I can’t even recall my name.
Friday, July 27 around 9 o’clock in the PM
As the day slowly fades to night I’m left to speculate about my roommates yet my imagination and short-lived nods have twisted reality into a paranoid kind of hysteria. I hear the guy across from me typing away at what must be some kind of a laptop computer and it seems his typing speed picks up any time a nurse comes in to tease me with my ration of pain medication and I can only deduce from this that he is definitely
some kind of spy. If he’s able to type with such stealth and abundance, why is he here in the first place? What is he writing and why is no one coming to visit him. He is brought a lunch that he consumes effortlessly and all the nurses go to him immediately before and immediately after coming into my “room” which is just a curtained off area that is continually being left open by everyone who leaves the “room” only fueling my paranoia and confirming that the staff is in on it too.
There is a school aged boy who shows no physical symptoms of anything worthy of a stint in the hospital and I also question what he is doing here. His family is respectful of the others in the room but I can sense them keeping an eye on me and apparently he has a girlfriend who visits when his family isn’t around whom I saw wearing a typical, slightly tarted up school girl uniform which, it goes without saying, sends my imagination into a spiral of Japanese Hentai porn that I will go no further into at this time.
Again the old guy next to me has a coughing fit that lasts long enough for me to buzz the nurse call button on his behalf because it is clear that he is not going to be able to get himself out of this one on his own. Make no mistake, I do this out of my own selfishness, not out of any kind of compassion on my part. I just feel like listening to him die would kill the small buzz I have going on and just like when his alarm didn’t stop going off last night, I have to take matters into my own hands. I don’t know how far this will go but nothing is certain and I feel like this could get messy.
As I’m lying here in my bed, watching my breath come out of my mouth and crystallize in mid-air, my thoughts flash back to the first time my dad, Dave had a heart attack and I couldn’t find the hospital because I kept going South instead of North on Highway 270 and the girl I was with finally had to go home and I think about how long ago that must have been because I didn’t have any mobile device whatsoever in which to communicate with anyone and I deduct by the girl I was with and by the car I remember driving that I must have still been in High School and it blows my mind momentarily. That means that I had been visiting Dave in the hospital, hospitals not so different from this one, in the same condition I’m in now or worse, on a regular basis for half of my life. Well, until last November that is, when he died.
Another faceless nurse comes in and delivers her line, “You know, how long you are here all depends on you.” and I have little to no idea what she’s talking about. I tell her to bring me a bag of pain medicine or I’m going to slit my own throat with the needle sticking out of my arm and she smiles at me with a flirtatiousness that fuels my next nurse/ patient fantasy and I ask her if we can get some air freshener for the stench in the room. She looks at me blankly before turning around and vanishing off camera.
All the times I had to see my dad just like I am now; laying in a hospital bed, shaved in all the wrong places, weak, bruised, tubes and needles sticking out of me, pathetic, sore, and drowsy. I think about Keiff and I feel guilty and ashamed at the state I’m in. I don’t want him to see me like this, I can’t even pick him up. I could barely say, “Hi.” to him if he were here.
My hallucinations are alluding that myself and the dying guy next to me are in fact connected but in different ways at different times. Time is not happening in its usual, liner form, it is much more fluid and difficult to fully grasp in any sort of sane manner. Sometimes the guy is my dad, Dave just before he died, sometimes it’s my dad as a young man. Other times he is me as a kid or in about 30 years time and Keiff isn’t
coming to see me anymore because he’s given up on me, everyone has. Sometimes he is Keiff in different stages of his life, unable to break the cycle.
It occurs to me briefly that I didn’t actually do anything to cause this, this isn’t really my fault and am able to find some comfort in that but this is my life and I believe you have to take responsibility for everything that happens in your life. Maybe this is sort of a preview of exactly what it’s like to have a heart attack or two or three and then just be generally unwell for so long that your body, mind, and spirit simply give up and all decide to just sort of disappear.
The coughing coming from the old man next to me is getting worse and more persistent and harder to ignore until it’s all I can hear. My thoughts start to drift in and out and throughout time and space, almost flashing before me. Back to Dave and the way he used to cough so horribly that you were certain something was sure to rupture and then I couldn’t help but think that I’m sitting here with something ruptured in me and I start to understand how Luke Skywalker felt when his hand was cut off by a light saber and he got it replaced by a mechanical hand and how that was obvious foreshadowing of how easy it is to take the steps that turn a boy into his father and someone from off camera
whispers, “Break the cycle.”
Break the cycle. Of all the thoughts that I should be focusing on; my stomach, the faceless nurses stabbing me with random needles, Mama and Keiff and so on, the only thing that I can think of is that phrase, “Break the cycle.” If the old man lying next to me is a version of my dad at different times of his life, and at times different versions of myself, and still at other times different versions of my son then what I must do is clear. Past, present, and future. Suddenly it all becomes clear, time has flattened itself out and I am now able to see the full picture. I know what must be done.
The first thing I need to do get my strength up without looking like I’m getting my strength up. I do a couple of reps of leg lifts and sit-ups. I hold the bars on my bed and lift myself up a couple of times but then stop, I must appear frail and bedridden. I wait until the nurse makes her final rounds for the night and when she is walking off the set she slips on the ice. When all is still and quiet I get to work. Only the sound of the old man’s heaving coughs and the pitter-patter of the spy typing away at his keyboard can be heard.
I start by carefully taking all the tubes out of my body, first the one jabbing my forearm. I remove the needle from my vein and a stream of dark red blood streams down my arm onto the white sheets of the bed. I quickly take the bedpan and put it under my arm to catch the blood. I must be very careful not to leave any evidence that they will find after the deed is done. I also must work silently so that the spy who is still typing away on his computer, keeping close tabs on me isn’t hip to what I’m up to. Next I slowly remove the tube that is inserted into my stomach to vacuum out the remnants of my appendix. The tube doesn’t just pull out cleanly though, the scar is no longer bloody and lubricated, it’s now dry and only comes out after tearing through already healed flesh and stomach lining. The tube is black with thick chunks of dried blood and pus caked onto it like the stem of a water bong that hasn’t been cleaned. I wrap the tube in gauze and lay it carefully on the night stand and take another handful of gauze and shove it into the hole in my stomach to stop the freshly opened wound from bleeding out.
This causes me to give an audible grunt and I hear the spy across the room stop typing. A wave of terror runs through my body beginning from the hole in my abdomen and spreads out to my extremities in long pulsating bursts. Break the cycle. I look down and the gauze that is
sticking out of my stomach has become drenched in blood and rotting appendix and is beginning to drip. I shove it deeper into my wound and wrap the gauze around my whole stomach to hold it in place. The old man is no longer coughing, just breathing heavily in his sleep. The spy has stopped typing and the room is suddenly thick with silence.
I decide that the time is now, I must act fast before the nurse’s midnight inspection cycle. As to not make any noise, I stealthily lay down on the floor on my stomach and do a military crawl under the dividing curtain into the old man’s area. It smells like feces
and the ground is so cold that I’m sliding on my belly like a penguin. I stop and notice that I’ve left a dark red streak of blood coming from my side of the curtain.
I slowly pull myself to my feet without making a sound, careful not to slip on the ice and am now within inches of the old man. All I can see is a dark figure lying still and the breath coming from his mouth. I hold up my iPhone and click it on to illuminate the old man’s face. His skin is dark and spotted with thick black pox that smell malignant. His face is hollow, his cheeks sunken in and it looks like he is having a dream that he is being tortured with rusty pliers and an industrial sized grill scrapper.
The director yells, “Action!” and I take a roll of gauze and slowly begin to wrap the old man with it, tying him down to the bed. I start with his chest and arms to immobilize him so if he wakes up he’ll be unable to escape then I work my way down to his legs so he can’t kick or squirm. Just as I’m tying off the mummification of his lower body I hear a high pitched moan and I look up, the old man is staring at me with a terrified look in his eyes. He starts to moan again, trying to yell but he can’t find the air necessary to pull it off because I have his chest and stomach tied down so tightly. I take the roll of gauze and jam it in his mouth causing him to gag violently but I just keep pushing the roll of gauze further into his mouth and down his throat. Muffled heaves tell me that he is involuntarily vomiting and I assume that he is choking to death on it so now I don’t need to use a pillow to suffocate him. On the table next to us is a box of latex gloves and I put one on each hand, careful not to make a snapping sound. Once the gloves are on I wrap my hands around the old man’s throat and begin to squeeze tightly and I can feel
his life slipping away from him from beneath my fingers. I study his face as his muscles start to relax and I’m thinking that this is all happening much more quickly than I had thought it would so I’m planning my exit strategy but then something happened that was
definitely not in the script. Nothing could have prepared me for what came next.
As I’m sitting here alongside the old man with my hands firmly around his neck,suddenly the features of his face begin to change. First his nose morphs into a thicker, longer version of itself, next his mouth and sunken cheeks begin to fill out and finally he opens his eyes lazily and blinks two or three times before settling in on me. The face that I am now strangling the life out of is my father. A cold breeze runs through the room that causes me to shiver, the spy begins typing again, faster and louder than before as I double down on my squeezing efforts while my father just stares at me expressionless and frigid. I push down on his throat even harder and then the features begin to change again, this time his skin gets smoother and the nose softens, color returns to the lips and ears and suddenly I’m looking at my son. He is a man, of about 27 but it’s him no doubt, handsome and well chiseled. He too looks at me peacefully, not choking on the roll of gauze still in his mouth, not struggling at all, just looking on at me with an almost bored gaze. I notice that I’ve released some of the pressure on his throat and, not able
to stand any more of this, begin squeezing again even harder than before. The spy’s typing becomes frantic and it sounds like he is slapping his keypad. The smell of shit is thick, causing me to choke and I bury my nose in the sleeve of the hospital apron I’m still wearing. I squeeze harder on the throat and when I notice drops of water falling on my grown son’s expressionless face I realize that I’m weeping. I wipe the tears on his face away before they freeze and when I take my hand away there is a new face that is looking back at me. It’s old and wrinkled but I immediately recognize it as my own.
Panic quickly takes hold and I’m frozen, shivering, sobbing looking into my own eyes, relieved that I still have all my hair, though it’s thinned substantially. As disturbing as this all is, somehow the blank stares coming from both my father and my son were something that I was able to work past but now, looking into my own empty stare brings on an existential dread that there are just not enough Xanax on planet Earth to curb. I can’t look at it anymore, I can’t take any of this any longer. In a frenzy I reach behind my older self’s head and rip the pillow that I’m resting on. I smother my older self’s face ashard as I can, so hard that I’m screaming out into frigid air, “No!!” I hear the spy slamming his computer on the metal bars on the side of his bed and finally he throws the laptop across the room and into the curtain where I am slumped over what is now just a wet pillow covering a pool of melted ice and I’m sobbing, “No, no, no.”
Exhausted, I’m now whimpering on the bed alone, gripping the frosty pillow and when the spy throws open the curtain I slowly turn to face him. It’s Dr. Feelbad from the first hospital and he’s smoking a clove cigarette with a bamboo stem and tearing up the script, tossing it in the air and shouting into a bullhorn, “No, no, cut! This is all wrong!” In his German accent. He’s holding a black leather leash that is connected by the neck to the nurse with the blood red lipstick and jet black hair who is now naked and wearing her hair down and it’s crimped and waist length. She has blood stained vampire fangs and is drinking an Avian through a straw and looking like there are a million other things she would rather be doing right now.
I want desperately to ask what the hell is going on but all that comes out is a whimpering, “Wha…wh…”
Dr. Feelbad is barking orders in German at the Japanese crew from his bullhorn and from no where cameramen, stagehands, and extras start scampering around and suddenly I can’t understand anything that anyone is saying. My father is sitting in an actor’s chair smoking a Benson & Hedges cigarette, wearing a bath towel and a gold pinky ring with a hebrew character on it and he is yelling at a 5 foot 3 inch tall midget
with ginger, spiky hair and stubs for fingers on his left hand in a language I’m not at all familiar with. There is a pair of conjoined twin ballerinas sharing a pair of faded blue jeans and an old school Elvis Costello concert T-shirt who are twisting themselves around each other like a wrung towel and they are getting taller and taller with every twist until blood starts hemorrhaging from their eyeballs. There’s a guy in a garbage can
freebasing meth through a straw who looks like a real life Oscar The Grouch who is getting a double fisted hand job from Marilyn Monroe’s corpse. Three sumo wrestlers wearing traditional kimonos are gang raping a young boy, maybe 11, who has dead flowers where his eyes used to be and is having a heated debate about the pros and cons of using pink vs. yellow highlighters with someone named Flo on an late 90’s
model Motorola cell phone. A 230 pound mentally retarded kid wearing a blue suit with an oversized blue and yellow polk-a-dotted necktie that is tied around his head is beating off to Russian older brother/younger sister porn on an iPad and above him is a seascape painting of a lighthouse after dark.
Gradually, the painting comes to life. The dark blue waves start crashing on the rocky shore, the light from the lighthouse starts rotating 180 degrees, illuminating everything in it’s path for a split second and as I focus on the painting, watching the waves ebb and flow back into the vast expanse I can briefly make out a boat rocking back and forth. The stars twinkle in the night sky as I wait for the light to come back around to the boat which is old and wooden and in the boat is a man. I focus in harder on the painting and all the madness going on around me in the hospital room starts to fall away as quickly as it appeared. The light from the lighthouse comes around again and I can make out
the features of the man, he isn’t old but he is haggard beyond his years. I watch the light go back and forth a few times watching the waves smash against the rocks and I wonder why the rocks are still so sharp and rigid, shouldn’t they be smooth by now, warn down by the mighty ocean? I notice that the boat with the man in it are moving closer and closer to the deadly shore yet his expression is unchanged. He remains
clam, leaning back in the boat, not holding on to anything though the boat is now swaying violently amongst the waves, the oars are resting peacefully at his side. He is neither rowing toward nor away from the jagged rocks, he is simply allowing himself to be peacefully carried off into the night. The stars are alive, the stars are real. The light from millions of eons ago has traveled through time and space to grace this night sky and they are real. I wait for the light to find the man in the boat again. The light passes by once, twice, a third time. The man and his boat have disappeared. Disappeared here.
Suddenly I’m cold. I can feel the heat of the sidewalk on my back and although my eyes are closed and I can’t seem to open them, I can feel the warm sun pulsating on my eyelids, but I’m frozen. A voice slowly becomes audible, it’s Mama and she’s saying, “Don’t go, don’t go.” I need her to know that it’s going to be alright so I force my eyes open and look up at her and she’s sobbing outside of the station in front of the clinic holding my head in her lap and rocking back and forth. I let out a weak cough and she looks down at me with bloodshot eyes and says, “Don’t go. Don’t leave us.”
I cough weakly then manage, “Baby…I’m not…going…to make it.”
The End
Last Caress I-VI are featured in the book #DeadFlowers.
Also from Mike Black, the novels #BougBoys and #SamuraiBlues.
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Mike Black 