6. Not Employing a Metaphor
On October 15, 2009, I took my mother to her local hospital to get her an MRI test. The MRI was ordered by her neurologist to confirm the brain damage from the untreated multiple sclerosis. For two decades, my mother took daily steroids to manage her multiple sclerosis, but she’d stopped taking her medication after her fifth husband, a schizophrenic, cancelled their health insurance.
How long had she been off her meds? She didn’t know. A while, she said soberly. And I really should be taking them.
I know the exact date of the MRI because it was the day of Balloon Boy. We spent hours that morning at the hospital, trying to check her in for the procedure, but they didn’t get her blood test results from the lab, and nobody was inspired to address it, because every person behind the admissions desk, along with every person in the waiting area, was intently watching the TVs mounted to the ceilings.
BALLOON BOY, said the banner across the bottom of the screen. We sat in the waiting area and watched the TV with everybody else—the security guard, two techs in blue scrubs, an old couple clutching each other by the forearm.
Live footage showed an amorphous silver helium balloon drifting and crinkling in the vivid blue. The TV volume was down but the subtitles were on:
A Colorado boy, age six, is missing from his home today. It’s believed that he may have climbed aboard a weather balloon that his father made, that’s the craft you’re seeing now…
My mother put one hand to her mouth. “There’s a little boy in there.”
Famously concerned with children’s health and welfare, my mother was.
The balloon has climbed to nearly 5000 feet, that’s about as high at the peak of Mount Rainier. We hope this isn’t a tragedy in the making…
It was quarter to noon. That morning, I’d given my mother a new phone and answering machine, because she said their home phone was “broken,” and that’s why I could never reach her or leave a message for her. After some discussion, it became clear that the phone itself was working, but her fifth husband, a schizophrenic, wouldn’t let her answer it. He’d also disabled the answering machine.
Then she argued with me at the lab for the blood test, because there were lollipops in the waiting room, and she wanted one. I said, You can’t have a lollipop until after they draw your blood. It’ll skew the results.
But I’m hungry now, she simpered. I didn’t budge. She turned away, annoyed, and stayed sullen until her blood was drawn and we were on our way out, at which point she grabbed three Tootsie Pops, unwrapped one, and put it smugly in her cheek.
Now that a child’s life was at stake, my mother watched the screen, rapt, like everyone else. Passersby in the hall stopped short to watch along, arms akimbo, mouths agape.
I went up to the person at the reception desk and asked if my mother’s blood test results had been received, and if the lab could be contacted again. She said she’d check. Her eyes didn’t move from the TV.
I retook my seat. I was in that liminal state between I’m seconds away from losing my whole shit, and I’m paralyzed, life is meaningless, I’m already half-dead.
“Why aren’t they trying to rescue him?” my mom fretted.
Subtitles: The Air Force has been following the craft with a helicopter, but they don’t want to get too close to it…
“Well,” she said. “Someone’s got to do something.”
Yes. It was urgent that someone do something, immediately, to get my mother into the MRI machine. It took months of effort to get us to this point, now all our progress was stopped, while we waited to see if we were about to witness a small child fall to his death from a great height on live TV.
On TV, the silver balloon waltzed and glided, mutating in shape. It did seem improbably light, considering the ostensible 50 or 60 pounds of kid inside, but maybe the wind made it look weightless.
1. Feeling responsible for things I couldn’t control.
2. Forced to witness tragedy without being able to intervene.
3. Stymied at every turn. Stultified.
4. The utter absurdity. The dumbness of the situation, how it defied solution.
I began to float out of my body and see it from above. Sometimes this happened during meditation, or when I was on the verge of a shit fit.
Floating. There’s the parallel. I was floating, just like Balloon Boy.
Can I end this part here? I hate writing “scenes” in memoir; it’s bullshit. I refer above to “two techs in blue scrubs” and “an old couple clutching each other by the forearm” in the waiting room, but I don’t remember who was in the waiting room back in fuckin’ 2009. They’re made up, so why put them in there at all?
And why ascribe meaning to the mundane coincidence that my mother’s MRI was delayed by the Balloon Boy? It felt relevant at the time. Immediately, I assumed the little boy was running away from his parents, as I ran away from mine, as my mother ran away from hers.* I imagined the boy’s exhilaration and his terror, as his balloon was buffeted by the wind (buffeted, as though by fate, which is what happened to me when I left home).
It felt significant. It felt uncanny. That whole year, 2009-2010, was uncanny. It was existential purgatory. I wasn’t living in a recognizable reality. I kept thinking, if I could just get my mother back on her meds, everything would be fixed—her mental faculties would return, her physical health would improve, and I could go back to my everyday mission of writing about how terrible she was. All I wanted was to get her feet back on the ground. Just like Balloon Boy.
Balloon Boy, of course, turned out to be a big nothing, a scam. We soon learned that the boy was never in the balloon. He was hiding in the attic of his family’s home, as his father had directed him to do. His father had set the craft alight and then called the police to report the son missing, because he wanted the family to be on reality TV.
And my mother turned out to have brain damage.
(* Technically, she eloped at sixteen, which was the 1959 version of running away.)