Thriller

     I have the same manic bus driver as I had on Monday. “Not running late today!” he says triumphantly. 

    I’m the only one in the waiting room, and I don’t have to wait long until Shelley greets me. “Oh good, you’re early. I need to get out of there and help my little monsters get dressed for trick or treating.” 

“    Where’s your costume? I thought everyone was supposed to dress up today.” The only person in costume is Vicki, in tie dye and fringed leather boots. 

    Though I see Sjon in the background, I’m relieved that Shelley is instead joined by Aaron. They don’t ask any of the usual questions, Aaron cuts the cast and Shelley sits at the computer, not typing anything. The inside of the cast has gotten wet, but just in the heel. “Don’t hesitate to come in if this gets wet,” he says. “It can really make things get bad really quickly.” I tell him I hadn’t realized it had gotten wet; I’ve been keeping it wrapped up in a bag now that the rainy season is upon us. But he says the wound itself looks smaller, though he doesn’t bother measuring it. There’s a small amount of drainage, which means I should be able to go back to once a week visits after next week, provided it doesn’t get worse over the weekend.

    Dr. Bayliss appears, dressed as a blue shark, complete with a floppy dorsal fin. “I wear this every year,” she says. I tell her I’m having flashbacks to all the shark movies Sally made me watch in the chamber. She swims off to let Aaron prepare for the cast. As always he is speedy but methodical, at times asking Shelley for her advice, to make her feel important, I assume. She is so sedate and pleasant I wonder if she’s medicated, but then she says she had too much candy and is crashing after the afternoon’s sugar high. 

    Jenny pokes her head in to say hi, then Dr. Shark returns to put on the cast, a yellow paper gown over her costume. The cast doesn’t go on smoothly, and Shelley ends up doing a lot of it, four blue gloved hands frantically rubbing my leg at once. They end up putting on an extra roll of Fiberglas. “Well, guess I won’t be taking my pants off this weekend,” I say. 

    “Hey, do you want a job?” Jenny asks as Shelley puts my shoes on. I always tell her I can do it myself and she always insists. “We’re hiring someone for the reception desk.”

    “Oh no, is Perez leaving?” I ask. 

    “No, her job’s just… changing a bit. You’d basically be answering phones and doing scheduling.” 

    “He doesn’t want to work forty hours a week,” says Shelley.

    “I already work forty hours a week,” I say. 

    “You could get free wound care,” says Jenny. 

    “Throw in a few free sessions in the chamber and you’ve got a deal,” I say. 

    Although it’s a gloppy, chilly night, I feel don’t feel like spending yet another night at home alone, so I wrap my cast in plastic and venture down to the Goose. It’s raining lightly and the chilly air is refreshing. At the corner of 16th and Clay I see a car approach the intersection. They have a stop sign, so when I see that they’re slowing down, I cautiously start to cross. They don’t stop, and slam on the brakes and avoid running me over by less than a foot. I stand there and stare at the driver for a moment, though I can’t see them, then continue to hobble across. This is why I don’t go out at night much anymore.

    The Goose is full of costumed revelers, and I take my usual seat on the deck and hope that one of the servers notices me through the crowd. Rachel Clark herself does. Bud Clark’s only daughter (he has two sons), Rachel has run the place for years. Since he died, she hasn’t changed a thing. She comes over to ask if I need anything. She’s dressed as a witch, and is clearly enjoying herself. “Thanks for being here!” she says warmly. 

    My Pendleton tastes particularly good tonight; just the right balance of sharp and sweet. Everyone is talking so loud I can’t make anything out. Rachel herds everyone in a line for the costume contest. I can make out a blurry farmer, a blurry Batman, a hot dog, an astronaut, a goose. 

    When all the contestants have filed inside, it’s a lot quieter out on the deck. Rachel pops her head out for a moment to ask if I want to vote. I say no thanks. 

    Michael Jackson’s Thriller blasts over the speakers, followed by the time warp and the monster mash, all as inevitable as baby it’s cold outside and Feliz Navidad will be a month from now. This is my beef with Halloween: like anything that gets too popular, it has become precictable. I'm bored of the tired tropes, the same skeletons  and tombstones in every yard.

    Every time the door opens I smell warm pastrami as another best Reuben on the planet is birthed. the ghost of bud Clark drifts among his guests, not unhappy in the afterlife but wishing he could still taste the beer. I wouldn’t be here now if he hadn’t created this sanctuary, this haven in the hollow. I wouldn’t be sitting on the edge of this deck, watching a hot dog hit on Cruella DeVille.  As always, I remain apart from the action, Invisible as a spirit. What kind of life is this anyways, this life spent observing rather than living, this life I’ve chosen?

    Rachel rides her broomstick into the dark and is replaced by a new server I’ve never seen before. She’s young and seems to know everyone.  she doesn’t look my way or come near enough for me to ask her for another drink. After a while I finally haul myself up and go inside.

    Cobwebs and skeletons are everywhere. Moe is behind the bar. 

    “Hey seann, what can I get ya?” she asks in her gritty voice.

    “Pendleton neat, then close me out. And I had one other one.”

    “Where were you sitting?”

    I point to my usual spot. Moe checks the ordering screen and says she doesn’t see anything. Rachel never charged me for my drink. I could have dissipated like a spirit into the night and no one would have noticed. 

Sourdough

The door to the bus opens and I clamber on with my scooter. At this point I’ve developed a pretty good technique for boarding without having the ramp lowered. First I haul the front wheels up, then hoist the rear wheels on, then ease my knee up onto the seat and hop on. If I’m paying attention, I can do all this in one smooth motion.

“If you’re wondering why I’m eight minutes late, it’s because of micromanaging,” the driver says, a manic look in his eyes. I take a seat, propping my cast on my scooter. “They didn’t like me being four minutes early. I guess they think it’s better that I’m eight minutes late,” he yells, I guess to me. 

We drive across the river and I pull the cord at my stop. As I’m getting out, he stares at me with an angry grin and says, “I don’t want you to think I did this on purpose. I didn’t try to be eight minutes late. It’s all the micromanaging.” I tell him it’s fine and he speeds off. As I cross the street I almost get hit by a car zipping through the red light.

I sit in the waiting area for a long time, just like I did last Monday. I close my eyes and try to nap, and just as I start to drift off I am roused by Sjon’s voice telling me to come on in.

“I need you to decipher some texts for me!” KC yells the moment I’ve settled in. Everyone in the office laughs.

“Leave the poor guy alone,” says Sjon, sounding irritated. KC runs off.

“It’s okay, it’s part of my treatment,” I say. I can hear what sounds like the entire staff talking at once and laughing. I can’t understand a word.

“I hate that Aaron’s off Mondays,” grumbles Sjon. “Being the only guy here is pretty brutal.” I think about when I worked in subscriptions at the newspaper back in Allentown. The only other men in our department were Jerry, who was gay, and Jose, who didn’t speak much English. The job was awful but I loved being surrounded by all those women. 

I was worried that the fact that the cast seemed to be too loose would have made my foot slide around, exacerbating the wound. I don’t tell him but I also walked around more than usual this weekend. Despite all this, he says things look really good. “It looks smaller. And this is probably the only place a dude likes to hear that.” As he leaves through the curtain, he says, “You’re healing,” he says this last with what sounds like real kindness, and I momentarily stop disliking him.

Taggert comes in to have a look and she agrees that it looks good. She lingers and we talk a while, just the two of us, which is unusual. She speculates for a while about why my cast didn’t fit. “Did you lose weight?” she asks. 

“Not overnight,” I say, not sure if she’s joking.

“Did you eat a lot of salt the day before? Maybe a nice big salty slice of pizza? You might have been swollen up. These casts really help with swelling.” I tell her I didn’t have any pizza. 

Unable to wait any longer, KC scampers in with her phone while SJon prepares my cast. Leaning affectionately against me in her burgundy scrubs, she reads what seems like a completely ordinary series of friendly texts.

“So?” she asks.

“So what?” I ask. 

“It just ends like that, with us talking about where to go to dinner. We had narrowed it down to two options, and he never responded.”

“Um, okay. When did you last hear from him?” I ask.

“Yesterday,” she says. I give her a look. “Okay, okay, so I’m impatient. I can’t wait to start bending him to my will!” She laughs evilly.

“Be patient,” I say.

I ask to see a photo of the guy. He looks like every large, bearded man in Portland, but she’s positively aglow so I tell her he looks cute, except that I don’t like beards.

“Oh I don’t either,” she says. “Except I really like his. So… I guess I do now?” 

I decide to tell her about asking Hannah out, and how I also wish she would respond to my texts a little sooner. I leave out the part that she was my home care nurse, in case she thinks that’s weird, which it probably is. 

“Huh,” is all she says. 

Taggert returns to swaddle my foot in Fiberglas. She makes sure to wrap it extra tight. KC says her new guy used to be a cook. “He makes sourdough,” she says. 

“Big deal,” I say. “Since the pandemic, everyone makes fucking sourdough.” It comes out a little meaner than I expected.

“I bake sourdough for my daughter and husband because it helps with their Ciliac,” Taggert interjects. “I hear it’s not too bad for diabetics as well though don’t quote me on that.” Sjon has been oddly silent this whole time, which is nice. 

“Now if you have any issues, I want you to call us right away,” Taggert says, as usual. “Don’t hesitate, though I know you’ll be back Thursday. Oh, you’ll be here on Halloween!” I ask if they all dress up. “We sure do! I was Cruella last year, with a black and white wig. I even made a black and white mask.”  She dashes off and comes back with a photo of her dressed as a minion.

“Oh right, Cruella was two years ago. This was last year. I used pipe cleaners for the hair.” I wonder what KC will dress up as, before I remember that she’s off Thursdays.

On the bus ride home, a couple struggle on with a pile of huge bags and pieces of rolling luggage. The woman asks a girl sitting nearby if she wants a new Coach bag to replace the one they have. “Brand new. I can give you a good price. Okay, your loss.” Then she points at my decorated scooter.

 “Are those flowers just for you to brighten up your home, or are they for a lady friend?” the woman shouts, even though she’s sitting just a few feet away. “A beautiful bouquet of fall flowers. Though now I see they’re leaves. And there’s some grapes in there too, aren’t there. And pumpkins, or maybe they’re apples. Oh wait, are you dating someone with a fruit fetish? I’m not judging, it’s all good, there’s all kinds of fish in the… oh shit, is your lady friend a manikin? Aw, look at him blush! It’s good thing I don’t turn red like that, I’d never be able to hide my feelings. No poker face. God look at how red you are!” She cackles. The whole bus is staring at me. “Of course us Natives don’t blush, do we?” she elbows her friend. He stares straight ahead as we cross the darkening river and doesn’t say a word. 

Cornucopia

 The waiting room on the fourth floor is filled with people. I’m used to coming in at the end of the week, when I tend to be the only patient.  After a very long wait,  SJon ushers me in to room two and starts up the saw.

KC bursts immediately into the room, resplendent in teal.

“Aren’t you dying to know about how my date went?” She has a huge grin on her face.

“I’ve been thinking of nothing else. Look how happy you are! Do I hear wedding bells?”

“Why, yes, actually! But not mine.” She has to almost yell to be heard over the saw.

“He’s married.”

“Well, technically in the process of getting divorces, but he told me he’s ‘been checked out for years.’”

I laugh. “Like that would somehow make it better?”

“He said he was so scared of her he used to hide from her in a different part of the house.”

“And this was your first date?”

She nods. “And when I told him I wasn’t very social he said ‘well we’ll have to do something about that.’”

Without looking up from his sawing, SJon says, “I miss the old way of meeting; drunk off your ass in a dimly-lit dive.”

“This guy sounds like a real catch,” I say.

She shrugs. “I have some other victims lined up. I should probably get out of the way now though.”

She leaves and SJon pries apart the cast halves. He starts complaining about how hard it is to date in Portland. 

“I’m thinking this isn’t the city for me,” he says. “I’m not a big fan of all this woke shit.” Oh no, I think. Don’t I get enough of this talk at work? He tells a story about when he was downstairs in the ER and he “wasn’t thinking and used a word for little people that isn’t acceptable anymore. I didn’t see that there was one of these… little people in the room, and she went berserk. No lie it took six guards to throw her out. She had those pointy meth teeth.” 

“Meth Midgets, good idea for a new reality series,” I say, being very un-woke. I ask if he wants to move back to Texas.

“Oklahoma, but it’s basically the same state. But no, I can’t go back there. Montana, maybe. Go back to working on the res. I’m part Native American, you know.” I do.

He tells me to think good numbers as he measures my wound. I think good numbers. 

“Could be better,” he says. He takes a picture and shows me. It could be better. 

Taggert cries, “It’s cast time!” She breezes in and looks at my foot, which has not been wrapped for its cast yet, and says, “Oh wait, is it debride day? Did we decide that? I guess we did. Debride day it is! Okay, tools.” She digs around in the drawer for the little knives she likes. 

She slices a bit then leaves and he prepares for the cast. “Let’s see if I remember how to do this,” he mutters. On the other side of the curtain, Taggert and Caitlin start carrying on but I can’t understand what they’re saying. “Cardio vascular doing surgery in a diaper,” SJon says to me, as if that explains everything. “Shitting like a goose all over.” I have no idea what he’s talking about. 

“Time to cast you up up up, time to cast you up!” Dr Taggert sings, and proceeds to cast me up up up. Shelly appears and stands there staring at her phone.

“Can’t even be bothered to say hi?” I ask her. She slinks away without a word. Everybody is a little off today. Or maybe it’s me; three appointments in one week is just too damn many. 

Taggert tells SJon she only really needs a little bit of water in the bucket. “Just enough to cover the rolls,” she says. “Any more and it kind of sloshes all over the place.”

“Dr. Thompson likes when it sloshes all over the place,” I say. 

“That’s what everyone tells me. I want to see her technique, but I asked her once and she said no.” 

“She really gets into it,” I say. “It’s quite a spectacle.”

“I need something like that,” she says, rubbing the casting smooth. “You know, a trademark or gimmick or something.”

“You sing a lot,” I say. “You would be the Warbling Wound Care Warrior.”

“I’m not sure everyone appreciates my singing as much as you.”

Out of nowhere, SJon tells a story about a woman who was undergoing open heart surgery when her dog somehow got into the operating room and pissed all over the floor. I feel like I’ve kind of had my fill of SJon. I wonder if I can switch to Tuesdays, when both he and Shelley are off. 

They finish with me exactly an hour later than last time. Before I leave, Jenny comes to say hi, back from seeing her family in Wisconsin. 

"Oh my God, I love your concucopia. Is that what it's called?" She asks how I’m doing and I say I feel really fortunate, and I actually mean it. After all, I get to come back and do this all over again three days from now. 

“I know this has been hard, but just think,” she says as I roll away, “You’ve had osteomyelitis twice in this foot this year and you haven’t lost anything.” 

“Not yet,” I say. “After all, it’s only October.” 

Birthday, Part II

     Thursday I leave work early for my eye appointment. I don’t have to wait long before the assistant calls me back. She sits me in the chair and asks me why I’m there. “I see that the scheduler tried to call you to make a date for your cataract surgery,” she says. This is true; last week, I got a call at work from a woman saying just that. I was surprised; I didn’t remember being told someone would call me, and I told her that I had an appointment with the doctor this week. She sounded confused, but the call got dropped. She called back once but reception at work is so bad it wouldn’t connect. She didn’t leave a message, and when I tried calling the number, no one answered. I figured she’d call back, but she never did. I tell all this to the assistant, and she seems confused by the whole thing. 

    “Can I just make the appointment now, since I'm here?" I ask.

  “No, it all has to go through the scheduler.” She hands me the woman’s business card.

    “Great, so I can call her?”

    “No, she has to call you.”

      “Then why are you giving me her card?”

    “Just so you have it.”

    “So I have to constantly carry my phone in my hand at work, where I get no service and shouldn’t reallly be taking calls in the first place?” I ask. 

    “I don’t know what to tell you,” she says.

    “Look,” I say, “I know this isn’t your fault, and I’m sorry if I sound frustrated, but this is really fucked up. I’ve been practically blind since March and I want this fucking taken care of.”

    “I understand,” she says, at this point just praying that I leave. I oblige her.

    As I wait for the streetcar, I start to feel irritateded with myself. When I got the call from the scheduler, I should have immediately called the office and tried to figure out what was going on. Hell, I was in the office for my retina shot; I should have asked someone there, even though they all seem like clueless assholes. I didn’t, though, because I am exhausted and emotional and probably not thinking straight about any of this. Just this morning I felt like I could handle all of this, but I am so tired. I am so fucking tired of all of it. 

        On the bus to my wound care appointment the next day, a woman across the aisle is writing in some sort of word search or activity book and talking to herself, occasionally praising god. When I pull the cord at the hospital stop, she thrusts something at me. At first I think it’s a pear, but it’s a fuzzy blue bunny with yellow ears.

        “I found this on the floor!” She yells, grinning manically. “You can have its blessing! It’s a Rosh Hashanah blessing! It’s for you!”

        Rosh Hashanah was two weeks ago. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to take the bunny, because she is shaking it wildly in my face. I just thank her and roll off the bus as she continues yelling. 

        Ten minutes later Courtney saws my cast off with impressive speed and efficiency, chattering the whole time about all the horror movies she’s seen so far this month. I don’t know where she got the idea I like horror movies. I’m not a huge fan of Halloween either, but I’m impressed that she has a different set of spooky scrubs for every day of the week. Today’s are crowded with ghosts, pumpkins, and black cats. 

        “It looks a lot better,” she says, “But there’s still a lot of drainage so you’ll have to come in twice a week for now.”

        “Lucky me,” I say.

        “It’s hard to belieeeeve, but it’s alllll coming back to me nowww!” Dr. Taggert sings at what I hope is the top of her lungs. She kicks the curtain aside and dances into the room. 

        “Looks like someone got an early start on her weekend drinking,” I say.

        “No way! I’m just happy it’s Friday!” she screams. Gladys and Courtney seem to be the only other ones left in the office. I forgot how loopy they all get on Friday afternoons.

        I ask her if she takes requests. “I had one guy the other day who wanted me to sing Highway to Hell,” she says. “He really hated his cast.”

        She takes a quick look at the wound then leaves while Courtney prepares the materials and Gladys stays “to torment you.”

        “It’s my birthday tomorrow, what did you get me?” she asks. 

        “Aren’t you’re a little old for presents? I mean, you’re going to be twenty-six, right?” I think about what I was doing when I was twenty-six. That was the year of my first infection, and Jasmine moved in to help take care of me. Almost half my life ago.

        “You’re never too old for presents.”

        “Here, I got you this.” I reach into my pocket and slowly pull out my hand with the middle finger extended.

        Dr. Taggert reappears, singing the happy birthday song. Gladys blushes as we all sing, loud and off-key.

        Taggert asks how work is going. I tell her i work with a bunch of guys who want to be hospital guards.

.        “I don’t know why,” she says. “All the guys here wear tachtical gear. We had two lockdowns last week. One of them was a guy with a gunshot wound and they thought someone was coming to finish the job.”

        “When I was doing my internship,” Gladys interjects, “I walked around the corner one day to find one of my patients totally naked and trying to pull out her triple pic line. Luckily it snapped before she could yank it out. She was screaming an hollering and the only thing that would calm her down was when this one security guard would hold her hand. She wouldn’t let go of it. She looked so happy as long as he was sitting there with her. That's what it's like being a hospital guard.”

        Taggert slaps the cast together in time for me to catch an earlier bus than usual, which is fortunate, as I’m going out to the movies tonight, pretending everything's normal, that none of the events of the year ever happened. Just an ordinary guy spending an ordinary Friday night on the town. None of it's true, of course, but sometimes it's better to lie to oneself. It doesn't feel as shitty as the truth.

Birthday, Part I

 My wound care day has been changed to Tuesday this week because of my eye appointment. When I get there, Vicki leads me to a room and Tim, the new guy, checks my vitals. 

My wound is showing significant drainage and maceration for the first time in a while. “It’s a good thing we’re switching to the TCC,” she says. I gather that she means the hard cast, though I’ve never heard anyone call it that. “I think all the shifting might be making things worse.” Ordinarily I would be upset by this apparent step backwards, but just like last week, I’m just relieved that the right foot remains intact. 

Gladys walks by a few times, glancing in through the crack between the curtain and the wall, and when Tim and Vicki are done measuring and photographing, she comes in. She tells me she moved out of Goose Hollow and is now living in Sellwood. I’m so wrapped up in talking to her that I don’t notice KC until she’s standing beside me. She makes as if to hug me but it’s too awkward with me in the chair, so she just touches my arm the way she used to when I was lying on the slab, just about to be slid into the chamber. 

“You’re the only one I never see here,” I say. 

“That’s because you only come in on my day off. Which I assume is intentional.”

“Maybe I should change my day.”

“Maybe you should. But listen, you won’t believe this: I have a date tomorrow,” she says, beaming. “I was so bored I finally got back online.” 

I tell her I'm happy for her, which is half true. “I could tell you were in a good mood about something. You’ve been in here five minutes and you haven’t hit me once.” 

Gladys says, “We really do a lot of hitting in here, don’t we? You know how Dr. Thompson and I are. Well one time she punched me in the arm in front of a patient and the woman got really upset and told her not to hit her staff, said she was going to report her. I tried to explain that this was just how we connected but she wasn’t convinced.”

Tim and Vicki are still there as well, and we all carry on like old friends. Vicki has never been my favorite, but she seems unusually loose and friendly today. Tim is really growing on me. He asks Vicki about a pin she’s wearing. She down looks at it. “Oh, that’s just my forty-five year pin.” 

“Forty-five years?” we all say.

“Yup. In this very building. Well, aside from seven years in Eugene.”

I tell them that last month was my twentieth anniversary working at the museum. They are all amazed, though it’s obviously not even half of Vicky’s career. 

I mention how strange it was being in the room with three guys last week. 

“I bet,” says KC. “Especially with S-Jon, he’s so manic!” 

“OK, look, once and for all, what the hell is his name?” I ask. “Everyone tells me something different.”

“It’s Jon,” says KC, pronouncing it Jean. “But he tells everyone to call him S-Jon and that’s what Aaron calls him, and he’s known him forever.”

“He’s part Norwegian and part Cherokee, from Oklahoma,” Gladys says. “As if that makes any sense. He’s still got a lot of that ER twitchiness. Taggert’s got it too, even though she’s been her two years. It takes a while to work its way out of your system. Speaking of which.” She leans in close. “If she gives you any of that crap about the wheelchair, just ignore her. You should just keep on doing what you’re doing.”

And then Dr. Arianna Taggert herself bursts through the curtain, not screeching like she usually does, but speaking in a relatively normal tone of voice. And soon everyone’s talking at once and joking and laughing and I’m back home, surrounded by love. 

Gladys supervises while Tim prepares the water and wrappings. “You sure you’re okay with the TCC?” Taggert asks. Hoping we’re talking about the same thing, I say yes. “Good. I think it’ll help.” 

She says she’ll be back in a bit. It takes a while to get the layers ready beneath the cast, especially because everyone’s talking and Tim is inexperienced. Gladys has him rewrap my foot when he does it wrong. KC holds a piece of silver foam, folding it one way and another, before realizing she’s not really helping. She says goodbye and I tell her I expect to hear all about her date next time I see her. 

“Oh you’ll hear everything,” she says. 

“Maybe not everything,” I say.

Taggert returns and as she wraps the cast, I think about how sad it is that I don’t have a group of people like this outside of the hospital. The memorial for Teddy made me realize how long it’s been since I had a real gang of friends. We certainly didn’t appreciate it at the time; we were just a bunch of misfits thrown together because there was only one coffee shop in town. And I left them all behind to come out here to follow some stupid dream of love, left them all for Portland.

Before she dashes off, I ask Dr. Taggert to remind me what TCC stands for. “Total contact cast,” she says. 

They bring me a new shoe for the TCC. It’s a little long in front- after all, I don’t have any toes- but it’s black, and looks much nicer than the ones they’ve been giving me.

Everyone is chatting by the computers when Tim brings me my scooter. It doesn’t get the kind of attention I had hoped for, considering I’ve covered it with nylon leaves and plastic gourds and random bits of autumnal flair. Maybe once I get the lights on it they’ll be more impressed. 

When I get on the bus, a bald guy in a t-shirt and jeans says, “Hey, nice holiday decorations.” I tell him I like his costume. 

“It’s my daughter’s birthday tomorrow,” he says, apropos of nothing. “I got a bad memory for most stuff but I always remember to give her a call on her birthday.” He stares straight ahead as he says all this, not looking at me. “I might not see her again.” 

“Well, um, happy birthday to her,” I say, and yank the yellow cord for my stop. 

Chamber Music, Hypberbaric and Otherwise

I write a list of the pros and cons of being on the meds. On the pro side is the fact that I don’t feel too bad and am able to function normally. I also have very little appetite and no urge to drink. On the other side are the side effects. None of them are severe, but added up they prevent me from enjoying anything. 

The responsible thing to do, of course, is tell all this to my doctor and have him adjust my dosages to hopefully alleviate some of the numbness. 

Of course I don’t do this. Instead I decide to just be done with the wretched things. I know they work and I know what to expect. If things get bad, I can go back on them. 

As the drugs leave my system, I feel myself surfacing. For a few days I find myself sobbing at random moments, then that phase passes and I experience a sharp clarity I haven’t felt in months. It feels like the first cold snap of the year; painful but refreshing. My brain is once again permitted to feel misery, and it does, but I look the misery in the eye and it doesn’t exactly disappear, but it shrinks a bit. I find myself feeling tired but not exhausted like I had been. The idea of lying in bed and doing nothing for days on end no longer seems like a viable lifestyle choice. 

At work one day I find myself taking out my pocket sketchbook and drawing without even realizing what I’m doing. It’s like my hand has suddenly woken up after a deep slumber. The pictures don’t exactly gush out, but they flow, easily and without struggle, and I feel a microscopic thrill of pleasure. 

The words are slower to return. I don’t push them, just try to stand back and let them emerge in their own time. When they do, it’s like drinking a cold glass of water after a long, hot day in the sun.

My senses return to normal. I go out to a fancy dinner with a friend and the food is so good I don’t even feel all that envious to hear that her life has turned around and everything is going great. What must that feel like, I wonder, gnawing the head off a shrimp the size of my fist. 

The following night I attend a chamber music recital performed by a trio from Copenhagen. The musicians resemble their instruments: the pianist is sleek and angular, the violinist seems to rest her chin on a small model of her own body. The cellist has a narrow waist and large bottom. I love watching her rock back and forth. I want to be held like that, gripped by her knees, with my head resting against her bosom as she coaxes beautiful music from my hollow shell. 

A delicate, dissonant piece by Bent Sorenson is paired with Beethoven’s “Ghost.” After the break they launch into a Tchaikovsky piano trio. It sounds like a Russian folk song has exploded, with shrapnel flying in every direction. After forty-five minutes of furious veering and swooping, the strings fall away to leave only the piano quietly plinking and fading to an almost unbearable silence. We all just sit there… surely it doesn’t end like this? But it does, it’s over, the mood shattered by applause that, after such an exquisite descent into nothingness, feels vulgar and inappropriate. It would be better for us to stand and file out without a sound, carrying that silence with us, letting it burden and buoy us.

*

“There’s a woman in your shoe,” Aaron says. He and Jean and the new guy surround me in room one. He’s right; over the weekend I drew a woman on the white inside of my post-op shoe with a Sharpie. I was surprised to find that it had transferred to the bottom of the soft cast. I was a little embarrassed, but Jean didn’t notice it when he pulled it off; at least he didn’t say anything.

It’s strange to be surrounded by men in this clinic which until recently has been overwhelmingly female. “Lotta testosterone in here,” I say loudly, and the women on the other side of the curtain laugh. I tell Aaron I haven’t seen him in a while and he says he was on vacation in Southern Italy. I’m surprised; he doesn’t seem the type to visit Italy. He usually just goes camping around Mount Hood. 

The wound on my left foot isn’t any worse, but it’s not much better. I’m not upset; all I care about is whether the skin on the right foot is still intact. And it is. 

Dr. Thompson comes in and asks if I mind having an observer, a young woman doctor from St. Vincent’s.

“Did you get to see your friend?” she asks. I had told her Amy was going to be in town. I tell her I had forgotten how nice it can be to just sit around and watch tv and laugh with someone. I talk about how difficult the isolation has been.

“It’s so nice to have people you can share activities with,” says the visiting doctor.

“I know, burying bodies is a lot harder by yourself,” I say.

The visiting doctor looks upset but Dr Thompson just shakes her head and says, “I think we’ll go back to the hard cast next week. It should help you heal faster. I know you had problems last time but I think you just needed a break from it. Does that sound okay?” I tell her it sounds fine. Another month, two months, whatever The skin on the right foot is still intact.

Aaron has Jean do the soft cast, but halfway through he takes over and does most of it himself. The two of them banter the entire time. The doctor from St. Vincent’s has stayed to watch. She comments on their rapport and Aaron says, “Ejon and I have known each other since we were twelve.” Ejon? What the hell is this guy’s name, anyways?

“So you’re like family,” the doctor says. 

“We’re actually brothers,” says Aaron.

“Stepbrothers,” says Ejon. “We have different moms. But we grew up together.” The doctor can’t tell if they’re joking, and neither can I, but  I seem to notice a slight twang in Aaron’s voice for the first time. 

As they’re finishing up, Sally from hyperbaric appears. It’s good to see her. I tell her I miss her and the chamber, and she says I can come back anytime I want. 

“Don’t I have to get an infection first?” I ask. 

“Eh, we can fudge the paperwork.”

During the bus ride home, I get a text from our building’s super saying the elevator is fixed. It’s only been down a little over a week, much shorter than they predicted. 

I put my phone away and see a man sitting across from me wearing ear buds and a brown sweater decorated with vegetables. He sings and sways and shakes his head, from time to time throwing up his hands and yelling “Christ is king!” I can only make out a few words at first, but eventually I realize he’s singing Sarah Smile by Hall and Oates. He’s utterly lost in the music. I watch him shamelessly. I’m the only one doing so; everyone is looking at their phone. With one final “Praise Jesus!” he bolts out the door and dances across the street, beaming, confident the traffic will stop for him, or maybe not even knowing it’s there. 

Elevator

There’s no question the antidepressants are doing what they’re designed to do, filing off the sharp edges so I can continue to function. I’m getting up every day and going to work and getting through the day without panic or anguish. But I have no drive and no urges, and if I don’t feel much pain, I’m not feeling much pleasure, either. I can read but every time I try to write or draw it’s like trying to wade through pudding.

The first day the elevator is shut off, I get three floors down the stairs when I realize I don’t have my wallet. In the ten years I’ve lived in this building, I haven’t once left the apartment without it. Until now.

The man who set burned down the May apartment building up the street a year and a half ago has finally been found guilty. He was obviously mentally ill and I feel sad for him, sad for all those people who lost their pets and their possessions, sad for everyone. And yet it’s a shallow kind of sadness; the meds keep me from dipping too far down into misery. I don’t like how weird and flat I feel though. Between the meds and my cataracts, I feel like I’m watching the world through aquarium glass. 

After work I go to Safeway to get my shots. 

“That’s a lot of shots,” the pharmacist’s assistant says, looking at the checklist. 

“Is that a problem? They didn’t say there was a limit.”

“I’ll ask.” 

She comes back and tells me to wait in a tiny waiting area facing the kombucha. I wait so long I get my daily drawing finished. It’s a picture of a goopy blob of a man being poured from a mayonnaise jar. 

The pharmacist leads me to a room barely big enough for both of us. A bowl of Dum Dum lollipops sits on a miniature end table. She tells me that both my arms will probably hurt and that I should take things easy for a few days. We exchange vaccine horror stories. She gives me a flu shot and COVID booster in my right arm and shingles and hepatitis B vaccines in my right. I don’t even know what hepatitis B is but they recommended it on the website so I checked the box. The shots have pierced both of my tattoos, the one of the ant and my cartoon of Noodle. She puts a band aid across Noodle’s eyes, like a blindfold.

When I get home I lock up my scooter and climb the stairs and try to nap but can’t. I make dinner and read some of the Wright Brothers book and try to nap again. I am so tired, and I know I should write but I have nothing to say. I try to collage my fragmented thoughts but nothing coheres. I can’t even feel upset about it, just irritated in an abstract sort of way. 

I wake up in the middle of the night aching and can’t get back to sleep. When the alarm goes off (I’ve finally switched from NPR to the jazz station, which unfortunately seems to play only the smooth variety) I sit up and feel horrible. I retch violently into the toilet but nothing comes out. Maybe it was a mistake to get all my shots at once.

I scoot a few blocks and have to stop. I’m utterly exhausted and my entire body hurts. I think of calling in sick, but press on for another two blocks, rest again, and slowly cover the last stretch to work. 

I leave early for my appointment and doze on the bus, and by the time I get to the hospital I feel… not refreshed, exactly, but able to function. Shelley is training yet another new guy, named Tim. She’s not impressed with the old cast. I tell her it wasn’t put on properly. “I can see that,” she snaps. 

“The other new guy put it on,” I say. “What is his name, anyways?” She says Jean. 

Someone in the next room says, “How are you feeling today, Gil?” Gil is a very old man who was in the chamber at the same time I was. I used to try to engage him in conversation and he would just stare at me blankly. I want to yell hello but he’d just be confused. I wonder how my other fellow patients are faring. 

Dr. Thompson is happy with the progress. The right foot is completely healed, though the skin is still raw and will not be strong for a long time. She doesn’t touch it, just has the nurse put a foam pad on it. The wound on the left foot is a little deeper but she says it looks healthy. “What you need is a third leg,” she says as she hacks away at the ever-growing callouses.

I’m supposed to go to a reading after my appointment, but instead I go home and make supper and swallow my pills, feeling queasy at how many there are. I take some aspirin, wishing I had something stronger. It’s a perfect evening, and I sit on the balcony for a little while but I can’t get comfortable, so I go back inside and lie in bed, aching. This is my life, now; no highs, no lows, no thrills, no trauma. My entire existence reduced to a low, dull ache. The pills are working their magic. There’s no point in trying to kill yourself when you’re already dead.