The Driver’s Seat
He was proud that he had developed a way to eat his favorite meal, spaghetti with tomato sauce, without ruining either his work clothes or the interior of his car. To do so, he lunched sitting in the driver’s seat, out of a deep plastic container, with a large beach towel draping over his body. He tucked one end of the towel into his shirt collar and unfurled the other end past his knees. Now there was no way tomato sauce could drip or be flung from the noodles onto his button-down shirt, which was frequently white or whitish. Sauce landed only on the towel, which was also whitish, with a popsicle-brand logo. The towel was flecked with light-orange stains. He washed it once a week. Some stains from previous weeks remained, faded. The sauce did not stain his sleeves, which were not covered by the towel. He was careful.
Dylan Stewart, 29, was proud of his ingenuity. At lunch time, he would disappear into his car and drive to a secluded spot within ten minutes of his office. Movie theater parking lots were particularly convenient. Not many cars were in movie theater parking lots, especially at their ends, around noon on a weekday. But today he had chosen a personal favorite spot, in the lot of the River Stone Park, an out-of-the-way amenity in an out-of-the-way Naperville subdivision. His usual space, far from the baseball field or the playground, offered almost complete isolation. There he opened his towel, took out his lunch, laid his phone on the center console, and turned on the latest episode of his NBA podcast. The playground and the baseball field looked like action figure playsets in the distance. In front of his car, as if built for him alone to see, was the low wooden sign that read “River Stone.” The podcast played via bluetooth on the car stereo. The spaghetti was delicious.
Dylan did not tell anyone how he ate his lunch. It was a bit like a dip, the way he felt about it. With a dip, there are often layers: taco dip, buffalo chicken dip, all kinds of dips. His mom made many layered dips. A great chili-no-bean dip, with warm cream cheese on the bottom. (That dip, she said, was “Dylan’s favorite.”) To use the dip-layering model: his embarrassment about his strategy for eating spaghetti in his car was often buried under layers of emotion that were more positive, ones associated with the self-knowledge of resourcefulness. These emotions, the dip’s top layers, were pride and contentment. But on most days he could not help but dig past those two emotions—in this way, thought is a chip—and find the embarrassment layer beneath. Sometimes, in concentrating on the embarrassment—here, his tongue is his mind, tasting the dip on the chip, which is thought—the embarrassment overcame him. And it was at times like these that he thought he would never get married.
He wasn’t sure that he could tell a woman about his lunchtime method. Dylan had loved many women. He had been devoted to every girlfriend he’d ever had, and every one of them had broken up with him—never the other way around. He felt lucky for that because it meant that he had dated extraordinary women. Dylan, from this vantage point, had been lucky in love. But sometimes he recalled how, in the end, his girlfriends had treated him with a disdain he found surprising. Why had these women disdained a man whom they had dated, mostly pleasantly and uneventfully, for several months? Who was, for the most part, personable, especially when he could wade into familiar conversational topics, such as computers, comedy television, video games, or the NBA? “My mistake,” he would think, reflecting back on these women, and their disdain, “was that I became too comfortable.” He had allowed himself to be too much himself in his relationships. One girlfriend, in breaking up with him, had said that after sex, as he lay naked, he “picked his penis.” This accusation shocked Dylan. He never got a chance to ask her what she meant. What could she have meant? He could not remember any time, post-sex, having picked his penis. But it sounded like something a man did when he became too comfortable. Thinking about it now, in the driver’s seat, beneath a towel, he tasted painfully the chip dipped in a layer of shame. Which was the bottom layer.
His phone buzzed. Then it buzzed a few more times.
She was at it again.
Dylan would look at the texts soon, maybe at the end of his lunch break, right as he walked back into the office, where he was a software liaison, but he would not read them. He would just look. His mother texted at least two dozen times a day. “If not three dozen,” he thought. (Just now she had texted, by his count of the buzzes, at least seven times.) She was lonely. His father had “died” some time ago. She had found herself something like a boyfriend, Brian, but recently they had separated. Dylan wasn’t sure why. When Dylan or his siblings—Beth who was older, Charles who was younger—asked her about the break-up, which she had taken a week to disclose to them, over text, her explanations seemed beside-the-point and pre-rehearsed. Though that was her way with all communication. In the first thirty seconds of her answer to a question, any question, she filled time as she careened inside the storage room of her mind until she came across the anecdote she thought appropriate—often she would miss and choose an anecdote only vaguely relevant—and then tell the chosen story steadily through, regardless of whether the other party or parties had heard it before or were interested.
Perhaps that was why Brian had separated from her, Dylan imagined. (It seemed that he had been the one to initiate the break-up.) It may also have been related, at least in part, to the fact that his father wasn’t technically dead. Kathleen Stewart had waited until Christmas in the second year of her husband’s vegetative state, which had been caused by a massive stroke, to tell Dylan and his siblings, around the kitchen table of their childhood home, that she would prefer to refer to their father as dead. Not aloud, which seemed crass to her, “but in my mind,” she said. She appeared exceedingly gentle and vulnerable in making this admission, which was such a sharp contrast to her usual style that her children did not voice any surprise or objection. She admitted that she felt better off, more able to encounter the world, living under the fantasy that their father was dead. This was right after they had all seen him, for Christmas, at his care facility, where they had said “Merry Christmas” to his open, vacant eyes. The air had reeked faintly of urine, even though his room seemed clean enough. The whole place was clean, and the workers were harried and kind. The three adult children continued to visit their father, mostly around the holidays. Their mother, thinking her husband dead only in her mind, continued visiting the most, four or five times a week.
The buzzing persisted, and Dylan, in the driver’s seat, tensed at the sound; he felt his mother’s proximity. Her home was only six miles away from his downtown-ish apartment, both in the southwestern Chicago suburb of Naperville, and her office—she performed clerical work part-time at a local insurance firm to keep busy—even nearer. Dylan’s siblings were nearby, too.
“She doesn’t even ask us about ourselves,” Beth once had complained. What would their mother have done if Beth and Charles had actually responded to her dozens of times a day, with anecdotes of their own?
They had never tried this strategy, which they referred to as “flooding the zone.”
Dylan had tried to pull back from his mother’s babying a few years ago, but after his father’s stroke, he had found it necessary, as a son, to soothe his mother’s grief by repeating, for instance, in a gentle sing-song, “Rosey are my toes-ys,” just as he had done as a child.
It was in the aftermath of the stroke, after Dylan had moved out of the house again—he had spent a month back in his old bedroom, helping his mother out around the house while his father’s health was uncertain—when the two-or-three-dozen-times-a-day texting had begun. Texts became the definitive storehouse for the trivia of her life, and at first Dylan had found it necessary to reply to each message, “oh wow!,” or “really?” or “that’s crazy.” Duty, he thought, was what the moment called for. Beth, Charles, and Dylan had made one attempt to confront their mother about her texting habit—a few months after their mother had decided he was dead. The confrontation did not have the desired effect.
She said that they didn’t love her. The siblings assured her otherwise (especially Dylan) and agreed that she was under a lot of stress. After they left her house, she reiterated, over text, that her children didn’t love her. The siblings texted back with more assurances. They loved her very much, they said. (Dylan both times had called her, instead of texting like Beth and Charles had, to tell her so.) The three children just didn’t need to hear from their mother two or three dozen times a day. “Understood,” she replied, clearly still wounded. She promised not to bother them so much.
“But it didn’t stick,” Dylan thought. She didn’t want to get it. She would say, “Well, when I see you you’re always on your phones.” That was true enough!
Dylan took another bite of spaghetti.
The children had lost. Beth and Charles decided—Dylan had never heard them say so, but there must have been some sort of agreement between them—that they simply, once in a while, would mark their mother’s texts with thumbs ups or hearts or exclamation points.
Yesterday, for instance, a cluster of texts had described a car accident that she had almost gotten into in the parking lot of Mariano’s. Mariano’s was the name of the newish local grocery store, the one with the bar inside. Every few weeks, their mother texted that she couldn’t believe that Mariano’s, in remodeling the space, which used to belong to a different grocery store, Dominick’s, had added a bar. To drink and shop for groceries? Why? Then she took a picture, or pictures, of the bar, of the people who were watching golf on the bar’s television and drinking in the grocery store. They were walking down the aisles with glasses of beer or wine in hand.
Dylan had become an expert in identifying a few keywords in his mother’s texts and then, using his knowledge of the thousands of texts she had previously sent, extrapolating the meaning of her messages with near-total confidence. Based on this keyword-scanning, he had deduced that she had been reversing out of her parking space at Mariano’s when another car zoomed down the parking aisle, and that car, which was red, would have hit the rear of her car had she not been paying close attention, which she was doing because she was worried about exactly such a thing happening—because of all the people drinking at the Mariano’s bar! She added the crying-while-laughing emoji. Twice. Hours later, Beth placed a thumbs up on “I’m lucky I’m on the lookout for drunks!” Charles did nothing.
On a day-to-day basis, Dylan also received at least a dozen texts on a one-on-one thread with his mother. Sitting in his car, eating spaghetti, he glanced at his phone for long enough to see that she was writing to him on that private thread. Using his keyword strategy, he saw that she was not asking him an IT question—this was a frequent topic; he was a software liaison, after all—but that she was, instead, talking about Annie Carsten.
Seeing the words Annie Carsten, he tasted the dip-layer of dread.
Annie Carsten had given a TEDx talk in late 2015 titled “Getting Out from the Inside.” A former coworker had forwarded Dylan’s mother the video with a note that read only, “Wow!!” She had clicked on the video, thinking that it would contain a Christian affirmation, which was what this former coworker had a habit of sending. Instead, in the video, Annie Carsten, a woman in her early 40s, told a story about how she had gotten severely sick one day, seemingly out of nowhere, and had to be rushed to the hospital. A blood clot had reached her brainstem; she suffered a debilitating stroke.
Annie awoke in a hospital bed. She could hear a doctor talking to her husband. The doctor said that it might be best, though she knew it would be hard, since this was his wife after all, the mother of his three children, the youngest of whom was five, if he pulled the plug, so to speak. His wife was a vegetable. “No, I am not!” Annie tried to shout, but she couldn’t. She could not move her body in any way. She was, to all who saw her, in a vegetative state, unable to perceive or interact with the world around her. Yet she was awake, inside her body, with her cognitive abilities intact. There she was totally unlike a vegetable, alive to the rhythms of her thoughts and her available senses.
“It’s called locked-in syndrome,” she told her audience.
Annie’s husband, fortunately, did not accept the doctor’s recommendation. He placed his wife in a facility, where she received around-the-clock care. In her well-padded bed she was consistently repositioned to avoid pressure sores, her muscles exercised to prevent joints becoming permanently bent through disuse. She breathed on her own but ate and drank via a feeding syringe injected into a tube running through her stomach wall. A cardiac monitor, an oxygen saturation monitor, and various other monitors beeped around her. She wore both urinary and rectal catheters, which were always having to be cleaned.
She lived like this for a number of months.
The main difference between a person in a coma and a person in a vegetative state, Annie Carsten said, in her TEDx talk, was that the person in the coma’s eyes are closed, while the person in the vegetative state lies, unmoving, with eyes forever open. In that defenseless yet observant position, Annie bore witness to the grief of her family members and friends whenever they came to her bedside. It’s amazing what people say, and how they act, she said, when they do not know that they are seen and heard by the body looking on. In Annie’s experience, they did not, as she had feared, show a different, more malignant or uncaring side to themselves. What was amazing, she said, onstage, was that her friends and loved ones spoke and acted as if she could answer. They silently filled in her side of conversations, though sometimes they ruined the effect by saying things like, “I know you can’t hear me, but…” Such comments did not defeat Annie, though. On the contrary, the comments, and the silence reserved for her side of the conversation, nurtured her willpower, as did the comments of nurses and doctors who described her and her condition dismissively while standing in front of her, not out of callousness, but out of frankness. Their frankness spurred her onward. Soon, her willpower had risen sufficiently that she managed, after many hours of intense concentration, to move her big toe. Next Annie reasoned that she should be able to move parts of her body closer to her brain, like her eyes, for instance. After some period of time, she began to control her blinking. A nurse quickly noticed and grasped the implications.
Once she was conversing through blinking, Annie did a lot of vowing. She vowed to stand, walk, talk, hug her children, and speak their names. Against the expectations of her medical team, which always seemed one step behind, not taking into account her reserves of willpower, perhaps, Annie accomplished these goals. And now, here she was, onstage, giving a TEDx talk, one of many talks she would give that year as a motivational speaker, warning her audiences about the dangers of locked-in syndrome and encouraging those with locked-in-like disabilities to tap into their own willpower reserves. “Who knows how many other people are like me?” she said. “How many of those in ‘vegetative states’ are not?” Annie Carsten was dedicating her life to the issue. She had written a book and acquired the funding to organize a trip to climb Mount Everest, to get the word out. She wanted to tell people about the tell-tale signs of locked-in syndrome: purposeful movement of the eyes (up-and-down or blinking, rarely side-to-side) or purposeful turning of the wrists. Also, according to her website, which Dylan Googled after watching her video, she was a coach and mentor to those who were known to be living in locked-in states. She met in facilities and homes with those confined to their personal interiors, though she likewise met with the formerly locked in, such as, most prominently, an athlete in Arizona who had become a well-regarded wheelchair bodybuilder as he overcame locked-in syndrome through willpower, which he had always, even before his life-altering series of strokes, had in spades. There he was, on Annie Carsten’s website, the athlete and his wife, whom he had met while overcoming locked-in syndrome—they fell in love over hundreds of emails, some of which took him hours to write, on specialized equipment—with their identical triplets. And there was Annie Carsten, holding one of the children.
Dylan took another bite of spaghetti and looked at his phone, which was lying still, for the moment, on the center console. His mother, in thinking of Annie Carsten’s motivational TEDx talk and texting Dylan her thoughts about the speech—as she was presumably doing now, according to the keywords “Annie,” “video,” and “locked in”—was likely to work herself into another one of her states. She would watch the YouTube video again as if for the first time, especially the scene—which Dylan thought crushingly morbid—in which Annie Carsten projected behind herself a picture taken during the time she was presumed to be in a vegetative state, a photo in which she looked ghostly and vacant, and then, cupping the microphone in her hands, with the death-like image behind her, she would begin to whisper, in a suddenly high-pitched and shaky voice, a dramatization of what had been going through her mind during the time when she was trapped underneath the surface of her own body:
why can’t anyone hear me oh what is happening? does anybody hear me?
please help me why can’t I speak? what is wrong help me help me why won’t
anyone help me? I’m here it’s me oh why why can’t anyone help? I need to
get up I need to walk I need a hug please please hold my hand hold me. I love you
Danny I love you Allison Tyler Madison please please will somebody hear me
hold me?
Descending into guilt and grief, Dylan’s mother would cancel whatever plans she had for her lunch break and drive straight to the care facility. She would park her car in the long narrow lot, overcome with worry that her husband was locked inside his body, thinking, hearing, feeling, and seeing, yet unable to communicate.
Soon his mother would be alone with her husband in his room. In the silence, under the fluorescent overhead bulbs, she would begin to take pictures of her husband’s face on her camera phone. She would take Live Photos, because she did not know how to turn off that feature, despite countless texts with Dylan on the topic. And so when Dylan viewed the photos, most likely closeups of his father’s face, he would hear her voice, saying to his father: “Honey, Tommy, can you hear me?” “Blink if you can hear me.” “Are you locked-in?”
If she did all of this today, Dylan knew that the only right thing to do would be to put down the spaghetti, remove the towel, drive the twenty minutes to the care facility, hug the woman, and tell her, no, his father wasn’t locked-in. He was in a vegetative state.
It had happened before, in this exact same spot, in the River Stone Park parking lot. She had sent picture after picture to Dylan—not to Beth or Charlie; she knew better—of his father’s face, on Live Photo, accompanied by her voice talking to her husband, pleading him to move purposefully, interspersed with texts asking if Dylan could see anything in his father’s eyes.
Of course he could, he said, though not to her.
What Dylan saw was the same distance his father had always measured when looking at his children. Kathleen had had a real relationship with him, but she had known him in high school, when he had played varsity baseball. The Cats should have won state. The Cats disappointed everyone in town. But it was the good kind of disappointment, the kind that came after one of the most exciting baseball seasons in a long time. Tom Stewart played pranks, some of them rather nasty. One time he got a friend’s dog drunk. He unloaded Pepsi trucks during summers between college semesters, and after graduating he joined the world of finance, a world that had made him a fair amount of money. But he wasn’t on Wall Street. “People think of finance, and they think that means Wall Street,” he’d always said.
Tom Stewart did not know how to interact with a son so smothered by his mother’s love. Beth, Charlie, and Tom had all asked, at various points in their lives, for kindnesses from Kathleen that she had balked at giving. Why had Kathleen smothered Dylan? Simple: because he had unreservedly accepted it. The others, at times, before they knew the consequences, must have resisted her and so cut off the flow forever. Dylan, on the other hand, had been like a frog, slowly boiling in his mother’s love, as his other family members looked on with fascination.
Dylan thought this explained why the last time his mother had driven to the care facility, and sent him picture after picture asking if she thought that his father might be locked-in, he had not gone to see her. He had merely texted back, “mom, he’s not locked in.”
Kathleen, shockingly, had texted back only a frowny-face emoji followed by a broken heart.
For the rest of the day, nothing.
Thinking of that day Dylan felt layers of emotions, relief and shame most prominently—of which the shame, thick on the chip, overpowered all else, so much so that the relief tasted exactly like the shame.
His mother did have a compelling theory, which she had explained to Dylan while he was home to do laundry the other week. He had been unable to refute her. Despite no evidence of eye movement, and even after ample assurances from the facility’s medical staff, she thought it was possible that Tom might be locked in for one simple reason: he had never been a very motivated person.
The more Dylan thought about it, as he was doing now, finishing his spaghetti lunch, without any splatters, even on his towel, the more he found it distressingly easy to picture his father, lying in the well-padded hospital bed, trapped in his own body, unable to move, not necessarily enjoying it—not by a long shot—but unable to muster the willpower necessary to move his big toe.
“He just wouldn’t do it,” Dylan thought. “He would give up.” Since high school, when he had almost won state and fallen in love with the beautiful, steadfast, headstrong Kathleen Martinson, she had controlled where (or whether) they went to church; where and how they vacationed; whether they would move to Sydney, Australia, as his financial firm had wanted (no); whether the children would be allowed to play rap music in the house (also no). “If he was locked-in,” Dylan thought, “what would give him the willpower, the kind Annie Carsten had, to move his big toe?” Obviously, there was only one answer: his wife. Her husband having a stroke and lying in a vegetative state was the only major event of his adult life to which she had given no input. She could not believe—it seemed impossible—that he did not need her input now.
The phone buzzed again. “I should read them,” Dylan thought. “Actually read them.” He picked it up, took a breath, and saw the notification. Oh, it wasn’t his mother at all. It was the telltale red drop of fire. Tinder.
Jessica, with whom he had matched that morning, had initiated their chat with, “So, uh, what r u playing these days?”
She had clearly noticed that he had listed, like her, “video games” as a passion.
Looking at Jessica’s pictures again, he thought she seemed like an obvious match. They were both on the short side, slightly stout, and whereas Dylan had always had a neutral style—whatever he wore on the job as a software liaison, plus Cubs and Bulls t-shirts on the weekends—Jessica had, in one of her three photos, a streak of pink through her dark hair. He liked the idea that they could be opposites who attracted. He looked in his rearview mirror at his dark brown hair, which he always told the woman at Great Clips to cut “the same but shorter.” The cowlick at the front of his hairline gave it a mild swoop which had always worked for him. (His mother called it, to this day, his “lucky licky.”)
He had been playing a lot of sports games lately—NBA 2k, MLB: The Show—but he would not say one of those games. He would say something that might intrigue Jessica enough that she would entertain driving the half-hour or so from Oswego to his apartment to play (or vice versa—he was more than happy to travel). She looked, from the pink streak of hair in the one photo, like she played lots of indie games, so he thought he might say an indie game with a couch co-op mode that they could play together, simultaneously, sitting next to each other on the couch. So should he say Spiritfarer? He scraped the remaining noodles at the bottom of his lunch container.
In Spiritfarer, Stella and Daffodil, Stella’s ebullient cat, accept the responsibility, from Charon, the mythical ferryman of the underworld, of transporting the recently deceased by boat across a vast fantasy seascape to the Everdoor, where the spirits exit their island-dotted purgatory for the afterlife. But the spirits need quests completed and moods boosted before they are willing to ask Stella to take them for that final, existence-ending boatride. To help the spirits accept the unacceptable, Stella and Daffodil build personalized guesthouses, cook meals, listen to stories, and offer hugs. Though Spiritfarer is, at its heart, a resource management game, it is wary, overall, of efficiency and utility. As Gustav, the spirit of a German art dealer who in life was confined to a wheelchair because of multiple sclerosis, says to Stella and Daffodil, “Usefulness is an easy way to meaningfulness. But not a trustworthy one. It vanishes as quickly as we do.”
Suggesting Spiritfarer now interested Dylan chiefly because, being a game about stalled journeys toward death, it might allow him, at his own discretion, to reveal to Jessica that his father was in a vegetative state. He had seen with his old girlfriend Amanda the power of revealing his father’s condition.
By the second round of beers on his third date with Amanda, the sun had set, and the outdoor lights at Jimmy’s Grill gave the parade of people flowing past the busy sidewalk a crystal-white glow. Amanda explained that her own parents were fundamentalist Christians, whom she could engage in very few topics of conversation without provoking their righteous anger. Surprisingly, they could talk without acrimony about Amanda’s church, which they liked to make fun of. Letting them tease her made her feel closer to them.
Listening to Amanda speak, Dylan had felt a sense of calm descend upon him, knowing that he would then tell the story of his father’s vegetative state. Moreover, he knew that he would do so with lightness and grace. It would light the spark between them. And he knew—he just knew—that he and Amanda would go back to his place, Dylan recalled, his spaghetti now finished, and there they would have sex.
He was typing out “Spiritfarer! Do u know it?” when a new notification pinged at the top of his screen. It was his mother, sending him a picture. He touched the thumbnail, and his father’s face filled the screen. So she was there. Dylan held his thumb over the image so that the Live Photo revealed its burst of video. His mother was silent this time. As he looked into his father’s eyes, which were pale green like his own, he thought that one of them, the right one, might have floated a little bit upwards, for a brief moment. Or it could have been just a trick of his mother’s unsteady iPhone camera. And even if it was the eye floating, Dylan thought, floating is not necessarily a sign of purposeful movement.