Dodgeball

     This morning Sally calls to ask if I can come in an hour later from now on. They’re staggering everyone’s schedules so the nurses can get proper lunch breaks. 

        “Oh, you mean like the law requires,” I say. 

“Now look here,” she says.

When I come in she’s in better spirits. She just had a week off and has colored her short hair a blond that almost looks gray. 

“What did you bring to watch today?” she asks. 

“Nothing,” I say. “I thought for my final week I’d let you pick for me.” 

Her eyes light up. “Dodgeball?”  She’s been trying to get me to watch this idiotic flick since I started treatments. 

“Dodgeball,” I sigh. 

“You’re gonna love it!” she says. “It’s really dumb.”

She’s right about the dumb part, but wrong about my loving it. A scrappy team of misfits, led by Vince Vaughn, enters a national dodge ball competition in order to save their gym from being taken over by an evil corporation. It’s no Raging Bull. The highlight of the film is when KC walks by with an armful of bandages, looking adorable with her red hair pinned messily on top of her head. She sticks out her tongue at me as she passes.

        After being pummeled by ninety minutes of testicle jokes, I close my eyes. I snap them open when Sally picks up the phone and tells me I have some visitors, that she is doing some training. I crane my neck, expecting to see medical students but instead there are six beefy men in FIRE DEPT t-shirts looming nearby. “You don’t mind, right?” She puts on the CARE channel and I watch pine trees shudder in the wind as outside the window real pine trees shudder in the real wind. 

        Sally shows the firemen how the chamber works and after she talks to them for a while they inspect the gauges and hoses then file out. Jenny turns the knob and the pitch of the hiss changes as I start to depressurize. 

        Before she can ask how I liked the movie, I ask Sally how it went with the firemen. “Pretty good, I guess,” she says, “Though they did inform us that the safety hoods we’re supposed to wear in an emergency aren’t actually heat resistant and will melt to our faces if there’s a fire.” 

        As I change back into my jeans I can hear Sally talking to Dr. R on the other side of the curtain. “That wasn’t how I was trained,” she says. “I don’t think any of us were trained that way. And remember that Japanese chamber that exploded? One of those boutique places?” I think about the news story about the racehorse in Florida, horseshoes sparking against steel. His name was Landmark’s Legendary Affaire. What a stupid name. What a stupid way to die.

As I push through the door I nearly crash into KC. “Oh, hello there,” she says, eyes twinkling. I want to take her in my arms and dance with her. Instead I step out of her way and head downstairs for the eighth last time.