The dummies were crude, I tell them. Nothing more than sandbags shoved into clothes we no longer fit. Plus we needed flesh that could bruise and tell the story of steering wheels.
Photograph: Photograph © Edward Burtynsky from the forthcoming book Oil published by Steidl
Nervous Pig, Dreaming Pig by Michael Kissinger
On the second Thursday of the month, the community centre holds its Good Grief support group for fathers. The coffee tastes like cavity fillings and the pastries are leftovers from the bridge club. Nobody talks much, so the counsellor likes to bring me in to start things off. I can think of a dozen warm-up acts more interesting than me--fathers whose kids were killed by packs of dogs, homemade bombs, peanut allergies--but he keeps calling me back. Bring in that seatbelt inventor, someone in the group will say, even though I was just one of a dozen fellows in those early days of testing. But it doesn't matter. I tell them the same story every time, repeating the same details as before. Most of them know how it begins and how it ends and what I'll say from one sentence to the next. I suspect it's the certainty they like, although you can never be sure. The dummies were crude, I tell them. Nothing more than sandbags shoved into clothes we no longer fit. Plus we needed flesh that could bruise and tell the story of steering wheels. So the Colonel brought in hogs from Alamogordo. Pale, see-through pigs we injected with sleep and strung up in car seats swung from a crane that squealed with rust.
Sometimes the air got so thick in that Mojave heat, all we could smell was pig. Nervous pig, dreaming pig, broken pig, cooked pig. And the Colonel's eyes never left one of them. Not for a second. From the back of that shit-covered cattle truck to the makeshift spit and fire pit we would construct at the end of each sweat-stained day. Eyes nearly pulled out of his head the year before, during the last of those land-speed tests that made his face ripple like water.
I can't see a god damn thing, he had said over and over, trying to paw away the blood trickling from under his eyelids. Earlier he had told everyone how he was teaching himself to dress in the dark. Just in case.
Afterwards, when his eyes and wrist had mended, he calculated that at one point while strapped into that red rocket-sled with water buckets for brakes, his body weighed almost 7,000 pounds. His body that had slammed against the air like a bullet frozen in shot. Like God's foot had kicked his entire body, he laughed whenever Lillian wasn't around.
We had been filming and measuring God's foot kicking the Colonel across the desert for months. Nine tests in all. Before gravity had sucked all the sight from his bruised eyes for nearly 15 black minutes. Before the army had realized that no amount of data or injury would be enough for him. How do you stop a man who sees everything in a whirr of multiple momentums?
He used to talk about his two-year-old cousin he had nursed to heaven after a house fire. How the boy's body was brittle, folded up like a cricket, but still managed to squeeze out a few more weeks of life. How the speed of time, when brought to a near halt, can transform the passage of seconds into a beautiful, slow motion ballet.
Lillian liked that one, with all the dancing she had done in New York, and then having to wait for him to finish putting himself through all those god-awful tests so they could get married like he had promised.
Even after the wedding though, he had insisted that we return to the desert. All for the procurement of numbers. New numbers that informed us that pilots had a better chance of getting killed in traffic than in flight. Numbers that calibrated our speech, slipped through our sleep and measured the velocity and resistance of dreams. Dreams of fire and blindness and pigs.
My boy, my dead boy, was one for numbers as well. The only kid on his Little League team to keep his stats over the entire year. His batting average: .425. His earned run average: 2.31. His wins: 8. Losses: 3. Saves: 5. I swear that's what he was dreaming about that night we drove home after the rainout in Twin Falls. Where the highway was dark and slick as a frying pan from the accumulation of grease and oil after a season-long drought.
The first truckload of pigs seemed quieter than the others. As if news of the pig-seatbelt-tests hadn't made its way back to the farm like it did with the later batches. Out of all of us, the Colonel spent the most time with the pigs. Making sure that they had been given enough anaesthesia, that their still bodies were positioned in the best possible way to resemble that of a driver, that the angle at which they would swing lined up precisely with the steering wheel and dashboard that was secured into the ground below.
The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle, he'd always say, fretting over every last detail like a worried mother.
I was always telling my boy, my dead boy, to buckle up. You don't forget all that time spent in the desert. The slow and silent film footage of bodies counterfeiting death. The angle a ribcage on its way through a windshield clips the glove compartment. But he looked so tired. My boy with his head propped against his ball glove. His eyes twitching in secret code under his eyelids. The only one on his entire team who could pitch worth a lick, so they had him close both ends of a double header. Even played shortstop the next day when he should have been riding the bench. His arm stung. Felt like a wrung-out towel, he told me before drifting off into the twilight of oncoming headlights. I didn't have the heart to wake him.
Those years before I retired had been tough on him. No argument there. All that moving around and making new friends and finally getting his stuttering under control. Pitching helped that. Focussed his attention on the mechanics of his body. Broke down the process of movement, frame by frame, until he understood it, and could speed it back up into one fluid, unconscious motion. His speech therapist gave him tapes to read along with. Just single words at first. Thick, blunt syllables he could wrap his shaky tongue around and spit out without having to think twice. Then longer words, ones that carried different weights in them, different stresses that led into full-on sentences and paragraphs. Still, nothing too complex. Just simple recreations of familiar sounds and patterns most of us take for granted.
There's a sound that a hog makes just before it slips into unconsciousness. Almost a quick sigh, a short whiplash of breath. I remember the Colonel would always count to nine after hearing it. Then he would slap the pig's belly to signal it was ready to be hoisted onto the launching platform. Kind of like a good luck slap coaches give pitchers after a conference on the mound.
My boy, my dead boy, had numbers that were the best in his division. Probably top of the entire league. And smart, too. Came home from school just about every day with a new fact he had learned. How an object's acceleration is equal to the force acting on it, divided by the object's mass. Or how there are 206 bones in a human skeleton, half of which are in the hands and feet.
That first hog was the only one I still remember clearly. The popping prick of the needle into pink skin, that delicate sigh. The dry cinch of ropes, the whistle of pulleys, and the wind. A loud directionless wind that blew glassy shards of desert into our faces like buckshot. Even rattled the crane so much that the Colonel ordered us to keep the pig dangling high above everyone until it stopped swinging back and forth, and a more accurate accident simulation could be executed.
It was dusk before we got out of Twin Falls. To this day, I've never seen anyone sleep as soundly as my boy could. Never even woke up. Not even when the high beams of the semi hit the windshield and cast a beautiful sheet of blinding white light across our faces. Or when I tapped the brakes a little too hard thinking it would somehow make the road reappear. Or when the back end of our car fishtailed across the soft gravel shoulder and hurtled us down the grassy embankment. Or that split second when the car was airborne and I turned to my boy, my dead boy, and said, We're flying, thinking of the calm dream of suspension. Or when we came to a sudden silent stop in that nine-foot drainage ditch. And the wind rustled my sticky hair while he dreamt of numbers and I dreamt of pigs hanging from the crane above our heads, twirling about in sleepy half-circles.
When we finally launched it down onto the steering wheel, part of me half expected it to wake up, let out a cry of pain or annoyance that its slumber had been interrupted. But there was just a thick slap like the Colonel had done, and then nothing but squeaking pulleys and the slow breath of sleep.
A steering wheel shaped bruise formed almost immediately across the pig's soft belly. A driver's tattoo, the Colonel called it. For two hours the pig lay there on the examination table completing its dream from when we'd first put it to sleep or maybe starting a new one.
I don't even remember seeing my boy, my dead boy, go through the windshield. I remember opening my achy eyes and thinking that the bits of glass scattered across the hood of the car looked like jewels. And just beyond that, curled up against the bank, on a bed of diamonds, there he was. Still asleep, like nothing had even happened. I spent nine days in the hospital watching him sleep. Watching him finish his dream of numbers as his eyes darted frantically back and forth under the safe and familiar cover of smooth eyelid.
We measured the pig's bruises, bagged up the organs, logged as much data as we could under the sweltering sun, and then checked to see if the coals were hot enough.
I've never eaten so much barbecue in my life. My boy, my dead boy, made some crack about his plate of ribs being broken, and we all laughed.
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Michael Kissinger lives in Vancouver where he works as the arts and entertainment editor for a local newspaper. His writing has appeared in numerous North American literary journals and magazines, including the Journey Prize Anthology, Prairie Fire, sub-TERRAIN, Event and Saturday Night, among others.
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Monday, 7 September, 2009
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