THE INCIDENT
Miracle Creek, Virginia
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
MY HUSBAND ASKED ME TO LIE. Not a big lie. He probably didn’t even consider it a lie, and neither did I, at first. It was such a small thing, what he wanted. The police had just released the protesters, and while he stepped out to make sure they weren’t coming back, I was to sit in his chair. Cover for him, the way coworkers do as a matter of course, the way we ourselves used to at the grocery store, while I ate or he smoked. But as I took his seat, I bumped against the desk, and the certificate above it went slightly crooked as if to remind me that this wasn’t a regular business, that there was a reason he’d never left me in charge before.
Pak reached over me to straighten the frame, his eyes on the English lettering: Pak Yoo, Miracle Submarine LLC, Certified Hyperbaric Technician. He said—eyes still on the certificate, as if talking to it, not to me—“Everything’s done. The patients are sealed in, the oxygen’s on. You just have to sit here.” He looked at me. “That’s it.”
I looked over the controls, the unfamiliar knobs and switches for the chamber we’d painted baby blue and placed in this barn just last month. “What if the patients buzz me?” I said. “I’ll say you’ll be right back, but—”
“No, they can’t know I’m gone. If anyone asks, I’m here. I’ve been here the whole time.”
“But if something goes wrong and—”
“What could go wrong?” Pak said, his voice forceful like a command. “I’ll be right back, and they won’t buzz you. Nothing will happen.” He walked away, as if that was the end of the matter. But at the doorway, he looked back at me. “Nothing will happen,” he said again, softer. It sounded like a plea.
As soon as the barn door banged shut, I wanted to scream that he was crazy to expect nothing to go wrong on this day, of all days, when so much had gone wrong—the protesters, their sabotage plan, the resulting power outage, the police. Did he think so much had already happened that nothing more could? But life doesn’t work like that. Tragedies don’t inoculate you against further tragedies, and misfortune doesn’t get sprinkled out in fair proportions; bad things get hurled at you in clumps and batches, unmanageable and messy. How could he not know that, after everything we’d been through?
From 8:02 to 8:14 p.m., I sat and said nothing, did nothing, like he asked. Sweat dampened my face, and I thought about the six patients sealed inside without air-conditioning (the generator operated the pressurization, oxygen, and intercom systems only) and thanked God for the portable DVD player to keep the kids calm. I reminded myself to trust my husband, and I waited, checking the clock, the door, then the clock again, praying for him to return (he had to!) before Barney ended and the patients buzzed for another DVD. Just as the show’s closing song started, my phone rang. Pak.
“They’re here,” he whispered. “I need to stand watch, make sure they don’t try anything again. You need to turn off the oxygen when the session ends. You see the knob?”
“Yes, but—”
“Turn it counterclockwise, all the way, tight. Set your alarm so you won’t forget. 8:20 by the big clock.” He hung up.
I touched the knob marked OXYGEN, a discolored brass the color of the squeaky faucet in our old apartment in Seoul. It surprised me how cool it felt. I synchronized my watch to the clock, set my alarm to 8:20, and found the ALARM ON button. Right then, just as I started pressing the tiny nub—that’s when the DVD battery died and I dropped my hands, startled.
I think about that moment a lot. The deaths, the paralysis, the trial—might all that have been averted if I’d pressed the button? It’s strange, I know, that my mind keeps returning to this particular lapse, given my bigger, more blameworthy mistakes of that night. Perhaps it’s precisely its smallness, its seeming insignificance, that gives it power and fuels the what-ifs. What if I hadn’t let the DVD distract me? What if I’d moved my finger a microsecond more quickly, managed to turn on the alarm before the DVD died, mid-song? I love you, you love me, we’re a hap-py fam-i—
The blankness of that moment, the categorical absence of sound, dense and oppressive—it pressed in, squeezed me from all sides. When noise finally came—a rap-rap-rap of knuckles against the porthole from inside the chamber—I was almost relieved. But the knocking intensified into fists banging in threes as if chanting Let me out! in code, then into full-on pounding, and I realized: it had to be TJ’s head banging. TJ, the autistic boy who adores Barney the purple dinosaur, who ran to me the first time we met and hugged me tight. His mother had been amazed, said he never hugs anyone (he hates touching people), and maybe it’s my shirt, the exact shade of purple as Barney. I’ve worn the shirt every day since; I hand-wash it every night and put it on for his sessions, and every day, he hugs me. Everyone thinks I’m being kind, but I’m really doing it for me, because I crave the way his arms wrap around and squeeze me—the way my daughter’s used to, before she started leaning away from my hugs, her arms limp. I love kissing his head, the fuzz of his red hair tickling my lips. And now, that boy whose hugs I savor was beating his head on a steel wall.
He wasn’t crazy. His mother had explained that TJ has chronic pain from intestinal inflammation, but he can’t talk, and when it gets too much, he does the only thing he can for relief: he bangs his head, using the new, acute pain to drive out the old one. It’s like having an itch you can’t stand and scratching so hard it bleeds, how good that pain feels, except multiplied by a hundred. Once, she told me, TJ put his face through a window. It tormented me, the thought of this eight-year-old boy in so much pain that he needed to bash his head against steel.
And the sound of that pain—the pounding, again and again. The persistence, the increasing insistence. Each thud set off vibrations that reverberated and built into something corporeal, with form and mass. It traveled through me. I felt it rumble against my skin, jolting my insides and demanding my heart to match its rhythm, to beat faster, harder.
I had to make it stop. That’s my excuse. For running out of the barn and leaving six people trapped in a sealed chamber. I wanted to depressurize and open it, get TJ out of there, but I didn’t know how. Besides, when the intercom buzzed, TJ’s mother begged me (or, rather, Pak) not to stop the dive, she’d calm him down, but please, for the love of God, put in new batteries and restart the Barney DVD now! There were batteries somewhere in our house next door, only a twenty-second run away, and I had five minutes to turn off the oxygen. So I left. I covered my mouth to muffle my voice and said in a low, heavily accented voice like Pak’s, “We will replace batteries. Wait few minutes,” then I ran out.
The door to our house was ajar, and I felt a flash of wild hope that Mary was home, cleaning up like I’d told her to, and finally, something would go right today. But I stepped in, and she wasn’t there. I was alone, with no idea where the batteries were and no one to help. It was what I’d expected all along, yet that second of hope had been enough to shoot my expectations high into the sky and send them crashing down. Keep calm, I told myself, and started my search in the gray steel wardrobe we used for storage. Coats. Manuals. Cords. No batteries. When I slammed the door, the wardrobe wobbled, its flimsy metal warbling and booming like an echo of TJ’s pounding. I pictured his head hammering steel, cracking open like a ripe watermelon.