The Lattice and The Maw

When I was seventeen, an exceptionally large surgical wound on my abdomen became infected and was reopened and then left open, like a mouth hanging in disbelief. It was almost the size that you could put most of your fist into, but you wouldn’t have wanted to, probably.

And of all the challenges of major surgery that also leaves a sort of Civil War-style maw right under your navel, the most striking was that I could just barely move my legs. When your stomach has a hole, you lie down a lot, and when you lie down, you need abdominal muscles to sit up again, and also to shift your legs to the floor, and to laugh at the realization that trying to do just about anything electrifies your body with pain so white brightly seering you cannot believe you will ever want to sit up again, for the gasping-choking brutality of the endeavor.

It was in between these moments of trying to move, with that pain so sudden violent that I was rendered prostrate again, that I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a text that had lain on our family hearth and invited me with a title so sneeringly, hopefully superior that I couldn’t be sure of its intended effect, which at seventeen I did not realize was exactly its intended effect.

But in this book, amid the unknowable tragedies of the author, offered to the reader for consideration, indifferent to judgment (but then really, really deferential to judgment, really, as any of us would be, as I am in writing this), Eggers offers The Lattice, the idea that we are all connected and must be to survive, that the more people to whom we are connected, the more the weight of our existence is spread across a surface, snowshoe-like, to prevent our falling through.

And I liked this idea and held onto it, because I am comforted that the more I push experiences out of myself, redistribute the weight of the maw and every other maw and also joy I have known, I am able to remain on the surface. And I have trusted the thought that in the same connection which keeps me above ground, others can also push outward from themselves, sharing and offering and sprawling, with the whole world of us waiting for the gentle addition of their weight, which to them is so impossibly great but to us is nothing, is manageable, is welcome. And then together, we remain, strong and ready, on the surface, in the light, connected and pushing and still alive.