Half-Raised

The floor is cold. Colder than it should be. I'm face down on it, my left cheek against the tile. I'm not getting up. It's not that I won't. There's nothing left in me that can.

My eyes are open. Six inches from my face, a line of grout runs off toward the tub. The little nightlight by the sink is on. The cabinet above the sink is open. The bottle's on its side on the counter, and some of what was in it's in my left hand. I know all of it without turning my head, without deciding to look.

There's a stretch of that night I don't have. I don't remember the hallway or the cap coming off. I remember the mirror, the telephone against my ear, and pieces of what happened at the counter. Then it's gone. Then nothing. Then the floor. Somewhere in the part I've lost, a decision got made, and it wasn't me making it. I could be walked the whole way to a floor like this without once feeling like the one deciding. I never felt like I was choosing the direction.

I can't feel my left arm. I'm in a fetal position and I don't remember getting there. There's a wet place on my chest and I don't know what it is. I'm not afraid of it, and that's the part that's strange. The cold has come up out of the tile into the muscle along my ribs, and it isn't leaving. Neither am I.

My hand stays shut. I can't tell if it closed when I went down or if it's closing now. I'm not going to tell you what the label on the bottle said. Not now, not ever. The label isn't the question. The question is what happened in that room, and why my hand stayed closed.

If you'd seen me that afternoon, you'd have called me fine. Everyone did. Big man, six feet tall, built like a Viking, full white beard. Fifty years old that day. The one people came to when they came up short, never the other way around. I'd just built my family the house we'd always wanted, and I loved them more than anything on earth. Nobody looked at me and saw a bathroom floor ahead, including me. The strong one spends his life making sure nobody worries about him. You don't get walked to a floor like this in one night. It takes years, and the whole way down looks ordinary until it doesn't. Tonight is only where mine stopped.

My mouth's gone dry. I can't tell if I'm breathing in or out. I'm above myself now, looking down at the floor and the hand and my own bare back. The man on the tile isn't deciding anything. I'm not either. Something else in that room is.

I was raised in church, and somewhere down the years it wore off. By fifty I didn't believe in much I couldn't see or put my hands on. Then something came into that bathroom that I've never been able to explain and have never once been able to call nothing. I went down onto that floor sure of what was real. I've been unsure ever since.

It wasn't a light. There was no tunnel, no figure in the doorway, no voice telling me what to do. I've gone looking in other people's stories since, and it was none of that.

What came next wasn't something I saw. The bathroom was still eight feet by ten, but I could no longer feel its edges. The ceiling, the walls, even the tile under my cheek seemed farther away without moving. There was only a size I couldn't measure, a void with no far side, and, inside it, a safety I had no reason to feel. My body was still on the floor, or so I thought. Whatever part of me could feel that safety was somewhere else, or everywhere in that space at once. I don't know. I only know I was no longer alone in the same way.

Then came something I've since called a smell because smell is the closest word I have. I don't know whether it was in the air or only in my mind. I didn't lift my head or breathe in to test it. But roses, talcum, and a third note I've never found a word for were suddenly as present as the cold tile under my cheek.

It wasn't the soap at the sink or the clean bleach smell of a bathroom. It wasn't anything anybody in that house wore. The recognition came before the name: an old perfume, one that had lived in my childhood so completely that I'd stopped knowing I remembered it.

My mind went to my grandmother. Nonie. Her house, her clothes, every room where I'd been a boy and felt safe without having to watch anyone first. I can't tell you whether I smelled her perfume in that bathroom or whether some deeper part of me reached for the memory of it. I couldn't tell then. I still can't.

There was no way it could be in that room, but it was. Nonie had been dead for well over a decade. I knew that, and I knew my whole mind had gone to her. I couldn't make those facts fit. I still can't. Whether the perfume was in the air or the sense of it rose from somewhere in me, the recognition was real.

What came with that recognition was the way she'd cared for me as a child. She could sit with a frightened boy without asking him to explain himself. She didn't need him to be brave before she made him feel safe. She stayed. She asked for nothing. On the floor, before I understood any of it, that was the feeling that found me.

I didn't hear a voice. I didn't see her. Nothing in the room told me what to believe. Whether the feeling came from Nonie, from God, from my own mind, or from somewhere I still have no language for, I can't tell you. But it carried one thing I understood without words: Stay. Not yet. Stay. And the decision that had carried me into the bathroom was no longer moving forward.

My hand stayed shut. I don't know whether I was holding it closed or whether something in me had changed before I understood it. The feeling stayed in my throat, on my skin, perhaps in the air, perhaps nowhere but inside me. I was too still to test it. All I knew was that I was being kept company the way she used to keep me as a boy, and nothing was being asked of me.

I'd spent fifty years not asking for help, and I still didn't ask on the floor. Whatever happened didn't wait to be asked. Nothing demanded an explanation. Nothing required me to get up, pull myself together, or tell anyone I was fine. I could be exactly what I was, a man who couldn't get off a bathroom floor, and still not be alone. That's why, when I look back, the word I reach for is love.

I started to cry, not because I understood what was happening, but because, for the first time in my grown life, I felt safe without having to prove I was fine. The hand stayed closed. The next thing didn't happen. Whatever had interrupted me hadn't explained itself. It had only made room for me to stay.

I don't know how long I was down there. The cold kept working into me. Out past the door, the house made the same low hum it always made, like nothing at all was happening. My hand stayed shut. The question I'd carried into the bathroom was no longer settled. Does he stay, or does he go. I didn't know. Something had interrupted the answer.

I'm not going to talk about how that night ended yet. First there's how I got to the floor.