As Graham waited in
the cramped chamber, he found himself thinking again about the decisions he had
made in his life. For someone with an
aversion to being confined, he sure had chosen a life that kept him locked up
all the time. For nineteen years now, he
had lived without fresh air, cool breezes, a view of the sky . . . without the
feeling of the sun’s heat rising off a parking lot on a hot summer
afternoon. He lived in a temperature
controlled, humidity controlled, hermetically sealed outpost in the middle of a
toxic wasteland. Every day, he faced
walk-in refrigerators, control rooms, and decontamination chambers. Even his quarters often felt unbearably tight.
In South Dakota,
he had slept with his bedroom window open every night. Even when it got down to twenty below, he
nonetheless opened it just a smidge, so that he could feel his escape route, so
that the inside air would not crush him, so that he knew that there was more
space just within reach. He had now grown
used to sleeping with everything sealed up.
But more and more he longed to live in a normal house, a place that did
not require complicated precautions and security measures just to step out into
the world.
Graham’s skin
began to itch on his back. Then, around
his ankles. He looked to turn the air
conditioning up in his suit, but it was already at maximum. His breathing sped up. He was afraid he might hyperventilate. He needed to get out of the chamber and the suit
– and quickly.
He reached
subconsciously for his scar, but the glove and helmet got in his way. He practiced the breathing techniques that
the Army psychologists had taught him and tried to think about starry skies,
the expanse of the universe, and the view from the boat out on the wide-open
ocean. Instead, as always happened when
he was starting to feel boxed in, he was transported back to the day of his
first claustrophobic attack.
##
That morning, Graham
and his parents attended a pancake breakfast to raise funds for the local
soccer league. Graham was nine. A few years later, the town council held
those same events to help farmers keep their farms. But these were the good years. Corn prices were high, and Graham’s father’s
farm was doing well.
On their way back
from town, Graham’s father said that he needed to get some of the recently
harvested corn into the grain elevator before the rains hit. Graham offered to help, but his father declined.
When they got
home, Graham’s father got to work. Graham
made himself a glass of iced tea and sat down on the porch steps to look
through one of his favorite science magazines.
For half an hour, he read and watched the afternoon clouds darken as
they marched towards the farm.
As the first drops
of rain began to fall, Graham suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to put
away the broom he had used to clean out the main silo in the grain
elevator. His father was down beyond the
garden. Graham yelled down to him, but
he could not get his father’s attention.
He noticed the sweat stains on his father’s shirt and the irritation on
his face.
Graham put his
magazine and empty iced tea glass in the house.
As he walked down the porch steps, he felt the first-to-arrive,
windswept sprinkle of rain and that energized, unsettled air that signals the
coming of a major thundershower. A swirl
of dust rose up as Graham crossed the yard and stepped into the grain elevator.
There were four
silos in the grain elevator. A week
prior, Graham’s father had offered to pay him ten dollars to sweep out the
entire area, including all four silos.
It had taken him a few days, but eventually Graham had finished the
task. Entering the largest silo, Graham
saw his cat, Ginger. She had been very
pregnant, but was now looking visibly thinner now. Graham followed her to see where she had
given birth to her kittens. She quickly exited
the silo, jumped into a small ventilation shaft, and disappeared. He knew that his father would be filling the
silo soon and thought that all of the dust from the filling process would not
be good for the new kittens. He peered
into the shaft, but could see nothing.
“Hiding them from
me, huh?” Graham called into the darkness.
He called again to her, but she did not respond.
He figured she was
a capable mother and could tend to her litter, so he went back into the large,
dark silo to retrieve the broom. He propped
the maintenance door open with a small block of wood and entered the silo. The rain had picked up; the patter on the
corrugated steel roof high above quickened.
After a few moments of groping around, he located the broom and headed
for the door.
Just then,
however, he heard a high-pitched meowing, a kitten’s voice. A second later, Ginger reappeared, scooted
past Graham, and crossed over to the far wall.
She had circled back to protect her litter. He walked over quietly, his eyes adjusting to
the darkness. There, just a few steps
away, in a little ball, lay four, squirming kittens – new, blind, and
beautiful. Ginger lay down and wrapped
her body around the fury newborns. They
would need to get Ginger and her kittens out of there before they could fill
the silo. He got down on all fours and
approached quietly.
“Ginger, come on mama,”
Graham cooed. “You can’t stay here now.”
Ginger began to
yowl, low and deep. Graham inched closer,
and then Ginger barred her teeth and swatted at him with her sharp claws. She definitely did not want to be messed
with. His father would know exactly what
to do. Graham backed away, stood up, and
grabbed the broom. As he turned to head
out, he heard the silo door slam shut.
Graham walked over
to the door and gave it a shove. The
wind had closed it tight. He banged on
the door and called out to his father, but no one was there. Sweat dripped from Graham’s brow into his
eyes, and they began to sting. He legs
were shaking. He was no longer
interested in the kittens. He just
wanted out.
Then, all of a
sudden, the elevator’s conveyor belt started up. The machinery’s loud grind reverberated
through the silo’s walls. Ginger began
to screech and yowl. Bits of old husks,
dirt, and dried corn fell from the conveyor belt above, covering Graham, Ginger,
and the kittens with fine, dry dust. Graham
began to sneeze. After a few seconds,
loose, dry corn kernels started to fall into the silo. First, it was just a couple of grains hitting
the metal floor – ding, ding, ding . . . .
A small pile took shape in the middle of the floor. Then, quickly, the volume of grain
increased. And in an instant, a thick
waterfall of corn began crashing down.
Graham moved over to the edge of the silo, next to Ginger and the
helpless kittens.
The corrugated
steel walls began to shake as thousands of pounds of corn poured into the
silo. Graham banged on the walls, but it
was futile; the roar of the machinery and corn was like thunder. For a moment, he saw Ginger’s mouth as she
yowled, but he could not hear her. The
air filled with a thick, grainy dust that got into Graham’s eyes and quickly
filled his nose. He could not catch his
breath. He was gulping down air and
dust, coughing, sneezing, and gagging.
The corn kept
coming. He tried to keep it off of Ginger
and her kittens, but he could not block the flood of corn. The corn reached his knees. He continued to dig, trying to save the
cats. He got a hold of Ginger for a
moment, but as he lifted her away from her kittens, she sunk her teeth deep
into his hand. He tried to hold onto
her, but she was thrashing wildly in his grip.
She reached out and clawed him in the face, catching his eyelid
momentarily and then tearing a deep cut down his cheek. He screamed and dropped her.
The corn quickly rose
to his thighs. He frantically dug down into
the corn for the kittens, but it was too deep now. He had to give up. The corn reached his chest. He tried to push himself up onto of the pile,
but he could not stay on top. It was
coming too quickly now. He kept sinking into
the rising tide of loose corn. He
thought he would die, buried in the corn and asphyxiated by the dust. He could not catch his breath and began to
shake all over.
The corn reached his
neck when all of a sudden the conveyor belt stopped and the machinery fell silent.
Graham heard his
mother wailing from far away, somewhere outside. She was screaming, “He’s in there, he’s in
the silo! I know he’s in there! I saw him heading over here. Graham, where are you? Answer me!”
Graham tried to
call out to his parents, but he could not catch his breath. He was coughing and spitting corn dust. He managed a weak yelp. Then he cleared his throat, spat, and this
time, he yelled as loud as he could. He
heard the silo door opening. A dim light
shined from the opening as corn spilled out of the silo. Graham saw his father’s face coming up
through the corn as he climbed up into the silo from the maintenance door. His father crawled across the corn and
grabbed Graham’s hands. With a couple of
forceful tugs, his father pulled him up out of the corn and threw him toward
the open door. They slid down the slope
of corn that had spilled onto the grain elevator floor. Graham reached up and touched the cut under
his eye. His hand came away stained
red. His mother grabbed him and squeezed
him against her, repeating, “I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead . . . .”
Graham saw Ginger
skittering away out of the corner of his eye.
He could not stop crying. He could
not catch his breath. His mother took him
into the farmhouse before he could tell her or his father about the suffocating
kittens.
For the next three
months, Graham did his chores and went school, but barely spoke a word. Every night, he re-lived that moment in the
silo in the same recurring nightmare. The
corn fell, the dust suffocated. Ginger
and the kittens cried. The corn buried
his legs, his waist, his chest, and then eventually climbed up over his
thrashing head. Then it pinned him in place, and he could not move at all. The weight continued to increase, pressing
against his legs, arms, and chest. He was
frozen in place. He could not
breathe. In this dream, his parents did
not find him for months.
When he awoke from
these nightmares, one image always stuck in his mind: the broom and those kittens under all that
corn. It often made him sick, and he
would have to rush down to the bathroom to vomit. Then, he would sit alone on the linoleum,
stroking the developing scar under his eye until he felt calm enough to return
to bed. His mother took him to see the
school therapist and then to a psychologist in Sioux Falls. The nightmares gradually went away, but the claustrophobia
and the scar were indelible.
One afternoon, a
week before Thanksgiving that same year, his father came back from town with a
new pocket knife. It had a thick blade
and wooden sides. Burned into the wood
were Graham’s initials. He sat down with
Graham at the kitchen table and said, “Son, I want you to carry this pocket
knife with you everywhere you go, from now on.
It’s yours, okay? If you’d had it
in the silo, who knows, you might’ve been able to pop the hinges off and squirm
out of there on your own. It’s the best
knife they carry down at the hardware store.
It’ll last you – you don’t have to worry about that.”
Graham did as he
was told and carried the knife with him everywhere, never showing it at school,
keeping it under his pillow at night. Over
the years, his grease and sweat seasoned the wooden handle to a dark gray.
Graham reached
down. Through his hazmat suit, he could
feel the familiar shape of that pocket knife resting against his thigh. He held it tight as he repressed the waves of
panic that washed over him. He almost
screamed out twice, but managed to hold it in as he waited for the moment of
his release from the overheated decontamination chamber and stifling suit.