Beyond Repair

Living in a Fractured State

Sebastian Matthews

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781597098540
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A Southern poet and author shares a "beautifully written and timely" memoir that "weaves together personal and national traumas" (David Graham, The Atlantic ). In 2011, Sebastian Matthews and his family were in a major car accident. It took them years to recover from their injuries and the aftereffects of trauma. When Sebastian finally returned to the world, he found society in its own a traumatized state—one brought on by police shootings of unarmed African Americans and the continuing occurrence of mass shootings. Sebastian saw the signs of PTSD in the people around him, and found his own daily interactions becoming more dysfunctional. Living in a progressive town inside a conservative county in the Mountain South only made things more volatile. So he decided to pursue an experiment in re-engagement. Sebastian sought out encounters with people in full awareness of the potential divides and misunderstandings between them. Starting with his own neighborhood, he moved out into the counties around him, then traveled further out into the country. In Beyond Repair, Sebastian recounts his journey through a series of recoveries—physical, personal, and communal.

Rounding the Curve

Fall, 2012

A year out from our accident, and everyone asks, “So are you all better?”

I wince theatrically and give a more or less sign.

“Maybe eighty percent . . .” Though really some days it’s more like fifty.

“Well, you look fine,” they say. “You wouldn’t even know . . .”

Yeah, I think. How about that?

I’m in Chattanooga, about to head home; it will take a little over three hours across the mountains back to Asheville. I probably shouldn’t have come, but I wanted so bad to connect with people again. I’d become, out of necessity, something of a hermit, yearning through those many long months of rehab and recovery to return to a life before everything changed—back to my body, my writing life, my family, my friends.

On my first day in Chattanooga I went walking, heading out across the long, wood-planked boulevard that spans the wide Tennessee River: the center of a trio of bridges. The late afternoon light painted the sky a backlit blue screen riffled by breeze. Bicyclists drifted by. A parade of bodies thronged the bridge, each body bathed on one side by sun glaze. No one was in a rush, no one on his or her cell. And I kept walking, off the bridge and into the city, letting my mind take snapshots inside the massive tombstones of commerce it floated through. (Without realizing it, I asked a blind man for directions, and he pointed the way.) Soon enough I was passing back out onto a bridge’s arching spine; and, for a few moments, I was back fully in my body—floating atop an island of trees—in perfect balance, attuned to everything around me.

Sunday morning I wake to birdcall and the plaintive whistle of a far-off train. Lying in the dark, I assess my condition. Left hip tight. Body stiff and achy. Right leg a little weak, a dull pulse in the femur at each break. Left foot a block, stiff at the ankle, as though someone has strapped duct tape over the top of its arch and pulled tight. Even my rib cage makes itself known with a tiny blare of pain at the sternum where it hit the steering wheel. Getting dressed in the dark, balance slightly off, I sway a little putting on my jeans, nearly falling over. A quick cup of coffee before slipping out of my friend’s dilapidated Victorian. Mincing my way down the cracked stone steps.

Two hours into the drive home it starts to rain. Waves of gusty wind roll in. The traffic narrows but doesn’t slow . . . and now I am shaking like a ragdoll behind the wheel, surrounded on both sides by lolling big rigs. Afraid I am going to lose control of the vehicle, I pull off at the Newport exit. There’s an abandoned gas station just down the road; I park the car around back, let the seat down, and shut my eyes.

I open my eyes. A car is driving straight at us. I close my eyes. I smell the smoke pouring through the shattered windshield. I open my eyes. A grim-faced EMT is hovering above me.

“We’re going to have to pull you from the car, sir.”

I’ve been stuck behind the wheel for close to an hour, feet jammed up under the dash, only my ragged breath keeping me tethered to the earth. Ali and Avery have been sent to the hospital via ambulance. Ali is badly injured and our eight-year-old son, Avery, has walked away with seatbelt burns. I don’t know this yet, but the man who hit us suffered a heart attack, dead before his car drifted over the centerline into our lane.

Pull you from the car, sir.

My eyes open. Close. Open. A second EMT is leaning into the open door. Together the two men take hold of me, cradling me in their arms. Then they wrench me up and jerk me a quick left out and away from the dash. I scream. Black out. I wake up in the whirling roar of the helicopter lifting off the ground, on its way to the nearest hospital as storm clouds gather.

Certain experiences draw up the sudden impact. Bumping my head. The sound of tires screeching. A crowded hall or sudden loud report. That specific burnt tire smell. With each, a part of me returns to the scene. All the classic PTSD symptoms—triggers sending me into quiet panic mode, raising my heart rate, or shutting down any emotional response. Flight, fight, or freeze.

We live by a public golf course, and one morning, an errant golf ball careened into my windshield. I shouted out of fear, banging the wheel in rage. I shouted again. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Later, when I explained to Avery that ever since that ball hit the windshield I’d been jittery, he said, “Dad, you’ve been jittery ever since the accident.”

For a long time I resisted the hard truth of not being able to fully return to my old life. A traumatic event such as ours cleaves a life into before and after. You have to climb into a new life, hand over fist, one foot in front of the next. Recovery is less about return, or repair, than it is about re-creation. You must retrain yourself to enjoy life, to engage in it without fear.

The rain has stopped. A few hours erased. I edge the car out of the lot and onto the business road. No way in hell I am getting onto that highway. Instead, I turn up a back road and probe for a route through the mountains, gripping the wheel tightly on the steep grades and switchbacks. When I come upon a detour at a downed bridge and have to turn around and find an even smaller road to ascend, I swallow hard and retrace my route. I keep moving forward through the drizzle and fog. I drive mile after slow mile, passing tumbledown barns, a lonely horse in a corner of a tiny field, and a fast-filling river—up and up until I finally crest a ridge, atop one of the gaps this part of the country is famous for, high above the forested hills.

I pull over at the scenic overlook, and while I stare out into the valley, I think of the home I am heading back to. Ali will be getting ready for dinner. Maybe Avery is playing soccer with his friends. The dogs will be eager for a walk. I can take a shower and grab a quick nap before I join Ali in the kitchen. It will feel good to be back in our new, albeit tentative, routine.

These images bring with them a recollection: the first time after the accident that I bathed standing up. I remember stepping tenderly into the upstairs shower . . . after months in a wheelchair, then lugging a walker . . . I was free-standing, head down, floating around the little steamy bubble like a sunflower, the water just a notch under scald. It was a brand of free agency I had all but forgotten—an easy physicality in the body, an eager wakefulness to sight and sound.

And, in turn, this feeling carries with it a vivid memory of being eighteen, on my own in Senegal, returning to my host family after a day of wandering the Dakar streets, notebook and camera wrapped in a satchel. I’d do my teenaged best not to nod off at dinner (fish and potato stew, bottles of Coke at each place setting) then head upstairs for a shower. Standing naked in that room, as skinny as I’d ever been after a bout of something vaguely malarial, I felt incredibly alive, entirely alone. A sink against a concrete wall, a small unframed mirror hanging over it; a shower head propped up in one corner; the tile floor slightly tilted in at four angles, drain in the center; and a rectangular window high up on the other wall, with a view down on a neighborhood I had to tiptoe in order to see . . . The smell of evening fires, “Beat It” blasting from an old-model car . . . I’d stand under that ragged spray for as long as I felt I could, not wanting to take someone else’s hot water. I was inside and outside at the same time. In body, out of body. Happy, sad. Wildly alive and a little dead inside. And I wanted to extend that beautiful reset: the dark outside pulsing with layers of insect trill and car horns, and, underneath, domestic sounds from the neighbors wafting up through the window.

I pull back onto the road, a loose CD pushed into the slot, and now mellow reggae is seeping like heat from the speakers, the bass pulsing in the sun. The road winds south then west then southwest—and I am breathing in and out, deeply, as I did back in that locked-up car seat, pressed against that wheel. It saved my life then—literally, a doctor pointed out months later—and brings me back to my body, stilling the panic, placing me in my seat, in my hands and feet, lifting the haze that fogs up in my eyes. And it’s not long before I am electric again on the switchbacks. I drop down the mountain road through a cheering crowd of trees as Marley chants, allowing the wind and rain to wash over me. And, coming through a tunnel blasted through the mountainside, I am unafraid again, even a little adventurous, in love with unencumbered movement, the slight resistance in the wheel . . . just a little spurt of speed banking the turn . . .

White Men in Trucks

What is it about them that shoots a brief goose of fear into my bloodstream? Is it imminent threat sounding in the revved engine? Derision caught in the side-view mirror? Or plain old disdain drumming its fingers on the drivers’ side door? A little of each?! All I know is I am walking through our suburban neighborhood, and a truck barrels past, not slowing nor moving over. That another swerves around the bend, almost clipping my dog, meeting my upraised hands with a jutting middle finger. And another drives right up behind me and rides my bumper all the way up the hill.

Just yesterday, downtown Asheville, a man steps around me in line and interrupts the conversation I’m having with an acquaintance. He is showing me a photo of his five-year-old boy holding up a large fish caught in one of the Biltmore ponds.

The man steps in closer. “That a bream?”

He’s got a smile on his face that I read as hostile. He wants me gone. But the father ignores the man, finishing his sentence about the peaceful water and how quiet it is out there with his boy.

“Almost mystical,” he says.

The man interrupts again, smile getting bigger. “Hey, Mike, that a bream your boy is holding?”

Mike bursts into an equally large smile.

“Hell no,” he drawls, and lists all the fish his boy has or could have caught.

I don’t fish, so I don’t follow. Nor can I make clear sense of the quick-fire exchange. The two men have fallen into a bravado-fueled, friendly back-and-forth—it’s as if they’re flashing each other signs or showing each other their good-old-boy badges. I feel as though I am being erased from the moment, No Trespassing signs staked at my feet. The men chat and laugh in the corner as I slip back in line.

Later, at dusk, one more truck appears; it slows to a crawl and follows me up the street. What’s with people these days? Are they so sick of their lives that they need to lash out at strangers? To hate them for being something foreign or different?

I turn to face my nemesis, who has rolled down the window.

“Whadya want?”

The man smiles, remains silent. There’s power in a comfort with silence.

“How old is that dog of yours?” he asks, leaning out the window.

He’s talking about the lab, just a puppy, bounding over and standing up as if seeking the man’s arms. The man laughs. The look in his eyes is pure sadness.

Determined

She is famous among those who pay attention. Famous for walking back and forth along Tunnel and River Roads. She roams as far out as Bee Tree and far into town as the Asheville Mall, maybe further. That’s at least a ten-mile range. You can see her striding along the edge of the road most every morning and again in the afternoon. There’s something about the sight of her on the side of a road that hardly anyone dares to walk—handbag clutched to her side, blonde-white hair cut in a wedge atop her head—that you find strangely affecting. It’s hard to tell exactly, but you’d say she’s in her early sixties. Tall. Spine straight. Once, in a heavy rain, you pulled over and asked if she wanted a lift. She didn’t look at you, her face hidden, a quick shake of the head in the negative. You’ve heard this is the case for other people who have tried to l...