Morrell brings me Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I have never so identified with a fictional character. Elliot calls: Now she has to look after you too? Tell her you never want to see her again. She can’t take on any more. Stella’s uncle Howard talks bedside about thetans and engrams. I just had déjà vu of you sitting up in the bed, Mimi says, not understanding there’s nothing more underwhelming than being in someone else’s déjà vu. Elliot calls: Freud spoke of the “other mouth,” the Vedic of the “third eye.” Nobody speaks of a second spine.
The ward psychologist says, Sorry that fully functioning human-life thing fell through. What’s next? I wonder. Other than the angrier child of happenstance, who am I now? This is my after-event. Who would this new me be?
Mimi says, Be grateful for what you have. I say, What I have isn’t what it used to be. Mimi says, You need to transcend your suffering. I say, But I can’t transcend his, and that’s what’s killing me. 3/4 of a guy named Dan says, Leave me out of it. Stella says, Be in the present, then. I say, The present hurts like mad. Morrell says, The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain, quoting Marx. I ask everyone to leave. Now Morrell is crying, not about leaving me, but about Iris Murdoch watching Teletubbies at the end.
Even when you’re lying there in agony people come to you with their problems. You don’t get a break. The patience of the patient needs to be elastic, huge. You can’t judge people because their problems are minor! Stella was in a funk—she and Craig split up. But should she be ignored until she’s diagnosed with cancer? Should she shut up until all her children die? What if nothing else ever truly tragic happens to her? What then?
Wouldn’t it be amazing if the stranger I became after my horrific life event was compatible with the stranger Stella became after hers?
• •
Each night I am turned like sausages, manhandled in the murk of sleep. Hairy hands, enhanced interrogation techniques. I wake midroll screaming
for amnesty. One night at the hour when shadows take their furlough, the nurse came in with a look of flustered helplessness you don’t want to see on
the face of your caregiver. At my slanted angle I hinted for painkillers and she obliged: The morphine opened a door and I fell through to the very
equator of sleep yet still anchored by fishhooks to the crinkled skin of pain. I couldn’t breathe, as if someone with unspeakable strength had put a hillside
over my face. I woke to see a moving tent of gloom, a figure slipping out. Hospital rooms (unlike prison cells) are never locked and anyone can unfold
and drip anything onto the charred or moldering bedridden oxen. Who slunk into the room to cudgel the patient? What ghosts are in a holding pattern above my
bed? Was 3/4 of a guy named Dan groping the beige walls trying out his prosthetic leg? (Yesterday he was hobbling around the room with a dry mouthful of pills
looking for a glass of water. Unbearable.) Or was it Leila’s clenched ghost or the bat-caved voice that I heard in the car or old enemies,
disgruntled investors who have me finally where they want me? Or was it my mysterious visitor, the old woman with bright orange hair who came the
previous day? She smelled like baked goods and reminded me of my old dog Sooty (some said she barked herself to death—I think she overdosed on
ladybugs). She said, I brought you some flowers. I asked, Are you here visiting someone? She said, Are you happy with your care? I said, They
keep a hygienic cemetery here. She said, The surgeons have a good reputation. Yes, I said, they have their fingers in a number of pies. She
frowned—she didn’t quite know what I meant. I didn’t either. Unlike Japanese soldiers, doctors rarely fall on their own syringes, I clarified. Are
you in any pain? she asked. Yes, I said, but it’s of no clinical significance. She nodded wearily, as if she’d heard that one before. Maybe she had. Well,
can I bring you anything? Some gossip magazines? I said, Oh yes, what are the rich and beautiful people up to? She ghosted and never returned.
Now harassed at night by a murderer with no follow-through, call buttons and squeak of sneakers on the ammoniac shine, medieval groans that start up
like zephyrs and waft along corridors, harrowing nightmares of trees reconsidering their upright position and of surgeons using the rib cage for a
xylophone or bringing bones home for the family dog or even the terrible green glaze of a parachute soldier whirling gyroscopically to the earth.
With morning light years away I think: The worst thing in the world isn’t suffering or loneliness at all. It’s a combination: suffering alone.
All I want is the old waking daydream, to kiss the patron saint of brain death, rise up into the star-strewn skies, be a voiceless
faceless thoughtless drifting eye ringing out like plucked strings and taper off or just frankly dissolve in an orange flash and be a traceless nothing, never more to
wake startled wishing I could sleep the sleep of a child, when all my nightmares were merely instinctual and my monsters standard issue.
• •
Dining-room electric chairs that beep like
Smoke detectors with dying batteries,
A strange hum and squeak of foot tray to back wheel
Queue of the paralyzed, the cerebrovascularly
Down on their luck, amputees wearing last season’s
Prosthetics, those with hip disarticulation and
Hemipelvectomies, neurodegeneratives with
Claymation faces, stroke victims whose speech
Is all ellipses and who wouldn’t last two minutes
In Hitler’s Germany. This is where the falling stones
Fell and stay fallen. The feet you see! The legs!
Nurse, fumigate the patient! Nurse, pulp that man!
Twisted torsos, veritable cubes, 18 to 24-year-old
Gregarious debacles screeching around corridors
They’d still put you in a headlock if they could.
They’re already pimping their rides and zipping
Through corridors like cannonballs.)
Or moving spiderlike or crabwise in the sob of night,
These wearying all-or-nothing personalities, clientele
Who are bad for business, for whom there was
Never enough plenitude, mostly football and motorcycle
Accidents (in less-developed countries falling from
Trees is aetiologically more common). One begins
To believe a man with children who gets on a motorbike
Is not a loving father.
The patients complain about larcenous
Nurses or sticky-fingered visitors; froth about peakless
Futures, the inaccessibility of tree houses and being
Wheelbound wallflowers waiting for fetishists to
Rustle our dark foliage. These are not our bodies but
Our scorched-earth policies. We are obscene gestures
Raving into bedpans. I’d prefer back-to-back awkward
Silence marathons. We’ve gone headfirst into our heads.
We weren’t without our faults, OK; still, we didn’t deserve
To be pulled up by the roots like that. If you believe that
Determination allows a man to walk again, and anyone who
Doesn’t get to their feet simply hasn’t the willpower to do it,
And that your God miracles so indiscriminately, then you
Are frankly a cunt. That other people are likewise suffering
Is the coldest comfort there is.
This you understand is pure economics: the redistribution
Of health. Hands changing hands. We had plans.
Places to go, fertility rites to wrong, but you can’t
Go home again. You can’t even get back into
Plato’s cave. Let’s face it. We are separated from the
Truly sick, we are not dise
ased, not even ill! Just broken.
The luck of the cancerous is, they have options:
Get better or die. We just keep on keeping on
Symbolizing injustice, and FYI:
Atheists are everywhere. Clearly we don’t
Frequent the same foxholes.
• •
3/4 of a guy named Dan has suppurating blisters and bedsores. His hips gurgle. He looks
like a vase left too long in a kiln.
His avocado-green crater forever opening on his bone. Premonitions of septicemia come true.
He is dying. His death won’t be cathartic for anyone.
3/4 of a guy named Dan says, Promise me something. Turn over a new leaf,
escape yourself, start again, redraw the map, go to a time-management consultant, keep proper documentation, find pleasure in a ray of sunlight or die trying, get in touch with the ocean, live every day like it’s your last.
I say, I’ve never understood that. If this was my last earth day I’d shoot
heroin and have unprotected sex with multiple strangers. He says, Stop, it hurts to laugh. I say, It hurts to do a lot of things. It hurts.
It’s my turn is all, he says. It’s like jury duty. I say, Don’t worry. Your
doctor is so famous he can drop his own name. He dedicates each operation to a different lover.
We were not quite right, like we’d been homeschooled in a cave with Wiccans.
Before they take him for surgery he says, When I get back let’s break
quarantine and prowl the halls with kerosene lanterns like caretakers in a storm.
I kiss his hand. It wasn’t just my complete turnaround that was shocking to me,
given the frenetic heat of fear and anxiety in that sickbed, the poisonous atmosphere of the spinal ward where camaraderie is scarce and each injured man jealous of his brother’s recovery. It is madness that a friendship blossomed at all.
• •
Heart operation interrupted by a mobile phone. The surgeon waits until the embarrassed intern can silence it. He is too slow, the patient bleeds out. “We’re sorry for your loss.” (A nightmare)
Just when I’d almost forgotten about them the police enter like spies whose code names
are the same as their actual names.
I sit up, preparing to help with their inquiries, obliging though enigmatic. You know how it is. We are forever in our trailer, waiting to be called to set.
Witnesses say you drove straight into the wall without turning and without trying to stop.
I did? Christ. How embarrassing. Wait. I wasn’t even driving!
Or was I?
You weren’t on the phone, were you? Sending a text message? Eating a sandwich? Smoking a cigarette? Or did you—he stops midspeech
and puts his finger to his forehead as if marking a place—fall asleep? My feet are cold. I reach for the blanket,
it falls on the floor. The other detective picks it up, drapes it over me. Under the sheets I clench my fists. Tucked in by
my interrogators. The indignities never end. So, were you depressed or something? the detective pressed. You didn’t swerve.
Officer, Mimi says, surely half the human race has been killed in a car accident by now. What do you care if my client
drove into a brick wall? The policeman says, Because there was a kid on the other side of it. I am an iceberg
breaking free from the mainland. The policeman continued, He was writing graffiti. And you dropped a brick wall
on his head. I ask, Is he . . . ? Mimi asks, Is he . . . ? Stella asks, Is he . . . ? The policeman leans over me
and shakes his head. It’s not looking good. He is a crumpled mess yet to surface. The doctors
are dragging his lakes, separating the flesh from the bones. He’s tangled as headphones.
Now the police keep me under surveillance, the doctors keep me under observation. I spend the remainder of my time in hospital
under the threat of prison.
• •
Mimi’s three photographs: “An Intriguing New Entry in God’s Bestiary,” “An Incident at the Assembly Line Where He Was Made,” and “Something That Once Existed But Has Since Disappeared From Fossil Records.” All feature in this month’s edition of Australian Photography magazine. Mimi’s new exhibition: Waiting for an Accident Waiting to Happen. Morrell tells me to leave my body, not to science, but to art—why have a funeral when you could have an exhibition?—and campaigns for himself to encourage the artists in the residency to start a new movement, not on form, not on representation, not on process, not on aesthetics, not on theoretical concepts or ideas, but the first art movement in history to focus on the subject, a single subject, so as to free the form. Creativity is at its most unleashed with limitations—and what could be more limiting than having to depict the same sad sack. He calls it Aldoism. While Morrell is blowing hard about it, Mimi asks if she can include my CT scans in her portfolio. Stella has her guitar and plays a new song based on something I asked the hospital psychologist: Is it still necrophilia / if the corpse fucks you? Neither women you want around for locked-in syndrome.
• •
In the morning, my two free-floating women glisten
at the foot of my bed,
bovine nurse beside them. I know you’re upset, she coos, but there’s
still a remote chance he’s going to pull through. He’s here? Upstairs, in the paleontology ward, the nurse says, or something like it. Stella and Mimi are
swelling hypnotically. The nurse transports out. The air spreads shadows across the room. I hold tight to nothing. I think you should go see the kid, Mimi
says. It’ll drive you crazy otherwise, Stella adds.
They crouch down sorting their hooks and baits trying grimly to start a hive
mind—I bare my teeth. I say, I’m sick of buying a bulletproof
vest only to be stabbed by the vest salesman. Mimi says, Are you coming
or not? I say, Fuck! Oil my wheel so I can equivalently
tiptoe—and help me up.
Stella and Mimi lower me into my wheelchair, and with my head dizzy
at high altitude, we prowl the hospital followed by the eerie hum of vending
machines, the nurse at her desk ignoring the buzzings
and their sad subtexts. Some patients want water or fatal morphine drips.
We charge through the hospital’s obvious lack of cartwheels,
headquarters of Population Control, we pass the burn ward where oilfields, haystacks & the
disproportionately caramelized are shucked from their clothes, pass visitors who
look like hitchhikers dropped unexpectedly at a
turnpike, pass the torn asunder, the tactical errors, the system bugs,
the design faults, the triple in size, the pried open, the
unresponsive to vocal commands, pass the operating theater, a room haunted by the memory of entrails, the smell of gloved hands, a man
in a mask with a high wrinkled forehead who leans over me smiling as if his smile is for the good of mankind, and a voice—I’m your anesthetist,
here to make sure you don’t let out a scream and give away our position, before his features became fuzzy and indistinct
like the face on Mars.
We share an elevator with a pregnant woman about to hack up an infant to
the sixth floor where a few whole-bodied visitors make way for me I must have looked that bad.
At the door of 608 (of all the turnstiles I’d been caught in, all the revolving
doors that pushed back, the automatic doors mistimed, the stage doors mistaken for back doors,
this was the worst) my women nudge me ruthlessly into
a small dimly lit room oppressively filled with murmuring
bodies, crowding the bed. There is only one light on, above the sink.
At first no one seems to notice us. Then a voice
in the green darkness: Aldo.
&n
bsp; My blood goes into a holding pattern. My mysterious visitor! The old woman with the bright
orange hair. (His grandmother?) Thank you for coming, she says, keeping her eyes low. My impulse is to return at magic hour. How is he? I ask. Roll credits, she answers, gesturing to the vivarium.
The visitors turn on like runway lights and clear a path to the centerpiece, the capsized boy. I
have never seen so puzzling a configuration of puzzle pieces. Such an imperfect likeness of a human
shape. His wrung-out pale body spread ceaseless on the bed, a tree split by lightning. Through the cold rail his hand falls down like dangled
bait. The visitors don’t take their eyes off, engraving upon me their malice aforethought. Fear is deafening with gusto. I lurch closer.
So that’s what a larynx looks like. So this is the failure to reconcile a brain to its stem. So this is the syrupy ruckus that intubated lungs make.
His sink is clogged—I don’t know the medical term—his dark streams have frozen over. This greeny backlit mode of sinking makes me sicker, my nausea nauseating me.
If death is peace then sleep is terror. His mother cries (almost) headlessly. Their little boy is all jugular. He will never again look into the
lens and not smile.
Stella is making vague sounds. Mimi hardens. The old woman sizzles at
me with quiet eyes. I am a source of fascination. Behind us, visitors from other rooms have heard the murderer has come to
visit his victim. Nurses, burly orderlies, men and women trailing fluids and held together with tape crowd the door. This is
an event in their hospital lives. Other than the tired human drama of living and dying, not much happens. This is something
different.
His parents peck and claw. Their pupils are like glowworms in a fetal position. They say, The hospital asked us if we want to pull the plug. And: We won’t. And: He’s brain damaged. And: A vegetable. And: At best. This isn’t news. Doctors rate survival highly, never how many resuscitated patients go on to dance in the rain. The human respiratory system gets pride of place.