Some Settling May Occur

The Owner's Manual You Never Got

The sock was on the floor, where socks live, and I bent to retrieve it the way I have bent ten thousand times in this life, and somewhere on the way down a sound came out of me. Low. Involuntary. A sort of geological unngh, the noise a porch makes in February. I have heard that noise exactly once before, every single Sunday of my childhood, rising up out of my father as he lowered himself toward his shoes.

I stayed down there a moment, holding the sock, recalculating.

Because here is the thing nobody warns you about, and I mean nobody. There was no ceremony. No registered letter. At no point did a calm official arrive at the door with a clipboard and say, Congratulations, your warranty has entered its interesting phase; please review the following changes to your terms of service. I simply woke up one ordinary Tuesday in a body that had, overnight and without my signature, begun shipping with new sounds installed.

And it occurred to me, crouched there on the rug, the sock dangling like a small white surrender flag, that I had never been given the manual. Not for any of it. They handed me a body the way you're handed a complicated appliance at a yard sale — runs great, mostly — and then the previous owner pulled out of the driveway fast, and that was the whole orientation.

Here is what I have since worked out, on my own, the hard way, which is the only way anything gets worked out around here.

You are a product. I mean that warmly. You have been on the shelf a good long while now — handled, shipped, knocked about in transit, left in a hot car at least twice — and midlife is simply the season when the fine print, the part printed in the gray ink the color of regret, finally begins to apply to you personally. Some settling may occur. Contents may have shifted during shipping. For best results, lie down. You skimmed all of that once, decades ago, and clicked I Agree, because everyone clicks I Agree, because the alternative was reading it, and who has the time when you are nineteen and immortal and can sleep on a friend's hardwood floor and wake up delighted.

Well. The terms have updated. They always update. And the updated terms are the missing pages, and these missing pages are the book you are holding.

Allow me to escalate, because the back was only the beginning.

There is the menu, of course. The menu, which used to sit at a friendly conversational distance, now must be held out at arm's length like something you found in a drawer and aren't sure is still good. Then there's the standing-up, which now comes with its own soundtrack and, increasingly, a brief verbal announcement — okay — said to no one, to the room, to the house itself, as if the act of rising has become a small project requiring the consent of a committee. And then there is the matter of names, of walking briskly and with great purpose into a room to retrieve a thing, and arriving, and discovering that the thing, the entire reason for the journey, has been quietly confiscated at the threshold by an unseen hand. You stand there. You are a person in a room. That, for the moment, is all the information available to you.

And then it got worse, which is to say it got familiar, which around here is the worse part.

Because the noise — that low geological unngh over the sock — was not a malfunction. I want to be very clear. It was not a glitch in the unit. It was an inheritance. It was delivered. It came down to me from my father, who got it from his, packed carefully in the same crate as his laugh and his way of standing in a hardware store as though he had nowhere else on earth to be. The sound was always coming. It was in the box the whole time, taped to the underside of the lid, waiting for the right Tuesday.

Which brings me to the man — picture a person, entirely hypothetical, no one you know — who threw out his back reaching for the television remote. A man felled, mid-evening, by the act of reaching for the device that exists solely so that you do not have to reach for anything. He went down hard. And as he lay there on the carpet, taking inventory, taking it bravely, his very first instinct — and this is the part I find magnificent — was to file the injury as work-related. A workplace incident. Something the institution should, in fairness, cover. He lay there composing the claim in his head, dignified, aggrieved, fully prepared to name the responsible party.

And he could not, for the life of him, name the workplace.

So. Before we go one page further, let me give you the document itself — the Owner's Manual You Never Got — and read you the fine print aloud, the way someone should have, decades ago, before they pulled out of the driveway.

Read carefully and retain for your records.

This book is for laughs and for company. That is the entire function of the unit. It is not medical advice — the body, with all its new sounds and shifting contents, is a doctor's department, and a doctor is a real person with a degree, which I am decoratively not. It is not legal advice — the will, the estate, the careful folder of arrangements, all of that belongs to a lawyer. It is not financial advice — the retirement, the money, the long arithmetic of the years ahead, that is a qualified professional's table, and you should sit at it. Every person in these pages is hypothetical, assembled from spare parts, resembling no one and therefore everyone. No statistic herein was ever harmed in the making of this book, because there are none; I made up nothing factual and everything else. Results may vary. They will. They are supposed to.

There. That's done. We never have to be solemn again.

Now — what can I actually promise you, having promised you no cure?

Nothing in a jar. I want that on the record. There is no cream in this book. There is no serum, no protocol, no dawn regimen, no firm and reasonable plan to defeat time in eight weeks. I am not selling you the back of your own neck. What I have instead is smaller and, I think, harder to come by: the specific relief of opening a book and finding your own creaking, forgetting, beloved life already in it — the noise over the sock, the arm's-length menu, the room you entered for reasons now sealed — set down by someone who's been winging it precisely as badly as you. Recognition. Company. The lights on in the next house over.

And one quiet hint, which I'll only set down lightly here and pick up again at the end, when we've earned it: that settling — the thing the label warns you about, the thing a house does in the night — may not be a defect at all.

Which is why this first page comes with a card.

Call it the Warranty Card. Here is the whole exercise; it takes a pen and a minute of honesty. Write down one thing your younger self assumed, without a flicker of doubt, would last forever — and didn't. The knees, maybe. The metabolism that once forgave a midnight sandwich without comment. The talent for sleeping on a friend's floor and rising restored. Name the one thing. Look at it on the page.

Now forgive it. Out loud is better. It did its years; it carried you here; it owes you nothing.

Then turn the card over, because here is the part the fine print buried: you were never only under that warranty. There's another one, quieter, that doesn't cover the knees and was never going to — and it's the better policy by a mile. It covers the laughing. It covers the people on both sides of you. It covers being here at all, settling, unngh and all, on the rug, holding the sock.

It does not expire.

I Slept Wrong: A Memoir of Injuries With No Origin Story

I woke on a Tuesday unable to turn my head to the left, which is a problem, because the left is where most of my life is kept. The coffee maker. The window. The person I married, who was lying there breathing the slow, smug breath of someone whose neck still rotates. I lay flat and stared at the ceiling like a man who has been told not to move and has, after long consideration, decided to obey.

Here is the thing nobody warns you about, the line they leave out of the brochure: somewhere in your forties, your body stops requiring a reason.

Up to that point there had been rules. You wanted an injury, you had to earn it. You fell off something. You lifted a thing that was, on reflection, a stupid thing to lift. There was a story — a precipitating event, a witness, a moment you could point to and say, there, that, that's when it happened. Injuries had origin stories. They came with receipts.

Not anymore. Now the body has become a haunted house that breaks its own windows in the night and then, by morning, blames the weather. You hear nothing. You do nothing. You go to bed a sealed and reasonable structure and you wake up to find a pane shattered on the kitchen floor, the curtains stirring, and not one single sign of forced entry. And there you are, the homeowner, the only suspect, standing in your own hallway in your socks, taking notes on a crime that has no perpetrator and no motive and absolutely will not be solved.

Consider the pulled muscle sustained while sleeping.

I want to sit with that one. Sleeping is the most restful activity available to a human being. It is, by design, the part of the day during which you are doing the least. You are horizontal. You are unconscious. You have voluntarily surrendered all command of your limbs to a brain that, as far as anyone can tell, spends the whole eight hours showing you a low-budget anthology series in which your high-school gym teacher appears, inexplicably, as a dolphin. And somewhere in there — between the dolphin and the dawn — a muscle along your ribs decides it has had enough and files a complaint. You did nothing. That is the entire problem. You did nothing, with great commitment, for eight hours, and you woke up wounded.

So I retraced it. Of course I retraced it. I'm a grown person; I have the dignity to demand a narrative. I lay there and ran the security footage of the previous day frame by frame, hunting for the heroic moment, the one bold deed that had laid me low.

Nothing.

I had stood up from a chair. I had carried a laundry basket the regulation eleven feet from the machine to the couch. I had reached — and here my heart lifted, here at last was a candidate — I had reached for a glass on a shelf that was, admittedly, a shelf. But it was the second shelf. Nobody is defeated by the second shelf. You cannot tell people you were hospitalized in a daring raid on the second shelf.

And that is when it got worse, because that is when the retracing failed entirely and I had to fill in the incident report by hand, and under Cause of Injury, after a long and honest examination of the facts, the only thing I could write — the only true thing — was:

Tuesday.

That's the turn. That's the moment the floor drops out. You realize you no longer need a reason; you just need to have woken up. The injury isn't a consequence of anything. It's a subscription. It renews automatically. You are no longer being billed for services rendered; you are simply, gently, perpetually, being charged.

It escalates, naturally. These things always escalate.

There is the neck that goes while you are checking a blind spot — a maneuver so routine, so foundational to the act of not killing strangers, that they make sixteen-year-olds do it. You turn your head to see whether it is safe to merge, and the act of confirming that you will not die in traffic becomes the act that injures you, which is the universe showing off. And there is the back. Oh, the back. The back that holds its peace through decades of genuine abuse — the moving of couches, the catching of toddlers mid-flight — and then, one ordinary afternoon, is thrown into open rebellion by a sneeze. Not even a remarkable sneeze. A sneeze of merely ordinary enthusiasm. You feel it building, that small civic event, and you let it out the way you've let out forty thousand before it, and something near your fourth vertebra reads the moment as a declaration of war and locks the gates. You are now a person who has been hospitalized by his own face.

I told the person I married about the sneeze. I expected sympathy. What I got was a long look, the kind you give a printer that has jammed for no reason on a document you needed, and the words, "You have to warm up for those now." For sneezes. I am to stretch before involuntary reflexes. There is a pre-flight checklist for being startled.

And it is hereditary, this whole arrangement — that's the part that ambushes you. I caught myself bracing a hand on the small of my back as I rose from the floor, and the noise came out of me, that low ancestral ohff, and I understood, with the cold clarity of a man finding his father's face in the mirror, that I had not invented it. I had inherited it. It had been lying in wait in me for forty years like a sealed envelope marked open at this age.

Then there is the matter of the freelancers — the finger, the hip, the shoulder. These do not bother with an event at all. They don't even pretend. One morning the shoulder simply begins to hurt, the way a faucet begins to drip, and when you consult it about a timeline it informs you, with the serene confidence of a contractor, that it will be hurting for approximately one year. A year. It will heal when it feels like it. It is on its own schedule, answers to no one, and will not be hurried by ice, heat, rest, motion, hope, or bargaining. The hip is the same. The finger you can no longer fully straighten has clearly read the same memo. They have unionized. They take turns.

Which is how I have come, with what I insist on calling great dignity, to a single unavoidable conclusion about that Tuesday morning and the neck that would not turn:

I was defeated, in single combat, by a pillow.

It is the only honest verdict. I went up against a rectangle of foam, unarmed and asleep, and I lost. There was no kayak. There was no avalanche. There was a pillow, and there was me, and only one of us walked away able to look both ways.

So here is the one thing I'll hand you, the page torn out of the manual nobody gave us. Start an Injury Origin Log. A small notebook, by the bed. And every time a part of you begins to ache for no reason you can name, you write down a reason — a glorious one, a lie of real quality. Left shoulder: kayaking incident. Dragon, mostly. Lower back: rescued a child from a well; possibly the well rescued me; details unclear. Right hip: parkour. You do this not to fool the doctor — the doctor gets the truth, the doctor gets everything, because the ache that doesn't fade is a conversation for a professional and not for a comic with a notebook — but to fool the small bleak in your own morale. Because the real entry, the true one, reads I stood up, and that is too bleak to say out loud before nine in the morning.

So you laugh, and you move the part that hurts, gently, the way you'd ease open a stuck drawer.

I rolled over, finally, the whole upper half of me turning in one careful piece like a man relocating a wedding cake. The person I married was awake now, watching me negotiate with my own neck.

"Sleep wrong?" they said.

"Pillow," I said. "Came at me from the high ground."

A hand arrived between my shoulder blades — found the exact bad spot it has always known, the one I never have to point to — and pressed, slow and sure. The window in the haunted house, for a moment, held.

"Happens," they said.

It does. It will keep happening. We have stopped, the two of us, asking why.