The Caterpillar

Nonfiction

William Hamm

I was eight years old curled up in pitch dark when I had to go to the emergency room for the first time. My eyes fluttered open in the backseat of my mom’s Honda CR-V as she raced down the salt-combed road. Streaks of light stretched past the windows. Houses, gas stations, late nights at the office. The smears of color whipping by in hyperspeed gave the impression of passing through a tunnel. Just when I started to ask where we were going, I received my answer in the form of a trickle of blood leaking down my forehead. The taste in my mouth stung like screws and loose change; a sharpness reminiscent of when you floss for the first time in a long while. That can’t be right, I think. How’d that happen? My eyes meet my mother’s through the rearview mirror. Two pearls in the chokehold of watery shells, highlights dotting the crest of every wave. Even in the ominous crimson glow of the center console lights, her eyes gleamed like quicksilver. The passing headlights and streetlamps betrayed her attempts to stifle tears in the darkness. The image was a stark contrast from the strong mother I was accustomed to. So I looked anywhere else.

In front of my face, orange sparks circle the headrest tv strapped to the passenger car seat like a heart monitor. The sparks arched like an Olympic high diver as they crested the top ridge, quickly traced the screen, and plummeted into nothing. On long road trips to grandpa's, my sister and I were constantly pacified by the same rotation of movies and shows we’d seen dozens of times already. My favorite had to be the SpongeBob time travel special where they’re all in prehistoric times. The joke with the barber shop quartet made me double over, even on a third viewing on the drive to grandpa’s. This one time, the bit made me laugh so hard, we had to pull over so I could throw up mid-fit on the way back. The puddle that escaped my mouth was bright pink, saturated with raspberry and artificial dyes. The kind they put in those ice breaker mints that lied to you and pretended to be mints when they were really just candy. The kind that was half fruit-flavored and smelled like the CVS we’d pick up medicine from. The kind that was always in my grandma’s nightstand in her hospital room. Each time we drove up to visit, we'd make a habit of finishing whatever plastic tin was left from last time, just so grandpa would pull a fresh one from the white plastic bag, which frequented the room as much as us, and give us a fresher batch. So it was no wonder my bile was this aposematic magenta on the way back from our last visit. I had to eat enough mints for the both of us after she was gone. 

There, once again, hung the void-like rectangle on Velcro straps to my parents’ seat, this time eerily devoid of that barbershop quartet. Though, it occurs to me as I write this that we hadn’t bought that one from Walmart until sometime after this incident. I wonder now what disk coldly hung in that pitch black screen as I watched the lights go round and round it. At the time, I looked elsewhere. I did my best to mop up the blood with my sleeve. I didn’t want to stain the seat after all. As I cleaned up I heard the sounds of the tires tearing and trudging through the pavement and snowmelt with a fervor that can only be managed by a mother scared for her son. Swerving around corners like she was manning the war rig (though it would be some years before I saw Mad Max and could add that leavener to the mix). The pulverizing crushing of the tread against the shards of salt akin to white noise in my exhausted ears. The tunnel closed in and siphoned away my strength as my eyes began to shut once again. The seatbelt tugged and kept my limp body in a hunched-over ball as I jostled back and forth with each turn of the steering wheel. Despite my attempts to stay awake, my eyelids like dumbbells as I drifted back into unconsciousness.

~~~

14 stitches later and I was back home. The scar was pretty innocuous for all the commotion it caused. A small dent punctuating the skin just above my left eye. A tiny scratch in my eyebrow, which could be mistaken for a barber mishap, was soon the only evidence of that harrowing night. I wish that I had more to recall of the experience, but truth be told the drive is the only part I remember. Of course, my parents recounted the tale to me many times. They told me I had been running around the house with socks on so that I slid across our hardwood floors using my momentum. This culminated in my skating into the corner of our carpet, tripping, and digging my face into the corner of our TV stand. My parents described how they shot up in horror and worry, only for me to spring back up to my feet, turn to them, and cheer “I’m okay!” while blood oozed down my face. They recalled how the doctors had to strap me into a wrap they coined “The Caterpillar” for fear I wouldn’t stay calm during the surgery. 

I have written about this event three times now and have recited it verbally innumerable times, though it never feels right. This story haunts me because every time I tell it, it feels more and more like a lie. Like a game of telephone, the details get muddied and warped through an echo chamber and, like that tunnel, cloud the bigger picture. Most of the details I learned second hand, which feels so strange because that night in many ways shaped who I am now. It’s hard to explain but something about being told these details second-hand and the doctors telling me how restless I was made me realize that being a kid and being a person were not mutually exclusive as I had once believed. From that point onward, I became supremely aware that I was a body inhabiting my parents’ house inhabiting the world. Ask my parents, they’ll tell you how I used to be the loudest kid ever. I could never take up that much space again, people wouldn’t approve.  I wish that I could milk every detail of that fluorescent lit emergency room, that I could describe how it felt to be tied down and blinking in and out of consciousness, but I cannot. In many ways this loss of agency hurt me more than the injury itself did. Even as I write this now, I fear I might still be stuck in that caterpillar. Would I even know it? Someone would tell me, right?