LIFTOFF

I was afraid of liftoff. Afraid what the sudden shift in altitude might do to my ears, which had been clogged for weeks—since Thanksgiving, actually—with fluid, a condition that had greatly impaired my hearing and caused me, in certain claustrophobic moments, to feel as though I was on the verge of a panic attack. I’d been to an ear, nose, and throat guy the day before, a young doctor who, after I removed my hoodie so the nurse could take my blood pressure, had eyeballed my natty T-shirt—the one emblazoned with the letters “USA” and the iconic Olympic rings—and asked me if I was a competitor, though he likely knew the answer to that question. The doctor then pointed to a map on the wall of the human inner ear and informed me that what most people thought of the ear—the visible fleshy part—was really simply an amplifier and that the process of translating sound took place inside, where a complicated group of twisty shapes collaborated to send sounds to the brain. He then prescribed a hearing test—it would be, he assured me, an X-ray for my ears—and so I exited the examination room and sat down in a waiting area alongside a very old man who had a scar running down the side of his head. Eventually, I was summoned to a soundproof booth, where a woman—one whose tan, wrinkled face made me think she must have lived a life in which the smoking of cigarettes acted as a frequent punctuation in her daily routine—provided me with a pair of headphones and a handheld mechanism whose trigger I was instructed to press every time I heard a beep. I heard beeps but they quickly grew faint, sometimes so much so that I worried I might be imagining them, and thereby contribute to an inaccurate reading. The doctor’s “X-ray” metaphor seemed to me something of a stretch, especially if we were relying as much as I assumed we were on human interpretation. The smoker lady then asked me to repeat a string of words she pronounced, like “birthday” and “baseball” and “sidewalk” and “downtown,” and some other words I couldn’t hear because each time her voice receded a little further into oblivion. Once we had finished, the doctor read the test, and explained that I did indeed have some partial hearing loss, and though this would likely be restored, and I could expect the problem to resolve itself in ninety days or less, he could cut an incision in each eardrum and then drain out the fluid, a relatively painless procedure that would hopefully ensure that I could avoid what might otherwise be, thanks to the increased air pressure inside the cabin of an airplane, an exquisite kind of agony. I didn’t like the idea of a knife entering my ear canal and cutting something open in there, but I also didn’t like the idea of a sustained and exquisite agony, so I agreed to the procedure. I sat in a chair that reminded me of a dentist’s and almost made a comment about my father being a dentist but didn’t want to postpone the inevitable. When it was over—after the doctor had made his incisions, each of which represented two scorching dots of pain deep inside my head, and after he had drained out the fluid—I nearly cried because nothing seemed to have changed, my ears still felt full, and I could still hear my voice in my head when I spoke. The doctor said, “Huh,” and “Well, I don’t know what to tell you.” And then in the car, I did cry, a little, and I felt stupid and weak and childish, but I couldn’t help imagining what it would be like if this clogged ear situation represented the tip of the iceberg in terms of my suffering, if this condition wasn’t temporary but was instead the beginning of a slow decline in terms of my hearing, that maybe I’d be a forty-three-year-old with a giant hearing aid, at least until the sense disappeared completely, and then I’d have to learn sign language, probably lose my job because I needed my ears, relied on them while teaching almost every minute of class, though maybe I could claim disability and because of some kind of diversity initiative I couldn’t be fired but instead would be included in a tally of the ways my university was inclusive, a notch on the belt of their own contributions to diversity and inclusion. I was thinking about all of this as I sat on the plane, which, as usual, was small and the seating cramped and had been sitting for what seemed to be far too long upon the tarmac. Our flight attendant was a tall black woman with square glasses and as we prepared for liftoff she buckled herself in a seat facing the cabin. It struck me that she resembled a grownup version of the avatar I created for Grand Theft Auto, an orange-haired, sunglasses-wearing, Mohawked woman who wore a hoodie and tiger-striped leggings. I don’t know why I created her except maybe in my mind I thought this fucked-up universe I was about to enter needed a hero that didn’t look like me, so I created her and named her Metatron, after the angel who led the Israelites out of Egypt, though that moniker got lost when I transferred her character from Xbox to PlayStation, and somehow ended up with my Rockstar email address, which is a combination of my and my son’s initials. Unfortunately, the fact that our stewardess looked like a badass offered little comfort to me, as I had the whole ears and exquisite pain thing to contend with. I put my phone on airplane mode, and tried to distract myself, tried to envision New York City, which was my destination, but instead I found myself thinking of the President-Elect and his cabinet, a veritable rogue’s gallery of the rich and powerful, and how the President-Elect was like Satan summoning the beasts of Revelation, except instead of seven-headed leopards and bears with horns we got old white men who were being primed to lead agencies whose very existence they opposed. Perhaps because I had a general a sense of impending doom, I remembered the morning of September 11th, 2001, which, I suppose you could say that I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday, and in some respects, more clearly than yesterday. On that morning, I was sitting in the living room of the duplex where I lived in Lafayette, Indiana, at a cheap Walmart desk, laptop open, working on a story that took the form of a will and testament. The phone rang, and moments later my wife, who had just gotten out of the shower, entered the room to tell me that her sister, who lived in Savannah, Georgia, had called to say that terrorists had hijacked airplanes and crashed them into the World Trade Center. My first thought was: no way. My wife assured me it was true, and that her sister had seen the replay of the event on TV. We didn’t have a television in the house—my wife was a PhD candidate in Purdue University, where I worked as a teacher of first-year writing, and our combined annual gross income was less than thirty grand, and cable seemed like a luxury we couldn’t afford—so I ended up driving a few blocks away, to our friend Arron and Cathy’s place, a house that smelled to me like somebody’s grandparents’, perhaps because everything Arron and Cathy owned—couches and lamps and bookshelves stuffed with old hardbacks—were at least fifty years old. There, in a room filled with the things of the past, I watched a transmission that seemed to be arriving from an alternate future reality: the unfathomable collapse of skyscrapers, a cascade of rubble that churned a doomsday cloud into the sky. Later that day, I sat in the tiny green yard outside our tiny white house. It was, as it had been in Manhattan, a beautiful day, the cloudless sky a deep blue. I didn’t know what to think. I assumed life would never be the same. Everything I had done, or would do, or could think of to do, seemed embarrassingly trivial. What was the point of writing stories, or teaching students how to consider audience, purpose, and rhetorical situation when writing essays? We lived in a world where desperate maniacs had come out of nowhere and used our own technology to slay thousands of people? What would happen next? How were any of us supposed to live? It may sound melodramatic to say, but I had experienced a similar feeling on the morning of November 9, 2016, when I turned on my phone and saw the name of our new President-Elect. Our nation, which had the chance to elect its first female president, had chosen a bully, a sexual predator, a failed businessman. I know that there are people who say that Obama didn’t fulfill his promise as a progressive liberal, that he didn’t dissolve Guantanamo, that he okayed drone strikes that ended up killing civilians. But I liked him. I liked having him as president. I liked knowing that he and Michelle invited intellectuals to private dinners, or that he’d befriended Marilynne Robinson, with whom he published a conversation about literature and books and citizenship in The New York Review of Books. I liked that he had a sense of humor, that he could roast somebody and that he could himself take a good ribbing, that he was capable of self-deprecation. I’m not stupid. I know his success is due in part to his charisma and charm, and that those things aren’t worth nearly as much as courage and honor, but you could count on him to respond to tragic events—Sandy Hook, the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the riots in Ferguson—with a calm and nuanced resolve. I didn’t care if in secret he had gone mad with power—though honestly I find that very difficult to imagine, in part because he stood up for things that I cared about, and championed programs and initiatives that would help those who were less fortunate, or who lived at the fringes of our society, or were shunned and denied rights by self-righteous fundamentalists. So waking up knowing that we had replaced one of our most literary presidents with one of our most illiterate was, to say the very least, disorienting. The sense I had of the country I lived in had dissolved. I didn’t know, for instance, what to tell my students, many of whom, I knew, could not abide the idea of a President-Elect who had once bragged about grabbing women by their genitals. So I didn’t tell them anything. In my Contemporary Fiction class, we’d spent the previous two months talking about received narratives—the stories we’ve been told by others about what it means to be alive—and we’d been reading stories and books by writers who were willing to turn our expectations about what it meant to tell a story on its head. Watching them engage with these texts, watching them struggle to understand why an author would end a story without resolving—at least to their satisfaction—the book’s main question, or why an author would forgo sensory description and figurative language in favor of speaking simply and directly to a reader, was not unlike watching the androids on HBO’s Westworld awake to the narratives that they’d been programmed to think of as real. The day after the election, I told the class that we weren’t going to talk about the novel we’d been studying—the one written by an Asian guy from Brooklyn who’d been celebrated in socalled alt-lit circles, and which detailed a relationship between a twenty-two-year-old writer and the sixteen-yearold girl he was dating, and included transcripts of their online chats, during which they talked about shoplifting, suicide, eating vegan foods, and whether a colony of ants could defeat Bruce Lee—we were going to write about what had happened over the last twenty-four hours; though most students wrote what they had to say within thirty minutes and left, one young woman wrote for the entire class period, and then thanked me afterwards, which, I’ll admit, struck me as strange, since she could’ve written at any time, didn’t have to be in a classroom to write, although perhaps she was simply relieved that someone in charge—someone she had to answer to, more or less—had taken the time to recognize that maybe she needed to write, and carving out that space where she could unleash her anger and sadness, handing in a stack of pages that were ribbed where the pressure of her pen had created furious little furrows, was essential to being able to move forward, because what else was there to do? I thought of my students as the plane’s wheels started to roll again, and because I myself didn’t know what else to do, I took out a notebook of my own, and as I felt the little surge that accompanies leaving the ground, I began, with no small amount of trepidation, to write.