The mice are running through the walls. They’re drunk on speed, they’re acrobats, they’ve got a Ferris wheel going and a carousel, a trampoline, a rock wall; they’re playing Ninja Olympics and every one of them has won. They’re wrapping medals around their necks, and the medals thud against their furry chests, and they thud and they thud; there are victory laps.
Just sleep, Bill says.
Who sleeps?
*
My father fell. He hit his head. I wasn’t there. Two ambulances came for the one of him and the bump on his skull, no bruise. When I got to the hospital the next morning my father’s voice was hoarse, the kind of hoarse you get from screaming. Spinning, is the word he said.
spinningspinningspinning
There were ninja mice in the orbits of his head.
He didn’t say mice; he said fish. He said there were two fish on the wall, one red and one green, and that the fish were swimming, could I see them? He said he fell inside in his bedroom, but he fell outside, on the cement—his hand reaching for the arm of a bench, his new cane flying. He said he’d walked too far and gotten lost, that there was a hill, and that he’d gone wobbly-legged as a drunk up that hill, and on this point, though I have never seen my father remotely drunk, I did believe him, even if he would not look at me when he talked, or when he screamed, hoarse, spinning.
There is security camera proof of where and how my father fell. The evidence shows that there was no daughter beside him.
The doctors came in and out of the hospital room, the therapists, the nurses. When they moved my father, turned him, twice CAT-scanned him, sat him up for breakfast, checked his heart obsessively though his heart was not at fault, he was spinning. The world was above him like a squishy balloon, and he was on the bottom of it, flattening.
Dad, I said. I’m here.
I wasn’t sure if he could see me through the spin.
*
The September hospital room was not like the January hospital rooms; it was so much bigger and its windows that much cleaner. There was a perfect view of the many gray days that we’d had and would be having, and I wasn’t there when my father fell because two days before, sitting in the retirement village garden, he had said that it was time that I come to see him less, that I had done enough, too much. I had tended to him, argued for him, eliminated the bad doctor, the wrong nurse, the abusive aide, demanded that they winnow down the mega dose of steroids, organized his medicines, brought him food and books, written his checks and done his banking, called his lawyers and cleared his emails, and when it so happened that it was time for him to move, to trade his independence for something less than independence, I had packed up his spacious five-room villa, and helped him shed two-thirds of what was his, and planted every remaining something inside his new non-spacious rooms (my brother coming one day, running the lamps, the tables, the dishes up and down the hill with me, the two of us riding the metal dolly, the two of us out of breath, the two of us sorting). Three weeks is what we were given to complete the move we had not seen coming, and then the move was done, and then I had sat with my father just to be with my father, and I had walked with him when he could walk again, and I had brought him flowers, and they were pretty flowers, and I had taken him out for his own banking, his own Staples shopping, his preferred restaurants, his camera store, to a rocking chair in a public garden, but now he was telling me that he wanted time alone, time to harbor and protect his secrets, which were family secrets, a definition of “fair,” he said, that wouldn’t be my definition of “fair,” and it was his choice, he said, to make—which fair was fair is fair—and so I should let him be.
He said.
And maybe my face was hard, maybe I was marionette grim, middle-child ugly, inflexible with my forgiveness in that moment on that point, and maybe on the way home I pounded my fist and maybe at home to my husband I cried, saying some things about what and which fair, too many episodes of the no-Merriam-Webster’s fair, for this, in fact, is what’s really fair, and how, after everything, all I’d wanted was time with my father. Transparent time. Unwithholding time. Honest time. But Go, my father had said—and that was a Thursday afternoon and on a Saturday he fell, and his world, he said, was spinning. The orbits and the orbitals were spinning.
A small bleeding on the brain, is what the doctors said.
Dad, I’m here, is what I said.
Beth, you’re never here, is what Bill said.
Make no mistake, the anthropologist Loren Eiseley once said. Everything in the mind is in rat’s country. It doesn’t die.
*
The mice are the ninja circus come to town. The mice have brought the elephants with them, the lions and the clowns, the miniature Olympiads. When I close my eyes in the dark I see their steam-punk operation—the pipes and struts and two-by-fours from which they swing and swirl.
Sometimes the mice are behind the mirror wall and sometimes in the bathroom and sometimes I hear them in the kitchen downstairs, swishing and giggling, bellies bloated, bellies up, bellies digesting my granola-bar nuts, and if my heart would stop thudding I would not see the mice, I would not worry the mice, I would loosen my anxious grip on the mice and on my own anxiety, and I would sleep so that tomorrow, and the next day, I would be the calm, good daughter that my father needs, the kind of daughter who might, with pleasantness of aura, ease my father into believing that he will not fall again. I would be the calm, good daughter who banishes every anxious thing.
The doctors are depending on me. The therapists and the nurses. My brother, my sister, my father, too.
Diffuse the anxiety. Help my father breathe. Forgive.
You will not fall again.
The world won’t spin.
The fish will swim away, and they’ll keep swimming.
But the mind is rat’s country. If you fall once you could fall again. If the world spins it could never stop spinning. If the fish break free they could keep breaking, and what is fair is never fair and it won’t be, and I am spinning.
Dad, I say. I’m here.
*
I need to tell you something. I need to make this true. There is a cost to the cost of vigilance. There is something else, something more that happened when my father said I was to stay away, that his secrets held more value than my company.
It’s this: Before that Thursday, two days ahead of the fall, I had been a daughter who ran to answer the phone. I had jabbed a finger. I had said hello. I had listened to find out. Was there a problem? A concern? I had been a daughter sturdy in her attention, dropping the present moment for the ringing phone. Dropping everything for her father.
But on the Saturday two days after that Thursday I had spent with my father in the retirement village garden, the phone rang and I didn’t answer. The phone was sitting right there, on the couch beside me, and I was reading, also breathing, and I did not answer. It can wait, I thought. It can wait. We can.
The rare self-assertion of the grim-faced middle-aged daughter.
One hour later my sister texted: I don’t think it’s a big deal, but Dad fell and hit his head and is in the hospital. All that evening long, I was on the phone with nurses and a doctor, with my father himself, and the next day, during a storm, I drove to my father’s apartment to get the things he would need for this hospital stay—a hospital too far away. At the retirement village I spoke with nurses, searched for witnesses, asked the question: How did my father fall? As if I did not know how he had fallen—he fell without his oldest daughter. Then, his hearing aids in hand, his batteries, his books, his socks, I got lost driving on roads mostly closed for repair. I got lost in the storm. Reaching the hospital at sodden last, I ran up the stairs and tripped and almost hit my own head.
Like father, like daughter to the end.
You can’t turn away, even when you’re asked to turn away. You can’t turn away, even when you agree to turn away. You can’t. You do.
They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up, and dropped again by mental pack rats, wrote Eiseley. Nothing perishes, it is merely lost till a surgeon’s electrode starts the music of an old player piano whose scrolls are dust. Or you yourself do it, tossing in the restless nights, or even in the day on a strange street when a hurdy-gurdy plays. Nothing is lost, but it can never be again as it was.
*
An anxiety attack is a direct response to an obvious but transient potential crisis. A panic attack is a shot out of nowhere dark, and it might not go away, it might just stick around and kill you. I’m good at both, of course: I am my father’s daughter.
A brief history of my personal outstandingness at panic and anxiety:
I’d given a talk and people came. I’d given a talk well and the line was long—strangers buying books, an unusual Beth thing. All day long I’d been at this hosting university. All evening long I had read and answered and signed and it was almost nine at night, and they were turning out the lights, and there was just one more person wanting the inked-in letters of my name.
She had a question for me: Why?
Why what? I asked, with all my pleasantness, her book in my hand, her pen.
Why would you write a book like this? she said.
I looked up now. The pen was spotty. Why wouldn’t I?
I don’t know, she said. It just seems like you’d not write this book—like you’d write another one.
I worked to maintain my pleasantness. I shrugged. I signed. I went home. I changed. I went to bed. I woke in terror at two a.m. for someone had pinned me to the bed. An iron stake through my heart, my left arm thudding.
Bill? I said.
Bill?
Mmmm? he said.
I am dying, I said. I’m already dead.
You should try to sleep, he said.
But it was too late, the damage was done, the words of the stranger were in the blood of me, they were the platelets, the full-on physiology. It just seems, she’d said. Fraud, she might have said. You are no writer. For wasn’t that the nature of her accounting? Wasn’t that the point, the message she had been sent to send—to inject into my bloodstream, to infect me. Why? Indeed. Why?
And so the attacks began. Panic was my new best friend. She was petite and curly headed. Wily and well-heeled. She carried a hammer and an iron spike. She waited at my side. She attacked me from behind. She was endurance, the ultimate marathoner.
Shaking me in the dark and rushing me down the stairs and putting me out on the stoop beneath a cold, blue moon, still sweating.
You are not who you wish to be, she would whisper, arranging her curls.
Your husband does not love you.
You don’t deserve your husband’s love.
Your son is such a beautiful son and you could have done more, should have done more, could have been a better mother, his life could have been better, and by the way, your age is showing, your age is advancing, your age shall henceforth be so unrelenting, and you made wrong choices, you wrote wrong books, you cannot resurrect the past to fix it. Your best friend is me, and I am panic.
*
I went an entire month, once, without sleep, thanks to my panic. You say it can’t be done; I say I lived it. I say that I downed pink pills and red wine, but nothing doing. I say I watched bad TV at three a.m. Still, the sleep-negating panic. I say that I stood in the biggest room of this small house, before the biggest window, and watched for fox or, I don't know, owl, in desperation for another, more appeasing companion, but I was adrenaline sick on panic; she was all over me, all inside of me, all empowered with her heels, her hammer, her rusting iron spike. I say I was pale and weak and sometimes angry, sometimes making noise to wake my husband, because what is fair is fair after all, and why should I be the only one about to die of panic? Why should my troubles not be his, compounded? There is a marriage contract.
In the end, I slayed that marathoning panic. In the end, I fell asleep at last, gripping one notebook and a single willing pen. The pen was bleeding. It had written:
You said, What is the color of the shadow
On the snow? pointing to a place
Beyond our reach; I didn’t know.
The hour was changing the color anyway,
And a tree was moaning with the cold,
Threatening misery. I tried
To kiss you, but you turned
Just then and stood yourself
Tall and were not mine
To claim, and besides, you know
How the wind can howl
In winter and the seeds down deep
Won’t speak. That night
The moon was going to be full,
And the snow was going to be lavender,
And we would sleep alone,
Or perhaps you slept,
While I waited downstairs for a poem.
I wrote and, in writing, I bored panic so thoroughly with the intimate instant that she turned, and I closed my eyes, and she was gone, but gone just temporarily.
There would, of course, be more. The transient potential and the nowhere dark. The thing with the curly hair and the Lady Gaga heels and the shame that comes when the radio host asks you a question, live, and you can’t remember (you are sudden-anxiety-onset paralyzed) how to answer, and the awfulness when you don’t recall (sudden onset) whether the red light or the green light is the stop light or the go light, and the danger (sudden onset) of your blood thudding so loud about your ears that you cannot hear whether the man is saying if it is time to put the fire out. Or stupid things, like the thirty times each day your heart knocks fast because you’re sure you have lost the necklace you’ve been wearing, are still wearing. Or the several times each day you check for your wallet, even though you have not left the house, even though you haven’t moved your wallet.
Otherwise, though, you’re fine.
Why, indeed.
*
After the hospital, after the bleeding on the brain was past, after vertigo had been ruled out but the doctors still had not tamed the spinning, after it was clear that a form of restlessness and agitation, a slurring of language and logic had set in, a condition I had no name for then, a condition I would only later read about—ICU Delirium (hallucinations, muddled thought, muddled language, anxiety, depression)—after it was clear that treating this derangement was not part and parcel of any official plan, my father was returned not to his two non-spacious rooms but to the rehab wing of the retirement village.
Here there would be trays brought to his bed, medicine ushered in on wheels, nurses on either side to help him up and through, physical therapists and occupational therapists to measure his blood pressure when he was sitting and standing, to walk with him carefully when he was walking. There would be this, and there would be me, doing my non-onset best to topple the strangers who were living in his head.
Cursor, lock and key, computer program, keyboard, my father said, meaning, I would learn: I need to go to the bathroom.
That thing, with the you know, he said, and so I would stand there, guessing, laying out simple words like a smorgasbord from which he might pick and choose his desperate meaning.
Just have fun with him, a doctor said, but I said, The current situation seems to call for something more.
Your father will make all the decisions here, the nurse said. And I said, or wanted to say or tried to say, But first we have to get my father back.
He thinks we’re stealing things, another nurse said. He doesn’t think that, I said. That’s not him speaking.
Make it incremental, take it step by step. Declare the fish mere figments, for they are. Substitute right syllables for wrong syllables and make him repeat after you. Show your father the wallet, then have him show you the wallet, until the wallet is right where it belongs.
What we do.
What we did.
Father. Daughter.
And write the bills, and talk to lawyers, and bring him books, and remove the books, and not flinch when he announces a sudden distaste for F. Scott Fitzgerald. Take him out for air in a wheelchair ride and park him near the aide singing Nat King Cole to her sleeping charge and get him all tangled up in a conversation about old-days Atlantic City and nudge his wheelchair toward the sun, for how he loves the sun; he sleeps there. Then roll him back to his rooms again—the rehab room, the two non-spacious rooms—and say again the words he needs, which are not cursor, which are not lock, which are not key.
My voice growing hoarse with the insisting.
You are fine, I kept reminding him. Fine. You are lucky, even: no broken hips, no broken skull, no continuous brain bleed. And some hours were good and some hours weren’t good and sometimes, after I got home, he would call me, panicked:
Where is my wallet?
Right where we left it.
Trust yourself, Dad, I kept saying.
Beth, where is my wallet?
*
I try to avoid the things that make me panic. I try to dispel the rush. I try to confound the curly headed intruder, avoiding all known triggers. This includes choosing stone-cold silence over direct confrontation. This includes maximum-security budgets, so that I won’t risk overdrawing my account or jeopardizing small but worked-for nest eggs. This includes packing the minimal least when I leave the house—less to be lost, less to be patted down excessively, less to be preemptively mourned (but what if I had lost it). This includes not flying on planes when I don’t absolutely have to and not standing around fires that must be extinguished and not looking in the mirror in the morning and, for god’s sake, not looking at the goddamned photographs. This includes avoiding the things people write about me and not asking others why I don’t matter enough to be written about. This also but of course includes no longer hanging myself on the ropes of radio or TV.
I am bigger than you, panic.
I am ready for you, panic.
I will not capitalize you, panic.
You cannot break me.
She breaks me.
*
The other night when I woke to the sound of the mice gone to scamper in the wilds of the walls, I was one-hundred-percent absolute that masked criminals had broken in. Every ricocheting swoop and shuffle was, quite obviously, the echo of a murderer headed straight for me. Every carousel turn was an underworld creature set heinously free to roam and ravage and ruin me.
I’d left my phone downstairs.
My husband was fast asleep.
My heart was a big black bird slapping its wings and at the center of the bird was the spike that panic brings.
Bill, I finally said. Do you hear that Bill?
Must be mice, he said, when he heard it.
Mice?
Mice. You could hear them squee.
*
It was time. It became time to move my father. To carry all his things from the rehab unit in the village to the two non-spacious rooms in the less-than-independent wing. To replace, to rearrange, to welcome him back to what we had not yet called home. I was in charge. I had a system. I put on my tip-toe self and talked my father through every broken-into-tidbits moment.
Now I am packing up your socks. Now I am packing up your pants. Now I am packing up your books. Now here’s your wallet. I’m going upstairs and then I’ll be back down, and yes, I have talked to your nurses, I have talked to your friends, I have told everybody that you are, yes, coming—what was the word? Not home.
He had told the nurses that he wasn’t ready, but he was. He had told me not to come and then he’d called me back and told me to come early, and I didn’t let the phone merely ring-a-ling this time. I was vigilant. I was on it. I was the good and calming non-onset daughter.
You’re going to be fine, Dad, I said, but I could see the wings of the big black bird through the walls of his chest, I could see the whites of anxiety in his eyes. I could hear the draw of his breath in his anxious lungs. I could hear the scramble of the words in his head—words going around in a carousel tumble—and I could see what I had to do: not be the one who panicked.
I did not panic.
One minute by one hour by one morning by one afternoon by one night by one day by another.
He settled.
He did it.
He beat it.
Take that, ICU Delirium. Take that, sudden-onset.
*
If I open the door, the air comes in. The air is green, and it is blue. It carries the sound of the howl of the child next door and now the child’s mother, talking casually with another. The boy’s howl, apparently, is not a howl worthy of attention and it will fade into itself and be forgotten. It will be a lesson to the child: prioritize your fear, calm your rage; you are responsible for your own panic.
A bird now, out there in the air. A car on its take of asphalt. If I think the word grace, my head will hurt less, my pulse will unquicken; it will be like I am writing a poem. So I think the word grace, and now it might be a toad out there in the air or a self-satisfied insect or the soft paw steps of the neighborhood deer, no owl, no fox. It might be anything on tender toes. It might be friend, not foe.
How are you doing? my father called today and asked me. He is good today. He is more than good. He has a whole week planned out, and he has planned it well: a movie, a concert, a recital, a lecture—all happening right there, in the village that does not, at this moment, need a daughter.
I’m a little tired, I said.
Tired? he said. Why is that?
I told him about the mice and their Ninja Olympics. I told him about the sound of the medals around their necks. I told him I thought a stranger had broken in. That someone was coming for me. Something.
Oh my, he said. Oh my. What will you do?
The things one does, I said. I guess. Though it pained me to think of stopping any ninja short. It pained me to be the cause of another mouse’s panic. It pained me to think of killing a mouse, when all I actually wanted to kill was my panic.
Beth, my father said. You need to do this right. Call in the pest people. Will you?
I’m good, Dad, I said. I’m good. I promise, but he wanted none of that.
No, he said, you have to do this right. You have to let me help you.
Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly thirty books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-founder of Juncture Workshops. Her essays appear widely in Ninth Letter, Catapult, Creative Nonfiction, The New York Times, Life magazine, and elsewhere. A new memoir-in-essays—Wife|Daughter|Self—is due out from Forest Avenue Press in Spring 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com
Photo by simplebitsdan on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND