Paul Heilker is the Co-Director of the PhD in Rhetoric and Writing at Virginia Tech, where he teaches courses in rhetorical theory, composition, writing pedagogy, and literary nonfiction.  He is the author of The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form (NCTE, 1996) and of numerous essays masquerading as scholarship, which have appeared in journals such as College Composition and Communication and Rhetoric Review.

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 October 1989

 

 

February 2001

 

 

 

March 2001

The call wakes me from fitful hotel sleep. I wrestle my way from under the leaden bedspread. All I can think is that I have to get home. I’m dressed and packed in five minutes, moving but mindless, moving in order to stay mindless. I find myself in the lobby restaurant choking down a bowl of oatmeal. I feel compelled to flee, to return, but there are no straight lines this morning; the cab to the airport must first evade the police roping off streets for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. We snake our way through downtown Denver, and I am relieved to feel myself being forced into the seat cushions as we accelerate, swaying against the door on turns. When we finally reach the highway, I press my forehead against the cold window; a soothing blur races by outside. I walk around the airport all day until my flight, covering the same ground several times. I search for moving sidewalks to see how quickly I can move through space. I create my own breeze.

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March 20, 2003

This morning, as we invade Iraq, I will ride north on the Crescent, a train so named because its route arcs from New Orleans through Atlanta and Washington to New York. But my mind sutures the Crescent to the Red Crescent, to the Red Cross, to the growing conviction that I will die in a midday poison gas attack as we pass through Union Station. 

 

I board the train at dawn in Lynchburg, Virginia, pausing longer than usual this morning to feel the texture of hate and death in that name, past and present. Most of the passengers are sleeping; in the darkness their blankets are shrouds. “So if there’s any problem at all, you’ll turn around and come right home?” my son has asked repeatedly, and I realize that I am, in fact, ready to leap off a moving train in a heartbeat.

 

We rock forward. The rhythm helps. The sun rises. I see trees and towns pass by -- a soothing, simple movement through space. I am able to eat a bit, although I keep recounting the water bottles in my pack. Other passengers are yawning, stretching, standing, and I am relieved to see that they have eyes and faces, working limbs. I am glad to hear their voices yet equally glad that I can’t discern the words. I try to read, to write, but give up, look out the window, think about my wife and kids getting ready for school. I wander down to the club car and buy a vile cup of coffee which I am nonetheless delighted to have; I philosophize about the beauty-mystery of styrofoam, heat, liquid matter to keep myself distracted.

 

I look up to see that we are coming into the King Street Station in Alexandria. I know this place. We stay at that Embassy Suites, use that Metro station every time we come to DC. Everything tightens as I realize this is the last stop before Union Station, my last chance to bolt. If anyone else gets off here, I’m gone, I think, but no one moves. So I sit still, watch the doors close, and think myself foolish, but I can’t decide whether I am foolish for staying put or for feeling the need to flee.

 

Union Station feels like the lead apron at the dentist’s office. Breathing is work. We stop for twenty minutes as they change from diesel to electric locomotives. They cut the power, the fans stop, the car sighs, dies. We all feel it. In the dark, we start whispering. A memory erupts -- twenty years ago, when the eye of Hurricane Gloria passed over Long Island at 2:00 a.m., we met our neighbors in the middle of the street, whispering in the dark. I escape to the platform. Four kids begin playing tag. Their whoops get louder, and I study their energy.

 

We finally, mercifully, start north again.  I am pleased that I was wrong, that I am not dead. Soon, though, a young man with tight blonde curls strides purposefully up the aisle and into the next car, an acrid vapor of day-old vodka and cigarettes in his wake. Five minutes later, he returns, followed by a conductor. They move swiftly past me toward the back of our car. Heads pivot. Indistinct but rising voices behind me, then an anguished shout –

 

“But where the fuck is my book?!” 

 

“Sir, you’ve got to calm down—”

 

“I’ve gotta find my fuckin’ book!”

 

“—or we’ll put you off this train at the next stop!”

 

“Maybe I can help.” I turn to see a slight woman with large eyeglasses, dark skin, silver hair. She beckons. “Come, sit here. We’ll figure it out.”

 

Both men pause.   The young man looks at the woman, then the conductor, then back to the woman. He sits beside her. The conductor waits a moment, then walks slowly up the aisle and back into the next car.

 

“Can you mind your language for me, please?”

 

“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

 

“That’s all right. Now what’s all this about a book?” she begins in quiet, measured tones, and it is clear that the crisis is over. I feel the full day’s worth of adrenaline sink to my feet, and I am suddenly very tired. I recline the seat and put my head against the window.  When I wake up, we are coming into the 30^th Street Station in Philadelphia. All is quiet. I look for the blonde man: he stands in the doorway waiting to exit the train. I look for the dark and silver woman: she sits with eyes closed and hands folded. 

 

Halfway across New Jersey, I walk back and thank her for helping. “Oh, you’re welcome, but it was nothing,” she says. “I know lots of young men like him.” Mrs. Matthews teaches typing at a public school in Brooklyn. “He’s just confused and needs a little direction. He has potential. Here, look at this,” she says and hands me a piece of tasseled paper torn from a spiral notebook. “His book was right where he left it. He wanted me to have this.” I read.

 

 

I sigh. This is a quilt of “The Sunscreen Song,” originally a Chicago Tribune column by Mary Schmich, circulated around the internet as “Kurt Vonnegut’s Commencement Address at M.I.T.,” then bought by Baz Luhrmann and made into a pop song, a novelty hit in 1998. I am torn: should I tell her? I decide that I must.

 

“Really? It’s not his?” she asks. But she is unfazed by my bombshell. “Well, he still has potential,” she says, and that settles the matter. She folds the paper carefully and puts it in her purse. I look out the window and see the familiar -- no, altered -- Manhattan skyline. 

 

As I make my way through Penn Station, I remember that the last time I climbed these steps I was stoned, stumbling, skipping school, and I understand that Mrs. Matthews is right. There is always potential, always hope, for all of us. As I reach 33^rd Street, I see the barricades, horses, and riot helmets, and I know that I must believe this. I walk east and hail a cab uptown.

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June 2003

The alien warble begins at dawn, the Martian death ray from The War of the Worlds, only everywhere, incessant. It is not death, as it turns out, but life -- Brood IX of North America’s “17-year locusts” emerging, molting, and mating here in southwestern Virginia, choruses of male Magicicada calling from high, sunlit branches. And not the end of the world, as it turns out, but a lapse of sanity -- the omnipresent resonation of their hollow abdomens keeps me nettled, fragile, off-balance, exhausted for weeks.

 

After living underground and sucking root juices for 17 years, the nymphs have clawed their way up to become adults -- obscene black bodies, vacant, blood-red eyes, orange-veined cellophane wings -- hundreds of thousands of them, sometimes a million of them an acre. They are piled four inches deep under the trees in our front yard. I run them over with the lawnmower, and they, contemptuous, never flinch, never move to save themselves.

 

Meanwhile, at the bottom of our hill, the county’s water workers have spent weeks laying a new line, straining to make straight pipes follow the road's contortions through the hollow. Now, though, an impasse: there is already plenty of water where they want to put their pipe. A natural run-off soaks that side of the road; on rainy days, it eases over its meager banks to cover and cross the pavement, wending its wide and unhurried way downhill.

 

As quickly as they dig their trench, it fills up with water. Big, gas-powered pumps bail out the ditch, but now water seems to be welling up from below, as well. The pumps whirr and spout but the water tirelessly reclaims its space. The workers don waders, walk in up to their waists, and struggle to install a water pipe underwater.

 

Meanwhile, Aileen, my wife, is having surgery. Dr. Abrams has seen sonographic shadows on her ovaries and, fearing cancer, wants a better look. For two weeks now, Aileen has been absent, disappearing into one Harry Potter book after another. When we arrive at the hospital, the parade of people prepping her for surgery seem obsessively concerned with whether she is wearing dentures. No, we answer, six or seven times. I bend close to kiss her, feel her breath on my neck, and they wheel her away.

 

Twenty-five minutes later, in the waiting room, I get a call on my cell phone. It is Dr. Abrams, sounding shocked and relieved and concerned, all at that same time. It is probably not cancer, she says, but endometriosis, and it is everywhere. Tissue that should be inside Aileen’s uterus suffuses the surrounding cavity, cementing her ovaries to the back of her uterus and her uterus to her intestines. Dr. Abrams needs my permission to make a bigger incision.

 

Afterwards, when I see Aileen in her room, she is angry about her post-operative vomiting. I am so happy to see her angry I almost cry.