Chainsaw

    On the first day of autumn it was as if someone had flicked a switch to turn on the rainy season. I felt restless, so I forced myself to get out of the house and do a few errands. The light rail seemed to be taking a very long time. I heard some people talking about how one of the trains had hit a car. 

    Eventually the train showed up and it was packed. No one moved for me so I sat precariously on my knee scooter and held on to the pole. Everyone was talking about the train that had hit the car; no one had any details but they all had opinions about it. I picked up my prescriptions at Safeway then headed to the downtown Office Max. It was a lousy location and a lousy company but I’d been buying my pens  there since I’d moved to Portland so I felt a certain amount of fond animosity towards it. The store used to be two levels then at some point the basement part became a TJ Maxx. At some point that closed and after limping along for years the rest of the store was finally closing down. I was hoping they’d have some good sales but the pens were only 10% off. I grabbed the last package on the shelf. 

    Downtown smelled like rotting fish, the way it always does when the first rainfall mixes with the crow guano on the brick sidewalks to make a sort of rancid slurry. I got back on the train to head across the river to get something to eat. Once again no one moved for me. Men sprawled across the seats as if they’d been tossed there like dolls, deep in the sleep of addiction.

    I got off at the convention center and rolled up to Burgerville. It was the weekend of the Rose City Comic Con and despite the rain the streets were filled with people in costume. Everyone seemed really young and I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be dressed as. I felt even more old and out of touch than usual. 

    The woman behind the counter stared at me blankly without saying a word. I had to repeat my order three times and she still didn’t get it right. I sat down with my number and watched the colorful characters parade past. There were plenty of Comic Conners in the restaurant as well, clutching bags advertising Stranger Things and Dark Horse Comics. Vampires sucking milkshakes, Anime princesses gobbling French fries. At the next table over sat a young man and woman dressed in British school uniforms. He was paunchy with a man bun and a samurai sword across his back. She was gorgeous, heavily made up with bright pink hair. Her uniform was distractingly tight. They had a child with them who appeared to be dressed as a chainsaw, with the blade sticking out of his head and a handle on his back.

    As my food arrived, the woman ordered the child to blow his nose. He didn’t seem able to, so she told the man to help. After a few minutes of watching the spectacle of sniffling and snorting she stood up and held a napkin to the child’s nose. 

    “Go ahead and blow, baby,” she said. “Harder. Harder. That’s it. Harder. Yes. Yes. Don’t stop. Don’t stop, baby. Harder. Harder. That’s it, baby. That’s it. You can do it. Harder. That’s it. Yes. Yes. Yes.” This went on for an uncomfortably  long time. Finally she gave the kid’s nose one final wipe and said, “I don’t see any more boogers. Not really sure why that that took so long.” The chainsaw looked up at her with his mouth agape. They all got up end left and I finished my meal and got back on the train. No one moved to give me a seat. A group of robots and aliens laughed in the corner. I sat on my scooter and held on tight and watched the rain splattering the windows as we headed back across the river. 

Tightrope

     It was a beautiful sunny day and the stands at the fairgrounds were full of families. Below us stood a cage, or two cages, filled with tigers. The ringleader introduced his special guest, Wonder Woman. It was the late seventies and the Wonder Woman TV show was on, though this wasn’t Lynda Carter but just some woman dressed as the character she played. Our seats were pretty high up but her sexy red, white, blue and gold outfit is seared into my mind as she cracked her whip at the big cats. 

    “You don’t remember that at all?” I asked my brother recently. He did not. A few days later I asked my mother and she didn’t recall any of it either. “I feel like I’m losing my mind,” I said.  

    The only other thing I remember about that day was an older man walking up a rope that stretched diagonally from the ground to the rafters of the grandstand. He passed right over our heads, carrying a pole for balance. I can very clearly see his white shoes; they were cleft, like a camel’s toes, to help him grip the rope. I remember thinking there was something dishonest about this. As he passed overhead, he looked down and winked at me, though I know for sure I’m making that part up. 

    Years later, our father took us kids to the Ringling Brothers Circus. Unlike that earlier experience, neither of my siblings contests that this one actually happened. All I remember are the elephants shitting behind the tents. It’s so lonely being the only one who remembers something, especially a spectacle as surreal as an Amazon princess taming a pack of wild jungle beasts. I know I didn’t dream it, though the memory has the feel of a dream. The old man on the rope winks at me again. I yell up to him that I hope he falls and breaks his fucking neck. 

Marmalade

        They discharged Lee from the hospital so he could die at home. Val drove Julie and I out to his condo. Not knowing what the accessibility would be like, I took my crutches instead of the scooter, and it’s good I did since his unit was on the second floor. There was no parking so Val went and parked across the street and came back and led us upstairs. A young man answered the door of a darkened apartment. Val apologized and he told us we probably wanted 205-B instead of A. So I hobbled down the hall and down the stairs and across the lot and up another set of stairs and down another hallway until at last we were greeted by the woman who I’d met in the hospital last week. She hugged us all and started to weep.

        The visit was a blur of women coming and going. They said there was a 24 hour nurse but he was in the back room taking a nap. I wasn’t really aware of much other than Lee’s body. He was propped up on a hospital bed in the living room, facing the door. The walls were covered with concert posters. He was conscious but not lucid, words dribbling from his lips in a stream of slurred glossolalia. I sat next to him for a while as the women flitted about the kitchen. He had lost a lot of weight over the past two weeks and his skin had a grayish pallor. He kept trying to rip his tubes and bandages off and I kept gently pulling his hands away. He didn’t fight me. The skin of his wrists was scaly, his arm hair stiff. I thought of my father, just a few years older than Lee, who at that very moment was in the hospital for another fall. Instead of being there I was here, staring into the face of a man who was unquestionably dying, little more than a shell breathing and muttering and doing very little else. 

        I’ve been losing more and more friends over the years but somehow I’d never actually seen anyone this close to the end. The deaths had all been sudden and remote and while the shock is awful, this was obviously very, very different. Actually seeing it, smelling the sweet lotion they put on his flesh to mask whatever smells his body was emanating, was a completely new experience for me. I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say much, just gave him some water when he stuck his tongue out like a lizard. He kept trying to scratch and pick at himself and once he managed to throw the blanket off. Suddenly, there was his penis, vulnerable and exposed to the brutal world. I quickly covered him up and held his hand. His wrinkled fingers were soft and dry. He mumbled a word that sounded like "marmalade" but probably wasn't. 

        At one point a German woman stopped by who made it a point to tell us she was the head of the HOA. It seemed obvious that she was there less from caring about Lee than concern about all the strangers coming and going. She did not linger, and we left as well, after what might have been days or weeks but was probably about an hour. There was nothing else to do or say. He wasn’t opening his eyes, was only grunting occasionally. We didn’t know it but he would be gone within hours. In the hallway outside the condo I found the blackened husk of a dragonfly splayed out on the concrete. I picked it up and pressed it between the pages of my book then slowly made my way back down the stairs. 

Happy Days

    A few days after my visit to Urgent Care my phone rang. It was a man from the Center of Disease Control telling me that the lab had called him with my test results, as they are required to do when they come across any fairly uncommon pathogens. He explained that the bacteria in my foot is the same which causes diphtheria, though he assured me I was in no danger of contracting that. Shortly afterwards my GP, whose name I can never remember, called me. I’ve never met him in person, we’ve only had a few video appointments, in which his face shimmered like a phantom against a wall of light. He told me he was talking to the infectious disease department to figure out a course of treatment. That night I picked up my new script and he said he’d try to find a foot doctor who had an opening. I asked if he knew anyone good and he said no.

    That weekend I got nervous and went to Urgent Care again. The same  jockey-sized physician’s assistant saw me and took more photos of my foot and said I should just keep taking the antibiotics. I asked if he knew any good foot doctors and he said no. 

    The following Tuesday we had first aid/CPR training at work. We spent the afternoon breathing into the parted rubbery lips and clicking the chests of the limbless torso. “Be prepared to do this for hours if you need to,” our instructor warned. “And remember, you’re going to break some ribs.”

    The following day my GP managed to get me a last-minute appointment at a foot clinic. As I rode the bus across town I braced myself for the worst, prepared myself for the news that the infection had entered the bone and my misshapen foot would, at long last, need to be completely amputated. 

    My new doctor was young and lovely and met my gaze with huge brown eyes as I gave her the basics of what I was going through. She carefully unwrapped everything and scraped and hacked at my foot, then took x-rays and sat and went over them with me. The infection was serious, but had not reached the bone. She said I should stay off it and come back in a week. My terror of amputation evaporated but was replaced by a wave of lesser but still powerful anxiety about what would happen next and how it would affect my job. There is always more fear waiting in the wings.

    She sent me to the hospital to get a bunch of blood work done. In the waiting room I emailed my bosses to let them know that I was happy to keep working but would not be able to be on my feet. On the way home the head of the department called me to tell me not to come in to work the next day, that HR would be contacting me. I was surprised –when I’ve had foot issues in the past, my old bosses always found sit-down work for me to do. These were not my old bosses though, and I felt myself overcome with dread and paranoia. This is how they are going to get rid of me, I thought. 

    HR sent me a terse email the next day with instructions on filling out forms for a new state medical leave program that just happened to be starting in a few days. I didn’t really understand it but in the meantime I would use up what sick and vacation time I had. After that I had no idea what would happen. 

    Saturday Mich once again picked me up so we could visit Lee, who was still in the hospital. He was supposed to leave last week but instead they’d had to operate again. It had not gone well, and they were sending him home as soon as they could get hospice care set up. I walked on my crutches past the office where I had seen one of my many useless foot doctors to the ICU. The visit was awkward. I didn’t know what to say, and then felt bad for not knowing what to say. My humor –the tool I reach for most in awkward situations- remained out of reach. Mich was also subdued. Lee was quiet as well; I couldn’t tell if he even knew or cared if we were there. What can one possibly say in the face of death? What good can words possibly accomplish? It seems like language is the least accessible when we need it the most. 

    Another of his friends arrived during our visit, and she immediately went up to the bed and warmly grasped Lee's hand and held it as she smiled sadly down at him. I felt humbled by the eloquence in this single gesture, and saw in this woman a compassion I did not feel capable of. 

    I had a ticket to see a play later that evening. I wasn’t about to let my limited mobility stop me from going, so I hopped on my scooter and got onto the train to head across the river. A tiny local theater company was putting on a production of Beckett’s Happy Days in the abandoned Victoria’s Secret store at the mall. Most of the mall stores have closed, but they’ve been trying to revitalize the place by lowering the rents to allow smaller local businesses move in. My favorite comic book store is there, and a nice little record store, and a bunch of other shops. And the ice rink is still operating, though it was closed for the night. A very widewoman was driving a Zamboni around, leaving the ice shiny and reflective in its wake.

    A few flyers pointed the way to the old lingerie store. A woman sat taking tickets just inside the entrance. Sheets of plastic hung everywhere, corralling you to the middle of the store, where thirty folding chairs set on the floor or on risers in front of a pair of red sheets that looked like shower curtains. I sat of to the side so my scooter wouldn’t be in the way. A young woman sat behind the old check out counter which had been converted into a makeshift sound and light booth. 

    The play consists of a woman buried up to her waist in the ground, or in this case a cloth-covered mound. Beside her is a bag filled with belongings that she occasionally rifles through. Her husband or partner sits just out of sight behind her; you can sometimes see his arm or back of his head when he moves around. It is unclear how their situation came to be but it is apparent that it has been going on for some time, and their provisions seem to be dwindling. The woman prattles on cheerily to the audience, to the man, to herself, insisting on how wonderful everything is. It would be unbearable –and it almost is- if it wasn’t so comical and strange, and while the woman’s acting was a little broad, I really loved the show in all its hysterical bleakness. I thought of Lee in the hospital, I thought of my parents, I thought of all the people I know who seem to be inexplicably sinking into the earth.

    When it was over, they led us toward one of the staff exits, since the mall was closed for the evening. As we filed past a security officer he smiled and said hello and I recognized him. He used to work downtown and would come to the museum’s coffee shop. I hadn’t seen him since the beginning of the pandemic. We chatted as he walked alongside us across the mall, then left us as as we filed through a set of double doors into a long, narrow corridor. I was last in line and as I heard the doors slam shut behind me I saw up ahead a steep set of concrete stairs leading up. There was no way I could drag my scooter up that many steps. I called out to the people ahead of me but no one turned around or stopped, they were all focused on escaping the buidling. I wheeled back to the double doors and tugged at the handle but they were locked. I banged on them and called the name of the guard, the sound echoing along the dimly-lit corridor. 

    I pounded and pounded.