On the Saturday soccer field, the six- to eight-year-olds are dropping like flies. Many team sports incorporate the art of the flop—a strategically exaggerated response to physical contact—as one among a handful of commonly played mind games pertaining to health and strength, but none quite as integrally as soccer. Spanish is the common language at the Eastside Y, but we don’t speak it, and this makes the drop and roll, the dry-grass writhing harder to read.
Pain as autonomic reaction or pain as performance? Pain performed as advantage, seduction, evidence wholly forged or simply highlighted for easier viewing? Something happened or I want you to believe it did. Here, see it, let me help you. The act makes visible the invisible or invented, broadcasts what otherwise might remain private.
“What’d you do?” a colleague asks with a smile when he sees me cantilevering down the hall in a postsurgical boot. Over the course of several years, he’s barely spoken to me, has never inquired about anything, really. Something about the visible sign that points to pain, but in a fun athletic injury or human foible kind of way, invites comment, opens the door. My answer, toe surgery for a congenital defect, leaves nowhere amusing for the conversation to go, so it ends. Given the opportunity, we’d rather not look at all. Compelled or invited to look, we quickly invite ourselves to look away.
The interaction brings to mind another from some years back with another usually reticent male colleague. “When are you due?” he blurted out with an unmediated mix of incredulity, revulsion, and alarm upon seeing me eight months pregnant, and lumbering up the stairs. For some conditions, there’s no possibility of flopping. Invisibility has its price, but visibility does, too.
Once over a period of weeks, I invented a serial story for my son about a misfit band of underwater friends—an orphaned mermaid, an octopus into decorating, an immature beluga whale, and an implacable old turtle—who lived in the unhaunted part of the mermaid’s castle left to her by her father. Every morning, they breakfasted on food natural to their kind but repulsive to one other. By appointment each month, they visited the mermaid’s sister at the edge of a certain dock, both parties having traveled several days to get there, the underwater crew by sea, the no-longer-mermaid sister by land—years ago she had given up her tail for love of birdsong and forest. (She didn’t regret her decision, but she did miss swimming, which, according to the bargain she had struck, was now forbidden.)
The gang’s other adventures came by way of a treasure map leading them to secret alcoves within the ocean—kelp forest, whirlpool, birthplace of bubbles, source of darkness, origin of light—where its magical powers were stored. They also visited the beluga’s mother, who missed him. One day, compelled to face the fear they lived with, they unlocked the scariest room in the haunted part of the castle and found there a tortured zombie-shark swimming in circles and thirsting for blood. I don’t remember why I stopped telling the story.
Actually, I do. Over time, it became formulaic, almost procedural. I grew tired of it, I grew bored, so I’d take longer and longer breaks between installments, and then I’d forget where we’d left off, how we might begin again. I barely remember any of it now. Margo was the mermaid’s name, the one who still lived in the sea. A reminder of how much passes through us, sheds off us, the fleeting nature of processes such as parenthood, such as pain? Two weeks into my time away, with much fanfare after only brief daily phone calls, I Skype with my son to tell him a bedtime story. Looking at each other, we both end up sad. It made a pain visible. Or, visible, we made a pain. Neither was helpful.