Into the Maelstrom

He’d been sick for a week. Summer cold they called it when he was a boy, but he didn’t think it was hay fever. What would he have been allergic to? Mold and dust? They’d mucked out the barn late, a mid-spring chore but time had wandered away from them and it was nearer to summer. The horses had already been turned out into the lower forty, hock deep in an abundance of growth and greenery, noses hidden in carpets of bluebells.

The barn took the both of them two days and just after that he’d fallen ill. Sick as the proverbial dog. Racking coughs, lungs that sounded like cedar being kindled. She was fine as houses, and they hadn’t been to town nor had a customer up from town for the mill. But he couldn’t breathe. Literally, figuratively, the physicality of inhalation and exhalation becoming an emotional toil. His lungs didn’t hurt; they were just not working the way they’d worked for the entirety of his life. She’d teased him good and hard about it. He was two decades her senior and he allowed the ribbing, deciding it was a good-natured lambast, but alone thought slantways about the distance measured by an ageing body and knew at sixty-eight he was old and at forty-seven she was not. Or not near as.

But he didn’t couldn’t spell out in words the extent of what he was experiencing. Later realizing not telling her was fear borne from a deep childlike belief that he could possibly jinx the very ability of his body to keep him bodied, ensouled. He tamped down his symptoms, dismissed the idea of going into the clinic. Waved away even a hint of diagnostic concern.

Naming a thing doesn’t always give the namer power. Some things acquire a name, and the power becomes all theirs, monstrous, overbearing, overarching, made real and whole.

The first sense of hardening, something lodged, something stiff inside his chest had woken him out of an already bad sleep and came at him with an existential dread so fathomless that he knew in those darkly pre-dawn hours that God had reached inside his body and touched the unseen organs toiling in their mysterious viscera at keeping him earthside. He knew he had been beckoned, felt that finger quirk within the twinned grey lobes, filters of the very air itself. A whisper come home son.

But he didn’t. Heed the call, respond. In another aeon without medical choices he would have acquiesced, quickly bent a knee to such a godly mandate, and within the year dutifully laid his stoved-up body down and not gotten himself back up again. He was astonished at how his corporeal self, pavlovian began to slaver at the command of fate.

It was hard work, to flee, to turn away from the lure of the abyss, the echo coming back emptied of his pleas, hauling great mouthfuls of air into his hardened lungs, willing them to soften beneath his will, to generate as though it were an act he understood or had any sort of control over oxygenated blood. His mind committed to a marathon, but he learned the body does not work that way.

Acquiescence. An exam, then labs, then quiet pronouncements from white coated analyzers.

ILD. Interstitial Lung Disease. There came the naming, the christening he’d gone to such extremes avoiding. He did not feel empowered. Identification did not lead to compartmentalization. The panic of it made it more difficult to breathe.

Accusations or recriminations were never part of the conversation in the sterile examination rooms. Neither courtroom nor pulpit. Regrets only his. All their probing and prodding, questions and answers.

But. Had he done this to himself?

Cemented his own lungs? The bronchus, bronchioles solidified inside the yeasty lobes. The deflated sacs, gummed closed. He wasn’t a smoker, leaf or grass. No childhood asthma, no rheumatoid arthritis. His heart was steady, his arteries clear. Occupational dust or fibers.

Years at the sawmill, whittling a figure of a man close to earth, organic and respectful of the mighty conifers, the broad-leafed hardwoods. Riven down to the heartwood, the splitting and the milling. The board feet of his daily grind, the blades, the growing mounds of sawdust, the smells and soils of a hard day’s work. The labor of the felling and the bucking, the chain dragging, and the ripping. The packaging, boards and stickers, and the redolent incense. The perfume of his own wood lot, his own lumber yard. It lined the inside of his sinuses, and he relished it. Tasted it on his tongue, scraped it out between his molars.

Fibrosis, necrosis, pyrosis.

One year. Into the second wearing oxygen but his strength was sapped. His vision swimmy, his ears ringing with the labors of his breathing.

Double lung transplant.

Now that was a thing to give a body the shakes. He quivered like a strung bow as charts and diagrams were shown, then the contractual agreement and he wanted to make a dark joke but could read the room. These men did not see themselves on a side other than that of a clinical, mathematical God. This for that. One life for another. Interchangeable beneath the skin that pretends a difference between one or the other. All scientific progress and supposed presupposed human gain. He signed and jested silently, inside his head about blood and souls bartered for a bit more of this and a lot more of that.

The waiting and the worsening. The dizziness brought on both by his body and his thoughts.

The loneliness ached him more than the faltered breath, the straining ribcage, the sinking realization, the bartered understanding. She tried to comfort or strengthen him up by relating the stories of her two births. It’s like birth, she said. It’s entering a room in which there is only one exit. He could not grasp the concept. For him the room was not a room, but a box fitted to the width and breadth of his shoulders, the length of his skeleton head to toe.

After after afterwards. Sitting wrapped in a blanket he’d pilfered from the months’ long stay at rehab on a rocker on the deck he had built when a younger man a different man a man breathing through his own lungs staring out across the land he owned had bought for her wanting not just one thing but all the things for her for her for them such a short allowance we are given he measured the length of a thing against the weight of a thing and wondered. And could simply not decide.