Gas Leak

Empty cans of paint loaded into the trunk of a rental car. 

The desire to return to an imagined state of purity. Was there ever one? 

They evacuated the building while the fire department tried to find the source of the leak. They gave the all clear then immediately rescinded it. I stood out in the sun, watching people walk by. A man carrying an assembled tent on his back walked past, never once setting it down.

When they say purity, they mean whiteness. They want everyone to be white. As if that was inherently a good thing. 

He complains that the only car they had available to rent was a Prius and that when he got in his head touched the roof. “I had to drive all scrunched over,” he said, then gave me a fist bump, which was his way of saying both hello and goodbye. Like aloha. 

And the government was busy kidnapping brown people and putting them in jail in El Salvador and everyone just kind of accepted it, even if they didn’t think it was okay. What could they do?

And I forgot my password. And the cat refused to sit in my lap, even though she usually likes to.

Of course many people vote against their best interests.

And I tried not to stare but I sneaked a peek when I thougth she wasn’t looking but she caught me and I felt terrible. But I knew I would probably do it again. 

I’m white and to be honest I don’t think it’s anything special. Though a little part of me, a little lump in my scrotum, is relieved because it makes me less likely to be spirited away to rot in a jail in El Salvador. 

Belief in the existence of purity is a kind of madness. 

They never found out what caused the gas leak.

And I went out to happy hour and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu and felt terrible. And it wasn’t even worth it.

What Happens to Shadows During an Eclipse

 The wall of light could not hold back

The rushing torrent of water. 

It could not stop the stampede or the fire 

or the tanks. We were so proud of it, we spent 

So much time building it. And it proved to be

totally ineffectual against all the things

that could destroy us. But oh it was pretty. 

I guess we thought its shimmering surface 

would mesmerize the forces of chaos 

the way it mesmerized us. 

But they barreled right through

without stopping to admire the swirling colors

and glowing layers we had worked so hard

to cultivate and collect. In retrospect,

we should have used stone. We should have 

dug a moat. We should have erected

an electrified fence, thirty feet high 

and topped with razor wire. 

But we worried that would make us 

too much like them. We thought 

we would preserve our integrity

if we chose to protect ourselves

only with the most ethereal of defenses. 

And so we were enslaved, and so we suffered,

And so we died. Without glory, without dignity,

and even though -or because?- we were right. 

The Future

I leave work early to get my bimonthly shot in the eye. It’s cold and rainy as it has been all week, and the streetcar is fragrant with bodies cocooned in wet blankets. 

The waiting room of the eye clinic is packed. When I’m finally called, the aide –as usual, someone I’ve never seen before, despite my frequent visits- tells me they had three people call out sick. She gives me drops and checks my eye pressure with a device the size of a pen, instead of the usual machine. She leads me to the room with the retina scanner but it’s in use so I sit outside while she leans against the wall of the narrow hallway. I ask if she’s a knitter, pointing to the tattoo on her forearm. “Socks, mostly,” she says. I try to make small talk but she’s unreceptive. It’s Friday, and we’re both tired. 

When the room finally frees up, she has trouble adjusting the retina scanner properly. I’m so tired of all these machines, tired of this whole eye business. I’m tired of pretty much everything, really. 

She leads me to the dreaded Small Waiting Room, where I sit crammed in with a bunch of elderly people. The guy next to me screams at his phone is what sounds like Croatian, but there are no other seats for me to move to. I take out the hundredth anniversary issue of the New Yorker from a few weeks ago. It’s surprisingly dull for such a notable occasion. There are a lot of congratulatory ads along with an article about the fiftieth anniversary of Saturday Night Live. I nod off occasionally. I wait for an hour and a half before my name is finally called by an aide who I may or may not have seen before. They are starting to blur together. 

She leads me to another room and puts drops in my eyes and leaves, and a few minutes later Dr. Wang arrives and says the scan showed that the bump in my retina only looks slightly better, so he wants to start me on a stronger medicine. I ask if this is normal and he says it happens with seventy percent of his patients, but the insurance company requires him to try the weakest medicine first before it allows him to try stronger kinds. He leaves and the aide returns to have me fill out the forms for the new medicine, which require a lot of personal information, including my social security number. 

She departs and Wang returns and gives me drops and asks if they burn, gives me more drops and asks if they burn, then gives me the shot with one sudden stab. It doesn’t hurt but I feel it slide in, which is unusual. He must notice my discomfort because he asks if I’m okay. If you would’ve told me a year ago that I’d be getting a shot in my eyeball every eight weeks, I would’ve freaked out, but at this point it’s just a minor annoyance. He says that the hope with the stronger medicine is that I should only need it occasionally.

Afterwards I head across town to the Tomorrow Theater to see if they can squeeze me in to the sold-out Miranda July event. I hadn’t planned on even trying but a coworker told me I should stop by. I was hoping they’d be working the door, but it’s a woman I’ve never met, though I know her face from the staff handbook. She grills me, asking me who told me I would be able to get in. I tell her and she looks suspicious. I say it’s no big deal and turn to go, and she tells me to wait until closer to show time and she’ll see what she can do. I feel embarrassed and stand in the corner of the tiny, crowded lobby, feeling awkward. I don’t like crowds, plus my sugar is low and on top of it my right eye is filled with floaters like a series of cat scratches. I’m surprised to see a bunch of people from work, including the head of the museum. 

At last the woman at the door leads me in and seats me in the back by the sound board. The head of the museum is right in front of me. I sit down next to an attractive woman, perhaps a little younger than me, who asks me how I got a seat. I tell her and she says she saw that they were sold out but they told her they could get her in. We both talk about how much we love All Fours. She says she works as a somatic therapist who also makes steel sculptures. She seems really interesting (despite my doubts about the whole somatic therapy thing), but we don’t get to talk much before the lights go down and the director of the theater comes out to introduce Miranda July. 

She comes out onto the low stage, looking exactly the way she looks in her movies and author photos; short curly hair, wide eyes that always look a little sad and bewildered. She wears what looks like a man’s red robe. 

I dislike the theater director immensely, and once again she proves herself to be a  twit. Happily, July tends to ramble on at great length after every idiotic question, and even happier, that rambling is interesting and entertaining. She comes across as less flaky than I had imagined judging on interviews I’d read; she’s smart and funny and everything she says seems propelled by anxiety, which I find charming and relatable. 

After about an hour, the director opens things up to questions. July asks if she can try something; she wants to swap clothes with someone in the audience. She asks anyone who wants to do so to stand up, and she walks up and down the aisles trying to decide what outfit she feels drawn to. “Oh, I love that sweater, but… no. Sorry. This feels so cruel,” she says, and like with so much of what she does, it’s difficult to tell how much of it is an act. The artificially of her shtick always feels like there is an undercurrent of sincerity though, which keeps her from being too precious and annoying, though she always seems to step right up to that line. Her early work felt a little too cloying to me, but over the years she has mastered the high wire act. 

. “I think maybe a man’s clothes,” she says after a few minutes of sadly turning people down. 

“Oh, I’m wearing man’s clothes,” the woman next to me says, and leaps to her feet. 

July finally picks a tall, well-dressed man to swap outfits with, and they duck behind a folding screen that has been set up on the stage. She keeps making little comments and cries of pleasure that seem like they could easily become sexual but never quite do. It feels uncomfortable and manipulative and playful and genuinely intimate. 

The theater director keeps making comments like “I wish you all could hear the things I’m hearing!” and “See, this is the kind of experience we bring here at The Tomorrow Theater!” Until the museum bought it, the place was called The Oregon Theater, and showed nothing but pornography.

When they are done changing, July steps out from behind the screen –“No, wait, you can’t go first,” she scolds- in the man’s stylishly mismatched suit, and emerges in the flowing red robe. Everyone applauds, then she takes questions, occasionally pausing to preen and pose. “I wish I had a mirror!” she chirps. 

There is a break, after which they are going to screen her film The Future, which I haven’t seen since its original run. The woman next to me is surprised; she didn’t know they were showing a film. My sugar is still really low so I go out to the lobby to get some popcorn. My neighbor follows me and when I get to the counter I ask if I can get her anything. I say casually, but I can tell by the way she declines that I have made her uncomfortable. I find I have this affect on women a lot, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps my desperation to be loved comes through without my meaning for it to, and they find this repulsive. Perhaps they can see through my friendly, jovial façade to see how deeply miserable I am.

I remember that the first time I watched the movie, I was initially irritated by it, but by the end it won me over. I watched it the woman I was seeing at the time; the first girlfriend I had in Portland. She lived upstairs from a man who claimed to be the inspiration for the male lead; the story of him pouring lighter fluid on his hand and setting it on fire was his. I was skeptical, but then we watched some Miranda July short films she had on tape and sure enough, the guy downstairs was in one of them. 

This time I feel captivated all the way through. I had forgotten how steeped in loneliness it is, how the entire thing seems to be about much we need to connect with other people, and how difficult it is to do so. I think of the lovely, curly-haired sculptress beside me; the irony is not lost on me. Or maybe I’m just projecting.

When it’s over, the somatic therapist and I walk out together. I want to ask what she thought of the movie but I’m feeling overwhelmed by emotion.

I hold the door to the street for her and she says, “Bye.”

“It was great talking to you,” I say. She strides away without another word and I hobble off through the rainy darkness to wait for the bus to carry me across the river, from my lonely present into an even lonelier future.

The Bell

Blanketed by fog, the morning sun looks like a full moon as I head to my appointment with dr taggert. This is only my second time seeing her since the nurses went on strike nearly six weeks ago. They signed a new contract over the weekend but they’re not back at work yet. When the bus pulls up in front of the hospital, I see that the tents and port-a-potties for the picketers are all gone.

The metal detector is in operation for the first time in a while, and I put my bag in the tray and set off the alarms when I hobble through on my crutches. A polite young man wands me over and for the first time it starts to beep. He asks if I have anything in my pocket and I tell him just pens and he waves me on without checking to see if they are in fact pens and not a knife or gun. 

I check in with a man I’ve never seen before, then head up the green elevator. The lights are on in the office but I’m very early. I only have to wait a few minutes before taggert bursts out and hollers for me to come in.

She asks where my wheelchair is, as I knew she would, but she seems satisfied when I tell her I’ve been using crutches all the time, which I have. “The wheelchair is just so much harder,” I say. 

She says she understands. “I told you about my brother, right? He had MS as a kid and we wheeled him around everywhere.” She’s not wearing her mask, and I can’t stop staring at her mouth, which I’ve only glimpsed before. There’s nothing wrong with it, in fact she looks younger and prettier without the mask, plus for the first time her hair is down. Freed of its ponytail, it’s golden and longer than I imagined. I would not recognize her if I saw her on the street. 

The only other person in the office is Bridget, the new receptionist. Taggert says the nurses will be back tomorrow. I ask if she’s relieved. “Oh god yes, this has been a nightmare. But I saw what some of them will be making and I think maybe I should’ve just become a nurse. Now maybe you can tell me, does the chair look right to you? I can’t get the leg rest to go back any further but maybe it was always that way?”

I slip off my postop shoe and sock and she peels off the bandage. “Well, this still looks good,” she says. “Really good. Wait, what about your knee? Is that still… oh, that’s healed up too. Wow. Okay, let me just get this callous off.” She plucks it off with a knife and says everything is healed up underneath. She slaps a bandage on and says, “Oh wait, it’s all wrinkled up, that’s not…do I need to cut it? No, I can just fold it over like…you know, the nurses really are better at this. Anyways, that’s it! You’re all healed up! You don’t need us anymore!”

“Really?” I ask.  I had figured on there being at least another visit or two. It’s strange to suddenly be separated from people I’ve spent so much time with over the last year. I wanted to hear how they weathered the strike, if they enjoyed the time off or were just tense the whole time. And of course the one I miss the most is KC, her awkward flirting, her terrible singing… I feel sad knowing I may never see her or any of them again. But mostly her. 

Or I may be back in two weeks. Regardless, I should draw them a thank you card with my info so they can keep in touch, though I’m pretty sure they won’t. 

“So now what?” I ask. 

“Now you can start breaking in your shoe, though if you’ve had it a while you might want to get a new one,” I tell her I’ve never worn it and she says I should still get a new one. “Besides, Medicaid covers a free one every year,” she says. “Oh wait, you don’t have Medicaid.”

“Yeah but soon no one else will either!” I cry.

“That fucking guy,” she mutters. “I can’t even bring myself to say his name. But give them a call. They should be  adjusting your inserts quarterly anyways.”

“Quarterly?” I groan. She nods and gives me that bug-eyed stare I’ve grown so accustomed to, though its intensity is oddly diluted without her mask. 

“A wound like this takes ten to twelve months to fully heal up, and even then it’s only ever going to be 80% of what it was before,” she says for possibly the thirtieth time. “You are always going to have to be hyper-vigilant. The moment you se any signs of rubbing or soreness, you rip those shoes right off and get them adjusted. And if the sores open up, you call us immediately.” I tell her I will, though I feel tense and tired just thinking about it. This isn’t over. This will never be over. This is my life.

Taggert holds my coat up so I can worm my arms into the sleeves. “I feel like your butler,” she laughs, and escorts me to the door. She surprises me by giving me a big hug. 

“This is so anticlimactic,” I say. And it’s true; there are no emotional outpourings, no fitting denouements to any of the character arcs. Apparently this story ends with just me and Taggert hugging awkwardly in the vestibule. From a narrative perspective, it’s pretty weak. But perhaps there’s something fitting about that, even if it feels unsatisfying. 

Sitting on the counter is the bell you get to ring when you finish your treatment. For the first time, I notice that there are actually three bells; the one I rang last time, and also a town crier type hand bell and a squat cowbell. 

“Don’t I get to ring the bell?” I ask.

“Oh my god, of course!” Taggert laughs. “I forgot! It’s been so long since anyone’s rung it!”

I grab the little cowbell and shake it maniacally. It clonks dully, a harsh, ugly sound. I should’ve taken the town crier bell, but it’s too late. You can’t undo these kinds of mistakes. Taggert nevertheless waves her arms in the air and cheers. Bridget grimaces and shakes her head. I ring and ring and ring that fucking bell.

Outside, the sun has burned away the fog, and the world and all its denizens are cast in a harsh, cold light. It feels strange to be going to work after my appointment instead of the other way around. As I wait for the bus, a spotlight seems to shine on the litter at my feet one object at a time. Soggy brown wads of paper towels. A sheet of newspaper. A family of cigarette butts. A wrapper for a king-sized Snickers bar. A guy in a bright yellow vest is lethargically sweeping it all up. 

A man with purple hair walks past, wearing a black jean jacket with the words Where Roses Bloom So Does Hope stitched in Gothic lettering on the back. I move so the guy with the broom can sweep up the Snickers wrapper, and then the bus comes and I climb on and we head down Glisan, taking the Burnside bridge across the river, which is still shrouded in mist, despite the sunshine, into downtown, past the empty storefronts and boarded-up buildings, past addicts frozen in place and cops strapping on their riot gear, past people with baby carriages and mobility devices, couples holding hands or walking their dogs or getting coffee, past all these stories unfolding all the time around us, until finally I pull the cord to ring the bell for my stop.

The Alternative

     It’s Valentine’s Day and the museum is closed due to inclement weather. Everyone in security had to come in anyways, though there’s no need for all of us to be here, so I hobbled on my crutches through the snow and am now sitting here getting paid to drink cold coffee from a paper cup.

      My bosses are laughing and carrying on about a new product one of them saw advertised. It is a metal and plastic ball that attaches to the muzzle of a gun. When you pull the trigger, the bullet is slowed down by the ball, so that by the time it hits the target it will have been rendered non-lethal. It’s called the Alternative. I admit it sounds pretty questionable but these guys are howling  like it is the funniest thing they’ve ever seen.

      They talk about an incident ten years ago, there was a guy acting rowdy down on the waterfront and when the cops came they shot him with an orange shotgun, which is only supposed to be loaded with non-lethal ammunition, only someone had loaded it with real bullets. “Lotta people lost their jobs over that one,” one of them says. The other nods, no longer laughing.

      Today is the one year anniversary of my first day of hyperbaric treatment. This exact time I was being pulled from the hyperbaric chamber, dazed by the strangeness of it all. 

     I think about whether to send a text to nurse Hannah wishing her a happy Valentine’s Day. I would send her flowers but I don’t know her address, don’t even know her last name.

      I was supposed to get my shot of retina medicine today but the office is closed. The nurses strike has hit a wall. Last week the hospital made them an offer but 83% of the nurses rejected it. There have been no talks since. The hospital says the nurses will lose their insurance at the end of the month. I would like to hunt down every one of those millionaire administrators, gun them down in cold blood. I don’t love the idea of murder but we are being left with no good alternatives. 

      Nurse Hannah isn’t affected by the strike since she isn’t an RN. I send her a text and she texts back immediately. Friendly but noncommittal. I send another text and she doesn’t respond. I sip my cold coffee. Snow is still falling but the streets are black. it’s already starting to melt. 

Rosa Parks

All day at work my knee is killing me, and sure enough when I get home and take my pants off it there is a giant blister that hadn’t been there the day before. It looks like I can no longer put off the wheelchair. All weekend I alternate between it and the crutches. Sunday I don’t leave the apartment, and I call in sick on Monday. In the middle of the afternoon the phone rings with a familiar number, and when I answer it there an equally familiar voice on the other end.

“Hello this is Luna from wound care, is Seann there?”

She says Dr. Taggert has her mornings free to see and asks if I want to come in for an appointment. “She won’t be casting you,” she says. I say yes, of course, that sounds great, when? She says how about tomorrow. 

There is frost on the grass when I wheel down to the bus stop, but luckily the sidewalks are dry. This is the first time I’ve used the wheelchair outside the apartment and my arms start hurting instantly. The hill down to the bus stop is very steep, and I use my good leg as a brake, which also hurts by the time I get down there. If I’m this worn out before I even get onto the bus, how am I going to get through the day? 

The driver puts down the ramp and I drag myself aboard with some difficulty. He says there’s no charge; it’s Rosa Parks Day. The morning is so foggy I can’t see the river when we cross it. I get off at Burnside and catch my second bus. I’ve made this trip so many times with my scooter or wearing the cast that it’s become second nature, but the wheelchair changed everything. I feel self-conscious taking up so much room, feel like an obstacle. Luckily the bus isn’t crowded so I’m not actually in anyone’s way. I just feel like I am. It’s difficult not to feel self conscious, though I know there’s no need to.

Tents have been erected on the corners surrounding the hospital to give shelter to the strikers. A truck has set up a table with coffee and donuts, and a row of portable toilets lines the street. I don’t see anyone I recognize so I just slowly make my way down another extremely steep hill to the hospital entrance.

They’re open but most of the lights are out and there’s hardly anyone inside. I roll up to the counter, feeling very small, and tell the woman who knows me, “I’m back!” 

“Any COVID symptoms?” she asks.

“I missed you too,” I say as I wheel past the Starbucks, whose non-union workers are hard at work pouring blackberry sage refreshers for the scabs. 

The lights in the office are out but I hear someone fiddling with the door handle. “I don’t know how to open this thing!” Dr Taggert laughs. “I’ve never done it before! Oh, hello!” she says, finally having figured out the latch. She’s the only one in the office, aside from a gorgeous Black woman behind the counter I’ve never seen before. I almost wish her a happy Rosa Parks Day, but fortunately I stop myself. 

Taggert introduces us. “She’s the new Luna. Or will be, once this strike is over.” It’s been a month with minimal headway being made but she sounds certain that it will end soon. I’m less optimistic.

She has me sit in room one. I tell her about the knee wound. She looks at it and seems a little concerned, but after poking at it a bit decides it’s not as bad as it looks. I take off my shoe and she peels off the makeshift dressing I slapped over my foot wound.

“Oh wow, this looks great,” she says, and shows me the dry bandage. “Look! Nada!” She gets a knife and starts carefully cutting at the scab. “I’m not seeing anything under this but skin. The wound is gone.” 

While she continues to cut and clean the area, I ask how she’s doing and she says not too bad. “We’re kind of sheltered from the madness in here,” she says. “Just running the chambers.”

“Making sure not to blow up any children, I hope.” 

“Oh God, isn’t that horrible,” she says. 

Last Friday a hyperbaric chamber in Michigan exploded with a five-year-old boy inside, burning him to death and injuring his mother. “You know what started it?” she asks. “A toy. They let him have a toy in there. Can you imagine? You see how careful we are here. Of course the place wasn’t accredited, one of these boutique places. And you know what he was being treated for? Autism!” 

She goes on to says that, insanity about using oxygen to treat autism aside, places like that don’t even use enough pressure to be effective on anything other than altitude sickness. I tell her the tragic story of Landmark’s Legendary Affaire, which she has somehow never heard. “That’s why we remove all our patients’ horseshoes,” she says.

She’s cheerful and chatty, and after my surprising good news, I am too. But as she re-bandages the wound area, she lectures me again about how I have to accept the fact that I am never going to be able to go back to living the way I used to, in other words, being able to walk. Part of me refuses to accept this can possibly be true; surely there must be some sort of shoe or surgery that will allow me to use the foot for more than just balancing? I don’t want to run marathons; I just want to be able to stroll around. I wish I could talk to Dr. Thompson about it; she’s always much less dire and reactionary. Taggert says she just got back from Hawaii. Maybe I can find out what days she works and make an appointment with her.

When Taggert asks if I want to come back next week, I tell her I’d rather wait another week. I feel resentful at her for squashing what little hope I can summon. She says to call Luna when I’m ready to schedule, and to just keep doing what I’m doing, then says that when she went to Costco the other day there was a line of people all the way back to the snack aisle. “Everyone’s cart was totally filled with toilet paper! It’s like the pandemic all over again! Did you know that our toilet paper comes from Canada? And everyone’s freaking out because of the stupid tariffs. So what could I do but fill my cart with toilet paper.” 

I ask why she doesn’t just steal it from work like everyone else does. “Nobody will notice,” I say. “They’re all on strike!”

As I wait for the elevator, the fire alarms go off and all the doors slam shut. A female robot says that there is a Code Red in the cancer center, which is a whole other building, so when the elevator arrives I just take it down to the ground floor and head for the lobby like usual. The lights are on now and there are a lot more people here; you would never know that thousands of supposedly essential frontline workers are fighting to be fairly compensated.

It takes me a long time to struggle up the hill to the bus stop. At the top I say hi to the nurses crowded under one of the tents with their picket signs. They are bundled up and crowded around a gas flame and they look like they are freezing their asses off. Cars honk in support as they pass, the blaring horns playing an appropriately irritating requiem for America. 

Milkshake

The scheduler surprises me by calling me at work on Martin Luther King Day to confirm my cataract surgery for Thursday. She says the clinic will call me with details, and, again to my surprise, fifteen minutes later they do.

You can’t eat or drink anything the day of surgery, so by the time the Widder comes to pick me up at noon on Thursday, I’m famished; and deprived of coffee, my thinking is as fuzzy as the vision in my left eye. I also strained my back the day before, and if I twist in a particular way I feel like I might pass out.

We are very early. I sign the consent forms and take a seat.  The Widder abandons me to find a Starbucks. There are four elderly couples waiting already, chatting amongst themselves. How nice it must be to not have to go through things alone. 

 There is something bittersweet about losing this lens I’ve used my whole life. I think of the vanished friends whose images were once reflected upside down upon its surface. Will it be harder for me to picture them with a new eye that has never seen them? I know that’s not how it works, but it still unsettles me.

I look around with it for the last time.  The waiting room is long and narrow and the carpet and walls and furniture are gray. The only color is provided by two gargantuan monstera plants in the corner. Trucks thunder past and through the glass doors I can see an AutoZone and a 7-11. This is a truly bleak corner of the city.

Then the door opens and if this was a movie, the music would come to a halt with a needle scratch. A goddess stands there, blocking my view of the 7-11. All the couples stop talking. She strides in slow-motion up to the reception window in a pair of boots that seem to make the earth shudder beneath their soles. Her ebony hair is long and flowing. Her pants are supernaturally tight. Her blouse and lipstick are the color of blood dripping from a saber toothed tiger’s jaws. She says something in a thick Hispanic accent to the receptionist, then walks over and sits directly across from and crosses her legs. I catch a faint whiff of perfume; tasteful yet intoxicating. She’s not wearing a wedding ring. 

Thankfully, a few minutes later they call my name and I somehow mount my scooter without falling on my face. I turn around in the narrow space, coming dangerously close to brushing against one of Aphrodite’s shitkickers. She doesn’t look up from her phone.

The assistant is the same one I had last time. She leads me into a tiny room and has me sit in a huge chair that takes up most of the space. There is barely enough room for her and I and my scooter. Just like last time, there is music playing when she’s there, and just like last time it shuts off the moment she leaves the room. The song this time is Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely, and she is. Her skin is brown but her hair is thick and blonde beneath her blue hairnet. She hands me a hairnet of my own from a box on the wall labeled Disposable Bouffant Covers. 

She asks me which eye I’m having done and I tell her the left and she tells me to point to it and draws a dot above it with a marker. They always do this when I get my foot worked on as well. Every nurse has tales of the catastrophes that occurred because a doctor operated on, or cut off, the wrong appendage. 

On the wall is a black and white photo of a calla lily so vaginal it would make Georgia o Keefe blush. Luckily the nurse who comes in next is very plain looking. She even has a couple of warts. She asks all the same questions and starts the series of drops. “We want you numb like gum, as they say,” she tells me. I’m not sure who says that, but within minutes my eye feels like it’s coated with rubber cement.

She inserts an IV line in my hand and apologizes for her cold fingers; I can feel how icy they are even through her gloves. She says it’s due to a neurological disorder. She checks my blood sugar and asks me how old I was when I was diagnosed with diabetes. I tell her fourteen and she says that’s how old her kid is. He’s had Crohn’s disease for five years. “I had gestational diabetes when I was pregnant,” she says. “I kept a pretty strict keto diet but the one thing I got cravings for were strawberry milkshakes from Burgerville. I was pretty sure I was going to give birth to a strawberry milkshake.” 

She leaves and the anesthesiologist appears. She is very attractive. She asks me how I did with the anesthetic last time. I tell her it was great, and ask if she can send me home with some. “We don’t want you feeling too good, we just need you pliable,” she says. She talks about the time she had to use a scooter like mine. “It wasn’t fun but when I was done I fixed the brakes and sold it for what I paid for it.” She doesn’t close the door after her, and across the hall I see a pale, delicate young woman who looks like Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring, only wearing a blue bouffant cover.

The doctor pops in to say hi. I never noticed how young and attractive she is. Soon after that, two more cute young women arrive to escort me to the operating room. One of them has glittery pink shoes and I compliment her on them and both women start giggling and babbling on how much they love them as they lead me into the operating room. 

Once inside I hop off my scooter and someone takes it away. I lie down on the bed and the doctor tells me to scootch up, then up some more, then down a bit, then up again, then to the right. “No, right,” she says. A woman wipes my face with disinfectant and the anesthesiologist takes my hand. The doctor tapes my forehead back and pries open my eyelid and adds more drops. 

I feel less stoned this time; I probably shouldn’t have made that comment about how much I enjoyed the drugs. I notice the whir of the machine, which I hadn’t before. Last time the colored lights seemed tactile, like globs of paint, but now they look watery and translucent, spinning around each other like spotlights.

The doctor keeps ordering me to look down at a single white light that pierces through the colors. I keep trying but it’s very uncomfortable to do so. She sounds impatient. While last time I felt almost nothing, now I feel a lot of poking and prodding as well as bursts of pressure and a sudden splash of water. It’s not painful but it’s far from pleasant.

When it’s over they bring my scooter and I carefully wheel into the next room to recover. A clear plastic sieve covers my right eye. Sorry, left eye. Good thing they made that mark.

 The nurse with the cold fingers asks if I want a drink and I gulp down two cups of water. We talk about the nurses’ strike. She says she has a lot of friends who are involved with it. She says they all hate that they have to strike but are enjoying the camaraderie of the picket line. She says a bunch of them are single moms who are working for DoorDash to pay the bills.

The doctor pokes her head in and says everything went great, then runs off. The assistant with her own soundtrack comes in to say she’ll see me when I come in to get the third eye done. I tell her I think that’s a different kind of doctor.

The Widder is waiting for me in the waiting room. The goddess, of course, is nowhere to be seen, if she ever was there at all. 

The sun is blinding even with the sunglasses. On the way home I feel so nauseous I close my eyes and have to breathe heavily to keep from throwing up. 

Just like last time, I topple into bed like a corpse. Olivia creeps under the covers beside me, and when I wake up she’s still there, chirping irritably when I sit up. I carefully peel off the eye shield and blink. Everything’s still blurry from all the damn drops, but it’s already easier to see. I look out at the hills, darkening with dusk, and the tints in both eyes look similar. Even with the blur, I can tell that they’re no longer fighting for dominance. 

I’m not really hungry, despite not having eaten all day, but I really want coffee. I roll down to the coffee shop, where two beautiful women wait behind the counter. “Can I have a name for the order?” one of them asks. “I’m sorry, I know I should know it by now.” I tell the other barista I like her Dead Moon t-shirt and she mutters thanks. A group of equally attractive women have pushed a bunch of tables together and are holding some sort of meeting. I try not to leer but I find myself sneaking glances like the lonely old pervert I am. I’ve been blind so long I’ve forgotten that the gift of sight can also be a curse.