San Pham, Crane Daughter 3
holy
“I’m going to Escapay.”
You say it like the word agape, which you like, because it renders your feeling appropriately, that leaving the office building offers a hope for unconditional love. It’s comic relief with your coworkers to lighten the fact that you don’t want to work, which they can sense. Your job is holding children down for blood draws: children have very small veins, and you have to puncture them, at just the right angle and delicately, to coax the necessary blood cells out without blowing another hole right through the other side of the venular wall. Though all this commotion induces panic in the child, you need the blood to come forth from the resting river in the warm body to test it, to make sure the child is not getting too much or too little of the asthma medication they need to keep their airways open. So you better make that hole (and only the one hole) the right way.
Have you ever noticed that the homonyms whole and hole are also at first glance seeming antonyms, bound up together in a sideways kind of meaning? To make a hole (with an H) in something one bisects a (W) whole, seemingly destroying unity, although of course there is always more than one way to see it: in the army, to make a hole (H), one parts a little sea of soldiers like a military Moses to make a channel through which goods or other people may move quickly under duress. Unity is still inherent, it just happens in a new direction now, across an old unity which had become, from another angle, a barrier.
In the year after you’d escapayed from the army, you lost two friends. One of your best pals, Dana, nestled a pistol deep into his soft palette, and a broke guy Cam sold drugs to slipped a knife between his ribs once or twice in his bathtub. This, you think, is what happens in trailer trash Portland, the part visiting hipsters don’t catch on their cocktail tours, where heroin isn’t chic anymore and desperate people can’t dig themselves out of their desperate.
After Cam and Dana departed, you moved back into your little room in gramma’s attic: you’d stare at the knotholes in the wood-paneling and venture backward in time
On days you feel more positive in your ruminations you could apply the same logic to the endeavor of battle training in general: all those bullet and bayonet punctures opening channels through which a nation's continued survival may occur. Or perhaps conversely, how Christ's lanced ribs, and the stigmatic hands of his best followers, provided paths for people to see an alternative to the use of force: unity comes in many shapes.
When you “Escapayed” from the army 3 months into basic training, you felt that by dis-unifying yourself from your unit, you were also returning closer to a larger form of agape: living in better harmony with humanity as a whole (W), even though all the other bunkmates who’d become your friends had to stand at parade rest on broken bones after you left, being counted and recounted while your recent former-superiors began to try to find you. Which they never did—you’d vanished like a ghost into the bright southern sun and now you have a discharge like everyone else.
What’s at the center of a black hole? People still guess at that too. Sanna, your best friend from middle school, is a physicist now. She once told you matter sucked into a black hole is most likely compacted and crushed, almost like it “reverse grew,” becoming dense and intractable. Before Sanna finished her PhD, you’d gone AWOL and showed up at her apartment in Louisville, seeking shelter. She gave you shelter for three days before you caught your 3-day-long greyhound busride back to Portland to hide. You lost track of Sanna for a decade after that, and when you found her again, her brother had shot and killed himself, which would have also been the same years in which your own dear friends, Cam and Dana, were themselves made holey (with an E).
The good thing is, you’ve always Escapayed from places that posed threat of an irreparable hole, or too many holes, to yourself. Most people close to you are mostly ok too. Bobey, in fact, has moved to Florida where the sun shines bright, and holes move horizontally and somehow vertically both, filled with salty rain sucked up from the sea. You hope that if your brother is ever caught up in one, he’s funneled upward all the way into the sky, so he has a lovely big view; so he can see, after all, that unity is still inherent. So he will not be frightened.
Escapay.
Agape.
Make a (W)Hole
.
down the wormhole in your mind: trying to imagine yourself there with them—Cam and Dana—in their moments of travail. In these last moments, you’d say the last important thing, the thing they should both have been able to hear: “Don’t be frightened; I am with you.”
Some ten years later, after you “Escapay-ed” from the army, and then from gramma’s attic, you escapayed from the asthma clinic where you held kids down for blood draws, and then from Portland itself. You’d find yourself on a ferry in New York, suspended in the seeming-calm flat sheet of East River between Staten Island where you lived, and Wall Street where you worked. You’d sit on the back of the ferry and pretend it was a pleasure cruise, and you were cruising out to the stars to look around, instead of into another office building. You sat on the back of the ferry because Jacques, your much older roommate, who claimed to be an ex-CIA foreign correspondent, told you that if anybody bombed the ferry, said bomber would secure the explosive to the front of the vessel, so when the hole was blown out by the blast, the engine would continue to push forward, driving the ship down into the deep. All the terrified passengers, recently leaning on that front rail, would now point downward toward their futures, be simultaneously sucked into history, and those lingering at the back, like you, could jump away.
You told this to your brother Bobey when he moved to New York—Jacque’s advice—but he seemed in a funk and didn’t care. Depression, your depression-prone father told you both, runs in the family. It’s a selfish disease, he said, like a black hole that pulls you inside yourself and then eventually inside out. What’s at the center of yourself, once you get there? No one really knows.
Lydia Paar is a graduate of Washington University, Northern Arizona University, and Prescott College. Alexander Chee selected her essay, “Erasure,” as the 2020 winner of North American Review’s Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction Prize, and New England Review recently nominated her as a finalist for their 2021 Emerging Writers Award. Works of hers have also been showcased at Literary Hub, The Missouri Review, Essay Daily, Alligator Juniper, Five:2:One, Manzano Mountain Review, and another is forthcoming at Witness. A former recipient of a Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation Fellowship and of a Millay Colony for the Arts Residency, she currently co-runs NOMADartx Review and is finishing a memoir-in-essays. www.lydiapaar.com.