What You Have to Lose

 

By Jodie Noel Vinson

 

 

Breath in.

What you have to lose often reveals itself just before it’s gone, a mounting wave that crests before breaking and receding. An editor calls to say she’s decided not to publish my manuscript, and the accumulated years of craft and composition, creation and revision rise up before me, then diminish and dissolve. My job is in danger, and I watch the identity I’ve built out of my work totter on spindly legs, before collapsing.

Breath out.

The simultaneous loss of book and career has affected my ability to breathe. My lungs are calcified coral. My stomach hollows into a well into which coins keep dropping like wishes. I wake before dawn with a gasp, sucking in the darkness.

***

Breath in.

My mother calls from India, where she’s arrived after three flights to meet my three-month-old nephew. Her face appears blotchy and swollen on the screen, her voice hoarse with a virus picked up along the way. All that recycled air in the plane. When her cough deepens, we hang up so she can rest.

Breath out.

My husband is accustomed to calls cut short. His father has just been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, scarring of the lungs. An auto immune disease without a known cause, or a cure. As his parents adjust to a quiet, contained life in Boston, we are packing to move to Seattle for Marc’s graduate program. Wracked with guilt for leaving, Marc calls his dad often, spending hours in online backgammon matches. From the next room I hear the coughs and labored breathing over the clatter of digital dice.

***

Breath in.

A week after my father-in-law’s diagnosis we drive west toward our new home. Reaching Montana, we stop in Glacier National Park. Our leg muscles seem to have atrophied with the days in our sub compact, and we wheeze up the steep grades, the change in altitude a slow burn in the chest as we wind through alpine meadows and marvel at the heights.

Breath out.

Oxygen levels at the summit of the tallest mountain on earth are 33 percent of what they are at sea level. In 1924 George Leigh Mallory made his final bid for the summit of Mt. Everest. Though on earlier attempts Mallory disparaged the use of supplemental oxygen, as his companion for this climb he selected Sandy Irvine, known for his skill at repairing oxygen tanks, which often proved defective. In the year of their climb, 38 tanks sprung leaks.

***

Breath in.

Each morning my husband leads me out of bed. I wrap my arms around his waist, lean my head on his warm back, and follow him, step by step, to the bathroom. Every time we conduct our stumbling dance toward the day I recall myself as a child, following my father through a theme park’s haunted house. I held onto his belt and shut my eyes against the grotesque ghouls. While Marc turns on the lights in the apartment, I sit on the toilet seat, chin to chest, dreading the day to come.

Breath out.

Something that helps me get over the initial panic of a new day is a photo of my infant nephew. His round face has such a smug, satisfied expression that it’s impossible not to smile back. As soon as I do, breath comes easier.

***

Breath in.

A phone call from my mother wakes me in the dark. My nephew has contracted her virus. He’s too congested to nurse. When the baby turns ghostly green, flecks of foam forming at the corners of purple lips, he’s driven to the nearest hospital, an hour down the mountain.

Breath out.

When the geologist Noel Odell, who followed Mallory and Irvine up the mountain as support, reached high camp on Everest, he found hardware from the oxygen apparatus scattered about an empty tent; Irvine had been making repairs. The pair were never seen again.

***

 Breath in.

I worry that my morning panic has become my body’s habit, that I’ve dug and re-dug a well-trodden trench around the bed frame, which deepens each time my feet swing toward carpet. As the anxiety reaches new heights, I see a therapist for the first time, and follow her advice. I drink tea, take hot showers and download a meditation app called “Buddhify.” Feel the sensations of the breath, a disembodied voice instructs in a calming Kiwi accent. I place my hand on my stomach to measure its rise and fall. Just this, the Kiwi instructs. Inhale. Just. Exhale. This.

Breath Out.

Just. This. Just. This. Just. This.

***

Just.

My nephew’s lung has collapsed. This sounds so dramatic that I begin to research. During the polio epidemic, I learn, a patient was inserted into an iron lung on what was known as a “cookie sheet.” While the head and neck remained free, the chest, paralyzed by the virus, was enclosed in a chamber that mimicked the breathing process, lowering the pressure to allow the lungs to expand and draw air in, then contract and expel.

This.

“The climber does best to rely on his natural abilities, which warn him whether he is overstepping the bounds of his strength. With artificial aids, he exposes himself to the possibility of sudden collapse if the apparatus fails.” —George Leigh Mallory

***

Just.

Breathing is a negative act. When you meditate, you wonder about the mechanisms, the anatomy of the breath. First the diaphragm contracts as the rib cage expands, opening the chest cavity. As the pressure inside decreases, air flows into the lungs: inhalation. The diaphragm relaxes and we exhale.

This.

Two of the strongest proponents of Mallory’s assertion that using supplemental oxygen made an ascent somehow less pure were Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler. In 1978 the pair attempted Everest without the aid of tanks, only to turn back after being caught in a severe storm, concluding that the mission had been “impossible and senseless.” A few weeks later, they tried again.

***

Just.

My therapist suggests yoga. I buy a mat and some tight black pants, show up at my first class. Ambient music is playing in a dimly lit room. I try to relax into the poses, to inhale and exhale at the right moments, sometimes losing my breath instead of finding it. Soon it becomes impossible not to listen to the breathing of my classmates. One man, whose mat is rolled out behind mine and slightly to the left, seems to store up an endless capacity of air on each intake, releasing a gale force into the room, a steady whoosh that sounds more mechanical than human.

This.

There are iron lungs and then there is the Aqua-Lung, invented by Jacques Cousteau during World War II. The device included a valve that regulated the flow of oxygen, only releasing air when the diver breathed in, conserving the precious resource and allowing for longer dives. With his Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, Cousteau was free to explore the underwater world, film it, and introduce the ocean’s depths to others. As he put it: “From this day forward we would swim across miles of country no man had known, free and level, with our flesh feeling what the fish scales know.”

***

Just.

On the morning of their summit attempt, Messner and Haebler took two hours to dress in the thin air. When they experienced dizzy spells and double vision, the climb became a silent march, communication reduced to gestures. Every ten feet the climbers collapsed; falling to knees they lapped at the meager atmosphere. Messner describes feeling “apathy mingled with defiance” and confesses to his tape recorder that “breathing becomes such a serious business we scarcely have strength to go on.”

This.

My brother-in-law sends a photo of his son at the hospital. Though we’ve never met, I’ve grown accustomed to my nephew’s round shape, chipmunk cheeks and plump limbs. In the photo he’s sprawled on his back in a diaper, looking almost scrawny, skin tinged gray. An oxygen mask is strapped over his button nose and small mouth. Tubes strangle his ankle.

***

Just.

Originally Cousteau was more interested in feathers than fish scales. He trained at a naval aviation school and often dreamed he was flying. One night, Cousteau borrowed his father’s sports car to drive to a wedding. The car’s headlights shorted on a dark road, causing a near-fatal accident that mangled his left forearm. Doctors recommended amputation. Cousteau would never get his wings.

This.

Because we live 7,000 miles apart, over the past year, I’ve watched my nephew grow up in photos. He was 12 weeks in the first image my sister sent, a pale tadpole in a churning black sea. After 32 weeks in the womb he began to practice breath. Of course, at that point, breathing was more like swimming. I imagine him as a tiny diver taking small gulps, dreaming of flight.

***

Just.

I return to yoga class on the first day of spring. The instructor leads us into a tree pose: one foot planted, the other cocked but rooted on the floor, or, for the more daring, couched against the calf, and, for the experts, perched above the knee, against the thigh. Our arms become branches, balancing. My hands are uplifted, palms up, awaiting awakening. Behind me I hear the incredible velocity of my neighbor’s lungs, and I begin to breathe.

This.

I can hear the air whistling within, the sound of distant, echoing canyons, the song of a conch shell pressed to ear. I, too, contain caverns and cavities, branching ducts and intimate folds, microcosms of the expansive sea, its coral and its tide, the ocean’s breath.

***

Just.

It was while swimming to strengthen his broken limb that Cousteau discovered the sea, the beauty of its coral reefs and the wonder of its inhabitants. He compared diving to the experience of flight, and liked to claim that after his first swim with the Aqua-Lung, he never again dreamed that he was flying.

This.

“In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.” —Reinhold Messner on completion of the first successful ascent of Mt. Everest without supplemental oxygen

***

Just.

Just before he turned fifty, Cousteau was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. It was 1960, the year his documentary film, The Golden Fish, won him his second Academy Award. In the Time cover story, Cousteau predicts that one day people will have gills surgically added to adapt to underwater living.

This.

He also said: “Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course.”

***

Just.

Over my husband’s spring break, we fly to Boston to be with his father. It is the week my nephew, breathing on his own, will be released from the hospital. Marc has done his own research and discovered that the years will be short. His father is as charming as ever, but we hear every cough like the distant thunder of a storm about to break. I listen to the sudden suction of air, slight pauses in sentences in the midst of a story, and recognize that even as I have found my breath, he is losing his.

This.

The lungs, which can burst and scar and collapse, are imperfect organs. We, engendered and breathed upon, are fragile beings capable of greatness. Every invention tends toward this summit; we lift from the depths of discovery on the two-beat rhythm of those wings. I no longer feel the anxiety of long nights or my morning panic. I’m unconcerned about my failure to publish or produce. The real danger, what you have to lose, is closer than that, as close as breath.


Jodie Noel Vinson holds an MFA in nonfiction creative writing from Emerson College. Her essays and reviews have been published in Ploughshares, The New York Times, Literary Hub, Harvard Review, Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, Nowhere Magazine, and Electric Literature, among other places. She lives in Providence, RI where she is writing a book about creativity and chronic illness.

Website: https://www.jodienoelvinson.com/