You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.
Bob Dylan
Imagine this. You and your family are driving up into the mountains for a weekend getaway when a car veers into your lane. You are driving 50 miles-per-hour. So is the other car, which is being driven by a man in the throes of a heart attack. (The police report says the man was dead before impact.) The sedan crosses the centerline and crashes directly into you. Your wife shouts out in surprise an instant before impact.
Close your eyes, open them. The windshield is spread out on your laps in a blanket of chipped ice. The car engines sizzle like restaurant ovens. Your wife is slumped in the front seat beside you, eyes closed. You can’t tell if she is breathing. You look back at your then eight-year-old boy, seated in the back behind his mother: eyes wide open, he has been brought to silence by the shock. You look back just as your wife draws a large breath. Everyone is alive.
The man and woman from the car in front of you arrive at your window within seconds. Their teenage son takes your boy away and sits him down on a nearby grass embankment. You don’t know it yet, but he has walked out of the wreck unharmed except for a minor case of whiplash and a serious seatbelt burn on his chest. Your wife keeps her eyes closed, nods when you ask if she is okay. Later, you will learn she has broken an arm, both her legs (even breaks on both tibias). One of her heels has been crushed.
Your feet are both broken—one a simple ankle break, the other a more complicated set of breaks inside the foot. They remain stuck up in the well and have begun throbbing in pain. Your femur has snapped in two places (dead center and up at the hip), cracking the patella in the process. Your sternum has cracked, as well, along with fourteen ribs. Later, a doctor will inform you that both your heart and lungs have been “bruised” and a small piece of spinal cord has chipped off. Lucky it didn’t land somewhere it shouldn’t, he says. No head injuries. No internal bleeding. Lucky to be alive.
The engines keep sizzling, and smoking, until someone extinguishes them, filling the car with foul-smelling fog. The man and woman stay at the windows and say positive things to keep you both alert. The EMTs arrive and shuttle your wife off to an ambulance. You are not so lucky. Even though they bring out the Jaws of Life, the men are unable to extract you from your car seat: they can’t wrench the steering wheel free from the dash. Your seat is jammed in place. You spend close to an hour pressed into the wheel, doing your freaked-out best to maintain your cool. You accomplish this by breathing quietly and slowly, counting your breaths as if meditating. This breathing becomes a lifeline to your sanity. You climb up your breath, hand over fist, as if from out of a deep well. You disappear into these breaths for as long as you can, only coming back to the car when they ask for your name, where your pain is on a scale of 1 to 10. A few times you can’t help but cry out in desperation. All you want to do is to free yourself from this claustrophobic posture. You keep asking yourself, What just happened?
After endless minutes an EMT leans in close and informs you that it is time to get you out. You whole-heartedly agree. It’s about fucking time, you want to say, though you only nod and smile at the man. It is getting dark and cold, he says, your femur break worries him. You need to get to a hospital as soon as possible in case you are bleeding internally. You think, Good idea.
The guy says, “This is going to hurt.” And you think something along the lines of “No shit.” But what the guy means is he’s going to have to pull you out of the car, with the help of another EMT: first by wrenching you up then jerking you a quick left up and away from the dash. You scream. Maybe you black out a little. But then you are on the stretcher—out of the car, feet free from their tangled imprisonment—and shuttled onto a waiting helicopter. You are far from home. The pain rises up in your body in a flood. It’s okay. You are alive. You have survived. You are lucky.
~~
You wake up in a hospital bed: your casted leg slung up in traction, awash in morphine and woozy from the anesthesia. Your parents are bedside, fear and relief in their eyes. Two friends have arrived overnight, jumping into their car when they get the news and heading down the mountain; another bullies his way into the ward after three long hours on the road. “Are you family?” “I’m his brother,” he grunts, and he’s not lying. Your wife is in another hospital, two hours away. Which doesn’t make sense.
You drift in and out of consciousness. You’re taken off for another surgery but left on a stretcher in the hall for over an hour before being wheeled back to your room. The surgery has been postponed. In a sad version of Munchausen’s Syndrome, you fall in love with each new nurse who takes shift on your floor. One brings you ginger ale and sugar cookies in the middle of the night, knowing you can’t sleep. Another brings you extra pudding. You punch at the painkiller button like they do in the television shows. A day passes, another.
You don’t react well to the painkillers. You start seeing things. A white cat visits you at night, floating around your bed like a tiny nurse shark in and around a reef. The nurses disappear for large stretches, won’t come when you push the call button. Your feet are jammed into the baseboard, forcing you to relive the aftermath of the accident. It’s driving you crazy. You imagine a conspiracy. Your mother finally raises hell with the head nurse and your too-small bed gets fixed. The doctors come around and reluctantly explain. You have become lost in the standard spiraling hell of hospitals.
They keep you in the hospital for a week after the surgeries. Your parents stay by your side the whole time. When your son visits he looks relieved to see you sitting up in your bed, made nervous by all the nurses and wires and by the large circles under your eyes. He laughs easily at your lame jokes and wants to see your stitches. Later, you talk to your wife on the phone through a cloud of anesthesia and painkillers. She is going through the same hell you are but in a hospital up the mountain. Surrounded by friends and family. You are both so happy to be alive, too tired to say much more than I love you.
Time passes in lurching jumps. Your brother comes in from the coast, stays a few days, heads back home. Your aunt arrives from New York. A modern dancer, she confides in you, “The way out is through.” It seems a bit dramatic, a little too metaphysical for your state of mind. Eventually, the doctors release you from the hospital. One doc assures you that you will be reunited with your wife at a rehab center in your area. That now your son can visit you every day. You’ll be there for at least a month, maybe more. You’re wheeled out into the parking lot, which feels like being released from prison; that your life has been re-booted and is now a blank screen.
They put you in what your wife jokingly call “the honeymoon suite.” You push your beds as close as allowed. Holding hands as close to lovemaking you will get to for a long time. It’s enough. Your son spends the afternoon, and the three of you pile into bed to watch some movie. It doesn’t matter which. Friends float in to see your face and leave handfuls of flowers.
A few weeks into your stay you slide out of your bed and climb into the wheelchair on your own. You wheel yourself back and forth to the bathroom, using the board as you’ve been taught, then flop back into bed. This takes half an hour. The simple set of actions saturates you in sweat. When you tell the nurse, he doesn’t believe you. So you execute the move again. You do it for the doctor and she gives you a blue slip that allows you access to the halls. You are free. Free to roam the empty halls. Free to return to your room. Your wife is crying. Everything has been upended, she says without saying it. Our life has been dumped on the ground.
Finally it’s discharge day. Your wife’s parents drive you home. There’s a ramp where the stairs used to be. You dog waits for you, tailing thumping the wood. Neighbors have stocked your fridge with food. Your bedroom has been moved down to the living room. Your son shows you around the new digs, beaming with pride. It is all a little too much. You extract yourself from your chair and lay down in your bed. The walls are covered in get-well cards. A lifetime since you last were in your own bed. You are home. The real work begins.
~~
Your first time on the court, you mince out to the free throw line like an old man. The lights flicker to life in the murky dark. Your feet are on fire, your right leg as stiff as a plank, the ball a shot put in your hands. You square your shoulders, dribble the ball a few times (echoes around the gym) and hoist up a foul shot. Air ball. The ball comes to a rest by a set of double doors. You hobble over and think of pushing them open, giving up before you’ve even begun. But no, this will be a yearlong recovery project: you have come here to heal by teaching yourself how to shoot hoops again. It seems an impossible task.
The college gym becomes your refuge; you head over after classes at least twice a week, sometimes three. Your friend, a trainer, provides you with a regiment of core exercises, stretches and light lifting. And because you’ve never really been a gym rat—a lover of sport but not a true athlete—you are surprised that you actually like working out, like the solitary effort of it, the concentration it requires, the endorphins it releases. You appreciate that the students leave you alone, don’t make you self-conscious, as you struggle with the weights. If you are going to get yourself back, it’s here you’ll accomplish it.
You spend an hour in the weight room then twenty, thirty minutes in the gym shooting hoops. You focus on the footwork, on getting set and letting the force flow up through your feet into your legs and hips then up into your arms. But you don’t have enough strength to shoot further out than fifteen feet. (No arc, no real spin off the fingers.) You usually miss. Nor can you run. It hurts to bend over. And you can’t push off on your gimpy knee.
Your spend most of your time “chasing” after missed shots. The few times you try to execute a move to your right, bringing the basketball up high on the dribble, you feel a sharp pain in your knee. If you shuffle too fast after an errant shot, your femur blares out a warning. You get a headache after five minutes, and every little jump and reach lights up your ribcage in an elaborate system of prickles and jabs. I can’t do that no more, your body whispers. I can’t do this. You keep your mouth shut.
What you do instead is shoot foul shots. Shoot 10 in a row, make 6. Shoot another 10, make 5. The ball keeps rimming out, hitting back iron, nicking the front of the rim and bouncing up and away. So you focus once again on your feet, on your calf muscles, the carpenter bevel breath. (Always back to the breath.) You shut your eyes and let the body slip into its dribble groove. Slight bend in the knees, one last backward spinning dribble, eyes open as you come up, smooth release. You hit 9 out of the next 10. When you are done with foul shots, you play a little Around the World, moving around the key in an awkward dance of shoot and rebound, shoot and rebound. It takes twenty minutes to get up to the top of the key. You heave the ball twice at the rim then give up in disgust.
Once and a while, near the end of a session, you get into the old rhythm and nail a few jumpers in a row. You are able to rise up a little on your toes. Your arms, stronger from the weight lifting, behave for once and provide just the right support for the corner jumper, the top of the foul line set-shot. Occasionally your friend comes down and rebounds for you. These are magical moments. Little glimpses into the joy of shooting hoops. The brief flashes of physical grace.
But mostly you slog around the gym for as long as you can take it then head home. You are exhausted by all the necessary drudgery.
~~
You’ve made it out of the damn bed, the damn wheelchair, damn walker, damn house. Now you’re on your feet, wobbly but on them. Your nine-year-old son has been dying to get you back playing ball. He needs you back. A few steps behind in the recovery, your wife needs you back. Your students need you back. Even your aging dog yearns for a walk longer than half a block. You want to be back. But the painkillers you’re tapering off of fog your mind. You have a small parcel of energy for the day and no reserves. You’ll come back, just not yet. When you crawl into bed, our body aches head to toe.
Rehab keeps you busy. The PTs start you off with a monotonous set of stretches. You can barely move. Can’t even stand back up on your own. You’re a fucking invalid. But before you know it you’re hauling your underused body across the endless span of parallel bars, keeping your balance on a variety of equilibrium devices, taking your first Frankenstein steps, climbing a stage-set staircase to correct mechanics. The PTs talk you through everything, cracking jokes when you get frustrated. You let the conveyor belt of physical therapy carry you forward.
After a month, you graduate to the pool. They slide you in on this PVC pipe wheelchair, which feels like a cross between a throne and a highchair. You hide your emaciated legs under the towel. The water is warm, almost exactly body temperature, so it feels like slipping into a giant bed. At first you just float, quietly ecstatic by the surprising fact of weightlessness. But then you set your feet down. The pool bottom tickles your soles. The water’s up to your chest; you start walking. Or you start pantomiming walking. It’s as if an invisible alien sits on the edge of the pool asking you to explain this whole walking thing. You put your leg up like this, you say. Toss it in front of you slowly, then shift your weight…But the whole shifting weight thing just doesn’t feel right. You turn around and head back the other way. Your wife seems to be more adept at this strange underwater strolling. She pumps her arms out in front of her like she’s jogging and, though her face is set and determined, a small smile appears at the sides of her mouth. And though you’re back out in under an hour and you didn’t actually do much but pretend to walk, float around and lift your legs. You can barely get in and out of the high chair. Face it, you’re are a wet noodle, too tired to hide your legs and more than happy to let the PT woman hold your arm as you disengage from the seat. You think, this is what it feels like to be old.
~~
You have come to hate this place. They march you up and down the halls, up and down the stairs. They make you stride backward up the hill behind the parking lot. Take laps around the lot. There’s a sign in one of the halls that reads: "If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere." You want to spit at it. It makes you sick to think of returning three times a week. You have come to hate the sight of stairs. You have become allergic to the dingy, smelly halls. You don’t want to hear the PTs praise your effort or support you in your momentary lapses. “You can do it,” they say. You think, Do it yourself. “Just one more set,” they chant. You think, Fuck off. And then you realize that your aunt meant by “the way out is through.” She was really talking about pain, and about how an athlete uses it, and fatigue and exhaustion, as a springboard deeper into training. She was talking about a life-long endeavor, offering you another form of lifeline.
When you are still in your chair, your son coaxes you outside to watch him jump on the trampoline. You’ve been watching the summer Olympics, following the volleyball matches. He starts knocking a beach ball around inside the circular net. He throws it up and caught it in mid-air, spiking it into the net. You wheel closer. He throws you the beach ball. You catch it and throw it back. A game starts up. You try to throw it so he can’t catch it. He dives and lunges. A natural athlete he quickly covers every angle you, reading the trajectory as soon as it’s out of your hands.
When you graduate to a walker, he starts to make you reach a little. You’ve learned where to throw the ball so he can’t get it. There’s a little trick to use the tape at the top of the net to break the ball’s path, divert it. He learns how to get there, master of the shoestring catch. Now you’re on your own two feet and he starts placing the ball so you have to take a few steps to grab it. You get two bounces. A week of hard work, of getting your feet to pick up off the dirt and pivot, of applying what you’re learning on the court, and you only get one bounce. When you’re able to move around a little, the play area you patrol expands. You replace the beach ball with a soccer ball. You come up with a point system. Rules about serves. Dos and don’ts. Your boy has stopped playing nice. You can reach just about anything he sends your way. He always wins. It doesn’t matter. The game is called “Butterfingers” and you begin to envision it becoming an Olympic sport, you and your son the heroic pioneers. But, really, you give thanks to the trampoline for providing such an elastic and flexible arena for you and your boy to connect. You don’t tell him, but you see your boy as another of your trainers. You stay out until it’s so dark the ball starts disappears into the tree shadows. Until Mom calls her boy inside.
~~
A year since the accident. The memory of the crash lurches around the bend and swerves into you once again. You don’t come up for air weeks. Then three more months tick by. Slow and steady wins the race. You still can’t drive more than thirty minutes without needing to pull over. Still can’t help but flinch when a truck nudges close to the centerline. Your wife joins you in the gym. The trainer works with both of you. She jokes: “Now you’re just another out of shape forty-something.”
But now your stamina has been built up from all the workouts. Your feet don’t hurt quite so much. Even the knee seems to be healing. You can stay out on court longer, can shoot from behind the three-point line. Your son joins you on a few occasions after school. He shoots with you a while then pulls out his soccer ball. He joins you on the exercise bike, then in the pool for laps. He doesn’t say it, but he’s proud of you; relieved, you think, to see you back in action. He’s got his playmate back. His father is no longer such an old man.
Most of the time it’s just you alone in the gym. You get out before the men’s basketball team starts practice, make room for the cleaning crew to sweep the floor. Often an exercise class needs the gym to do station drills. One afternoon a student joins you in the gym. He’s the starting shooting guard for the team. He’s there to talk about his latest paper and to support your recovery, but he’s also there to shoot some hoop. When you challenge him to a game of HORSE, he laughs. You require that he shoot from inside the three-point line. He laughs. And he laughs again when you give him a letter with a corner shot. But, of course, it’s no contest. It feels good to be out on the court with someone other than your lonesome. To pass the ball out and have the ball passed to you. You make a few 15-footers so step back to try one behind the college three-point line. Brick. Top of the key. Brick.
Now when you go to shoot, you wear headphones. There’s no second guessing the body, no hesitation in your shot. When the ball bounces into the corner, you scurry after it. You can almost forget the two years of pain and disappointment and struggle it’s taken you to get to this point. You’ve got this old soul mix on your I-pod that helps you tune it out—“Boogie on Reggae Woman” into “Sex Machine” into “Sexy Motherfucker.” That’s all you need to get into a rhythm. Shoot from the corner, swish, retrieve the ball, shoot from the other corner, off the rim, grab the rebound, lay-up, back out to the line, swish. It’s a dance, a meditation. You spin on the dribble and drive to the basket: pull up and rise for a jump shot, slight double clutch in the air. You try for the patented Tim Duncan bank shot. No chance. You back up, dribbling, and try again, this time spinning a little tighter, raising up a little higher. You are a sexy motherfucker. You are a sex machine.
On your way out you pass some of the players taping up in the training room. Your student throws you a shy smile. Maybe he makes a friendly joke about the old man limping around the court. It doesn’t matter. You take the stairs two at a time and head out to the car. You’ll need to ice your ankle when you get back, pop some Advil. That’s okay. You’re back.