Make Straight the Path
A Story for Advent
“Kids, look up,” Mrs. Alexander snapped from the front passenger seat of the Windstar. “We only make this drive once a year and you’re missing all of it.” Her children made no reply. For the last two hours Gracie and Thoas had been punching furiously with their thumbs at their Gameboys, Christmas gifts from earlier that morning. Ori, too, said nothing, but rested his head on the cold glass of the backseat window. He was watching the plump drops of water that had condensed there from the fog race into one another, swelling and swelling, until finally they edged off, tossing themselves to the wind as the family minivan rounded curve after curve of mountain road. Beyond the glass were the vague shapes of thick trees, blurring by at a pace that seemed to exceed the speed of the van. The trees, Ori knew, extended far beyond the rim of what the fog had left visible into an impregnable wilderness.
Mrs. Alexander turned around. “I mean it, now, no more games. Ori, honey, are you feeling any better?”
“Not really,” he replied. His voice was low and weak. All morning long he’d felt a tight, pungent knot at the center of his gut, like it wanted to empty itself, empty though it already was.
“Do you need your father to pull over?”
“No, ma’am.” He paused. “Maybe.”
“I really wish you’d eaten something before we left.”
“Sorry,” he said, and then, “I wasn’t hungry,” which he knew was only partially true.
“Well,” said Mr. Alexander, easing on the brakes as he rounded another turn, “there will be plenty to eat at your grandmother’s. We’re running a bit late so she’ll want us to start eating as soon as we get there.”
“I bet she’ll have your favorites, Ori.”
He bet she did, too. The thought of the Christmas feast Grand-Mae had most assuredly prepared perked him up almost instantly. It was her crowning achievement year after year—a spread so formidable and decadent that on seeing it one might believe the Alexanders hadn’t eaten a thing since last year’s. And Ori, all of ten years old, had become the feast’s most reliable victor. He could all but see it now, laid buffet-style on the kitchen counter: green bean casserole, the kind with cream of mushroom and French fried onions; macaroni topped a half-inch high with at least three kinds of cheese; creamed corn; dinner rolls baked golden; ham, of course, glazed in brown sugar, honey, butter, and cloves; for those who prefer poultry, half a turkey brined in cider and slow-roasted to a crisp; and to wash it all down, at least three pitchers of sweet tea, glowing like amber beneath the recessed kitchen lighting. And that was just lunch. Dessert would follow closely behind. His mother had brought two pies with them, pecan and chocolate chess, nine inches each. All of it, all of it every year, was, in a word, delightful. The last two Christmases he’d gone back not only for seconds, but for thirds and fourths. “Just a little more,” he’d said with each successive scoop of macaroni. On finishing one glass of tea, he’d think, I’m still pretty thirsty…, then fill up another so that by day’s end he’d downed seventeen cups of the stuff.
The prospect of all of this in Ori’s mind hadn’t had much of a chance to loiter when suddenly his stomach lurched and a hot sap leapt up his throat, retreating back in what could have been the same instant, scorching his breath. He winced and swallowed hard. A bitterness lingered on the back of his tongue, a sickening sweetness at its front. Ori feared he would make a mess of the car—or rather, he feared the mess that would follow in the wake of having made a mess at all. Gracie and Thoas would be ruthless. They always were. They’d never let him forget it.
It wasn’t the first time he’d come close to heaving on the ride so far—a fact he would have accounted to car sickness were it not for similar episodes he’d endured all month. The first time it happened was just like any other day. Ori had stepped in the house from his family’s attached garage after spending the day at school, the first one back from Thanksgiving break. He dropped his bookbag in the mudroom, said hello and kissed his mother as she prepared dinner, walked into the pantry to fetch a box of Nilla Wafers and Nutella, which he’d enjoy, per habit, at the kitchen counter, with a glass of 2%, the noise of the evening news roaring over the hiss and sizzle of whatever was on the stove. He was just about to take a bite of the first wafer when his mother turned from the cooktop. “Oh!” she said, rifling through the newspaper on the counter behind her. “Something came in the Herald today, Ori…” She plucked a booklet from the stack and handed it to her son, perched atop a bar stool. “Your favorite!” she smiled, then returned to her cooking.
It was the Target Christmas toy brochure. Ori had for several years now cultivated a tradition of sorting through the brochure at this time of the year, pen in hand, circling his favorite candidates for what he’d like to discover beneath the tree on Christmas morning. In this, Ori had learned, as did untold millions of other children, a great deal. He learned, chiefly, just how many varieties of objects there were in this world that could be to him as mirrors—things in which he could find reflected even the subtlest of his wants and worries, things which announced to him all that he was not but very well could be, things which promised him agency and personhood and above all hours of unmitigated fun. And he learned this all without even knowing that he was being taught.
Even Mrs. Alexander took enjoyment in the brochure, but only after he’d made his way through it. Mostly, she liked to see what Ori circled. His markings were almost like a map of the boy’s personality, shifting and stretching in new directions every year, adopting arrangements hitherto unknown, taking up interests that were as fleeting as they were formative.
But as he began to flip through now, Ori felt nothing of the elation that he had in years past. Suddenly, it was as if the multitude of sounds cascading around him, all fractured and confusing, were at the same time crashing into him. It occurred to him later, once he’d gained some better sense, that he felt as if he had become the noise. Weird, was the first word that came to mind. But that wasn’t it. Funny, he might have said, if he hadn’t wanted to scream. For as he saw the multitude of toys and playthings sprawled out before him, he saw refracted a little glimmer of himself in each of them and found not an ounce of the promise or solace he once had. Everything seemed to be shifting round about him. His body, too, felt fraught, sliding every which way at once. His vision spun, his stomach tightened, his breath caught in his chest. And then, of course, the burning in his throat.
He had been thankful then that he was just a few paces from a bathroom where he could spit and rinse his mouth. But such luck was not a given in the episodes that followed. There didn’t seem all that much rhyme or reason to their onset, either—not as far as Ori could tell. He could be amidst the din of the afterschool living room or in the near-silence of only the sighing A/C, wandering dazed through a churning ocean of color or clenching shut his eyes to an endless black. No matter where he found himself, the episodes kept coming all the same. What had helped, even just in some paltry way, was refusing food and water for lengthy intervals throughout his day—hence the empty stomach on the way to Grand-Mae’s.
The familiarity of his nausea hadn’t dulled the experience of it, though. If anything, each episode formed at the front of his consciousness something of a wound, one that deepened and deepened and never healed.
His sickness, he was realizing, was way more than just one of the body. It was, in a sense, imaginary, though he intuited that it had only permeated into that sphere of his person from yet somewhere else—somewhere that felt at once both proximal and remote. Whatever the sickness was, the cruelest of its symptoms, the one he felt most keenly, was not the flux of acid at the mere suggestion of decadence; it was rather the sense that something essential in him was—how to say it? Off? Broken? Split into parts? And all the stranger was the sense that he had always been this way—that at the center of his person, by nature, as a fact of being alive, he was not one but many. Was he only just now, in this final month of the year, discovering himself, for himself?
He wondered now, watching the droplets on the window. Each little bead of rain was different, was by features visible to his right eye pressed to the chilled glass minutely distinguished from the others. And yet they were each of them rain, nonetheless. They had been born—had they not?—of the same clouds swelling over the range of rolling hills through which the Alexanders now wended. And those clouds, they were just another expression of infinitely many others, from the same water that has always filled the oceans, lakes, and streams of Earth.
Ori let his eyes become fixed for a moment on one singular droplet and followed it closely. It was alone, yes, but surrounded. And as it moved, it became the new center of another set of droplets around it, amassing those in its path to itself, swelling, engorging, through each of its glissandos.
Did there exist on this pane of glass a point at which they would all again be gathered to a single point? Not that he could tell... But as they flung from the car, what then became of them? Were they returned then to their source?
Ori had no answer to the questions that now paraded through his head. Among all of them, he wondered simply if anything could fix him.
Perhaps he should have just done as Gracie and Thoas and enjoyed his Christmas. He’d been given a Gameboy too. With hers, Gracie had received a game in which she could take care of horses in her very own stables. Thoas had gotten one that Ori couldn’t quite make sense of, but which intrigued him nonetheless; it featured a tiny man in red overalls that jumped and stomped on all kinds of creeping monsters, in search of a stolen princess. Both seemed like secret tunnels to worlds set entirely apart from this one. But it was no use entertaining this thought. It threatened to churn his stomach once more and alerted him afresh to the disparate nature of competing desire that now marked him indelibly. And besides—what was it he had discovered of himself if not a little world? The world of games was interesting, sure, but it was also limited. It had laws to govern it, a screen that bound it closed. In time, Ori would learn that the world he held within him had laws and limits of its own. There, though, he’d find that law would give way to freedom, and limit to something that knew nothing of constraint. Indeed, the more Ori thought about this little world making known its presence in him in the back of the minivan, it troubled him less and less. It even seemed now kind of nice to think that all of this was inside of him, each part with an ache of its own, each ache the expression something bigger than itself.
“Gracie! Thoas! I mean it!” Mrs. Alexander scolded. “If you’re not going to put those away, could you at least do us all the favor of turning down the noise? You’re making me regret even buying you the silly things…”
The toy in Thoas’ hands chimed a descending tune. “Stupid game!” he shouted, oblivious to all but what had so absorbed him on his screen. He struck it on the back of his mother’s headrest.
“That’s it!” Mrs. Alexander writhed free of her seatbelt, reached to the seat behind her, and snatched the toy from her eldest son.
“Hey, Mo-o-o-m! Give it back, I was so close to beating that level!”
“I don’t care, you can have it back tomorrow. You’ve lost your privilege for today. Gracie, you too.”
“Mom, no, please!” Thoas whined. “I’ll be better, I promise!”
“Hush,” she warned, grabbing Gracie’s game. “Ori, honey, it looks like we’re at the bottom of this mountain. The roads should be a little easier on your tummy for the rest of the drive.”
Ori pulled his head from the glass and looked past the watery beads. The shoulder of the road, still low and soft, had raised considerably. It seemed, too, that it no longer hugged in on itself, but now proceeded plumb through a thinning avenue of pine. Further back behind the Alexanders the fog was still thick, but here on this stretch was but a mist gently lifting from the forest floor and shining like an old gown in the mid-morning light. Ori looked up and saw suspended in the tulle-thin air the silver disc of the sun, parting the veiled air as with tender fingers. His stomach settled. In each bead on the glass the light echoed. He greeted it in silence, and, turning inward, greeted what he found there too.