When my movie -the last third of 2001, with its psychedelic light show- ends, instead of having them put another one on, I watch the C.A.R.E. Channel for a while, which shows a series of nature images –mostly mountains and waterfalls, with an occasional deer or goat- to gentle piano or guitar music. The website for the service claims that “This highly effective therapeutic tool significantly contributes to improved satisfaction and patient outcomes,” and it does, a little, until the signal cuts out and the nurses can’t get it back.
I feel tense and agitated. I try to meditate but I can only do so for short periods of time. My mind will not clear, it feels goopy and sticky with misery. I replay good memories but they quickly turn dark; dreams that transform into nightmares..
I stare up through the curved acrylic. The TV is a reflective black slab hanging above me. It resembled the monolith in the movie. With it turned off, I really notice how loud the chamber is. It makes a constant sound partway between a hum and a whine. I hum to try to figure out what note it is. It seems closest to some kind of do. I idly wonder if this is what it feels like to start to mentally unravel
I concentrate on looking at the ceiling tiles, trying to really see them as accurately as my diminished eyesight will allow. The tiles are divided into quarters, each of which is a foot square. I focus on the quarter tile directly above me, a lower right hand one, and its own lower right corner has a quarter circle of light brown water stain.
Here and there the perfect grid of tiles is blemished by a sprinkler or recessed light canister, though none of the lights are on. The room is still bright though; I’ve never noticed where the lights are located. There are windows along the far end of the room. I can see the faint shapes of tree branches through the vertical blinds. Two large metal grids contain fans; there is one almost right above me. A single smoke detector hangs in the middle of the room. I go back to my square. It is off white and evenly covered with tiny gray dots, tiny holes. There are also lines of rough gouges that look like trails left by some small animals. I these are to help absorb sound, which of course doesn’t help me any with the whining hum.
In the house I great up in on Wyoming Street, my parents’ bedroom was covered with similar drop ceiling tiles. In middle school, I read a library book called How to Hide an Elephant, and as a result I started hiding things in the ceiling tiles, standing on the bed and pushing them up from the metal tracks they rested on. One day I found a silver Parker pen on the street; it was sleek and smooth and I loved it. I hid it in the ceiling tiles and never saw it again; I don’t remember if it disappeared or if I just forgot about it until years later, at which point I felt really sad. Everything about that house makes me sad though, I never really got over leaving it, and I dreamed about it repeatedly for years.
As I’m lying there, I think about how a truly great writer could make something as banal as ceiling tiles compelling.
The hour passes fairly quickly. The diminishing pressure makes my ears crackle just before the only male nurse in the whole department pulls my rack out and slides it onto a cart. This part of the operation always makes me feel like a slab of beef being prepared for butchering. He takes my air mask and urinal and pulls off my blankets, then takes my vitals and checks my sugars. I sit up and swing my legs off the side and stretch for a few minutes before padding off to change.
On the wall of the dressing area, I see a sign I’ve never noticed before; Hyperbaric Patient Bill of Rights. There are seven of them, and it’s all pretty basic hospital legal stuff. “You have the right to: -Actively participate as a member of your hyperbaric team. –Know what treatment options are available to you.” The staff here is incredibly kind; the more time I spend with them the more I like them. Some days they are the only humans I interact with. This morning they were mercilessly teasing the man in the chamber to my right, who has only one partial foot.
“Wow, you guys are really brutal today,” he laughed.
“Hey, you’re family now,” one of the nurses said.
“Oh man am I in trouble,” he groaned.
At the bottom of the sign is printed, “Last Updated May 20, 2015.” Things were objectively so much better for me back then. Noodle was still alive, as were some of my other friends. My beloved cat Ivan would die a few months later. The pandemic was still a science fiction trope looming in the future. I still had a steady job, and could occasionally convince women to date me. “You have the right to have your pain adequately controlled,” reads the sign. Of course they mean physical pain. Neither familial love or cloud covered peaks can soothe this heartache; no number of ceiling tile holes will dampen the racket inside my skull.
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