Falling Down the Stairs

Chapter One, excerpt from The Nostalgic Future www.hiddenhouse.world

Falling Down the Stairs

CRACK! Before … before! my ass hits the ground, before I even stumble, a deafening sound pierces my living room like electric lightning. It’s so LOUD against the stillness of my empty house. But there’s no one here to witness my personal catastrophe. I’m not bungee jumping or skydiving; I’m just carrying a laundry basket up a flight of stairs… and I misstep. An unimaginably loud crack slams through the air and rebounds off the white walls and vaulted ceiling. I hear this noise BEFORE I fall. Then, everything STOPS. Time, air, clocks…me. The All holds its breath in silence. I still haven’t hit the floor, mind you, but there is…a moment. I don’t know how long this Suspension-of-Time-Thingy lasts, but it’s enough for a woman’s Voice to enter my head while I’m midair. It’s not audible, and it isn’t made of sound waves. It’s something else. A kind of deep hearing felt within me. And it’s real.

The Voice is thunderous. It is female. Not listening is impossible, like stopping my own heart. It says, This is going to change everything. Do you accept?

And for the life of me, I don’t know why, but I seem to whisper a reply in my head to the empty living room (granted, with exceedingly low confidence): Yes…?

***

I had a whole life before I fell down the stairs. I was a completely different person before June of 2017. I spent exactly zero time thinking about the “Other Side” or the “Thin Veil” between worlds or whatever the hell. In fact, I was absolutely sure that nothing like that mumbo jumbo even existed.   

My life was a series of plate-spinning responsibilities: from motherhood to teaching to gigging to recording to doing all my own booking and marketing. I was respected by my musicians because I’d evolved out of “chick singer” into someone who’d taught themselves composition and learned some “tasty chords.” But I was exhausted on a soul level. My album had been nominated for a couple of jazz awards, and I was busy booking two tours to New York City. Unfortunately, I also had a sinking suspicion that all this “success” business was pretty much meaningless. Indeed, I was the embodiment of the Myth of Sisyphus. I’d been pushing boulders up mountains my entire career and was unfortunately getting pretty good at it.  

Looking in the rearview mirror, I admit I mostly chose to do things the hard way. (Damn it all, if only real estate could’ve been my thing.) Globally, jazz represents 0.08% of the music share, and even still, I wanted to compose originals, which was professional suicide. In the world of jazz, the audience wants to recognize what they hear, while the musicians want to play everything in some weird time signature with crazy distended chords, proudly making the song unrecognizable. So, you’re fighting a three-way push-pull with obscurity, mediocrity, and your own personality most of the time. The recurring theme was that I wanted to do what I wanted to do. It wasn’t the world’s fault that I was a square peg in a room full of round holes. But it wasn’t my fault either that I was walking around the world feeling like a weirdo. And a failure.

Needless to say, I never had piles of money or recognizable stardom. I just kept banging away at it like a bull against a partition wall. I’d finally pushed the boulder to reach the top of one mountain: I was what they called “locally famous.” People recognized me, but only some people. One time, somebody actually stopped me in my car (like literally summoned me to roll down the window and pull over), just so they could tell me how much they loved my music; does that count? I was usually able to precariously balance that metaphorical rock up there at the top of that hill, sweating and puffing, and having a look around at all the other mountaintops. Unfortunately, “success" always kinda felt like: eh...  

So, I’d just climb some new plateau which I could see way off into the distance, and say to myself: Oh well, that must be the one, over there! Yes of course, I was just on the wrong mountain. And off I’d trudge, climb, huff and puff my way up to the next lookout point. 

But it was never enough. I was always chasing the dragon. There was never any “there” there when you got there, as Gertrude Stein put it. No place where the Meaning of It All, neatly packaged, could be grasped like a brass ring. The whole damn process just kept starting over and over again with every project. I’d find myself less fulfilled with every goal I achieved. With no finish line, I was the same person at 40 as I was at 20. Ambition was a disease, an insatiable hunger, an incurable wound. The worst part was that I was aware of what was happening and I hated myself for it. 

This kind of egoic trap could make a person feel like they’re living out the movie Groundhog Day: wash, rinse and repeat on an endless loop. Like you’re literally going to die, get your memory wiped clean, and wake up in the same life again, not remembering who you are (except for all the inconvenient déjà vu’s of course), and just live the whole damn thing all over again, endlessly! (Shudder.) Horrifying. Thank god I didn’t believe in that sort of thing. 

***

So, let’s recap: I am in midair. There is a CRACK, and then an eerie lady’s voice chats inside my head. And then…THEN(!): I hit the hard tile floor and my ankle starts screaming at me. That’s the sequence…not the usual order of things, but there it is. (Note: I do NOT hit my head, not ever. This will be very important to keep in mind when the story really starts going off the proverbial rails.)  

Contact with the floor below our staircase is directly on the top of my right ankle. The pain is a white burning, seething thing. It cracks me open and pulls me apart. But I’m not dead for goodness sake; this isn’t supposed to be such a big deal.  

And then it happens. I’m still in the foyer of our home, but I’m also kinda … NOT in it. I am in an All White Place. It feels like the inside of a giant white Egg. There are no seams where the floor meets the wall or where the wall meets the ceiling. It’s all rounded whiteness here. There are no sharp edges, just fluid, milky weightlessness, like being held inside of a cloud by an invisible giant’s hand. I can still see the living room, but now I am also trapped inside of this great white hall, simultaneously. I can see through both places, reminding me of gentler times. 

I remember being a little girl, barely out of toddlerhood, when I hid underneath the Thanksgiving table and looked out upon my grandmother’s dining room. Through the holes of a crochet lace tablecloth that hung over the table’s edge, I saw everybody’s legs and the party that went on without me. I felt safe and secret knowing I was both a part of it and separate from it. 

Here, too, Time is no longer a thing inside the Egg. I’m in a world overlaid in quiet suspension, a scrim on top of the physical world. Like I’m in a dream and I know I’m dreaming, I’m in a place that dangles between moments, between breaths. The air is liquid light, wrapped around me gently. Each shimmering probable future stretches out in slow motion, as though Time itself has been suspended, its passage no longer tethered to the world I’ve left behind. Beneath it all, there is a rumbling sound, deep and relentless. Like the earth itself is detonating, pulling me deeper into this strange, infinite impermanence. This sound is the literal definition of earth shattering. Honestly, it’s kind of driving me crazy. It’s a profound sound. It makes the living room feel ten times bigger, like it stretches out past all the other houses in our neighborhood. 

Pretty soon, I can hear four sounds. It takes me a while to sort them out and distinguish one from another. They’re all mixed up together and yet somehow distinct. Like a quintet playing together, but if you’re musically knowledgeable, you can tell the guitar from the bass.    

One sound is like the rumbling of an earthquake. This is what I imagine it might sound like if I were to find myself gripping the undercarriage of a freight train ripping through a station.  Say, if I were Tom Cruise doing my own stunts on a movie set, except I’m not, I’m just me.

When I was 21, I got my first big girl apartment as a working actress in L.A.. I was smack dab in the middle of an earthquake within the first month of living there. I both loved and hated that apartment. As with everyone else on my mom’s side of the family, I’d worked in the entertainment industry my whole life (my first commercial shot when I was just 3 years old), but living alone in L.A. was like being on a merry-go-round in elementary school: a lot of spinning and kind of a sick feeling in your stomach, and me wanting to get off, but none of the big kids letting me. That thing called “Showbiz” has been around for so long, it has its own centrifugal force. There’s always a lot going on all around you that you can’t keep track of, like being stuffed into a crowded party but feeling deathly alone in the midst of all that action. 

So there I was, all moved in, just a kid really. Alone with my new doors and windows rumbling and groaning this calamity beneath me. Everything in my new apartment was at war with me. The furniture, the wood, the glass, the odds and ends, the tchotchke I’d so carefully picked out at thrift stores. Everything shook their fists at me and screamed: No matter how many wins, you’ll always feel small!  

And now here I am again, in my own home that I share with my second husband (the good one) and teenage daughter, and I can remember that sound over 20 years later, like it’s yesterday. I didn’t know I could remember it so well. I think it was in a memory hole. And now, I can’t believe it’s here again and I can feel its colossal clamor beneath me. I remember everything rumbling, just like this, all-encompassing. But it’s not an earthquake. It’s my consciousness that’s in upheaval. 

As with the many times in my life when I have despaired, the world around me slows waaaaaaay down like thick mud. I’m wading through a thunderous ocean of hollering sound, pounding in my chest, my head, my whole being. I slow down to a crawl. The current is too big for me, I’m powerless. Moving, talking, even thinking, decelerates. I’m lost inside of myself in unwilling inertia. Because of this, everything feels real and yet also unreal. 

The second sound I hear is the sound of tinnitus: the ringing in the ears. But it’s so loud!  Maybe it’s my blood pressure shooting through the roof. It sounds like all hell is breaking loose in there but with tiny little bells, like a million of ‘em. Ring, ring, ring!!! (Somebody gonna get that?) I never had tinnitus before I fell down the stairs, but all these years later, it never leaves me. I notice it even now as I tippity-tap my fingers on this keyboard. It often comes when I am very tired, just before I go to bed--calling me back to leave this body and fly off to the netherworlds. Sometimes it changes tones, goes silent momentarily, or increases in volume. I could let this drive me batty, or seek help from a doctor, but I don’t do that. Sometimes I feel like it awakens me to notice things, essential things. It turns up the volume and says: Here now. Pay attention, dear, this could be something.

The third sound is a weird one. Harkening back to my childhood, I recall a toy made of corrugated rubber tubing, about three feet long, that you could twirl around and around over your head. It made a creepy sound like wind whistling through a tunnel. There was a definite extraterrestrial vibe to it. It was called the Whirly Tube. You could spin the Whirly Tube at different speeds around your head to make pitch adjustments, sliding through the microtones in an ominous way. This strange sound is playing a weird alien instrument for me now, like I’m in some sci-fi B-movie. And suddenly, there are dozens (maybe hundreds) of Whirly Tubes playing in ethereal harmony, like the harmonious ringing of the planets recorded by NASA. I’m hearing a symphony on Mars!

The last sound is voices, so many voices. I don’t know what they are talking about, because they’re all blended together. They come out like whispers. It’s like being there for a concert at symphony hall during the intermission listening to the people chattering, but I’m high above it, hanging from the rafters, like a bat. I’m floating above a sea of nebulous voices, whispering.   

I hear these four sounds, and I am inside of an Egg. 

I am in a lot of pain and yet I am also set apart from the pain. A pain so expansive it disappears by covering itself over everything else in the world. I don’t have the wherewithal to “look back” at my body, but I know I’m not really taking part in the physical experience of having a body right now. The pain is just too massive. I am set apart. 

I don’t know how long it lasts: a minute, an hour, the afternoon? I am definitely missing time. I also have no “evidence” of this experience. I have no witnesses, other than two dogs who will never spill the beans. Nobody can see me falling or hear me landing. No one knows where I am or what I’m doing.  

I’ve always liked this feeling, really. I was alone a lot as a child. I never thought that a feeling like this was called “loneliness.” It was just the way it was and I accepted it, the way a sad child accepts the inevitability of death, even longing for death as if it would be a release. I never thought of myself as lonely, only in the overview, afterwards, when I thought about my childhood as a whole. Never in the moment. I savored being alone because I could listen to my weird thoughts, there in the quiet. I have a lot of memories of sitting on the ground in my room in the very late afternoon when the light starts to die. This must’ve been when my mother could stand no more and retreated to her own bedroom. I lived inside my mind then, wandering slowly through the long and narrow hallways of thought and memory. I talked to myself. I answered myself, too (still do). I talked weirdly, always using “we.” I would say, “We need to go over here now. We should do this; we should do that…” I wonder now why I’ve always said “we” when talking to myself. I was obviously a weird kid and not much has changed since. 

I could die right here in this moment, lying on this cool tile floor. No one would even know it, at least not for a while. They’d come home and find my body (what’s left of me), just the meat bag. They’d have to pick up the shell of what used to be me, haul it off to wherever we bring these things in the end. Some stranger would have to process it: burn it, bury it, or maybe turn it into a tree or something poetic like that. My daughter and my husband would be left picking up the pieces of a life without the center to it, as we moms and wives inevitably become.  All that would be left is the memory of me. Ephemeral, incomplete, and getting more vague by the year. 

Just like we were when we lost our mother. 

I was 38 when my mother died, but still, I felt like an orphaned child. I was a single mother at the time; this was exactly six months before I met my second husband (the good one).  

My mother “died suddenly.” That phrase has always made me curious: even if you knew it was coming, (and we all know there’s a 1:1 ratio here and nobody is getting out alive), yet, isn’t it always a surprise? Don’t we all die suddenly in the end?  

She was not ill. There was no dwindling away from cancer or old age. One day, she simply vanished. She said she had a bad headache; she went to sleep that night and by the next morning she had lost the tongue’s faculty. She could not speak. My stepfather, befuddled, summoned me to their house. I went upstairs to have a look at my mother. I was already put out.  She moved her mouth listlessly, without any sounds. Her eyes stared at me: wane and translucent, without recognition, mutely scared. She had lost the ability to communicate, but it wouldn’t last for long, and neither would she. 

Frankly, this was her only moment of silence. My mother had a lot to say. For example, she knew everything there was to know about politics; we used to call her “CNN Central.” She loved to listen to all the trials on CourtTV, too. If she’d been alive longer, she probably would’ve branched out and listened to podcasts or even believed in conspiracies, but they weren’t really a thing yet. I called her for updates on the O.J. trial, or to find out who to vote for and why. 

We could talk about anything and everything. She made friends with my friends. I loved that. I liked the way my mother had her own ideology about things. She wasn’t what you’d call left or right, politically. She was an outside-the-box thinker. She wasn’t a joiner. Her affiliations were spread widely across the map, she had a hodge podge of ideations and that was her genius.  This was a confusing experience for my stepdad and brother who fit neatly into their checked boxes. 

She was the greatest patron of the arts, as I saw it. “Just don’t stop,” she would continually say to me: “You can’t stop.” And that was all she needed to say really. It saddens me that she missed two nominations for Album of the Year, (one from Los Angeles Music Awards and one from San Diego Music Awards). She would’ve loved that, even if it made me feel like a fraud. But that was my problem, not hers. 

It’s tempting to let memory become eulogy, but I know she wasn’t a saint. She was complex: addictions, midnight screaming eruptions, and a whole subterranean history shrouded in dark mystery that we never really touched. There was a lot about my mother that nobody in our family ever understood, especially about her past. There were times when she said things that disappointed my soul. She could be witty and then she’d be cold. But she was so smart! And in so many ways, she was the center of our family’s orbit. That morning, seeing her literally struck dumb was “the most terrible thing” that had ever happened in any of our lives, because it was her. 

She was rushed to the Emergency Room, then life-lighted to a special Intensive Care Unit at a bigger medical center. We were told she had suffered a brain aneurysm. They relieved the hemorrhage by draining the blood and she could speak again, but only for a little while, a kind of “terminal lucidity.” 

I sat beside her that afternoon and cried. I told her, “I’m so sorry, Mom, I didn’t know.”  Crushed by my own stupid assumptions, I had thought she was making it up, just being a hypochondriac or overly dramatic or something. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” she said, and she “just wanted to go home.” In fact, this was the last thing she ever said to me. She never made it back to her home.  

It all happened in one weekend. Too late for surgery, too late for other treatments. My brother and my stepfather (who had been a physician of great note himself and should’ve known better) looked hopefully at the doctor and said, “What’s next?” He just stared at them. There was obviously no answer and they had asked the wrong question. 

My mother died the next day. Actually, to be more precise: her organs shut down and it was me who was relegated to the duty of choosing to  “pull the plug.” My dad couldn’t do it. My brother wouldn’t do it.

I’d been in the room with Death before. It started when I was young, being in the room with Death, with my grandmother, a family friend, my first boyfriend, and now my mother. It never occurred to me that when you see a lot of death from a young age, when you’re “lucky” enough to be there in those precious moments when someone crosses over, you start to live with an awareness of the two worlds, or at least you come to understand that there’s a liminal space between them. 

It was all over in less than 48 hours of her telling us she had a “terrible headache.” But that was my mom; the woman could really milk an exit. She was cremated and buried in a historical garden where I grew up (where my stepfather’s ashes would join hers in short order).  

We left the hospital and my brother and I slept in the same bed that night and held each other like we were still children, boundlessly crying until we crashed into a deep sleep. Losing our mother was such a shock to us, as if a decree had been announced that henceforth water would no longer be wet. Life without her was impossible to fathom. When I think about my brother and I holding each other on that night, I see us as different people than ourselves. I’m like a fly on the ceiling looking down and feeling sorry for these two people. But I don’t see them as us. Something that horrible could never have happened to us. We were the Golden Children.  

But it did happen, and our family was never the same. When my stepfather followed my mother a year and a half later, it subsequently broke my brother and I apart, bit by bit, year after year, until we were somewhat estranged from each other. Each of us became separately absorbed into our spouse’s families. 

The most influential chapter of my life had closed, that’s what I thought. And I was right about that, until the day I fell down the stairs. 

Lying on the cool tiles we painstakingly picked out for the remodel of this house, I imagine that this is what it would feel like to die alone. The “real world” is slipping away so easily, and what’s left is the vastness of the space within me: my consciousness, my history. Everything I have ever been, thought, or done, and nothing else matters. Maybe even this doesn’t matter. 

Lying at the bottom of the stairs, I don’t need to close my eyes to go inward. I don’t need to look inside because my whole life is encompassed right here in this swirly, familiar vagueness in front of me. It’s as though there’s a wind tunnel or a small tornado in our living room and I’m inside of it, watching it spin around me 360-degrees. Strangely, it takes the shape of a cartoon. My childhood is at my fingertips, nearly touchable. Every watershed moment hovers close, folding into one big, whole, pulsatinging me. I see that I am the same person I have always been. It’s all One Thing. I AM the “whole world,” if only for just a moment. Or is the world…mine? Did I make it up? Or maybe none of it ever really existed at all? 

I may’ve merely sprained my ankle, but some other part of me has just died. I know it. I’m not the same person anymore, and I’m not ever going to be the same again. 

I call my husband who heads home to bring me to Urgent Care. I crawl into the den which has no lights on. The den faces east, always dark in the afternoon, but it’s the room I enjoy most when I want a quiet place to hide. I look up at the ceiling. The tile is cool. This floor was so harsh when I fell upon it a few dramatic moments ago, but now it’s like an old friend with its cool hand on my back. I lie here and concentrate on the window where roses are planted. I try to focus on anything other than this rising pain, the ache coming back, uninvited.  

Honestly, there are no thoughts in my head. I just wait for Joe and listen to the tinkling bells in my ears.