Collecting Cactus
I don’t remember him before the hospital but I know he must have been there. I knew it from the way he pulled my wallet from his backpack when I asked where it was.
– Still here, he said.
– Did I already ask you that?
– Only every five minutes.
– I’m sorry, I said, and I was. I hated this, the waking up out of darkness to find I was already awake, already moving around before my brain had caught up. I was embarrassed, too, because judging from the sun slanting through the high windows it was midday and I was wearing a hospital gown instead of a shirt and I couldn’t remember why.
– You can hold it, if you want, he said, leaning towards me from his stool.
– No, you should keep it.
– That’s what you said last time, too. He put my wallet back in his pack.
I knew he didn’t appear in the hospital: he wasn’t a nurse or a blood test or a volunteer. His shirt was sweated in and he had a little sunscreen in his ear. He was talking like this was all funny, somehow, or even endearing and he wasn’t having an entirely bad time. I still couldn’t place him. Did I meet him on the trail? I had been bicycling, I remembered. But that seemed so long ago. Was he the one with the truck and all the bikes hooked over the tailgate, the friend of my friend? He was holding my phone in his lap.
– Your mom says hi.
– My mom? I was going to ask, or ask again maybe, but a man in a white coat walked into the room with his hand over his breast.
– Do you remember my name?
I told him I didn’t and he took his hand off his name badge and I read it as he said he was Nurse Dave. Nurse Dave pressed his lips together like he was sorry not to be remembered and then said that the CT scan had come back clean and my concussion was, fortunately, not severe. I was glad at the news, not only because it was good news but also because it answered some questions for me, settled me a little more firmly into place, swiped away a few of my headclouds. But Nurse Dave wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to the boy on the stool with my phone in his hands who was looking at me and then at Nurse Dave and then nodding. I stared at him. Was this the first time? He seemed so like someone I knew but only vaguely; someone I could easily know, or have known. Were we friends? He sat with his back straight and away from the wall though he could have leaned on it if he wanted to. His sunglasses were pushed up on top of his head that was covered in spikes of near-translucent blonde hair. It might have been either very soft or very coarse. It didn’t look clean. He saw me looking at him and smiled again without his teeth. I looked down at his feet. A line of dirt ringed his mid-calf where his socks must have stopped before he took them off. He was wearing flip flops and I thought again I knew him.
– So drink lots of water, eat some carbs, rest up. No screens. No beer. No driving. If you experience nausea, headaches, fatigue, abnormal, uh, vision then you need to come back here. Ok?
– Ok, I said. I’m feeling much better.
– I’ll look after him, said the boy in the stool and I remembered his shoes, where I’d seen them before. They were on the floor of my car when I was driving yesterday. I thought they were someone’s from home but here he was, wearing them. Had he been there too? I would remember that: I had driven four hours to come here and if he had been there I would remember. I thought it was only my music and me. Or my music and his shoes and me? Nurse Dave was walking out of the room telling me to take care.
– Cheers, I said. Thank you. He was gone.
I knew that I knew him already because of how he touched me when he stood and walked to my bed. He put both hands around my face and looked at me to see me, really, like he was watching the headclouds recede from behind my eyes and he wanted to be there when I got bright again. I knew that I knew him because he kissed me on the forehead and pulled my keys from his pocket but said – I’m going to get the car. Wait here. He smelled like sage and bonfire. I waited there because I didn’t really have a choice.
To make the drive more reasonable I camp out along the way. In the dark I creep between trees to find the perfect span. There’s supposed to be a lake here but everything is loose and dry. The ground is crowded with cactus and the moon shorn to crescent gives little light. Pinion pines reach toward me and I grab back, thrusting my whole arm shoulder-deep into branches. I loop my hammock strap around the trunk and gave a little tug. The needles rattle but the tree stands firm. I turn and stretch my hammock behind me, strapping myself to an opposing pine and in the air my bed unfurls. I sit gently. I’ve done this before and collapsed. Once, I ripped a big juniper limb down and off the tree with a scratchy snap. I apologized to the tree and then slung myself around another branch. That one held. I’ve done this before and been stuck in the butt with cactus thorns. Sometimes, the hammock rides too low. Not this time. I can relax. But first I tiptoe through the sticky underbrush back to my car. I brush my teeth and pull out my sleeping bag, blanket, book. Who left their flip flops in my car? They’re coming with me now. Back to billowing hammock. A warm night below stars. I read only a few pages. I fall asleep.
That night after the hospital we ate pizza on the porch of my friends’ house. They were inside watching a movie on someone’s laptop. I could hear them talking over the story, making plans for later, opening cans. He sat with me in the dark, warm night. I drank water and he had a beer.
– You took your bracelet off! he said.
– Oh, yeah.
– All the real schralpers wear their hospital visits. For, like, a few weeks.
– No they don’t.
– I would, he said. I thought that I could get used to his smile. I thought that maybe I already was.
– It’s stupid. It’s embarrassing.
– There’s nothing embarrassing about getting rad.
– I wasn’t getting rad.
– Coulda been, he said, but we both knew this wasn’t true. As he’d explained on the car ride home, again, my friend riding behind me didn’t see the fall. It wasn’t a big feature or anything. She said it had maybe been a log. I was getting up when she came upon me and I had said I was okay and that might have been true until a little later when I started repeating myself. I had thrown up once, too, but what had earned the hospital trip was when we were home later eating a snack and I asked if we’d already gone biking. They’d put me in the car then and we’d gone to meet Nurse Dave and get some pictures of my brain just in case. My phone on the table buzzed.
– No screens, he said, reaching over my hand.
– It’s my mom.
– I’m texting her, he said, his fingers playing over the glass. You’re supposed to call her before bed.
– Is that allowed, sir? I asked. I wanted him to smile and he did, looking up from my phone.
– You’re a real twerp, he said, getting up from the table and finishing his beer. He took our plates inside and I heard him talking to them, my friends, who were standing around in the kitchen eating the last slices out of the box. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but I could tell they were talking about me, how I was, about my head. One of them hugged him and I thought I saw her saying that she was glad that he was here. It was a Saturday and they were all going out, crushing cans and stowing them under the sink before they called a car to get to another house or a bar or somewhere with music. I would have gone too except I was so tired and my day was still bundled behind me, all loose ends and no form. I stood in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror for a long time.
– This is real, I said.
Sometime in the night in my hammock I am so cold that I think my bones will crack. But then I fall back asleep and when I wake the sun is new and I am sweating in my sleeping bag.
I unfold myself from my hammock. Now I can see where I chose to sleep. I am at the toe of a steep embankment. The ground is loose shale and dark, living soil sprouting pinion pines and prickly pear cactus. Below me I see the lake I was aiming for but it is dry and cracking. No wonder it didn’t shine in the moonlight. I pack my things and walk to my car. Midway, I find my blanket on the ground. I must have dropped it last night in the darkness. It is stuck completely with cactus, spines anchored to the fabric and poking through. I lift it gingerly and hold it away from me. It will be a real pain to pick clean. I toss it in the backseat of my car: not now.
I left home yesterday and sped an hour at night to get myself here. I still have a few to go until I reach the city. I have miles yet to drive. My bike on the rack will follow me north to where I can find friends and mountain trails and bars and boys and groceries and whatever fill I’m seeking. And then, a few days from now, I’ll be ready to return home to the little town where I weed and sow seeds in a big garden and hike out into the desert made of sand and erosion. I have become accustomed to being alone in a strange, quiet town where everyone flirts with self-sufficiency. There’s pride in solitude. Like any home I have to shed it sometimes. Leaving is good. Coming back is better. I find meaning in the contrast. After a little time with crowds I will return south to my sweet town where I am working hard and learning all the good that comes from the ground.
On the phone my mom sounded equal parts relieved and concerned. I told her no when she asked me the same things Nurse Dave did, about my vision and my helmet and any headaches or more vomiting? I can only wait and see, I’ll be fine, we both agreed.
– I’m so glad Cack is there, she said, and I remembered that Cack is the name of the boy in the stool who texted her and drove me home and gave me food.
– Me too.
– Lucky you, she said. Lucky for your head, of course, and that you were wearing a helmet. But for everything else, too.
I knew what she meant.
I went to bed early and alone and fell asleep before I heard my friends pull away. I dreamt of a bed suspended high in the trees. It was so comfortable but so hard to set up. I dreamt all my clothes were stuck with thorns and quills and nettles and goat heads and stings. I tried to pull them out but I couldn’t for they were growing out of me. My shirt shredded as I pulled it off. Cack came near to whisper something but he was too close and we stuck together like burrs and I didn’t know how to tear myself away.
In the morning he was there next to me, sleeping. His eyelashes looked like the fuzz on prickly pear fruit that will stick in your fingerpads if you pick them without gloves. He stretched and yawned and smiled.
– Good morning, he said, and I knew him.
I drive the rest of the way to Salt Lake listening to my playlist called Music for when you can’t be sad because you’re driving in a car on low because he is sleeping in the back, my cactus boy. He wakes up when we get to my friends’ house where his bike is in the garage. He unwraps himself from my blanket. It is free of spines. He stretch-speaks something that sounds like – Here already? and we are. We’ve come this far. We eat eggs and dress and drive to the trailhead, all the bikes in the pickup bed like horses in a starting gate. We ride until I fall and then we ride some more. I go to the hospital. We eat pizza. I call my mom. I am feeling better. I am feeling fine. I sleep a lot. We buy groceries, the things we can’t get out of the garden: olive oil and white wine vinegar, limes and lemons, a big block of pepperjack cheese. He picks out our toothpaste. I buy a fizzing drink with activated charcoal and chia seeds. – That’ll help your head, he says. Anything else we need? – I’d like yesterday back, I say, my memory, the plans we would have had were I not concussed. – It’s fine, he says, and it will be.
On our way back home I worry about what it will be like in town, how I’ll explain him: where he came from and who he is. But maybe, I hope, it won’t matter. Maybe it will be like nothing: they will already know his name and he will have his own things to do, his own plants to tend and his own work and days off and his own friends. Maybe there will be no explaining. Maybe it will be like everything: the headclouds will disperse and the sky will become more clear and I’ll forget to worry where he came from, the cactus and my fear. Maybe we are always inventing memories.
