Green

Mrs. Jordan is afraid of her own, clawlike hand. She looks at it under the glare of the fluorescent lights and the skin is green; there is green in the skin of her hand. She watches as it attempts to lift up the pen again and she can feel each muscle moving in each finger, like a multiplicity of tiny levers being pushed and pulled beneath the skin of her hand. The pen drops again and she notes that the skin of her hand is not green but brown, the color of her desk; and her hand is the desk and the paper on it. There is no difference between the desk and her hand.

Suddenly, clarity again washes over her consciousness like cold water and she feels the pressure behind her left eye. The pressure grips her head and her eye and squeezes hard enough that her skull seems to bend. The pressure increases until she almost loses consciousness, but subsides again and she becomes aware of the drone of the lights in the otherwise silent room. Something is wrong and she is afraid. She tries to stand up from the chair she fell asleep in but the floor is suddenly in her lap and the wall is falling on her and she lands on the floor, all the weight of her body on her shoulder and arm. 

She is having a stroke. She remembers her grandfather before he died and how it always seemed to her that his scalp must be sensitive beneath his thin hair from the ravaging of the strokes on his brain5. She was always careful not to touch his head. She heard her mother describing the symptoms to her when she tended to him because she couldn’t get work off for the family vacation. This is a stroke and she needs to call someone. She should call Dave; he would answer his phone in the middle of the night and drive her to the hospital.

She pushes herself into a sitting position, her limbs stiff and remote from her like jointed stilts moving through a costume of flesh. She reaches for her jacket which hangs on the back of the chair in front of her desk. Her arms will not lift higher than her shoulder. She cannot see where the pockets begin so she pulls with her hand on the hem of the jacket until it slides off the chair onto the floor. Again, she is afraid. She cannot distinguish the sleeves from body of the jacket; she cannot find the pockets. The pressure behind her eye increases and begins to squeeze her skull.

Her leg is green again. There is green in the skin of her leg and the desks in the room are hard, so hard it hurts her jaw. The room is deep and wide and the straight rows of desks stretch on to infinity like metal pillars floating through space. Then the desks are stacked inside of each other—one desk with a hundred hard, shiny legs. Everything glares: the shining black windows, the plastic face of the clock, the smooth white walls. She is lost in the vertigo of sensation, staring at the fibers in the carpet, some green, some gray, some blue, some white.

Again the cold water on her brain. She reaches for the jacket and pulls it into her lap, rubbing it with her shaking hands. She is afraid and she cries out softly for help; but her voice is not her own. She speaks again but she knows that the words she can hear in her head are not the words that her mouth forms. Her words turn into animal sounds as she speaks and she realizes that Dave will not understand her when she calls. Tears begin to line her cheeks with thin, wet lines and the cell phone falls out of the jacket. She grasps it and picks it up but the numbers on the buttons have become meaningless lines that light up under her frantic fingers. She remembers that Dave’s phone is the speed dial under the number “1” and although she cannot tell one number from the other, she remembers the position of the key, presses, and holds. The phone begins to ring and she lifts it to her ear. Five rings she counts, then fifteen. She loses count as the squeezing returns. Her eye seems to bulge as the pressure returns and she places her hand over her eye to keep it in. She drops the phone and a dialogue begins in her head. You can’t move; is this how you will die? There are windows in the room and the blinds are up. I can wave my arms or pound the glass. There is no one outside; who will see you? I can’t die. I haven’t finished the school year yet. I am not finished living yet. You are alone. Do you want to die alone? The janitor will be here soon to unlock the school. I can hold on until the janitor comes. The janitor is not coming; he left you the key. Is this all? Is this how short your life will be? Maybe it will pass, maybe it doesn’t have to kill me. This is only a stroke. Where is Dave? Anthony? Tobias? Where is Liza? There is a fire alarm near the door. Where is Mom? There is a fire alarm near the door. Your sister? There is a fire alarm near the door.

Mrs. Jordan is crawling out from behind her desk on her hands and knees. She is dressed in a white blouse with a vest and matching slacks. Her hair is short and flat on one side. She can feel the slowness in her limbs, in the individual muscles of her arms and legs. Her vision becomes unimportant beneath the throbbing of her eye. She cannot perceive the world around her as separate from herself and she becomes a being with no edges, a creature of infinite volume. With intense concentration she communicates with her clawlike hand, raising it up and placing it down again on the carpet. Then she moves her knee. Then her other knee. She cannot move them without watching them; she cannot feel the boundaries of her body. She crawls between the desks and the carpet is vast, like an ocean she could fall into if she let herself, but she continues to monitor the movement of her muscles and her bones. There is a ball inflating behind her eye and a vice around her skull. She lifts her head, trying to judge the distance between herself and the door. She sees the door and the red square beside it but she cannot calculate the spacial relationship between herself and the door. So she counts the desks in front of her: 3. She looks down again to guide her clawlike hand.

The lights in the room are beginning to hurt her eyes. The shiny spots on the legs of the desks seem to stab her eyes and she closes them. The pain subsides and she is lost in an ocean of space where she can only feel the throbbing of her head, faintly, like the reverberation of waves underwater. She is floating, weightless through space. She could be anywhere: heaven, oblivion, the center of the earth. She opens her eyes again and the light stabs her through her eyes. Her vision begins to darken and suddenly she is aware of the beating of her heart. She loses awareness of everything else and feels only the beating of her heart. It seems to her that it is not her own, but an animal struggling in the cavity of her chest. The beating becomes louder and she knows it will engulf her soon. She is afraid to let go. Then she tells her chest to move and she senses that her lungs must have taken in air, though she can only feel the beating of her heart. She tells her chest to move again. She has never done anything so difficult as fighting her beating heart. She breaths again. And again.

She opens her eyes and guides her hands and her knees. The pain in her eyes has rendered her nearly incapable of thought and she barely recognizes the fact that there are no more desks in front of her. She moves until her head rests against the wall by the door. She looks up at the red object, placed low enough for a third grader to reach. She fumbles with the handle, then pulls down hard.

An explosion of light and sound. The lights no longer stab her eyes; instead, she sits, her back against the wall, and she is lost again in the vertigo of sensation. The bell rings incessantly and the lights flash repeatedly, like the roar of an angry crowd. But to her, it is the same as silence.