My Papa Shakes and It’s All the Same to Me | ALYISA GONZALES

My Papa Shakes and It’s All the Same to Me

fiction by ALYSIA GONZALES

Hold his legs down. Put his head back. Restrain his arms. Watch the trembling. Wait for it to pass. Hope that he is not stronger than you, that he will not fall and split his skull open. Hope that the nurses hear you in time. Hear the strained vocal cords. Hear the gurgling saliva in the back of his throat. Don’t put your hands near his teeth. Don’t look at his eyes. Try not to vomit. Breath. Breath. The rumbling of the bed echoes through the floor and you can feel it in the soles of your feet. In this moment, you are reminded of the time when he stood at the foot of your bed when you were a child. Even though Ma would berate him for making you so hyper right before bedtime, but he couldn’t help himself. When you would go to sleep, he would ask you, Are you ready for the earthquake?, and you would giggle yes, and he would lean his big, burly arms on the bed while you lay with the covers pulled up to your chin in anticipation, and he would shake the entire mattress with a force that you didn’t even think that a person could have. The springs would shake and creak underneath, Earthquake earthquake!, he would holler, and you would laugh so hard that it hurt your lungs as you bounced on the mattress in the tiny bedroom. You come back to yourself. He has passed out now. The hospital lights cast a sickly yellow on his skin The nurse says, It’s over I’ll get him some water, and leaves the room. You sit back down, his body is limp, exhausted from the episode. You are tired too. You haven’t showered in three days, you’ve been taking care of someone who has a team of professionals taking care of them, and for what? What do you do there? The woman at the cafeteria knows your name and your order for breakfast lunch and dinner, knows you must have someone in the hospital you’re staying for because you don’t have a lanyard, you have a sticker. She knows enough not to ask who. After taking your hands off his body, in this moment, you feel the crud between your toes, the grease in your hair, the itchy dandruff, and the film on the front of your teeth. You aren’t sure why you haven’t suffered the 24 minute bus ride home to shower, change

your clothes, recharge. Something holds you here. He would go almost a week without a shower when he was in the thick of a binge, he would come home in the middle of the night rank with must and sweat and the bottle. On these nights, you would pull the covers up to your chin in a different way. Ma would cry sounds from the kitchen and then all of a sudden the sounds would stop. Silence in that house like diving underwater. You’re hungry now, so while he’s out cold, you walk down to the cafeteria to pick up your usual. The woman working there nods in recognition, but thank god, she decides not to talk much. You don’t want to talk to anyone just now. Denise! someone yells from across the cafeteria. Denise, I thought that was you,

how are you? Carla, your mouth says, what are you doing here? Oh, my sister had a baby, we’re visiting. What are you doing here? You look down at your tray, rub your thumb against the plastic wrapped apple and it makes a screeching sound. It’s my Dad, you say. You can’t remember the last time you used that word, and you can’t remember what you said to Carla next, but soon, she was gone, probably after wishing you well and hoping everything works out. You're not quite sure what “working out” would even mean. Back upstairs, in the room, he sits there quietly in the bed. He’s so helpless there on the table. The cafeteria food leaves its residue of slight indigestion in your stomach, and you wonder if the food in the feeding tube tastes like anything. He is breathing steadily. His finger is twitching. He must be dreaming. You wonder what he dreams of. If you were younger, you might wish it was you and Ma dancing in his head, and fake earthquakes, but now, you know that his induced sleep probably produces no dreams, and for a moment you’re glad of it. Your hands are sweating and sooner or later, you’re going to have to go home and clean up, wash yourself, wipe away the dirt and grime and sweat and oil. Your hands are swelling with their dirtiness. Your hair has begun to clump. You can feel the crust in your eyes from the few hours of hospital sleep last night. But you will have to come back, he has no one else, and the guilt eats at you like a parasite, gnawing somewhere between your amygdala and your right supramarginal gyrus.

The last time you didn’t shower for this long was a week when you were 9 years old. Your eczema had manifested in a fiery rash, starting in the crook of your elbow, and climbing up your arm, onto your shoulder, your clavicle, your armpit. The water and soap made it sting, and you hadn’t yet developed the discipline required to withhold your itching. It was the dead of summer, and you wore a sweatshirt every day to hide it from him and Ma. It was easy, they were so preoccupied with their screaming. When you would come back from camp, you were able to slip into your room under the loud music, the open doors begging the summer air to bless the house with a breeze, under the arms passing bottles of what he called “Maple Syrup”. One day he gave you some and you dry-heaved into the sink but no one heard you. You were an inconvenience. You didn’t ask for this. In your room, you would switch your sweater, and after quickly going into the bathroom to wet your hair to make it seem as if you had showered, he would call from the kitchen “all clean?” and you would nod before disappearing into your room. You missed the earthquakes. And there you would stay, usually for the rest of the night except for a few moments where you would scrap together a dinner from the pantry. Then, back into the room, through the loud music, the hollering, then later, the broken bottles, the yelling, the thumps against a wall, the sound of items hitting the floor, sometimes he would burst into your room, asking nonsense questions, slurred words, he would grab your wrist just a little too hard, just a little bit of hurt so that you could think it was an accident, and he would storm outs, slam doors. Did your Mother get this tattoo for another man? Did you do drugs after school yesterday? Did you sleep with that boy? Did your mother sleep with your Uncle? The silence afterward, the kind that would envelop the house, then you could begin the process of falling asleep. It was a Monday, or a Thursday, or any day really. You had to wake up for camp or school or a game, and they would wonder why you were so tired and you would shrug and say you had no idea. Ma finally caught a whiff of your unshowered body while you were walking past and forced you into the bathroom and when you took off your sweater, she gasped at the rash and took you to the hospital right away. They gave you medicine for the rash, steroids for your skin, and sent you right back home. You’re all better now, they said. Ma’am, you can go home, he’s gonna be asleep for a while, same as always. We can call you if he wakes up.

You nod and go back to your apartment and while you collapse on the bed almost instantly, you cannot fall asleep. Upstairs, they must be watching a movie, something with a lot of bass. You can feel it in the walls, in the floors. You think about knocking on their door, asking if they can keep it down, you can do that now, as an adult, but you don’t. You sit there, listening to the vibrations come up and through your body, you wish they would go through and exit out of your head, your skull, but they seem to be caught inside, amplifying somewhere near your rib cage, inside your solar plexus. ***

Days go by and you still haven’t showered.

You’ve eaten more than hospital cafeteria food, but you’re still in the same clothes. You can start to smell yourself and you know it’s getting to the point where it’s bad, it’s noticeable, but you can’t bring yourself to do it. To strip down, to let the water wash you. To feel that naked. You rearrange the fridge, you clean your entire apartment top to bottom. You do anything but shower. You get a call on your phone. He’s not awake yet, but he’s showing signs that he might be soon. No guarantees. If you want, you could come in today. You pack up a bag, you’re still in the same clothes, you put on some deodorant and shake out your jacket to mask the smell, and you head over to the hospital. He is still asleep by the time you arrive, and you sit in the same chair by the bed. The hospital continues on outside, comfortable clogs attached to the feet of nurses trod by, families either having the best or worst day of their lives walk back and forth. A young

mother is wheeled around with her newborn.

He makes a sound, you turn, and he is starting to shake. You realize that the

sound you thought was from the bed was actually coming from him, from somewhere deep down at the bottom of his vocal chords. He is not awake, though his eyes are involuntarily

open.

You press the nurse’s button, but he is already going into the clonic stage of the seizure. You learned that word from the nurse. But there are no nurses here yet, so you do what you’ve been told to do. Hold his legs down. Put his head back. Restrain his arms. Watch the trembling. Wait for it to pass. Hope that he is not stronger than you, that he will not fall and split his skull open. Hope that the nurses hear you in time. Hear the strained vocal cords. Hear the gurgling saliva in the back of his throat. Don’t put your hands near

his teeth. Don’t look at his eyes. Try not to vomit. Breath. Breath. The rumbling of his voice, from the caverns of his chest, deep within his ribcage echoes through the floor. It would be so easy to let him eat himself alive, his brain is already doing it for you. Years of binging, of episode after episode, they think that’s why he’s here, why he’s like this. But it could happen to anybody, they say. It could be anything. And why do you care, what compels you to be here, you try to answer the question but his arms are shaking and his fists are clenched and it reminds you of the time he hit the picture frame by the door on his way out, it was two in the morning, and you stared at the shard of glass, still stuck in the frame, held up by so many spider web shatters, a drop of blood hanging on. The scar is still there, on his knuckle. For a moment you think about pulling his oxygen, you imagine the satisfying thunk of the plug releasing from the wall, you imagine his body slowly coming to stillness. But when you look at him, he looks frail and worn. The skin on his forearms is loose and peppered with age spots. Your fingers overlap around his delicate wrist. His arms could never bounce a mattress now, never again. He can hardly stand now, let alone work up the strength to hit a picture frame, to fracture the glass within. He is nothing now, he is a prison for old flesh and medical tubes, he is an echo of the force you knew him to be. It passes. The nurses tell you, Good job. You are tired, and you think that you could maybe sleep, maybe wash yourself. You’re not sure whether you will come back. You don’t have any obligation one way or the other, and this freedom suits you, and you think it might even make you more likely to return. You grab a plastic-wrapped muffin from the cafeteria, and even speak to the cashier this time. She is a nice woman, her children are cute. Before you leave the hospital, you go back to his room. You hold all the images of him in your mind, the one from your bed yelling earthquake!, the one who smelled of must and the bottle, and the one here on the hospital bed. You hold all the images together in your head, and you dance the impossible dance, you forget nothing.

Untitled, WYNN NGUYEN