Randon Billings Noble - Be with Me Always: Essays

b ew i t hm ea lways Noble.indd 1 9/26/18 9:57 AM Noble.indd 2 9/26/18 9:57 AM b ew i t hm ea lwaysEssays Randon Billings noBle University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London Noble.indd 3 9/26/18 9:57 AM 2019 by Randon Billings Noble Acknowledgments for the use of previously published material appear on pages 000 000, which constitute an extension of the copyright page. Figure in A Pill to Cure Love is from Wikimedia Commons. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Noble, Randon Billings, author. Title: Be with me always: essays / Randon Billings Noble. Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: lccn 2018017691 isBn 9781496205049 (pbk.: alk. paper) isBn 9781496213686 (epub) isBn 9781496213693 (mobi) isBn 9781496213709 (pdf) Subjects: lcsh: Noble, Randon Billings. | Near- death experiences. | Dj vu. | Memory. | Life change events.

Classification: lcc ps3614.o248 a6 2019 | ddc 814/.6 dc23 lc record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2018017691 Set in Whitman by Mikala R. Kolander. Designed by L. Auten. Noble.indd 4 9/26/18 9:57 AM Be with me always take any form drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Heathcliff to Cathy, Wuthering Heights Noble.indd 5 9/26/18 9:57 AM Noble.indd 6 9/26/18 9:57 AM Contents i. shadoWs and MaRkings The Shadow of the Hours 33 Leaving the Island 38 Behind the Caves 43 Marked 49 iii. shadoWs and MaRkings The Shadow of the Hours 33 Leaving the Island 38 Behind the Caves 43 Marked 49 iii.

Biologies The Heart as a Torn Muscle 55 A Pill to Cure Love 58 What of the Raven, What of the Dove? 61 Assemblage 65 Vertebrae 71 iv. the voice at the WindoW Yet Another Day at the Jersey Shore 77 The Sparkling Future 88 Widow Fantasies 97 Striking 100 Noble.indd 7 9/26/18 9:57 AM v. on looking On Looking 107 The Ownership of Memory 115 The Island of Topaz 120 Shells 130 Camouflet 133 vi. the Red thRead Knots 141 69 Inches of Thread, Scarlet and Otherwise 144 On Silence 150 Devotional 165 Acknowledgments 167 Bibliography 169 Noble.indd 8 9/26/18 9:57 AM b ew i t hm ea lways Noble.indd 9 9/26/18 9:57 AM Noble.indd 10 9/26/18 9:57 AM i

I was fifteen years old. I was with my best friend. We drifted farther and farther out until our toes gently left the sand and the salt lifted us up and over each incoming swell. But then one wave rose larger than the rest and picked Jocelyn up (or was it me?) and brought her crashing down on top of me (or was it her?) and slammed us, a tangle of arms and legs, to the bottom, where the impact split us apart. I remember groping toward the surface, feeling the desperation tight in my lungs, and plowing my face deep into the sand I had lost my sense of direction. There in the oceans bed, hands clutching fistfuls of shells and weed, I had a long moment of deep clarity.

Instead of being taken away, my breath was given back; my panic dissolved into a deep calm, and I hung in suspension with my body. But this moment was torn from me as a hand, her hand, reached blindly through the dark water, touched my ankle, and, finding, pulled. She reeled me to the surface as a lifeguard reeled her. He had seen us caught in a riptide, had swum out to bring us back, had found her wrist just as she found my ankle, and pulled us both to shore. I remember coughing on the wet sand, the sun and sky piercingly bright, cough ing and coughing, faintly realizing that I had lost that moment of Noble.indd 3 9/26/18 9:57 AM clarity in the turbulence of recovery, in my bodys mechanics. As I looked over to Jocelyn, I thought I saw a flicker of recognition.

We trudged to our towels, embarrassed, and lay in silence. It wasnt until the long drive home up the Jersey Turnpike, in the safety of the car and the dark and the miles we had put behind us, that she said, We could have died. I never asked her what she had felt under the waves and never knew if she, too, had a moment of clarity on the threshold of death. I could not have described that moment to her, nearly impossible to put words to, and yet, at the same time, it was the truest thing I had ever almost known. What I caught that day was only a glimpse. It would be years before I had another chance to see.

I was in France, at a party, with friends and friends of friends. We were on the patio of someones country house, playing a drinking game that involved reciting limericks and drawing on each others faces with a burnt cork. When I went inside for a glass of water, and to take a break from the smoke in my eyes and the French in my head, Marc kissed me behind the pantry door and asked me to go upstairs with him. I said no. But when Enzo, at one in the morning, asked if I wanted to go for a ride on his motorcycle, I said yes. We flew, no helmets, my hair streaming, the wind blowing any words we might have said into the night behind us.

Then I saw the tree ahead of us, and when I knew we couldnt hold the curve, when the impact was inevitable, I thought, with a directness that surprised me, You should be thinking something really important right now. But there was no time to think. We slid along a barbed wire fence, crashed into the tree, and I was thrown from the bike. Then nothing. I came to in a field of grass, its itchiness a reassurance that I was alive. There was, as yet, no need for last thoughts.

Instead, I had to attend a more practical need: my arms and legs could move, my head could turn, but my face was wet and I couldnt see out of my left eye. But even while I was absorbed in this physical self, some other part of me stood by, aloof, watching and waiting, for what I didnt know. 4 paRt i Noble.indd 4 9/26/18 9:57 AM I will get help, Enzo said, stumbling and backing away from me. He tore the motorcycle from the wires of the fence. I will bring help, he said again, before the engine caught and drowned my weak voice saying over and over, like the lover I wasnt but wanted to be: Wait. Wait. Wait.

Then I was alone or thought I was. It was dark and getting cold. That other self grew more vigilant after Enzo left. It watched as I flailed weakly against circumstance. It watched as I dug a mirror out of my back pocket and saw that the wetness on my face was blood blood had blinded my left eye and I saw that I wasnt going to be all right after all. It watched as my shock became panic in the privacy of the night fields.

But the whimpering, squealing me knew that second self, calm and clear, was there as well, attending me during those moments of separation. Later I began to wonder if the body has a chemical, something like adrenaline, that bathes us in this calm acceptance. Something different from the endorphins that gauze over our feelings of pain, something instead that gives a mental awareness in the midst of the bodys trauma. That day with Jocelyn, underwater, my breath was failing fast. Very little time was left. And that night on the motorcycle there was nothing I could do to prevent the crash, no use for fight or flight.

In neither case did I feel pain, but I felt something far deeper, something the essayist Montaigne described after his own terrible accident, five centuries before my own. Montaigne says nothing of pain but languishes over the pleasure of letting himself go, that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep. He is so removed from his body dead, he claims, for two full hours that these mysteries can be revealed. He describes the easy and quiet feeling he had while in the early stages of shock but only hints at the idea of a split. Reading Mon taigne a few years after my accident, I began to wonder if during such moments of bodily crisis we split for spiritual reasons. More and more I believe we do.