I can’t even recall my name.
Wednesday, July 25th around 11:30 am
I’m laying on the scorching hot sidewalk outside of the station, somewhere near the clinic when an icy chill runs through me that causes my body to jerk, I’m flat on my back, breathless and grunting uncontrollably when Mama runs up to help me. “Oh my god! Are you OK?” She asks, and though I love her with all my heart, my eyes cannot conceal my disdain for what is becoming the NO SHIT question of the day that I’m tired of hearing and answering, “No” to in Japanese or English. She helps me up effortlessly, her hands are cold and she drags me into the clinic where the smell of old people and death is inescapable. The clinic staff immediately admit me and get to work performing all sorts of tests on me with little regard for my physical pain which isn’t getting any better after all the positions they are forcing me to hold; X rays on cold tables, CAT scans, CT scans with metal pads that feel like icicles on my body as well as drawing blood a few more times than seems necessary before declaring my condition a pulled hernia.
They knock me out and do an unknown procedure and when I wake up I’m alone in a large four man room in a seemingly empty wing of the hospital that is freezing and where it looks like I’ll be staying for a few days. I’m dozing in and out of consciousness and every time I come to and the pain starts to creep back I call out for more medicine and the cycle continues.
I don’t know how many times we’ve cycled around but at one point I reach for my iPhone and notice it’s only 4 o’clock in the afternoon and for some reason that seems unbelievably early for all the shit that has happened since leaving the house this morning at 8:00 am. The cycle continues. I get one more dose of pain medication and when it starts to wear off again and the pain returns, again I call for a faceless nurse…again. She comes a lot slower this time and I sense an attitude maybe I was too doped up before to notice but it’s clear now that she’s getting stingy with the pain medication. It’s around 5:30 and she says she’ll be right back, right back she says she’ll be.
Wednesday July 25th Around 8:ooPM:
“NURSE!! HELP ME!” I shout pathetically, as loudly as my aching abdomen will allow into the nurse call button that I believe with all my heart is acting like a Walky Talky though the conversation is clearly one-sided. I hit the button once, twice then double over in pain on the lone hospital bed that is raised to about a 45 degree angle in a lone hospital room that is at about a 45 meter distance from the nearest intersecting corridor from what I can make of the footsteps that I used to hear come and go, yet haven’t heard come in quite some time. There is absolutely no way to position my body that is not excruciating in its own unique way and this is starting to sound very familiar. If I lay on my left side it feels like the right side of my body will be stretched to the point of tearing apart at the seams. To lay flat on my back means to have my abdominal muscles contract so forcefully that I feel I’m being drawn and quartered and to lay on my right side, where I am currently negotiating with myself the possibility of sustainability, it currently feels like I am laying directly on a dagger that has been having it’s way with me for longer than I care to think about.
But I must think about it…again. How long have they left me here now in utter agony, screaming for help? How many times have I done this? I reach for my iPhone and press around at it until the time comes up: 9:00. 9 o’clock. The last time I saw someone was like…I don’t know, hours ago. I press the nurse call button again and shout into the imaginary microphone, “HEY! This pain isn’t going away by itself you know!!”
Wait a minute. I whisper that last line again to myself “Hey.This pain isn’t going away by itself you know.” I’m hit with a deja-vu that is so vivid that I’m thinking a moment ahead of everything that is going to come next. The thoughts I’m going to think, the words I’m going to say, the things that I see in the room, I see them coming just before they happen. Before I turn my head I can already see my iPhone charger, my pajamas, my toothbrush, Keith’s LIFE autobiography, everything feels like I have just lived it and am reliving it again. The cold hospital room, the reeking odor, all feel like this has just happened to me. Not like it happened a long time ago or in a dream I dreamt, but like this is a movie and the director just asked us to do this scene over again.
At first I let the scene play out again because this is the pleasant part, where the drugs begin to take hold but then Dr. Feelbad with his thin mustache and red scarf bursts in and, right on cue asks me, “How is your pain?” I remember the last time he asked and how long it took to get across just how much pain I was in so instead of going through all of that ball ache again, I motion for him to come closer and when he does I grab him by his red scarf and knee him in the stomach and as he’s crouched over in agony I say, “It’s worse than that.”
He orders the nurse with the blood red lipstick and the jet black hair pulled back in a tight bun to give me more medicine and she helps him limp out of the room but I can’t relax because I know that they’ll be back in 3, 2, 1, enter the doctors. I mouth along with him when he says, “Your pain is not supposed to be getting worse, it’s supposed to be getting better.” As all the nurses pack up my things and then, on cue, Mama’s aunt makes her entrance. The first time this happened, I questioned my sanity, I thought I must be dreaming or hallucinating but now I can accept it for what it is which, in and of itself puts me at ease that I would rate somewhere North of six and a half but less than nine.
He starts to deliver his line about being wrong about the hernia but seems to have forgotten the dialogue so I help him, but not correcting his English. I don’t want to dilute his character as the evil Japanese doctor with the German accent. I belt out my line, “Am I going to die?” much more dramatically this time, gripping his icy cold red scarf and he delivers the, “Japan has good technique.” line perfectly.
I lay back on my pillow which is so cold that it crunches beneath my head and close my eyes, waiting to hear the sirens and when they come, the nurse says, right on cue, “The ambulance come now.”
To be continued…
The Last Caress series is featured in the book #DeadFlowers.
Also by Mike Black, the novels #BougBoys and #SamuraiBlues.
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Mike Black 