“Hey there, are you alright? You need help?”
“Just taking a little nap.”
“Okay, I just wanted to make sure you were okay. Take care.”
I had noticed the enormous man lying on the sidewalk by the bus shelter, but unlike this good Samaritan, I hadn’t even thought to check if he was okay. It’s horrifying how easily we grow numb to the cruelty around us.
The bus is early, but luckily I got out of work on time. Mumbling something, an old man moves his walker to make room for me.
“The situation is hopeless but not serious,” he says, staring straight ahead. I wonder if he might not have it backwards. He takes out his phone and starts scrolling. “5,496 views on YouTube. Blog has 593. I don’t want to be an influencer, I want to influence. Get the right information to the right people.” He tucks his phone into his backpack and gets off a few stops later, maneuvering his walker with some difficulty.
His seat is taken by a young man in a plaid shirt and cowboy hat. He carries a thick, gnarled walking stick, and his left foot is sheathed in a big gray walking cast identical to the kind I used to wear. He takes out a paperback book called Claw Machine and starts to read. I don’t think I’ve ever tried one of those claw games; it seems like a foolish gamble for a disappointing prize. The claw is designed to let almost everything slip out of its grip.
There’s something unsettling about this guy, and after a while I realize that he never blinks.
In the hospital lobby, I’m surprised to see that there are two security guards standing behind the metal detector, a tall Black man and a tiny white woman. I put my bag in the bin to be x-rayed and skirt the machine .
“I didn’t think you used this anymore,” I say, holding my arms out so the woman can run the wand under my armpits.
“We do when we have the staffing,” the man says.
The wand beeps frantically.
“Do you have an artificial hip?” the woman asks.
“Not yet,” I say.
The woman at the desk says, “I’ve seen you before,” she says.
“I’m here twice as week,” I say, trying not to sound irritated. She asks me to spell my name three times then says I’m all checked in.
Jenny comes out of the office the moment I sit down. “You’re in big trouble, mister,” she says.
“Please help me,” I say to an old woman in a wheelchair. She stares at me. “I’m begging you,” I say. “You don’t know what she’s going to do to me.” The woman opens her mouth and lets out a raspy, toothless laugh.
“Don’t listen to him, Eleanor,” says Jenny. “He’s just being a baby.”
She leads me to room one, which also has a new chair, though a very different model than the one in room two. This one is brown and looks like it was built in the seventies.
She takes my vitals then saws off the cast with some difficulty. She asks how I am and I say feisty. “We’ve all been feisty today,” she says. “Must be something in the air.”
Shelley comes in and says she can’t wait to get home and have some wine. She giggles, but turns serious when she measures the wound; in the past three days it has gotten wider and deeper.
“Why?” I ask. “I haven’t done anything differently. There’s no reason for it to be bigger.”
She says she doesn’t know. “It’ll start to get better,” she says. “It’s not as wet as it was last time.” The wound on my knee is also bigger.
Dr. Thompson comes in and she says she likes my hat. I tell her I got it at a junk shop. “You don’t strike me as a junk shop kind of guy,” she says. What the hell is she talking about? My entire wardrobe is from thrift stores.
She starts to scrape at both wounds. “This is too pale,” she says. “I don’t like this at all. Not healthy flesh.” She chops and slices and keeps having to wipe the blood from her knife. “That’s much better. Now we can start fresh.” She leaves and Shelley holds gauze against my foot to staunch the bleeding. She pulls her hand away then immediately puts it back. The blood is shockingly bright, like strawberry syrup.
“I am never going to get better,” I say. “This will just keep happening and there is nothing I can do about it but do like Taggert says and stop pretending I’m ever going to walk again.”
Vicki comes in for a while, then Karen. Agnes even steps in to lob a few snarky comments, which I ignore. Everything is melting together. “My brain is starting to crack,” I say. Or maybe I yell it. Have I been yelling? I can’t tell. I feel like I’ve been yelling but everyone seems calm and normal, so maybe not. Maybe I’m just screaming inside my skull.
Dr. Thompson comes back with some printouts for me. There are photos of various knee scooter cushions.
“These are from Amazon, but they might help with the knee. And, this is saying too much maybe, but I got one of those Temperpedic beds and it didn’t work, so they brought me a new one and told me to throw out the old one, so I took all the foam out of it and used some of it for a dog bed. I still have a lot left, I can bring some in if you like, you can use it for padding.”
She goes to change into her yellow paper “ball gown,” and comes back and asks how she looks. She has rolled up an extra set of scrubs and draped it across herself like a sash. Maybe I’m not the only one whose brain is cracked.
She puts the cast on, splashing and rubbing and complaining, “Why isn’t this sticking? Is this defective?” When she’s done, it’s the fattest cast she’s ever wrapped me in. I can barely pull my pants down over it.
I don’t even try to make the bus, and plop myself dejectedly on the wide concrete slab of a bench to wait. For the next one. A woman at the other end of the slab has her back to me. Her shoulders are shaking as if she’s sobbing but she’s not making a sound.
In the bus shelter sits an attractive middle-aged woman with long blond hair who i’ve seen here on and off for over a year; she dresses like a hospital administrator. I smile at her and she smiles back; a warm, gentle smile. When the bus arrives, I get on and she follows, sitting in the very front. Her shapely left leg disappears into a walking cast. I’m seeing these things everywhere. I want to say something but she doesn’t look my way and anyways I’m sure she’s tired of creeps like me trying to chat her up.
If only some hand would descend from the heavens to take mine, or at least clamp itself around my head and lift me from the glass box of my misery, save me from drowning in this sea of plastic eggs and cheap plush.
The woman gets out after just two stops, like always, and waves to thank a truck for stopping for her as hobbles across the street. She carries herself with a kind of damaged grace. I close my eyes and for a moment allow myself to imagine what it would be like to hold someone like that, to be held by someone like that, and then I open my eyes and shake away that asinine and stare out at the hard, bright world speeding by.
