Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction by Lex Williford, Michael Martone

town.
     
       
    Despite my efforts to ignore it and to despise it, I am still susceptible to the mean — a magnet that pulls even flesh and bone. For some time I entertained the idea that my spine might have been straightened by my long-held misconception that normal spines were perfectly straight. Unknowingly, I may have been striving for a straight spine, and perhaps I had managed to disfigure my body by sitting too straight for too many years. “Unlikely,” the doctor told me.
     

    A force 6 wind on the Beaufort scale, a “Strong Breeze,” is characterized by “large branches in motion; telegraph wires whistle; umbrellas used with difficulty.”
     
       
    Over a century before preliminary scales were developed to quantify the wind, serious efforts were made to produce an accurate map of Hell. Infernal cartography was considered an important undertaking for the architects and mathematicians of the Renaissance, who based their calculations on the distances and proportions described by Dante. The exact depth and circumference of Hell inspired intense debates, despite the fact that all calculations, no matter how sophisticated, were based on a work of fiction.
     
       
    Galileo Galilei delivered extensive lectures on the mapping of Hell. He applied recent advances in geometry to determine the exact location of the entrance to the underworld and then figured the dimensions that would be necessary to maintain the structural integrity of Hell’s interior.
     
       
    It was the age of the golden rectangle — the divine proportion. Mathematics revealed God’s plan. But the very use of numbers required a religious faith, because one could drop off the edge of the earth at any point. The boundaries of the maps at that time faded into oceans full of monsters.
    Imagination is treacherous. It erases distant continents, it builds a Hell so real that the ceiling is vulnerable to collapse. To be safe, I think I should only map my pain in proportion to pain I have already felt.
     
       
    But my nerves have short memories. My mind remembers crashing my bicycle as a teenager, but my body does not. I cannot seem to conjure the sensation of lost skin Without actually losing skin. My nerves cannot, or will not, imagine past pain — this, I think, is for the best. Nerves simply register, they do not invent.
     
       
    After a year of pain, I realized that I could no longer remember what it felt like not to be in pain. I was left anchorless. I tended to think of the time before the pain as easier and brighter, but I began to suspect myself of fantasy and nostalgia.
     
       
    Although I cannot ask my body to remember feeling pain it does not feel, and I cannot ask it to remember not feeling pain it does feel, I have found that I can ask my body to imagine the pain it feels as something else. For example, with some effort I can imagine the sensation of pain as heat.
     
       
    Perhaps, with a stronger mind, I could imagine the heat as warmth, and then the warmth as nothing at all.
     

    I accidentally left a burner on the stove going for two and a half days — a small blue flame, burning, burning, burning…
     
       
    The duration terrified me. How incredibly dangerous, so many hours of fire.
     
       
    I would happily cut off a finger at this point if I could trade the pain of that cut for the endless pain I have now.
     
       
    When I cry from it, I cry over the idea of it lasting forever, not over the pain itself. The psychologist, in her rational way, suggests that I do not let myself imagine it lasting forever. “Choose an amount of time that you know you can endure,” she suggests, “and then challenge yourself only to make it through that time.” I make it through the night, and then sob through half the morning.
    The pain scale measures only the intensity of pain, not the duration. This may be its greatest flaw. A measure of pain, I believe, requires at least two dimensions. The suffering of Hell is