Tarantula

        I woke up and made coffee and crawled to my writing desk and I immediately felt it: the wall. I couldn’t do this any longer, couldn’t stand the waiting to hear about my insurance. I sent a desperate email to the third party caseworker begging her to contact me, then sat staring at the computer screen for a long time, not reading, just staring. I could feel myself shutting down, which is what I do in cases of extreme duress. It’s like the lights of an office building being shut off floor by floor. I could not do this any more. I didn’t know what that meant, but I was done. The well was dry, no water left for me for me to draw. I had pushed so hard and been so patient and now I couldn’t any more. 

        Finally, with what felt like my last scrap of willpower, I called the wound care clinic. I left a message on the machine in which I told them how helpless and hopeless I was. I don’t know what to do, I said. I need help. Please.

        An hour later the scheduler called and said she was connecting me to someone from the hospital’s insurance department. I told her the same thing I had been spending all week telling various representatives, and like so many of them, she said she would look into it and get back to me later that day. In the meantime, she said I should reach out to my employer –she kept calling it “my former employer,” which was disconcerting- just to let them know about the issues I’d been having. When we got off the phone I wrote an email to HR and accounting and resumed my staring.

        A few hours later the phone rang. It was the insurance woman from the hospital. “It’s all straightened out,” she said. “You’re re-enrolled.” I felt a great rush of air, like I’d been floating in a vacuum that was suddenly filled with oxygen. I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. She said there had been some miscommunication but they’d gotten some kind of confirmation from my “former employer” and that I was covered as of April 1st, which was two and a half weeks ago, and that as long as I kept making my monthly payments, I should be set. I thanked her profusely and got off the phone, in shock that the wall was no longer there, that with just a few words, it had vanished.

        The scheduler called back a little later and said that my chart still showed me as not being covered, but she would call me when it changed so we could resume treatments. It felt like so long since I had seen any of them.

        That night some friends invited me to one of those big Literary Arts readings at the Shnitz. I hadn’t been to one in years; tickets are expensive, and I don’t know or care about most of the readers. This was a poet who had just published a prose book about nature and her relationship to it. She was bubbly and perky and spoke almost exclusively in truisms. She used the phrase “Be true to your authentic self” multiple times. 

        She started her talk with BBC footage of a pebble toad, a tiny, drab creature from Venezuela. The toad is climbing up a steep sheet of rock. At the top it encounters a tarantula, and instantly releases its grip on the rock and tumbles down, down, what seems like hundreds of feet, bounding like a ball to land with no injury to its bumpy little body. She referred to the toad many times during her talk as a symbol of resilience. Her view of the animal kingdom was completely benign, and she spoke like someone who had never endured any hardships, or had shoved them down so deep she refused to acknowledge them. “Live your life with wonder,” she chirped again and again. 

        As we walked back to the car we cut through the park, bejeweled with strings of lights. We passed the museum and I imagined ghostly images of my time working there wafting up from its bulk. Flickering projections of everyone I had encountered there, all the artworks that had kept me company over the years. 

        My friends laughed as I fumed about the evening’s lack of substance. “This is what we love about you,” they said. I am an angry, bitter man, a plummeting toad, refusing to live my life with wonder. It didn’t matter. The wall had come down. I went home and fell into bed and slept like a stone.