Screaming and Other Things That Sound Like Death

Of course, it’s imperative that I am the way that I am. When I was two years old, my sister, having just graduated from slick newborn stature and recovering from the collapse of her tiny lung that garnered the attention of airlifting status, fell from her high chair like a wooden doll. To my father, this was simply a pin dropping in a room suffocated by noise. He was watching porn, perhaps on dial-up, when my mother came home, donning remnants of errands from the only time she’d ever had alone, my baby sister’s collapsed lung swelling with screams. 

There’s almost nothing to be said about nature vs. nurture anymore. I’ve lived the scientific blunders of thought and the scrolls of hypothesis, the theoretical jumps. It’s no longer an inconclusive evasion. It’s nature, the way tiny mites of microscopic proportions fuck each other in your eyelashes and the way a boa constrictor squeezes the organs from your mouth in one pull, how you can become dehydrated and blind from unbroken sunlight in a forest that lasts forever. Its cruelty softened only by the inability to change it or make sense of it, the simplicity of being able to pass something off as fact and therefore ease its cumbersome weight. This doesn’t comfort me. 

I was sitting in the car shoulder to shoulder with my mother, who was cross with me. It was around Christmastime, solemn garland of thin plastic strung from the peeling streetlights in our compact town, the last rope of someone trying to hang themselves. My friend, who now lives where I live on the West Coast, told me that the only thing she thought strange about where I’m from was the way the streetlights hang horizontally. There was simply nothing else of note. 

“You should have smaller dreams,” she told me, “think in reasonable terms. You’re getting older now. It’s time to grow up.” Her hands were bone white on the steering wheel. I’ve always hated the way I can see her translucent veins brimming with blue blood. There was even more physical proof of nature infesting DNA – I was an obnoxious driver, too, bad enough to crash head-on with a sleek black SUV in the dead of summertime, the pavement dry as bone and gripping all the other tires. 

Okay, it wasn’t a head-on crash. But I was T-Boned. If the loud connection of metal and gear had occurred even a moment later, I would likely be writing this from the depths of a wheelchair. 

I was really stoned. I don’t even like weed and didn’t back then. It made me feel like a ghost, scintillating and presenting my fleshy beating heart now gone cold. There was a thumb-sized amount of concentrated cannabis oil hidden in the center of a children’s bouncy ball in my center compartment, jaggedly cut in half by a knife. I was en route to collect my ungrateful siblings from school to endure a silent treatment of intense proportions, my sister, committing to her collapsed lung and saving all her breath. They enjoyed it when I accidentally ran gleaming red lights of satanic air, the records I’d force my old player to spin backward. I almost hit the KFC after skidding hopelessly on a patch of karmically placed black ice, my tires middle-aged and balding. They stared blankly ahead, rigidly unafraid of colliding with cement, or their sister’s exposed shame. I was sober. 

On that day I hit the SUV, I wasn’t worried about hitting anything. I put precisely $40 of gasoline into my car, neglected my seatbelt at first thought, then wrapped it around myself as an afterthought. I had a psychic tell me once that I had two spirit guides, one an older man that has accompanied me for many years and eras. I like to think it was him tying me with invisible strings, guiding a belt over my frame, too stupid to remember.

It was a nice day, sunny. I usually get anxiety when the sun shines with too much force, as it feels like pressure. Like, now I have to do something just because I’m washed in egg yolk yellow and the outside of my flesh is warm to the touch. It means nothing to me, warm weather. 

I wasn’t anxious on this day – I wasn’t thinking about anything at all. The stop sign at the corner was a mere suggestion, offered to me with arched eyebrows. When the SUV hit, it struck me hard. I was screaming with hands resting helplessly on the wheel, and yanking it in all directions was as useless as a discussion about my innermost thoughts and feelings with my boyfriend. It provided nothing for me, and I still spun in complete circles, chasing myself down the center of the street. When I let myself out of the intricate metal death trap, my door clinging uselessly to its hinges as I heaved it from my seemingly crushed legs, there was a child screaming and crying. My first thought was, I’m going to fucking jail. 

Let’s go back a little – this accident happened outside of a boy’s house. A boy I cheated on. We were sixteen and he loved me in that puppy-dog way only a man raised truly Christian can give you, an inexperienced kisser and exaggeratedly hesitant in the presence of gay rights, but he was funny. He didn’t understand cigarette sizes, and would always pick up kings every time I was far from home without my ID. He never chided me for lighting up, and when the chefs at the restaurant we both worked at would curse my slowness or my gaps in thought, he would be there for solace. He waited for me in the parking lot at the end of the shift when blue-black night had already descended and I was deep in pink wine. He would insist on physical touch in the elevator between floors, the hotel grand and old and haunted by security cameras in every inch, except behind those solid doors. Okay, maybe he was a little creepy. But his sweetness persevered. 

He told me he heard my screaming as I panicked for my life. I swear, when I was screaming I thought I was dead and that the expensive SUV had severed all my limbs and I was frozen in the seat, dismembered and scared and sorry. It’s funny, the way you scream when it’s literally all you can do, a sense of control over your lungs and chest and lips and brain for a single moment. I asked if his windows were open, and he said no. It was good to know my scream could puncture wood-frame houses, all hunched together in a row. 

I spoke to him later on, maybe a year later, and he told me he has nightmares about the screaming. I asked if it was my voice that he dreamt of, and he said yes. He said even before he knew it was me, he knew it was me. He’d never heard me scream before, either – his Christian roots ensured that, locked it in. 

I wonder if he still has nightmares. 

The father of the screaming child eventually showed, donned in one of those painful, neon orange construction uniforms that implied hard, laborious days. I was mute as he stood there, his son in his arms, she almost killed you, he said, gesturing to me as he crooned with a forced voice of maple syrup and sugar, you almost died because of her. 

What a dick. 

I managed to avoid the hospital, insisting to the confused paramedic and the stoic cop that I was, indeed, fine, though I had lost the ability to speak for a full fifteen minutes. I was dryly rasping to a stranger to call my sibling’s school, but my mouth felt cotton stuffed and paralyzed. I sounded like a geriatric gently sloping into dementia. When I could finally speak again, the cop slapped the yellow ticket into my open hand. Apparently, it only costs $220 to wreck your car, scar a child, and lie to the police.

The memory seared into my cerebral cortex is not the way my real boyfriend appeared in the aftermath, immediately asking, what is he doing here? Of course, he was referencing my work colleague, the man I would kiss in the elevator the way you can only do when you’re young. 

“That’s his house,” I said, pointing. An unreadable expression crossed his face. No, nothing like that, though the guilt is heavy and sits upon my chest like an animal. The memory at the forefront of it all is my own screaming. I imagine I was screaming the way people might when their demise is approaching faster than they can track. It was pure terror, wailing, almost, and I leaned into it, crying out all alone. In some ways, I’ve never really left that car. 

Screaming – always with the screaming. My sister and her eight pound body of soft bone hitting the floor like a bird going into cardiac arrest in the sky.