One spring night, Armen waded along the riverbank into the shadows under a bridge. He noticed that the river level was rising. He climbed up the bank, and soon found himself trapped under the bridge by the rising water. The river continued to creep up the bank after him, compelling him into a culvert under the road. The river followed him up the concrete pipe. The culvert was longer than he’d expected. As the floodwater crept toward him, the pipe grew progressively narrower, and imperceptibly transformed into translucent rubber—like medical tubing. It was filled with light. “Daylight?” he wondered.
The water tickling his neck pressed him ever forward. As the warm river water crept up to his cheeks, he pressed his face upward into the latex tube, until he could press no further. He gasped for air and convulsed.
His body lurched and he gasped again. He awoke to find himself sitting on his bed, soaked in urine from his collar down.
The hot, pungent juice that spilled out of him at night left him feeling impotent against his own body.
Bed wetter, by Nat Meade
Adults believed that kids wet the bed to get attention, but the attention drawn by wet, smelly sheets and pajamas was attention that Armen could do without. Perhaps something deep within him had intended this outcome. Perhaps he had a subconscious need for isolation and exile. Perhaps pigs play pinochle.
Thus began a typical day, and the routine continued. He stripped down, pulled his sheets off his bed, rolled up the pajamas, underwear, and sheets into a big wet wad, and dumped it all in the laundry room on the way to the bathroom. He’d stuff it in the washer and start the load if the machine was unoccupied. He wasn’t much for household chores, but this was no chore: it was a crime scene. He avoided sleepovers, boy scouts, and any outing that might lead to sleeping in the presence of his peers. Beyond all that, Armen exhibited a general mistrust of his body and the circuitry that controlled it. He suffered from a slight tremor that forced him to clamp down with his fingers where others might simply rest their fingers in position. He couldn’t just rest a pencil between his fingers: he had to grab it as though he were in kindergarten. Though his right arm could move with a fluid motion that gave him a talent for the viola, yet he mistrusted his fingers as they gripped the bow frog or moved between finger positions on the fingerboard. “Relax your grip!” the old German music teacher would scold. Still, he practiced faithfully, hoping that one day something would fall into place.
It seemed to Armen that his tremor sometimes caused his very mind to quake. As challenged as he was during viola lessons, he was doubly handicapped on stage. The music on the page would begin to swim before his eyes. He could only hope to piece together the music as his eyes caught fragments floating by, like boards in a flood. He could capture a sequence from memory as he was cued by the others in the orchestra. This experience compelled him to memorize the music, though he was not a gifted memorizer.
Armen’s very grasp of language seemed tremulous. Sentences seemed to just flow out of others as though they spoke instinctively, as though they merely had to listen to themselves speak. There was little conscious effort involved, but not so for Armen. He often found himself deliberately constructing sentences. He wasn’t a stutterer, nor was he at a loss for words, but he failed to achieve fluency. The words in his head trembled like the notes on the music sheet. It was as though he were trying to speak a foreign language that he’d learned by memorizing a dictionary. He had enough words at his disposal, but he often missed the most familiar, most colloquial term. He spoke something like an English teacher who’d learned to speak English as a foreign language. He might have wondered whether this just wasn’t his country if he didn’t already know the problem to be too general for such petty paranoias.
All the trembling culminated in a vague sense that Armen was constantly striving to play at living, whereas other kids seemed to live quite naturally. He was an actor, a pretender—a stranger in town.