When my brother Ike slid in the Lost Coast woods, he broke his neck. He lived through six operations that left him a paraplegic. With nothing to lose, and on a family friend’s recommendation, our long-divorced parents took Ike to see a curandera in New Mexico. Ixchel was a Mayan elder from Nicaragua, who the friend said was just as singularly impressive as John of God had been in Brazil, until he was discovered to have been another sex abuser. Our parents always fancied themselves great adventurers and would have gladly taken Ike to see her in the rainforests of Nicaragua, or anywhere on the globe for that matter. Outsiders of any race would consider them unusually adventurous for Black people. I can’t, of course, because your parents are unusual to you for different reasons. I don’t have all of the details of what happened with the curandera, because I did not witness it. I decided to stay at the motel with Ulla, the big Finnish girl I was seeing at the time.
My parents were there for the medicinal teas Ike was instructed to drink, but they weren’t allowed in the room where he spent the short time alone with the curandera. Not one of them could speak when they returned from the experience. Not a single word was uttered when they first got back to the motel. My mother’s eyes were glazed jelly, like a doll washed up from the night sea and dragged ashore. Ike was in his wheelchair, all closed in on himself. He looked like a newborn slumped in a toddler’s car seat. Then Dad told Ulla and me what happened. He walked! He shouted. He kept repeating it over and over, louder and louder until he tired himself out. Then he was crying. Balling, really. This was embarrassing Ike who spread his fingers wide like a game show host, and announced himself neutered, a loser, a gimp—everything we heard every day. Still my father wouldn’t snap out of it.
Ike had eight years on me, he was a stranger. I was born shortly after our parents’ divorce, and they called me Jane like an afterthought. Ike played in bands, he painted, he made shorts. For a while he was learning stop animation and getting pretty good at it. A review called his last one “transcendent.” But then he abandoned all of it. Even the band that was really beginning to hit, maybe even especially because it was. During my second year in college, he went to work in a homeless shelter. Of course this kind of work doesn’t preclude creativity, but he decided to make it so. Everyone everywhere loved him, anyway. Who can’t appreciate that sort of selflessness, and even if he hadn’t done any of it, he never had to prove anything to win everyone’s love. And before the accident, he didn’t seem to need anyone, ever.
He left the shelter and moved from L.A. to the Lost Coast ten years ago when everyone else he knew was moving to Portland. He set up camp in the woods, miles from the beach, and everyone up there was breaking national park law. Really, he was homeless. Ulla and I went to see him. We met him not quite halfway from where he lived. We were staying in some scary little town’s motel, as close as you could get, as far as allowed by car. Ike actually looked amazing, otherworldly, like out of some other dimension, coming from the Sinkyone Wilderness. Ulla brought Ike a sixty-five-dollar bottle of aquavit—it was my idea to give him some sort of offering, like you have to bring some sort of offering to a god like my brother.
He made a fire, and we sat around listening to the snaps, pops and crackles, and passing the bottle around. I was shivering even after the fire really got going, and I didn’t feel the alcohol at all, at first. It was freezing up there, the tips of my fingers felt bitten off. None of us tried to make conversation, and after a while I found myself wanting an apology from him for putting the family through so many episodes and cliffhangers, not the least of which was this one. And then Ike asked Ulla about the Finnish band scene, they got to talking about heavy metal—they were throwing band names back and forth, none that I recognized, until she wrapped it all up by saying she felt like the scene was certainly nothing to keep up with and that was just one reason why she left the country. Ike didn’t care either way. I took her hand and rubbed them between mine like it was wood I was trying to spark. A part of me was jealous that she needed to impress him. I wanted her to roll her eyes at him. She has a really cold side to her that was nowhere to be found just then. I stopped drinking, and so did she, and he kept the bottle in his hand.
On his way back, Ike slid in the woods and broke his neck. I thought I felt him the very moment it happened, but I didn’t actually find out about the accident for two whole months. He was lucky someone found him and got him to a hospital within some three hours after it happened.
The first months of being a paraplegic, living at home with mom, he started calling himself PP with what he thought was humor but only came off pathetic. He’d say PP has to peepee, then look at mom with this wild look in his eye. This became more sickening to me than the accident itself. More sickening than the fact that our parents still mess around, while now both married to other people. It’s not the ethics of the thing, it’s the confusion. Like what is the turn on, anyway? Ike became an alcoholic when he was never a drinker before. And I won’t dwell on the fact that we were the ones who brought the booze that did him in. Ulla thinks I’m good at non-guilt. I just know that everyone is responsible for his own life, is all. The mind is a powerful thing. Consider chaos magic. That’s why the curandera incident led to all of us having to start from scratch with our beliefs.
I first met Ulla at a drum circle in Venice Beach, which of course is an eye-roller. Ulla had a Mexican boyfriend who was raised Pentecostal, and at the circle, he started speaking in tongues, and freaking everybody out — even though most of them were high on whatever, and one of them announced he’d just gotten out of prison. The boyfriend sounded like he was burning up, like he was in an epileptic fit, like he was speaking through the spirit of Lucifer. Maybe I exaggerate, but this is how I remember it, the voice piercing through skin to bone. The circle started to break up a little after, and I noticed the tension between Ulla and her boyfriend, the nipping at one another after the boyfriend had come down from the high of his glossolalia. I think she felt he was acting superior, leaving her out of the shine of divinity. If I know her, she’d probably given him shit, and he didn’t let her get away with it. While he was ignoring her and talking to one of the better drummers in the circle, I got to talking to Ulla. We were asking each other typical questions about where the other was from, but I could feel how she was drawn to me, and anyone on the outside could see she was drawn to anything utterly different than herself. Still on the inside there was this instant kinship, and I could feel there was also the possibility for more.
A guy from the circle said he was crashing at a house on the canals, and he said this rather loudly to get Ulla’s attention. He’d brought up the stocked fridge and the view, and his “killer playlists” on the “sick sound system” and he was too old and corny for us, and reminded me of Alan Alda who my grandmother always liked, but he had this giant bobbing Adam’s Apple. His name was Burt, but I actually heard “Burp” and kept calling him that by mistake until the fourth time when he corrected me.
During the walk from the beach to the canals, the three of us were doing musical footing, walking in varied twos, or single file, down the crowded sidewalks, and whenever Ulla was in front of me, I was staring at the incredible contrast of her dyed black hair that she had tied up in this strangely conservative bun, and her pale pale skin, with these eyes that looked like hot coals popping out of the snow. The house in the canals ended up being perfectly fabulous, with a large patio overlooking the moonlit water, and he took us out on the gondola parked in front, on this smooth and beautiful ride, with ducks sometimes sailing out before us, creating skirts of the water. This was how things started between Ulla and me. Mosquitoes were nipping at me, but not Ulla, and she expressed genuine compassion. She looked at me with those burning eyes and I kissed her right there, behind Burp, who was kind enough neither to even hint at being turned on, nor for wanting to take advantage of either of us. After he pulled up the gondola and tied it securely with a tenderness that kind of moved me, he showed us the bedroom we could have for the night, and in the morning the three of us had breakfast on the patio, butter toast with sliced avocado and the best coffee I’d tasted in so long, all as we watched the Saturday morning locals and families of tourists walk by. I spotted a couple of ducks I recognized from the night before, as if they were friends, and all of it was a perfect kind of peace.
What happened is that the curandera saw the light inside of Ike and then he saw it. He saw his own light beaming off of him, and he felt it glowing from him, and so he got up and walked. He walked out of the room and into the waiting room, the parlor, my mother called it. He walked in front of everyone there, the eight or so waiting for their healing and our parents. Ike’s eyes got wide, my Dad said, they got so wide, it was like they were going to burst out of his sockets. And then he fell. Head first. He just couldn’t hold onto it. When I think about it, as I imagine it, as they told it to me, and I picture all of it, and that fall just after he really got the fact that he was walking, it feels so true about everything. Like there is no real bandwidth to conceive of a miracle being true. Like it had to be some trick of the imagination, some sleight of hand by the curandera—even with all the witnesses. And still, he walked, he did walk, that’s a fact.
A month or so after the miracle, my brother’s nurse found him dead in bed. He had been on every pain med one can name and had OD’ed on codeine. From Ike’s point of view, I can see it, of course, he had to be thinking, maybe every day for that month, What do you do if you walk once for one moment of some random miracle, and then never get up again? I cried, of course, but long long after. I cried after the senseless waste of it all, which started with him leaving his talents behind to work in a shelter. Who all did he help? What happened to those people? And then he ends up leaving all that to live in the woods. What was he thinking? What was he trying to find? A moment to break his neck? And then yes, what’s worse, seeing the light for just this one fucking minute. He walked, I tell you, and now he’s dead. Tell me, help me, make sense of it.
Contributor Notes
Lisa Teasley is the author of the acclaimed novels Dive and Heat Signature, and the award-winning story collection, Glow in the Dark, published by Bloomsbury. Teasley’s new story collection pubs in September 2023 on Cune Press. She is the writer and presenter of the BBC television documentary “High School Prom.” Lisa’s essays, stories and poems have been much anthologized, appearing in publications and media such as National Public Radio, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Essence Magazine, Parabola, Joyland and Zyzzyva.
Lisa Teasley has taught writing at UCLA, UC Riverside, Antioch University, and Cal Arts MFA Writing Program; she has lectured and led writing workshops around the world including in China, Haiti, Indonesia and Nigeria.
A visual artist as well, Lisa Teasley’s painting “Clymenza” was on the cover of the Fall 2021 issue. “Study of Vinzula,” is the cover art for the Summer 2022 issue. Her homepage is lisateasley.com, IG @lisateas, and Twitter @thelisateasley
Photo Credit: John Vlautin
