The Future

I leave work early to get my bimonthly shot in the eye. It’s cold and rainy as it has been all week, and the streetcar is fragrant with bodies cocooned in wet blankets. 

The waiting room of the eye clinic is packed. When I’m finally called, the aide –as usual, someone I’ve never seen before, despite my frequent visits- tells me they had three people call out sick. She gives me drops and checks my eye pressure with a device the size of a pen, instead of the usual machine. She leads me to the room with the retina scanner but it’s in use so I sit outside while she leans against the wall of the narrow hallway. I ask if she’s a knitter, pointing to the tattoo on her forearm. “Socks, mostly,” she says. I try to make small talk but she’s unreceptive. It’s Friday, and we’re both tired. 

When the room finally frees up, she has trouble adjusting the retina scanner properly. I’m so tired of all these machines, tired of this whole eye business. I’m tired of pretty much everything, really. 

She leads me to the dreaded Small Waiting Room, where I sit crammed in with a bunch of elderly people. The guy next to me screams at his phone is what sounds like Croatian, but there are no other seats for me to move to. I take out the hundredth anniversary issue of the New Yorker from a few weeks ago. It’s surprisingly dull for such a notable occasion. There are a lot of congratulatory ads along with an article about the fiftieth anniversary of Saturday Night Live. I nod off occasionally. I wait for an hour and a half before my name is finally called by an aide who I may or may not have seen before. They are starting to blur together. 

She leads me to another room and puts drops in my eyes and leaves, and a few minutes later Dr. Wang arrives and says the scan showed that the bump in my retina only looks slightly better, so he wants to start me on a stronger medicine. I ask if this is normal and he says it happens with seventy percent of his patients, but the insurance company requires him to try the weakest medicine first before it allows him to try stronger kinds. He leaves and the aide returns to have me fill out the forms for the new medicine, which require a lot of personal information, including my social security number. 

She departs and Wang returns and gives me drops and asks if they burn, gives me more drops and asks if they burn, then gives me the shot with one sudden stab. It doesn’t hurt but I feel it slide in, which is unusual. He must notice my discomfort because he asks if I’m okay. If you would’ve told me a year ago that I’d be getting a shot in my eyeball every eight weeks, I would’ve freaked out, but at this point it’s just a minor annoyance. He says that the hope with the stronger medicine is that I should only need it occasionally.

Afterwards I head across town to the Tomorrow Theater to see if they can squeeze me in to the sold-out Miranda July event. I hadn’t planned on even trying but a coworker told me I should stop by. I was hoping they’d be working the door, but it’s a woman I’ve never met, though I know her face from the staff handbook. She grills me, asking me who told me I would be able to get in. I tell her and she looks suspicious. I say it’s no big deal and turn to go, and she tells me to wait until closer to show time and she’ll see what she can do. I feel embarrassed and stand in the corner of the tiny, crowded lobby, feeling awkward. I don’t like crowds, plus my sugar is low and on top of it my right eye is filled with floaters like a series of cat scratches. I’m surprised to see a bunch of people from work, including the head of the museum. 

At last the woman at the door leads me in and seats me in the back by the sound board. The head of the museum is right in front of me. I sit down next to an attractive woman, perhaps a little younger than me, who asks me how I got a seat. I tell her and she says she saw that they were sold out but they told her they could get her in. We both talk about how much we love All Fours. She says she works as a somatic therapist who also makes steel sculptures. She seems really interesting (despite my doubts about the whole somatic therapy thing), but we don’t get to talk much before the lights go down and the director of the theater comes out to introduce Miranda July. 

She comes out onto the low stage, looking exactly the way she looks in her movies and author photos; short curly hair, wide eyes that always look a little sad and bewildered. She wears what looks like a man’s red robe. 

I dislike the theater director immensely, and once again she proves herself to be a  twit. Happily, July tends to ramble on at great length after every idiotic question, and even happier, that rambling is interesting and entertaining. She comes across as less flaky than I had imagined judging on interviews I’d read; she’s smart and funny and everything she says seems propelled by anxiety, which I find charming and relatable. 

After about an hour, the director opens things up to questions. July asks if she can try something; she wants to swap clothes with someone in the audience. She asks anyone who wants to do so to stand up, and she walks up and down the aisles trying to decide what outfit she feels drawn to. “Oh, I love that sweater, but… no. Sorry. This feels so cruel,” she says, and like with so much of what she does, it’s difficult to tell how much of it is an act. The artificially of her shtick always feels like there is an undercurrent of sincerity though, which keeps her from being too precious and annoying, though she always seems to step right up to that line. Her early work felt a little too cloying to me, but over the years she has mastered the high wire act. 

. “I think maybe a man’s clothes,” she says after a few minutes of sadly turning people down. 

“Oh, I’m wearing man’s clothes,” the woman next to me says, and leaps to her feet. 

July finally picks a tall, well-dressed man to swap outfits with, and they duck behind a folding screen that has been set up on the stage. She keeps making little comments and cries of pleasure that seem like they could easily become sexual but never quite do. It feels uncomfortable and manipulative and playful and genuinely intimate. 

The theater director keeps making comments like “I wish you all could hear the things I’m hearing!” and “See, this is the kind of experience we bring here at The Tomorrow Theater!” Until the museum bought it, the place was called The Oregon Theater, and showed nothing but pornography.

When they are done changing, July steps out from behind the screen –“No, wait, you can’t go first,” she scolds- in the man’s stylishly mismatched suit, and emerges in the flowing red robe. Everyone applauds, then she takes questions, occasionally pausing to preen and pose. “I wish I had a mirror!” she chirps. 

There is a break, after which they are going to screen her film The Future, which I haven’t seen since its original run. The woman next to me is surprised; she didn’t know they were showing a film. My sugar is still really low so I go out to the lobby to get some popcorn. My neighbor follows me and when I get to the counter I ask if I can get her anything. I say casually, but I can tell by the way she declines that I have made her uncomfortable. I find I have this affect on women a lot, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps my desperation to be loved comes through without my meaning for it to, and they find this repulsive. Perhaps they can see through my friendly, jovial façade to see how deeply miserable I am.

I remember that the first time I watched the movie, I was initially irritated by it, but by the end it won me over. I watched it the woman I was seeing at the time; the first girlfriend I had in Portland. She lived upstairs from a man who claimed to be the inspiration for the male lead; the story of him pouring lighter fluid on his hand and setting it on fire was his. I was skeptical, but then we watched some Miranda July short films she had on tape and sure enough, the guy downstairs was in one of them. 

This time I feel captivated all the way through. I had forgotten how steeped in loneliness it is, how the entire thing seems to be about much we need to connect with other people, and how difficult it is to do so. I think of the lovely, curly-haired sculptress beside me; the irony is not lost on me. Or maybe I’m just projecting.

When it’s over, the somatic therapist and I walk out together. I want to ask what she thought of the movie but I’m feeling overwhelmed by emotion.

I hold the door to the street for her and she says, “Bye.”

“It was great talking to you,” I say. She strides away without another word and I hobble off through the rainy darkness to wait for the bus to carry me across the river, from my lonely present into an even lonelier future.

Chicken

     I’m extremely nervous about starting work tomorrow. I know it’s going to be overwhelming and exhausting but my biggest fear of course is for my feet. What if they get bad again? What if I have to take time off work right away? It’s hard living with this fear, and I spend most of the day indoors, feeling paralyzed. I do the Sunday crossword, call my stepfather for Father’s Day, prepare my lunches for the week; I’ll miss having the luxury of eating whenever I want to. As if she knows the jig is up, Olivia demands to sit on Daddy’s lap all day and meows insistently whenever I try to get up. 

 Though the junco parents seemed to have disappeared, all weekend at least one of the fledglings was still coming in and out of the nest and chirping like crazy. Until today, when it is eerily silent. 

    Eventually I decide I need to get out. All day the sun has struggled to break through the clouds, with little success. I walk to the park blocks and get some coffee at the café there. The caffeine perks me up and I do some drawing and leave a message for my actual father. The air is cool but still; no breeze rustles the elms above me. 

    A woman staggers over and asks, “Hey Sweetie, do you have a cigarette?” I say no. She smiles and reaches into a paper bag and pulls out something and hands it to me. Even up close I can’t tell what it is, but I take it from her. It’s a morsel of fried chicken. 

    “There’s more over there,” she says, pointing to a bench with a paper bag on it. I thank her and she says you’re welcome and walks away. I realize she looks like a lot like KC if she had spent a few years on the street. Same red hair, similar build. It’s only been a few days and I already miss them all so much. I hold my hand perfectly still, afraid to touch the thing but not sure where to throw it away. It feels greasy and slightly warm on my palm. I sit there for a while then pop it into my mouth. It is incredibly delicious. 

A Cloud of Bats

         I continue moving the last of my things from the old apartment. It’s amazing how even when there seems to be nothing left, there’s always some little cache of crap you forgot. It feels never ending but I plod along, trying to ignore the dark thoughts that swirl like a cloud of bats around my head.

        The company handling my transition into paying for my own insurance is not returning my calls or emails. They cheerfully processed my payment, but the money hasn’t been sent to the hospital yet, and I remain uninsured. It’s extremely nerve-wracking. Just keep calling, everyone says. They’re just doing their job, and their job is to make your life miserable. I hope they rot in hell.

        It’s been ten days since I’ve been in the chamber. It feels like years. Shelley called today to see if I was coming in Monday. I was ridiculously happy to hear her gravely voice. I explained the situation and started to cry. She said not to worry, that the oxygen takes a long time to work its way out of my system and that they’ll hold my place for me. She says KC was just saying when my treatment is over, that we should all go out and get a drink. I’m so touched by this that I start to cry again. After all, are they not my family? Is the wound care clinic not my home? 

        Back at my other home, I spend the morning carrying every painting I’ve ever made, at least the ones that are too large for boxes. The emotional upheaval brought up by this feels violent and probably not good for me, but these fucking things have to be moved. I throw out a few of the unfinished ones I know I’ll never get to. I feel guilty giving up on them but there’s only so much room, only so much time. I can’t wait until I no longer have to navigate the labyrinth of my possessions, can’t wait until everything is packed away and in its place, and I can go on with my life, such as it is. 

        I know I brought this on myself; the move was my choice, was my attempt to seize control and be assertive. But this is so hard. I feel wrung out and frightened at how fragile my situation really is. My entire life is here, these drawings and paintings and photographs the only evidence that I existed, and you could fit it all into a good sized dumpster. 

The King of Cups

         One day in the late nineties, I was walking from the subway to my friend’s Park Slope apartment, when I found a playing card on the sidewalk. I picked it up, as was my habit; I had an idea of making some kind of art project out of all the single cards I collected. This one was not a regular card, but featured a picture of a king with a goblet floating above his hand. I was excited: I had never found a tarot card before, and while I’m not especially superstitious, I do love symbols and metaphors. Maybe this card was meant to guide me, in some way. 

        Upon doing some research, I was confused. There was a card called the King of Cups, but the figure on its face was traditionally seated on a throne and wore a fish amulet, with another fish leaping from the water behind him. I figured this was just a different interpretation, though I was also puzzled by the number 12 on the card, which I couldn’t find any reference to. But the king is usually seen as being creative, compassionate, and wise, with a balanced mind and heart. He seemed like a good protector, and for years I used him as a bookmark before eventually taping him to the wall beside my bed. 

        I took it down the other day as I prepared for my move. I thought I’d use the Google search feature to see if I could discover anything about this particular card. It came right up when I took a picture of it. It was indeed a King of Cups…only not from a tarot deck. It was a common playing card designed in Spain in the late 1800s and used all over the world in casinos. I was disappointed to learn that my talisman was nothing more than a scrap of mass-produced rubbish. But I still remember that instant of discovery, I can picture that street corner, still remember what it felt like to bend down to pick up an object that I believed, for a moment, might change my life.

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!” 

Snarl

         During my latest hospital stay, I had fever dreams the likes of which I’ve never experienced. The dream consisted of a tangled mass of thoughts in my head. They weren’t clear, like lines of gibberish in an ever-shifting knot, though I could tell they were stressful, anxious, paranoid. I kept trying to pull the lines away from the mass, as if they were strings or wires, but they kept becoming tangled together. I should emphasize that I couldn’t actually see them, they were just thoughts, though they seemed like they had a physical form. I knew I would not get well unless I could extricate them all, one by one. I needed desperately to do so, it felt horrible not to be able to. The dream seemed to go on for hours. I felt like I was in hell. 

        This morning I had another dream that again consisted only of thoughts, though these were much clearer and not stressful. In this dream I was thinking about my art, and how I am not a disciplined nor terribly skilled draughtsperson. I thought about the fact that after all this time I don’t really know how to do anything, and yet sometimes everything works out and I make something that looks pretty good. And I thought to myself, the key to my moving forward as artist hinges on two questions, which I jotted down the moment I awoke: 

Are your triumphs accidental?

Are your accidents repeatable?

        Of course, if you’re trying to repeat something, it’s not really an accident, is it? But you can make an accident more likely by setting up conditions that are unstable and could have unpredictable results. None of it’s really all that profound, but I was grateful  to my subconscious for giving me something to think about other than my goddamn foot. Surgery is still not scheduled. My doctors are not returning my calls. My disability claim is still under consideration. I haven’t worked or gotten paid in a month and a half. The knot gets pulled tighter and tighter. I fear I’ll never be able to undo it. 

Landslide

  I’ve been out of the hospital  a week and change but the foot is just not healing up. It keeps vacillating between looking slightly better and much worse. Both the podiatrist and surgeon decide I need to be hooked up to a wound vac, which is just what it sounds like. Everyone says they’re amazing devices but the thought of having this contraption attached to me 24 hours a day is the proverbial last straw for my somewhat fragile state of mind. My mood plummets immediately and nothing seems to be able to raise it.

   At the podiatrists’ office, they pump in a music station which exclusively plays covers of 70s soft rock hits slowed down even further and warbled by sweet-voiced nymphs. I’ve been here enough times to hear the songs repeat. Have You Ever Seen the Rain is always followed by Here Comes the Sun, and then I'm On Fire, somehow even creepier than the original. 

    Dr. B comes in and asks how I'm doing. I tell her I've about reached the end of my rope and am tired of living. She smiles through her mask and says she understands but notes that the foot is looking much better. I don’t think it looks any different but say nothing. A woman’s voice coos a syrupy rendition of Landslide, a song which has always turned my stomach. 

    The doctor brings her assistant in to attach the wound vac, but ends up doing the whole thing herself. She asks if I have anyone to help me at home. I tell her no, I had to fire my butler. "Oh, that's too bad," she says. I tell her I'm joking. She looks at me, puzzled, and says, "Well home care will be constacting you. In the meantime we have some supplies for you to take with you." The assistant lugs in a box the size of a big screen TV. 

"You're fucking kidding me," I say. The assistant assures me that she is not. She says my medical leave paperwork is waiting for me at the front counter. I go out and make my appointment and the woman at the counter says there's a charge for them having filled out the paperwork. "You're fucking kidding me," I say, but apparently no one around here kids about anything, so I hand her my card.

    As I sit waiting for my ride to return, I see a familiar face beaming up at me from the coffee table. Henry Fucking Winkler is on the cover of AARP, beneath headlines promising How to Stay Safe Driving at Night and Love Lost and Found after 47 Years. A man comes in to repair the automatic door opener, and for the next hour I am treated to blasts of cold air accompanied by a high-pitched drilling. I try to make myself some coffee but the coffee machine serves me a cup of hot water covered with a film of coffee grounds.  I give in and read the AARP rag. “Don’t think about what you don’t have,” Henry extolls us at the end of his interview. “Embrace and enjoy what’s in front of you.” The machine on my shoulder gurgles. I want to throw both it and the magazine at the wall. 

    At home I eat lunch and immediately black out. When I reluctantly come to, it’s dark outside. I warm up some leftover black-eyed peas and sit and watch the dark thoughts circle ever closer. 

    All the while the machine in the shoulder bag ticks like a drunken clock, occasionally emitting a deep gurgle like a burst of flatulence. It’s not large –about the size of an old portable cassette recorder- but it’s heavy. Crimson beads dart along the clear tube that leads from my bandaged foot to the vacuum itself. It’s not as off-putting as a colostomy bag but it’s still disturbing. Every once in a while it shuts itself off for no apparent reason and emits a high pitched shriek to alert me. As the night progresses the ticking sounds wetter, like someone taking slurps of bubble tea through a straw. 

    My first home visit nurse arrives the next morning to interview me. She’s very young and very kind, her hands covered in rainbow tattoos that look like they were drawn on in crayon. Olivia is obsessed with her but she says that while she loves cats, she’s deathly allergic. We talk a while and I somehow manage to convince her I’m no threat to myself, something I’m not all that sure of at the moment, and she leaves and says I’ll be seeing three more nurses this week; the nurses of Christmas past, present and future, I assume. I don’t look forward to the stream of strangers into my filthy, cluttered little burrow. 

    I try to sleep the afternoon away again but my body doesn’t cooperate. I manage to read an entire issue of the New Yorker but it’s so depressing I feel nauseous afterwards. I just want to close my eyes and at this point I don’t really care if I ever open them again.