrible, but it read as though it had been written by someone who didn’t own a vibrator.  A little inhibited.  But Professor Fraser Richman attacked Lizzie who sat in her wheelchair at the back of the class full of twenty year olds, and Lizzie cried.

“Where do you want to go with your writing?  Is it just an outlet to express your feelings?”  asked Professor Fraser Richman. Lizzie’s eyes fluttered and she didn’t know what to say.  She was a pretty inhibited person.  In class, Professor Fraser Richman used to make us play games to help us to know our characters.  One of them was called “If you were a fruit, what would be?”  We’d go around the table and make up questions like “if you were a drink,” “if you were a car,” “if you were a kitchen appliance... what wouldya be?”  And everyone would have to answer for their character.  A martini, A coke, Earl Grey Tea.  A Volvo, a taxi, a Mercedes.  A toaster, a microwave oven, a hand blender.  The Magic Bullet.  Lizzie could never come up with anything.

“Gee,” she’d say, her eyes blinking rapidly, her cheeks and forehead blotching red. She’d push her glasses up her nose.  “A car?  Gee, I don’t know.  You’ll have to come back to me. Sorry.”  My knees hurt whenever I watched her.  Just say something, I thought, it doesn’t matter. I always sat in class with my legs coerced around the arms of my chair, frozen into an excruciating lotus position.  If you were a tree, a country, a dessert…  What would you be?   Lizzie never knew.

“Think too much and you’ll be in trouble,” Professor Fraser Richman warned us.  We were doomed before we even started.  When Professor Fraser Richman stacks up all his published novels, they stand taller than he does.  The summer after our class ended, I set out to read the complete works of Fraser Richman.  I got bored after the first chapter of – I don’t remember what the book was called.  The trouble with stacks of books is that they can topple over and kill you.  3-2-1, and you’re dead.  The suckers and the fuckers.  Professor Fraser Richman used to warn us about swearing in our stories.  We risked drawing too much attention to ourselves.  The writer is supposed to be silent, yet brilliant.  Like God.  He also said that writing about dreams (you know, the kind you have when you’re sleeping), though they may strike the right chord, was somewhat of a copout since real writers succeeded at weaving the subconscious into the narrative inexplicitly.  Well, shit fuck Jesus Christ, I think I’m in trouble.

I Cop Out

by E. J. Bodhisattva

A few nights ago, I had a dream that I was in a movie about Lizzie.  The woman cast as Lizzie was tall and thin with dark red nail polish and shiny, perfectly smooth straightened black hair that went down to the middle of her back.  Together we rode up the elevator to where the filming would take place.  When the doors opened on the sixth floor, Lizzie walked in.

“Lizzie,” I said.  “You’re here.”

“I think I fit the part better.”  She wasn’t wearing her glasses.  I told the shiny black haired actress that we wouldn’t be needing her anymore.  She got off the elevator on the ninth floor.  Lizzie and I rode to the top.  Lizzie wore a pink blazer.  Her face was less blotchy than usual and her small brown eyes which normally darted back and forth, remained still.
“You’re here,” I said again.

“Yes,” she replied, her voice unwavering and wise.  On the top floor, there was a beach of red sand like in Prince Edward Island.  A little girl was playing in the sand with a bright red vibrator.  I knew that it belonged to her grandmother.
“My grandma’s dead,” the little girl said, pointing to the ocean.  Upon the waves, an old sinewy silver-haired woman lay on a lime green surf board paddling with her arms.  “That’s her.  She’s dead.”

“Me too, I am dead,” Lizzie replied.  Further up the sand dunes, a man in a navy blue Speedo sold blueberries under a yellow tent.  In each corner of the tent there was a video camera.  Beside the tent stood an empty motorized wheelchair.

“I’m hungry,” said the little girl.

“I’m dead,” said Lizzie.

I took the vibrator from the little girl and led her by the hand to the blueberry stand. Lizzie followed us.  As the little girl and I examined the cartons of fruit, Lizzie sat down in the wheelchair.

“It will be sandy,” the little girl exclaimed.  I tasted a blueberry.  It tasted blue and juicy, but it was neither sweet nor sour.

“I hate water,” the little girl declared.  I bought a pint of blueberries and turned around to walk back to the ocean.  Lizzie was already ten metres ahead of us.  She drove the wheelchair over the sand and all the way into the water, until she disappeared underneath the surfing dead grandmother. 

“I hate the water,” the little girl repeated.  “I’m not going swimming.”  I slid through the sand without lifting my feet.  “I wanna go home,” the little girl whined.  She grabbed the vibrator from my hand, ran to the edge of the water and threw it out to sea.  It landed just beyond her surfing dead grandmother.  By the time the little girl came back, an elevator had risen from the sand. “I like elevators,” she said. We entered and descended.

The End.

This is the lamp.
The other day when the sun came up, I yanked it out of the wall and sparks flew.
The Boatman said that we can probably repair it, although we are typically quite terrible of dealing with that sort of thing.

Follow the Boatman on TUMBLR: verysatisfied.tumblr.com, and feel free to share his drawings.

 



The Boatman came back from art camp where he helped the worms draw deeper lines into the clay sand.

Actually, they are miniature shrimp.

I like to say that at art camp, the Boatman got an infection from the worms. But the infection didn't come from the worms. It didn't come from the miniature shrimp either. The infection is going away. The Boatman will be fine. 

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