Pica

 

I had to go down to work to pick up a stack of flyers to distribute for one of my spring classes. It’s a non-credit community ed. course, so instructors play a certain role in self-promotion, I guess.

It was a beautiful day and I didn’t mind the idea of a bike ride after a long week of sitting in front of the computer.

Down by the sawmill, they were slicing through some kind of coniferous wood that had a clear, limey smell. In the rising, late autumn fog there was something compelling about this smell and, since I hadn’t eaten much, I found myself with a pica-like impulse to want to eat it. Perhaps pica, or the impulse to eat strange, inedible substances while pregnant can be transmitted. My wife is pregnant, but seems to crave only bread, but I frequently find myself struggling with some strange impulse to taste pinecones or the ornaments made of cinnamon and applesauce (you’re not supposed to eat ém!””—my wife tells me) on the Christmas tree.

When I make it through this appetizing fog of shredded green wood, I remember the appointment and check my phone. There’s no message and this leaves my stomach feeling cold and tight, so I send a reminder.

“How’d it go?”

Or maybe it was:

“Hope everything went well”

Something innocuous anyway, because I’m hoping that it won’t be some fresh insult to receive the message. I worry about it almost as much as she does. The Doppler, then the ultrasound, the undetectable heartbeat, the unfeeling ultrasound tech callously saying “there’s nothing there”. COVID keeps me from attending any of the appointments so I’m off riding my bike and thinking of eating pine instead of being supportive. Support these days is just a text message and an innocuous one because when you need someone, a text message is total bullshit.

I’m out by the mouth of the Elk River when I get the reply.

“Everything good! Bebe moving a lot.”

She doesn’t write ‘bebe’’ because it’s cute but because that’s how she pronounces it and somehow that detail makes the relief so much more palpable. I grin and pump my fists like a 10-year-old.

I get on the highway and ride the rest of the way to work with the speeding logging trucks and I listen to this podcast about how people who don’t lie to themselves are miserable. It’s true. They did a test. Respondents who lied about stupid questions were more likely to be able to hide the pain of the world from themselves. Respondents who confessed stupid truths were less successful and frequently miserable. But it made me think of Mikey and how everyone loves him—at least I do—because he feels it all so keenly and doesn’t want a filter. Yeah, life is difficult for those who only tell the truth to themselves, but they’re a hell of a lot more admirable. I guess I’m in the middle somewhere. I can distract myself with really stupid things like new cereal or Halloween and I guess there’s a bit of deception in the reliance on these things for happiness.

Campus—as you’d expect—was empty. All the calendars in the associate faculty room were still on March 2019. It reminded me of the time my friends and I went into a haunted house when we were teenagers and found a calendar on the wall from the 60s. The realization the no one had been in there since then was the scariest thing about the place.

I got the fliers and responded to emails before packing up. A student needed clarification. A student needed an extension. I typed answers, probably way too long.

As a teacher—I’m tired of calling myself an instructor, I’m not that important or bland—you develop relationships with your students even online. They tell you things and, if they choose to, they write about these things in reflections and for assignments. One of these things this semester was cancer. One of the brightest students had had it, had been radiated and had had everything cleared up (I’m using the past perfect very intentionally here; a duration of time in the past). And then, gained strength. All semester, I had read the road to recovery, no, fuck that, the road to life, the road to everything the rest of us totally take for granted: running, building confidence, making plans for the future. And now. Now. No more past perfect. Three organs. Immediate chemo. Assignments might not be in. And the kicker, at the beginning “hope you’re having a good day”.

I start the ride home through the subsuming citrus fog with glassy eyes. “I hope you’re having a good day”. The logger trucks are wetly lapping past and I put the podcast back on because if they hit me, they hit me. They have your number or they don’t. The podcast continues to remind me of Mikey and how feeling it all sucks. And how there’s really no benefit to not deceiving yourself. Those of us who don’t, we’re not successful. We’re not happy. If we’re admired, we don’t want it anyway (we see how this admiration, too, is self-deception).

“I hope you’re having a good day.” They won’t even let anyone in the recovery room. How could anyone not think about these things?

 I go by the sawmill and the pica-impulse returns and mixes with these sad thoughts and I’d just like to sit in the cool darkness and eat splinters and bark and leaves until I’m full of self-deception. Instead, I go to the grocery story—a Hopper painting in the wet dark—and buy a frozen pie which just adds more weight to my pack and doesn’t deceive me.

After eight miles, I get off the highway and coast through the marsh on the other side of the bay. It’s not so foggy, but the darkness is sodden with cold and the bike path is unlit and only visible section by section as a repeating patch of flat, wet leaves. At one point there’s a backpack and someone back in the treeline rustling into their burrow. I check my phone: “ride safe!”

In the bottoms, the flat farmland out by the ocean, the house is a smear of light against the darkness. The back door is even propped open and the light is spilling out onto the plum tree in the back. In the window, the living room, my wife and daughter sitting together on the couch, wrapped in the same blanket. Steven Kellogg’s The Mysterious Tadpole propped up between them. When she hears me come in, my daughter comes running up and, without thinking, I drop all the stuff I’m struggling out of to scoop her up into my arms and I can’t hide from myself how great this makes me feel even if, to feel it, I have to struggle out of my preoccupations for a while.

We go back to the couch and read the book together and then, my daughter and I put our ears to my wife’s stomach and listen.