| WFR FICTION |

| WFR FICTION |

Disability

by A. Mandelbaum

WHEN I came up here tonight, I found two teenagers sitting on my bench. One had curly blond hair and a light brown t-shirt that said, “LIFE IS GOOD,” in big white block letters. The other had short black hair and a black t-shirt that said, “LIFE IS GOOD,” in big white block letters. They slumped on opposite ends of my bench and stared at their phones. Who is life good for?, I asked them in my mind as I leaned against a tree on the other side of the bike path and waited for them to head off to their spodie or whatever. Life wasn’t good for me: some high schoolers were keeping me from settling in for the night. It didn’t seem that good for them: they looked bored. They’d forgotten each other’s existence, even though they’d presumably come here together. 

But the kids left, I put my shit down and sat down, and I’m finding I’m thinking about things a little differently than I usually do. I talked to a psychiatrist in the park who gave me a new perspective. I was walking around by the lake. It was sunny. People were out with their kids and their dogs. I was grateful I wasn’t in that hell downtown today.

The key to passing your time bearably out of doors is to get away from people in similar circumstances. This bench is good. There’s a line of RVs down the hill on Sand Point Way—I can see the glow of their cookers and their lighters through the trees—but no one comes up here to the Burke Gilman. In the evenings I sit and watch the commuters bike past. Little kids wobble by on their little bikes, and their parents stay within arm’s reach, trying to keep them from swerving in front of someone in a bike jersey going too fast. At any moment, an old person’s lapdog might run out to the end of its leash to try to get at one of those squirrels who dart across the path. The squirrels are trying to sacrifice themselves. They might trip up an innocent, but what they’re trying to do is execute the bikers who go too fast and gravely endanger kids and dogs. I sit and watch everybody, and the only price I have to pay is witnessing the discomfort in the parents’ faces when they notice me. The squirrels are more dangerous than I am, I want to tell them.

Maybe it would be okay for me to have a dog. For a couple of years after I came back from the desert, I slept on my friend Jesse’s couch. He had a dog named Luna. She was one of those mixed-breed dogs that dog people can’t help themselves from trying to guess what might be mixed up in there, but I think she came from a long line of mutts. She had German Shepherd-ish markings, but she was skinny and shaggy and had floppy ears. Jesse worked nights, so I’d make myself scarce during the day, and I’d take the dog because people would strike up conversations with me, asking what breeds were in her. Little kids would ask to pet her. She loved people. She put her ears back appealingly and smiled and wriggled, so even if people didn’t want to talk to me, they’d smile at her. I felt like I was doing a good deed, bringing a tiny bit of joy into a few people’s lives every day.

At some point Jesse got a girlfriend and started working days, and she was a nice girl and we got along fine, but naturally they didn’t want me living there anymore. I’d been saving money from my disability checks and had enough to come out here to Seattle and go in on an apartment with the little brother of a guy I’d known in Arizona and a couple of his friends. In Seattle I did what I’d been doing in Denver, but now that I didn’t have Luna with me, no one wanted to talk to me. And another thing is that when you have experiences you want to share them with somebody, even if it’s a dog. In fact, in some ways a dog is better than a person, except maybe a kid, because their mind is so different from yours that you experience your surroundings in two different ways at the same time. A dog or a kid will notice things you don’t notice and appreciate things you don’t appreciate. When I had Luna, I was more aware of puddles, for example.

God had this same deal. That’s why He made us. The thing about people is we’re so helpless and self-destructive. God didn’t create us to be good at surviving. He created us to have an interesting perspective.

God made the Garden of Eden and put all these animals in it. And plants. Rivers. Rocks, etc. Then He was finished. And then He made Adam, who was like Him but completely different because this creature didn’t understand anything, whereas of course God understands everything. It was interesting to God what Adam would think about all these animals, plants, rocks, and everything—what sticks out for someone who understands nothing? But to be a good audience, Adam had to be curious and intelligent enough to appreciate stuff to some extent. 

The first thing He wanted Adam to do was name all the animals. It’s like, if you get your kid a dog, you let them name it because they’re going to come up with something cute. God followed Adam around while he named the animals. He’d ask, “Why ‘bear’, buddy?” and Adam was like, “Bearrrr,” and God laughed and said, “You’re right. He does make that sound. Very good.” And that made God happy because He’d forgotten He’d given the bear such a cool growl.cHe hadn’t considered it important, and He was surprised Adam noticed that and not the bear’s enormous deadly claws and teeth. God really likes being surprised. That was the whole point of us.

The problem was that He’d put the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil right in the middle of the Garden. He could’ve put Knowledge underground or in inedible stones, but instead He put it in interesting fruits, and He put the interesting fruits within reach of this creature whose main personality trait was curiosity. God told Adam, “You can do whatever you want, but don’t eat from that tree right in the middle. If you do, you’ll die.” The fruit wasn’t poisonous, but if Adam ate it, God was going to have to exile him from the Garden, and that meant he couldn’t be immortal anymore. So he really would die if he ate it, just not right away.

After a while, Adam got lonely because he was so much smarter and more curious than the other animals. God couldn’t always keep him company because—I don’t know why he couldn’t. Maybe He was out making other worlds, or maybe He was doing god stuff with other gods. We don’t have the capacity to understand what God does with His time. God felt bad—not from guilt, but from pity—so He made another person. Adam showed Woman around the garden and was happy because she had a lot of questions he could answer, like, “What’s the name of that thing with the teeth and the claws?”

But then he had to tell her, “Don’t eat the intriguing fruit from the beautiful tree that stands prominently in the middle of the garden.”

And Woman asked, “Why not?”

And Adam said, “God says we shouldn’t.”

Now Woman was even more curious, so she went striding toward it through the garden with Adam trotting along behind asking, like, “Uh, where are you going?” She walked right up to the tree.

This was making Adam extremely nervous. He was terribly afraid of this tree. He said, “Don’t even touch it.” Then he remembered to add, “If you eat its fruit, you’ll die.”

Woman misunderstood and thought it was God who’d said not to touch the tree, but Adam who was hypothesizing that if they ate the fruit, they’d die. Sometimes Adam had an active imagination.

Later, a couple days later, when Adam was taking a nap, she went to have another look at the tree. Snake was hanging out there. At that time, he still had limbs. All of God’s creatures were as innocent as children, but Snake was like one of those shitty kids who like to make trouble, and he was angry at Adam for naming him after his speech impediment. So the snake said, “If you eat from this tree, you’ll know good from evil.”

“What are ‘good’ and ‘evil’?” Woman asked because it wasn’t just that there was no morality yet; everything in the garden was good, so there didn’t need to be a word for good. Everybody ate fruits and leaves, but it helped the plants spread their seeds and grow thicker. Nobody died. To tell the truth, Adam and Woman didn’t really understand what “die” meant because they’d never seen an example.

“I don’t know,” Snake said. “But I heard God talking to Himself about it. It sounded pretty interesting.”

“God told us not to touch it,” Woman said.

“Okay, here, I’ll touch it for you.” Snake grabbed an apple off the tree with the hand he still at that point had.

It was in Woman’s hands before she knew it. She thought, “Well, whether or not this counts as touching the tree, here I am doing it.”

Woman brought the apple to Adam. She nudged him awake with her toe where he was sleeping in some deep, soft grass. Bugs weren’t crawling on him because bugs were happy keeping to their own grass. Adam and Woman could sleep in the grass, there was plenty of shade and the sun never burned them, they were never hot or cold, and they could reach out and grab something whenever they were hungry.

Adam saw the apple and was like, “I hope that’s not what I think it is.”

Woman said, “If we eat this, we’ll know what ‘good’ and ‘evil’ mean. Snake heard God talking about it.”

Adam was all about the vocabulary. They both took a bite out of the apple, and suddenly they realized they were naked. That was, as it turned out, evil. It was disappointing there wasn’t more to it. Not yet. We were going to have to invent the rest of it ourselves. God created us, and then we surprised Him so much He had to burn us all up or drown us every once in a while to see if a little bit of selective breeding would improve matters. It didn’t help.

But that was all in the future. Now, nudity: anticlimactic but embarrassing. So when Adam and Woman heard God tromping around in the woods, they hid in some bushes, which tipped Him off that they’d cottoned on to the whole ‘evil’ thing, and they got kicked out of the garden, and everything has been horrible for us ever since. Now that they were going to die someday, they had to start having kids because God still wanted people around. God said giving birth was going to be painful and dangerous for Woman, who Adam renamed “Eve.” It means “mother.” He thought it might cheer her up if he showed some enthusiasm. And Adam was going to have to spend all his time getting food for everybody. Maybe this all seems a little shitty, since the reason God put that tree there was that He wanted to see what we would do, but God’s the one who decides what counts as shitty, not us.

Sometimes I go to the camp in the International District where I used to stay with Cammy when she was alive. There are people to talk to, and some of them aren’t going to get paranoid or violent, and you can hope a person you form a connection with will manage not to die for a few Months.

Down from the slope under I-5 where everyone sleeps, along the chain-link fence, a trail is worn in the high grass. There used to be more syringes on the trail before everyone started smoking fentanyl, but now it’s mostly just the methheads who drop needles. There are also food wrappers, old shoes, broken coolers, and strange things, too: dolls, the cover for the arm of a couch, a bigwheel wheel. Why do we bring all that garbage up there like giant crows? This is why the bike-path parents don’t like me, even though they vote for Democrats. They don’t know what strange corruption I’m bringing with me.

If you follow the trail all the way down, it lets out in the parking lot of an old self-storage place, dark brown, two stories tall, still in operation. On the side of the building that faces the lot, there’s a big sign that used to say “STORAGE,” but the S and the O have been missing for years. My friend Glenn, who died last year and used to teach at the university before his knee surgery and what happened afterwards, told me a couple of times that “trage” in German, if there were an umlaut, would mean something like “dragging” or “sluggish,” or if you added an “ich” in front of it, would mean, “I’m carrying...” or “I’m wearing....” Glenn said it was funny because “trage” is kind of the opposite of “storage.” On the side of the building that faces the street, about two months ago, the O went missing, so it says, “ST RAGE.” Some people say it looks like “strange,” but I always think, when I see it, “street rage,” which seems appropriate for the location. The junkies are mad at whoever’s responsible for the disappearance of heroin, and they’re mad at themselves. The methheads are mad at everyone. And all the people who don’t live with us are mad that we exist. But no one seems to be angry with who we should be angry with.

When I still lived in Arizona and had some trouble being around people, I was mostly camping on land that was owned by the government, so no one cared I was there. People here, when I tell them that, because Seattle doesn’t have animals more dangerous than kamikaze squirrels, always get the same wide-eyed look and ask about scorpions and rattlesnakes. I saw rattlesnakes when I’d go walking sometimes, and I’d turn my boots over in the morning to unhouse any scorpions that might’ve crawled inside during the night, but really it wasn’t any kind of a big deal.

One day I walked into town to pick up my check and get supplies, and I checked on my friends who hung out near the Baptist church there, and this woman I knew—her name was Rosie—asked if I could hold onto her dog for a week or two because she had to fly to Florida to see her mom, who was dying. I said sure because I liked dogs and spent most of my time outdoors, and the dog was cute, this big stupid mop named Bill. Bill was so stupid, he didn’t notice when he walked off with me instead of Rosie. He didn’t seem like he’d be any trouble, but that night when I was back out in the desert trying to sleep, the dog started whimpering and trembling. I had to hold onto him really tight to keep him from lunging out into the darkness. Maybe there were coyotes around. I didn’t know. I didn’t hear anything.

So after that sleepless night, the next night I decided I’d take this civilized housedog to sleep in the storage locker where I kept my stuff—it was a little bit of furniture that had been my dad’s, a couple boxes of papers and old photos, and my extra clothes. Maybe that stuff is still there. I left most of it behind when I left for Colorado. I spread out my sleeping bag on the cement floor, and Bill curled up next to me. He was happy, and I didn’t hear any rats, and it didn’t smell like anything but old furniture, and I thought, “Okay, this isn’t so bad. This is going to work. Here I am, just me and this dog, behind a closed door. How often do I get to be this Safe?”

When I woke up, it was still almost pitch black because the door was closed, but I knew it was morning because my watch had an alarm to tell me to take my meds. So I sat up and turned on my flashlight to go open the door, and there was a black widow as big as my hand sitting right on my lap. I shined my flashlight all around, and there were nightmare creatures everywhere, on the floor, on the walls, big pale scorpions, a footlong moth with iridescent wings, giant fat spiders squatting on boxes, a horrible centipede curved across my dad’s entire bureau mirror, in silhouette because of the light reflected behind it, only a twitch of an antenna here and there, like I was imagining it, everything frozen and waiting for me to make a move. You have never seen anyone inch out of a sleeping bag more carefully than I did that day. I had no idea what might’ve crawled in there with me.

Bill didn’t care about the bugs. He was looking at me curiously, like, “What’s the matter, Man?”

I was like, “You dumb dog. I don’t know what you’re so calm about. If I die here, you die here too.” That’s what I was thinking, but someone might’ve heard him whining eventually. In fact, when I started convulsing, maybe he would’ve had a thought in that dumb furry head like, “This is my moment,” and he would’ve barked. Like Lassie. And maybe it would’ve happened to be one of those rare times someone else had business in this nigh-abandoned self-storage place on the outskirts of a nowhere town in the middle of the desert. Well, probably, even if I had gotten bitten by a spider or stung by a scorpion, I would’ve made it to a payphone, but anyway, that’s another good reason to keep a dog, although what I felt at the time about Bill was guilty. For putting him in a potentially deadly situation. That’s when I decided I should never try to be responsible for another living creature. Which was true. I couldn’t help Cammy and Glenn, or Sergio or Jason or anyone else, and they were adult humans.

What happened afterwards, in case you’re curious about what Bill and I ended up doing about sleeping, is that my friend Ramiro, whose little brother I later stayed with when I first came to Seattle, was holding onto some of Rosie’s stuff, so I got her tent and slept where she slept, in the alley behind the church. Bill was happy as a clam, and I felt better about it than I expected, and it started me down the path to reentering society to some extent, but I didn’t get much sleep until Rosie came back because there were a lot of methheads there. Methheads can get a little shouty at night.

Today when I was walking in Magnuson Park, I saw an old man sitting on a bench by the water. He wasn’t looking at his phone, so I thought I’d take a chance, even though he was well-dressed. I sat down, not too close, and said, “Hi, nice weather,” and he was up for a chat. He told me his wife died not long ago and he still didn’t quite know what to do with his days. “You and me both, brother,” I said. I asked him what he did for a living. He said he was a psychiatrist, but he’d been retired for several years. “No kidding,” I said. “I’m bipolar.”

A lot of people don’t want to give out free professional advice, but this guy—maybe because he missed his job—was interested and asked how I was doing. “Yeah, I’m doing pretty well,” I said. “I don’t feel like I need the meds like I did when I was younger.” I expected him to tell me I was wrong because that’s what my doctor said when I explained why I was going off them. My doctor never listened to me. He just wanted to know I was taking my pills. Our appointments were like five minutes, and most of that was him checking boxes on his laptop. I couldn’t tell you what color his eyes were.

But this guy said, “Yes, I had a lot of patients tell me the same thing. They felt that their disease changed as they got older.”

“I wonder if I’m too old to start over now. I haven’t had a job since my twenties. Maybe I could contribute something now that I’m more stable.”

The guy nodded. “It certainly seems like it’s worth a try. What did you use to do for work?”

The last job I had before I stopped trying to hold down jobs was at a gas station, but I told him about my dream of flying jets. It was just from watching movies as a kid, nothing more romantic than that.

As soon as I was old enough, I joined the Air Force. My dad was a single dad and was good to us but was never great at stuff like making doctor’s appointments, so I didn’t know about my bad eye until the physical. It was not so bad for daily life, but they told me right away I was never going to be a pilot. I joined up anyway because I was a kid, and I kind of thought my vision would magically improve now that I had glasses. I have some condition I don’t remember the name of that is when your eyesight in one eye gets worse and worse because the eye starts out bad and eventually your brain stops paying much attention to it, so even glasses can’t correct it after a while. If I’d gotten the glasses when I was younger, I probably would’ve been fine. But I don’t blame my dad. Seriously, he had enough on his plate.

I was ground crew for a while and ended up being ground forces. After I got back, I had PTSD and eventually got the bipolar diagnosis, and here I am now.

So I told this old guy, this psychiatrist, how I still think about it every time a jet flies overhead. If my mom hadn’t died when I was born, my eye would’ve been fixed, I would’ve been a pilot, I wouldn’t have seen what I saw in Iraq and know what I know about people, and I wouldn’t have become bipolar, and I’d be a pilot now, and everything would be different. Maybe I’d have a family.

He listened to me thoughtfully, and then he told me, “I’m sorry no one has made this clear to you, but that’s not how bipolar disorder works.” He said I would’ve gotten it anyway. It was just a matter of time. And in fact, if I’d gone into pilot training, the stress probably would’ve triggered it right then. My dream never was possible for me in any scenario where I am who I am.

I’ve been thinking, and I think that’s just the way it is for us. For people, I mean. None of us has really lost anything. I feel better.

A. Mandelbaum, whose work has appeared in the Mason Jar Press Jarnal and The Hoxie Gorge Review, is an ex-philosopher with a day job.