For part one, click here.
For part two, click here.
I first knew something was different about me when I was in the seventh grade. I was at this girl’s house, and it was homecoming day in my hometown. There were a bunch of us kids there: my friend Ben and Mike, these girls Angela and Jill and Ashley. We’d all come from the parade that morning, and we were just killing time before the football game that afternoon. I was desperately into Ashley and all I could think about was getting her attention. I didn’t know what to do, but being in the seventh grade, I still didn’t have a lot of experience with romance. I told everyone I’d do a backflip off of the front porch and land on my feet.
I’d never done a flip like that before, but everyone knew I had been taking karate classes, and I assured them that it was a piece of cake. I got up on the brick railing, and I balanced myself. I stood, squatted, and with my momentum springing up and back, I went for it. There was not a fear in my mind that I wouldn’t make it. I had absolutely no fear.
I went back, my feet came up over the top, and stopped parallel to the ground. I bellyflopped completely on the hardpack ground.
Once, earlier that year at one of my first ever football practices, Coach Sanderson had gathered us around and said, “Boys,” he said, “you play this game long enough and you’re eventually going to get hit hard. I’m talking hard. You are going to feel transcendent pain, and you’re going to wonder what in the hell is happening. But this is normal. It’s just part of the game.”
“Coach,” I’d spoken up. “What’s transcendent mean?”
“It means you’re going to find out things about yourself you never knew. You’re going to change a little bit. You’re going to go into that hit a boy, and you’re going to come out a man.”
I didn’t really know what Coach was talking about, but I nodded my head just the same. I guessed I’d figure it out at some point.
When I bellyflopped on Ashley Moore’s front yard, I finally understood transcendent pain. It was like for a moment nothing in the world existed. Nothing at all. Then, suddenly everything existed, and it was all fire and chaos. Time stood still, and I could catch glimpses of things I’d never seen before. Flowers from the coast of Madagascar. Strange-looking electric fish that swam around in the deepest darkness of the ocean. Two men having sex in a changing room in a boutique in Munich. The inside of an alfalfa sprout. Particles of pollen as large as planets circling around me as I sailed through the air over swaying grasses. Just so many things. It was like I was surfing through all of these things from every angle all at the same time. And then it was gone.
And I was gasping for air. Ben and Mike were trying to roll me over, and Ashley and the girls were hovering overhead asking me questions I couldn’t answer. They finally got me up, and I sat on the steps and collected myself, thinking about how all of my guts felt like they were loose. My bones ached, but I knew I was going to be okay. Everybody else sat on the porch, telling stories and shooting gossip, but I just sat there on the steps feeling my pain and thinking about what I’d just seen. I knew I couldn’t talk about it. No one would understand.
That was my first experience with the aleph. That was the first time I realized that I had something inside of me that allowed me to see everything that had ever existed just like changing the channels in my head.
Now, my aleph was different than the one Borges saw. His was a passive aleph; mine was an active. He could only use his to see the universe. But me, I could use mine not only to see, but to travel. To experience. To live. That’s right, good reader, using the aleph in my mind, I could travel to any place at any time in the entire universe, and I could experience it safely with no fear.
I started to adventure with my aleph more and more over the years. Working with Johnny by day, and exploring the universe by night.
One afternoon as Johnny and I were buzzing around back alleys trolling for loot, Johnny wasn’t paying attention, and we got T-boned by a pick-up truck at a rare intersection over between Roderick and Grant Streets. The kids in the pickup truck were high, and they thought it would be fun to play cops and robbers in the back alleyways. The two boys in the pick up were killed almost instantly.
Johnny Tremain, tough SOB that he is, was nearly killed. He broke damn near every bone on the left side of his body, punctured his lung, ruptured his spleen, and suffered some pretty heavy duty memory loss. He was in a coma for several months, but he eventually came out of it and lived.
I escaped relatively unscathed. One of my legs got banged up pretty bad, and I still don’t really walk right today, but anyway, this isn’t really about that.
0 comments:
Post a Comment