Conference Call

         To clean my palate after all those Godfather movies, I watched Adaptation, one of my favorite films, followed by Mirror, Solaris and Nostalghia by Tarkovsky.  Solaris is the perfect movie to watch when you’re encased in an acrylic tube; you already feel like you’re in a space capsule. I try to think of other movies with big glass tube energy. 2001? All of the Alien movies, probably? The iron lung scene from The Big Lebowski? The finale of Wrath of Khan? Episodes of Futurama? Snow White? Every submarine movie ever made?

        It’s Thursday, so when I get out I sit in the waiting area to wait for my doctor appointment. A woman is on a conference call on her computer. The volume is up very loud so it sounds like the room is filled with dozens of people yelling. There are other people waiting but they’re all pretty out of it so I can’t tell if they mind. I stomp to the elevator and sit on a bench outside, even though it’s cold and rainy. 

        When I come back up the other patients are gone but the woman is still there with her voices. I sit down and try to practice not being annoyed by something so petty. Why do I cling to irritation at other people’s thoughtlessness? What good does it do me? Does it help me feel superior, as I sit with my casts on, preparing to have my wounds dressed and debrided? Does this negativity protect me somehow? From what?

        At last the woman snaps her laptop shut and strides off down the hall. One of the nurses comes out and asks if I want to go in early. 

        As I’m sitting in the chair waiting for the doctor, I take my sketchbook out and do some drawing. The doctor comes in and sees me drawing and freaks out. “Oh my god, did you do that? Lizzy, Kyra, come look at what this guy’s doing.” 

        Soon the entire office of wound specialists pushes aside the curtain and crowds around to marvel at my dumb little doodles. “You should do portraits of us to hang on the wall!” one of them gushes. They are all women and they are all lovely. It almost doesn’t matter that I’m reclining in a chair with my feet covered in open wounds oozing blood and pus.

        I tell the doctor the hardest thing about being in the chamber is not being able to draw. She thinks a minute. “We’ll have to work on that. I think if we get you pencils without that metal thingy on the end…” 

        To think that just a few minutes earlier, I had been thinking about the logistics of beating a stranger to death with her own computer. 

Freedom

        The isolation is getting to me. Being unemployed is only enjoyable if you are mobile and flush with money, and I am neither. It could be so much worse; I still get  around, albeit slowly, and I pay my bills on time and eat well as I wait to see if I qualify for long-term disability. But it’s too much time alone. I know there will be an end to this; I will eventually heal, even if it doesn’t feel like it. But I’ve already been out of work so long, and in true Portland fashion, the days have, for the most part, been washed in shades of gray and well-hydrated to boot. 

        I am not feeling particularly grateful for all the things I do have, though I spend time every day listing them and attempting to cherish them. I feel past that point. I fear that I am at a point where parts of my brain are starting to atrophy. 

        I have plenty of creative projects to work on, and an apartment stuffed full of books and music and things to keep me occupied, and I don’t want to do anything. Well, almost nothing. It’s been five years since I had a girlfriend, but it feel like much longer due to all the things I’ve been through, including the pandemic, which lasted approximately three hundred years. All I can think of is how lonely I am, how much I long to be touched, to touch someone. I need to stop thinking about it, and yet I don’t seem to be able to. 

        I know this is depression, but what good does it do to put a label on it? In the past I would take stroll around the neighborhood, take field trips to various destinations, go out to the bar, hit the junk shop or record store –and I still do these things occasionally, but they all take a lot of physical and mental effort, and most of them cost money. I try to take advantage of what free activities I can. I went to an art lecture and a poetry reading this weekend, the latter of which I was one of the readers. I had a great time and got to talk to a bunch of people I liked. It wasn’t enough. I came home afterwards and sat and stared at the wall. 

        I take naps but you can only sleep so much. After spending hours in the tube watching movies, I don’t feel like watching anything at night. The internet presents only ugliness and vapidity. I have talked to everyone on the phone who will talk to me; I have nothing more to say to anyone anyways. I meditate twice a day, trying to get good at wanting nothing, at fearing nothing. But I want so much and fear so much, and I’m having difficulty staying in that state of blessed nothingness for long. 

        This has been a fertile time for me; I’ve gotten a lot accomplished, artistically, and done some good, honest soul-searching. But enough is enough. I’ve had it, I’m ready to move forward, even if my body isn’t. And yet this time of isolation is nowhere near over. How do prisoners do it? I feel like I am on the verge of losing my fucking mind.

Khartoum

        First they assign you to a changing room, separated by a curtain from the room with the chambers. On a chair sits a towel and on the towel sit a set of blue hospital pants and shirt. There are lockers to put your clothes and belongings in. I never bother locking it. 

My chamber is chamber two, right in the middle. To the left is a large man who always gets there before me. The person in the right hand chamber varies; I guess not everyone needs daily treatment. You lie on a padded slab on a cart while they check your vitals. They check your blood sugar if you’re diabetic; most people are, and the procedure can lead to lowering your glucose levels. It’s reasonably comfortable. They check your ears to make sure they’re not dangerously inflamed. They slip an elastic band around your wrist. Attached to the band is a curling cord. You press a big silver button on a black box, and if the green light goes on, you’re properly grounded. If it’s red, they make an adjustment.

        They ask if you have any jewelry or metal on you, if you have any devices implanted in your body, if you have any keys in your pocket, if you’re wearing underwear, if you put on any cologne or aftershave or deodorant that morning.

        They take off your socks and place heavy blankets on you. It gets chilly in there; the whole room is cold. They give you a urinal (for luck, they say), a bottle of water if you want it, and an inflatable mask with a hose coming out of it 

        They slide you into the chamber and pull the cart away and close the hatch. It’s a lot like being in one of those cryogenic pods you see in sci-fi movies. The acrylic is very thick, and distorts the view of the outside world. It’s essentially a plastic tube. You can move around if you want but there’s not a lot of room. They put on a movie if you asked for one- they have an extensive collection of mainstream garbage, all of it donated. You can bring a video from home as long as it’s not porn (I asked).

        This week I’ve been watching all the Godfather movies. I’ve seen them before –all except the third one, which I could never get through. I’m struck by how ugly they are, how unpleasant every single character is. The acting is mostly great and the films are beautifully crafted but I can’t get over how pulpy they are, punctuated with cartoony violence. I understand why guys love them; they’re highly entertaining, and exercise a real masculine power. But halfway through part 2 I realize I hate them. I’m determined to get through them all though, I’m not sure why.

        The oxygen pumps in with a loud humming sound. My ears hurt immediately every time so I knock on the glass and they slow the pressurization down until I get used to it. 

        Halfway through the procedure, the tech will pantomime that you should put the mask on. The mask pumps in regular air for ten minutes to give your brain a break from all the pure oxygen.

        In looking up information about the dangers of these devices, I come across the headline, “Explosion of hyperbaric chamber kills woman, horse.” Of course it took place in Florida. Apparently the horse was inside, being treated for equine protozoal myeloencephalitis, a disease they catch from eating opossum feces. (I am fully aware of how batshit that sentence is. Feel free to do some research.) The horse kicked off a protective lid in the chamber, and its horseshoes sparked and created the explosion. 

        After two hours the tech starts decreasing the pressure. You get what they call “Rice Krispies ears” as they crackle and pop. They open the hatch and slide you out. “What year is it?” I sometimes joke. “Did I survive the apocalypse?” They’ve heard it all before but they humor me. They check your vitals and your blood sugar and your ears, and you can ease yourself off the slab and go behind the curtain to change. I’m always a little disoriented when I leave the office. I wonder if this will affect my dreams. A glass coffin shot into outer space, or sinking to the bottom of the sea. Flaming horse heads lobbed into my bed.

 

Vortex

         I woke up and my blood sugar was extremely high. Of course it was; I had been miserable, and eaten and drank too much last night. I thought I had taken enough insulin to cover it, but I was wrong. So I gave myself my shot and had breakfast and gave myself my other shot and headed out to my date with the chamber. 

        It was only the third day but I was already growing comfortable with the routine. And they were ready for me too, they even had a print out of the movies in their library printed out like they’d promised. I lay down on the bed and they checked my ears, which they said still looked red but not dangerously so. My hearing had not improved in the night, I still felt like my head was stuffed with taffy. My blood pressure was good. My glucose was 107, which ordinarily would be considered perfect. But they require it to be above 130 because the machine has a tendency to lower it. 

        They gave me a vanilla milkshake, thick and syrupy, and when they retested fifteen minutes later my sugar was 104. They laughed and said they didn’t mind waiting if I didn’t. Surely it would go down; the milkshake was loaded with carbs, I’d read the label. The three of us chatted –it was the woman who’s becoming my usual tech, and the really cute one, whom I don’t see as often. We talked about cats, about the machine, about some news story about an international flight that had to turn around because a load of maggots spilled out of an overhead bin. Someone had put a fish in their suitcase and it had caused maggots to rain down on the passengers. 

        They checked my sugar again. It was 97. 

        The tech went to get the doctor who said I should go home; despite the fact that the milkshake should be kicking in any minute, they wouldn’t take the chance of my having a hypoglycemic episode while locked in the chamber. The doctor asked how much insulin I’d taken and she said, “Well that’s too much.” I told them my metabolism is just very slow but they said not to worry about it, that missing a session is not a big deal  “Besides, it’ll give your ears an extra day off,” they said. 

        The wind was cold and bitter and as I trudged up the hill toward the bus stop I saw my bus drive past, which meant I’d have a full half hour to wait. None of this was tragic but I suddenly felt like I couldn’t take anymore. I couldn’t fight the misery, irrational though it was. My treatment was moving forward, I was getting the help I needed and hopefully I would soon be showing signs of improvement. I was on the road to healing. 

        But my mind reeled with all the medical bills and paperwork needed for long term disability, with never ending loneliness, with my artistic failure. Most of all it swirled with shame that I was still, after all these years, so shitty at taking care of my health. “How long have you been diabetic?” the tech had asked. I told her I had been diagnosed when I was fourteen. Surely I should be better at this by now.

        Sitting in the bus shelter, the thoughts spun like a vortex, like a cyclone in my head, sucking out all the air. My ears pounded and the wind whipped around me and when I got home I collapsed into bed and wondered if I ever needed to get out of it. 

The Book of Joy

         My ears never recovered from the first day of hypberbaric treatment. They didn’t hurt but I felt extremely uncomfortable, and I was paranoid that they had been damaged. If I yawned real wide, they popped and gave me a blessed split second of clarity before once again becoming clogged. I spent the night reading everything I could find about burst eardrums and the dangers of hearing loss due to air pressure before I finally passed out. When I woke up, the pressure had abated a bit, but as soon as I got out of bed it felt worse than ever. Every word I said seemed to pound through my skull, while outside sounds were muffled at best. 

        The first thing I said when I entered the hyperbaric room was, “My ears are still fucked up.” The tech said that was common, and when she shone a light in my ears she said they didn’t look too bad. 

        She asked what I wanted to watch inside the chamber. I said I didn’t care. She asked what I liked and I said artsy fartsy shit. She put on a movie about a woman who stays the same age while everyone around her gets older. It was terrible but I kind of liked it, aside from the fact that all the actors seemed to be made out of plastic, except Ellen Burstyn, who still looked good in her eighties. 

        Almost immediately I felt like somewone was stabbing me in the ear with an icepick. I pounded on the glass and the tech turned down the pressure before gradually raising it slowly. She turned the TV volume TV up as high as it would go. 

        Afterwards she checked my ears again and said they looked inflamed. She said not to worry about it, that they would probably be like this for another week until they acclimated. I went for my check up in the next room. I was disappointed to see that the substitute doctor was on; she’s nice, but not nearly as attentive as my usual doctor. The sub always seemed a little distracted. Today she told me she’s reading the book of interviews between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. She talked about how people use God to justify the worst behaviors. 

        “He’s always on their side, you ever notice that? Even when they switch sides.” She talked about how worried she is that conspiracy theories have become such a part of mainstream discourse. 

        “It’s true,” I said. “Growing up I had a friend we called Conspiracy Joe. Now we just call him Joe.” 

        She said she was going to check my lab results. She disappeared through the curtain and didn’t come back.

        On the bus ride home, a woman hacked repeatedly without covering her mouth every time someone sat down next to her. The other person would immediately get up and move and the woman would look around and smile and say, “Guess I scared them off.” 

        I stopped by the grocery store, where everyone seemed even more deranged than usual. I was in a wretched mood by the time I got home. I tried to think of something that would make me feel better but every joyful thing I imagined made me feel worse. I tried to listen to an interview with Desmond Tutu but I couldn’t appreciate their wisdom. My ears were too fucked up.

Grit

         Valentine’s Day was on Ash Wednesday this year. It was the day I started hyperbaric treatment. If I was one to believe in signs I might think it was a sign of something. The treatment essentially consists of lying in a clear acrylic tube into which pure oxygen is pumped. All I have to do is lie there and breathe it in two hours a day, five days a week, for two months. The bloodstream is flooded with oxygen, and this assists in repairing and growing capillaries. The hope is that the infection in my bones will be neutralized by this.  

        Because of the risk of combustion, they make you change into a cotton gown and pants and remove all your jewelry and adornments. I was surprised they let me keep my glasses on, but they said unless they contained titanium, they should be safe. They don’t let you take any items inside, so I couldn’t read or draw. There was a TV with a DVD mounted outside each chamber. They asked what I wanted to watch; I had no idea what they even had, and was so anxious I probably wouldn’t have been able to make a decision anyways. “How about True Grit?” asked the technician. “We have the original and the remake.” 

        They stuck three EKG pads on my chest, saying they only did this for the first couple of sessions, and fastened a bracelet around my wrist to ground me. The entire slab I was resting on was also grounded. “So am I in any danger of, you know, catching fire?” I asked. They said it was not one hundred percent impossible. 

        They gave me a mask to put on halfway through so I could breathe normal air for ten minutes. They said too much oxygen wasn’t good for your brain.

        I was to rap on the acrylic if I had any pain or discomfort. I wondered, if I was trapped inside with the oxygen shut off, how long it would take me to suffocate. Within a minute of them sealing me in, my ears started hurting. I knocked and the tech picked up the phone attached to the outside of the box. She said she would slow down the pressurization so I could adjust. My ears stopped hurting but they felt clogged the entire time; it was a good thing I knew most of the movie by heart. “You must pay for everything in this world, one way or another,” Mattie Ross says in the beginning. “There is nothing free except the grace of God.”

        Along with the light reflecting off the curved acrylic, in the TV I could see reflections of the techs moving around behind me. They checked the readouts on the machine regularly. They told me I could move around but I lay almost perfectly still the entire time. At one point, strobe lights started going off. One of the techs picked up the receiver and said, “Feel free to ignore those lights, it’s in another part of the building.” 

        My ears still felt stuffed up when they unsealed the tube two hours later. They said this was common and that I should get some allergy medication. They peered into my ears just to make sure, and checked my eyes and blood sugar as well. 

        The doctor stopped me as I was leaving the office and asked me how it went. “One down, thirty-nine to go!” she said. 

        “And then I rise from the dead?” I asked. 

        She pointed up at the crucifix on the wall and said, “You never know.” I made the sign of the cross and told her I’d be back the next morning. I went downstairs and out into the rain. Aside from my ears, I didn’t feel any different, just a little dazed. It was Valentine’s Day and my aching heart had not shuddered to a halt. Ash Wednesday and I had not burst into flames.

Bagels by the Sea

         A couple of friends took me out to lunch. They were both planning trips to the beach in the following week, and I found myself growing more and more jealous. I usually do an overnight trip to Seaside every winter, though this year I hadn’t due to all my foot issues. When I got home, I put my leftovers in the fridge and sat at my desk stewing. Out of curiosity I looked up rooms for my favorite beachside motel. They were as cheap as they were going to be all year, and another friend had given me a gift certificate, so I could stay there overnight for basically nothing. I looked up the bus line to make sure they had seats available and that the schedule hadn’t changed. The whole thing was doable. The only issue was my feet. But they were screwed up already; how much worse would they get during two measly days at the coast? True, I would be walking around a lot. And the weather was bound to be cold and wet. But if my treatments started as planned, I would soon be unable to get away for the next couple of months. If I was going to go, it had to be now. 

        I booked a room and reserved a seat for the middle of the week and couldn’t sleep that night from giddiness. 

        I’ve written about Seaside before. It’s basically the Jersey Shore of the West Coast. I’m not talking Spring Lake or Cape May; I’m talking Wildwood without the roller coasters. Instead of a boardwalk, there’s the Promenade, a paved path stretching the entire length of the beach. There’s salt water taffy and crappy pizza and t-shirt shops. It’s where teenagers go after the prom to lose their virginity and get hooked on meth. It’s a strange, depressing little town and I love spending exactly two days there every winter. Every since Jasmine died, it’s become a place of healing and contemplation for me; god knows there’s not much else to do there.

            I dozed most of the way down, and when we got there, the driver let us off downtown instead of up the road where he usually does. I saw this as a good sign; I was not sure how my feet were going to hold up. I had both my walking casts on, which made me self-conscious, but when you’re a fifty year old man no one pays any attention to you anyways, especially in a tourist town. 

        I hobbled up to the bagel place. I was extremely hungry, and looking forward to starting my visit with my usual bagel and lox, which is surprisingly good there. A fluorescent green sheet of posterboard on the door said to go around to the drive through, that their dining room was closed. “Walk ups welcome!” the sign promised. I was annoyed but it wasn’t too cold out, and there were picnic benches, so I walked around to the side of the building and stood in line with the cars. I approached the speaker where you place your order and waited for somebody to say something; this is what the cars had done. There was a camera mounted to the wall so I knew they could see me, provided it was working and they were watching. As I waited a car pulled up behind me and the driver pointed to my casts and said, “I had one of those on for a while.” I get a lot of comments like that, and it’s fine, people just want to connect and show their sympathy. I waited another five minutes before a guy poked his head out the service window and yelled for me to come up and order there. I asked for a pumpernickel bagel with cream cheese and lox and he said he was sorry but they were all out of lox. “We have salmon spread,” he said. I said no thanks and stormed off, feeling my mood start to sour. I don’t ask for much, all I want is a fucking bagel. Salmon spread my ass.

        There weren’t many breakfast places in town, but I was so hungry I couldn’t make a decision so I just went to the easiest choice, which was the Pig’N Pancake. I’d only been to one of these joints once, so I knew my chances of having an enjoyable meal were iffy. Sure enough, it was not only bland and unhealthy but expensive. I sat there listening to my waiter babble on about his 8 month old son and the upcoming Superbowl until I couldn’t take any more. I walked up the street to where the street ended in a turnaround facing the ocean. 

        I sat on a bench and stared out at the waves rushing forward to curl in on themselves. The sun shone on my face, the wind that usually scours the shore was oddly absent. A seagull with a chipped beak strutted along the concrete wall screeching at me. “You’re alive, asshole!” it screamed. “What more do you want, you fucking ingrate? You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive!”