good canary

beat poets, liquefaction, and red rooms.

I don’t remember when I first read On the Road. Maybe I was thirteen. Here are the other things I don’t remember: if I enjoyed it, if I liked the characters, if I appreciated the beats of the narrative, etcetera. Mostly, I was deeply, quietly jealous that Kerouac got away with writing something so unrestrained and wild and unlikable. I envied the quasi-autobiographical nature of the book. I envied the travels of the characters. I envied their friendships, which had emotional depth without the characters ever knowing much about each other. They could keep their entire lives secret and still be in love, which always seemed like the ideal to me— a purer, cleaner kind of love, one that exists in a single space instead of invading the map of your head. Sal Paradise and his friends acted on whims, created and abandoned problems, and didn’t give a single fuck about another person in the process, doing exactly what they needed to do to cover their own skins and nothing else. And the worst part is that they got away with it. There were never any repercussions. The existence of repercussions didn’t even occur to them. It didn’t have to.

I guess I’m trying to say that I was, and I still am, jealous of their freedom. It spilled out of them like they’d been disemboweled. It disgusted me. I don’t think I’ve ever felt a desire so strong. The freedom wasn’t the road or the bars or the sentence structure, which often defied reason but still sang beautifully— it was the bad. The freedom to be bad, to do bad, to leave a knotted web of bad things behind you wherever you go. To not be grateful. To not be helpful. To not be punished. We can distance ourselves from the concept of good and evil all we want, but generally speaking, Kerouac’s characters aren’t good men and they aren’t trying to be good men. They’re just free. Maybe they’re trying to be good at being a man, but they are not good. Most others can’t get away with that— Kerouac’s female characters, for example, who are often left at home with the children, expected to welcome the traveling man back with open arms whenever he deigns to visit her. They are the background to the road-song, an empty resting place. They don’t get to be cruel or to scorn the men or even to say no. Kerouac’s women do not have the privilege of being bad.

I haven’t revisited On the Road for a while now, but if I ever do go back, I hope the women have more life than I remember.

Long story short, in an effort to relate me to my mother, my therapist asks her if she knows who Jack Kerouac is. When my mother says no, my therapist tells her he’s a writer who’s “like me” and leaves it at that, moving onto the DSM-5 symptoms that make up my personality. Limited or no interest in close relationships. Nearly always chooses solitary activities. Finds pleasure in few activities. Displays emotional coldness, detachment, and affect flattening. Uh-huh, my mother says, which is how she says I can see what you mean but I still don’t believe you without actually saying that. And, sitting back with my mouth shut, letting it happen to me, I’m thinking about Jack Kerouac.

It’s a little funny. Obviously, I can’t attribute a personality disorder to a singularity, but I know that I’m only “like” Kerouac because I’m nothing like Kerouac. The foundation of my conduct revolves around the fact that I was deemed unacceptable for displaying traits that were waved off in boys my age. My flaws were their strengths. I got punished for their good behavior. When the boys cried, they were hailed as sensitive. When I cried, I was told that misery is a choice and I should know better. A significant portion of my silence, my serenity, my desolation comes from knowing that I can’t fuck up. The only reason my therapist singled out Kerouac is because every other famous person “like me” is a serial killer. Listen to me. I’m not allowed to fuck up.

Sitting in this meeting, watching my mother’s mouth twitch, it occurs to me that even if she’ll never say it, I shouldn’t have let myself become like this. I sanded off all my edges to be good, to be nice, and now I’ve been bad because I shouldn’t have done that. I fucked up. I shouldn’t have fucked up. Don’t I know better?

My mother asks if there’s a cure, a therapy or a pill I could try that could make it go away. “No,” my therapist says. “People who have developed this way are just like that, even with intervention. It’s not something that has a solution. She’s going to be like this for the rest of her life.”

When my mother hangs up the call, she doesn’t look at me for the rest of the day. I am not forgiven.

---

It’s strange to be back in the city. I am foreign within the house. I am attacked by invisible white blood cells. Eventually, I’ll grow back into it, but right now I’m still whittling myself into the correct shape to occupy my bedroom the way I used to. The way I need to. My white walls, my mattress on the floor, my icons and books and furs. Objects. People, places, things. They were never signifiers of identity— I’ve always been able to let it go, to let myself go, at the drop of a hat— but they still form a mold. I was gone just long enough to liquefy, dissolving into something soft and misshapen. Hours pass pushing pieces of myself back into the proper boundaries. Sit. Stay.

Feels like I’m spilling out the window whenever I move. I imagine myself sloshing out onto the porch, evaporating in the sunshine, sinking into the dirt and disappearing forever. I imagine having the deathlessness that comes with the ability to reconfigure yourself. In lieu of any of that actually happening— no walks off the windowsill, no molecular flexibility— I spend my time watching Say Yes to the Dress clips online and fading in and out of consciousness. One moment I’m dreaming, the next I’m awake. Two seconds later and I’m the dream again. Horses in my head crest like a wave. Necks like the ocean. Weddings and funerals. It’s the sound of roses dying.

Distant wildfires color everything. All the light is pink. Burns sneak into my sleep— smoked meat, racing against a clock, Francis Bacon’s inverted carcasses, chest split to better remove the organs. I always wake up at the wrong time whenever I’m the one getting my ribs pried open. Can never get past the death part. I wake up and it’s not dark enough out. I wake up and watch the sun go down on everything I love. Thick blue smoke kind of sad. Evenings on the porch kind of sad. The entire world touches deep water under me and I can’t touch anything back. And these nights are the closest I'll ever get to Heaven; not only because I don't know if Heaven exists, but because if it does, I won't be going there. But you can’t believe me. I was asleep when I said that.

Someone walks into the room and it goes away. I get drowned out. It’s all just blue paint on a concrete wall. Wish I could be a person when another person is in the room. Wish I wasn’t a mirror with hands. Wish the sun would go down already. Then I fall back into sleep and all my wishes go away, too.

---

I know what to expect. This isn’t my first rodeo. I grew up around a variety of New Age-types, so believe me when I say I already know the speech. I am here because I have been backed into a corner and I need to do something, not because I believe in his work or because I’m hopeful or because I want to do this. I take my mother at her word when she tells me that this man cured her neck pain and I let her take me to see him.

He’s technically a chiropractor. His mouth moves at me. I’m not listening— partially because I don’t need to, but mostly because the music playing in the background is slightly too loud. More than anything, I am unnerved by him. My posture reads threatened animal. He reminds me of someone I don’t ever talk about. I stare at the sockets of his eyes, which have lashes so pale that they’re practically nonexistent, as his skin dips into the place where the bone gives way. His hair is a similar shade of gingery-pale and he is covered in liver-spots. There’s a string of wooden beads hidden under his plaid shirt, which is how I figure that he’s serious about this. They’d be out if it was performative. I suppose self-belief is important.

I don’t think I like him. That’s not exactly an accomplishment; I don’t really like anyone.

Nervous system, energy, getting me out of fight or flight mode, etcetera. I don’t know if this is better or worse than the woman who said she was calling on the angels to heal me. The singing in the background is scuffing my head. The skin on top of my ribs feels hot. Active listening, right now, means nodding and not saying anything. I’m still looking at the place where he disappears into his face, the wrinkles on his hands, the strange stiffness of his hair.

Finally, after we both take off our shoes, he leads me into the back room. The vinyl massage tables are cherry red and the carpeted floor is the color of a brick. When I sit down, he starts taking measurements— hands on my head, hands in between my shoulder blades, hands on my waist without warning. “I don’t believe anything in the body is wrong,” he says. “I think everything exists to give us information.” Then he grabs me by the back of my neck, rocks me from side to side, and tells me that my skull is about three inches further forward than it should be. I feel like I’m getting frisked or worse. I remind myself that I can be good at suffering little indignities.

“See that tightness at the base of your skull?” he asks. “That means there’s a severe emotional block— it’s not good to have that much tension around your brainstem. But we can resolve that. Maybe not in this session, but we can resolve it.”

My mother, sitting quietly on the other side of the room, begins to look hopeful that my personality can be reversed (she doesn’t believe me) (she doesn’t believe anyone) (she puts more stock in a glorified faith healer than a licensed medical professional). I begin to wish that I had a gun (bullets for everyone in this room) (bullets for my family) (bullets for me).

I lay down when he tells me to and focus on the carpet, which I realize is really more of a tomato red than a brick red. The shade of the carpet is important because my whole world is the tomato carpet. The tomato carpet is all I can see. It’s the only thing I have right now. He picks my ankles up one by one. “I can’t go past here,” he says, crooking my legs to a 30 degree angle, “because your body is telling me no.” The last medium told me that my fear manifests as the feeling of being dragged by the ankles, but I’m more concerned with the color of the carpet than connecting the dots between my fear and my current situation. The disparity in color between the table and the floor irritates me. I am irritated because the tomato carpet is my entire life. Experience tells me that when I try to remember this, the carpet will be the only thing I can recollect, so it’s important I get it right.

He grabs me by the neck and the tailbone and presses me down into the table. Carpet. Carpet. Think of the carpet. I always end up looking at the floor in situations like these, imagining I could fall through it and disappear. I look at my hands. I look at the hair on my arms. When he momentarily releases his grip and crosses into my little tract of tomato, I look at his feet— they’re absurdly pale, soft and dark-veined with long toenails. Vampire feet. The white against the red reminds me of David Lynch.

He moves back to where he was and pushes me down harder. It occurs to me that the real color of the carpet is medical failure— ruptured-scelera, vomiting-up-an-organ, blood-and-piss-filled-catheter-bag red. Blood red like real blood. Maybe if I fall through the table now, I’ll end up covered in it. Surely that will heal me, of all things. Surely that will whisk me away from the corner I’ve been backed into. I could abscess myself into a tumor and get myself removed, thrown into a pile of other biohazards that need to be disposed of. I could go away. I want to go away, and going away inside my head— wandering off into my self-contained fog— isn’t enough. I want to go home. There is nowhere I want to be less right now than “home”. I feel— even though I know I won’t— like I’m about to throw up.

He hugs me at the end of the session and tells me to come back twice a week, that I need to do at least sixteen sessions. I don’t know how to say no to any of it. I’ve met doctors who took every refusal of mine as evidence that I was either faking it or that I had no desire to get better, and even if I don’t believe in this, I can’t afford to burn this bridge by saying no. Even if I don’t want it. The freedom I don’t have presses me like a brand. I can’t afford the blame.

You know what’s funny? For all that I was staring at his eyes, I don’t even remember the color of his irises. They just looked like dark holes, as if his eyeballs weren’t even there. Deep pits in his face. Eye contact felt like getting eaten alive. Everything felt like I was about to get eaten alive. I don’t like being touched. I don’t like feeling like prey. I don’t know what to do.

He hugs me and I smile and make a standing appointment for Thursdays at 5 p.m. This is what the people around me call “being a real adult”. Cue the applause. Cue the confetti. Get me the fuck out of here.