Contrapposto

    Things were different a year ago. They're different now, for that matter. I notice things more. Sometimes I think it’s just a side effect, one of the many quietly listed on labels I forget to read: hypersensitivity, under dehydration but above nausea. It’s a physical thing, colors and sounds and textures intruding on me, and after being shut up in the sensory deprivation tank–  with cable–  they called a private room, I could understand it, for a little while. Persistent thing, though; I wonder if this is a common complaint, if I should contact my physician. For all I know it’s like hospital pneumonia, a nosocomial condition occurring within thirty days after discharge. I remember the doctors telling me to anticipate a period of adjustment after my release. I don’t recall them elaborating on just what that meant.
    One of the duties of a patient in remission is to keep busy. It keeps you from going stir-crazy, or moping, or sliding back into a relapse, or noticing how much everything has changed. A year ago I didn’t have to keep busy; I was occupied. I slept at night, had things to do all day, squeezed things into my spare time. Having become a creature of spare time, I search desperately for things to fill the hours. I’ve found I read a lot more, and watch a lot less television. Hospitals are boring. Surgery is dull. The effects are absurd. Recuperation can be included in that.
     I have plenty of time to think, but not enough to think about. Between the boredom and the needling sensitivity, I’ve become conversant with things normal people don’t think about, things I never thought about before, either. The background radiation of daily life, clicking along so softly that it isn't worth the effort. Staples in telephone poles. Worn places in the carpet. The way milk blooms inside a cup of hot coffee, and just how much junk mail the average human receives per annum.
    I have come to recognize what my neighbors have been washing by the color and density of the dryer lint they leave behind. Denim leaves behind a heavy purple, an almost filmy powder blue comes off of delicates: dense matting signifies cotton, the slick stuff, artificial fibers. At some point, I’m not sure when, I started cleaning the lint screen after I used the dryers as well as before. I’ve considered switching laundromats, going to places outside the building. I’ve considered doing my laundry anonymously in the night, headphones on, eating two a.m. french fries and thumbing through my battered copy of Middlemarch.
    I hate the light in laundromats. I hate the industrial fixtures keening to themselves in binary: the hideous sixty-cycle hum clicking like pan-fried mechanical crickets. Long fluorescent tubes like the ones which illuminate sterile institutional corridors, filling ears with a subtly unspeakable ringing. I want it to stop, but unremitting it follows me from laundromat to hallway, from room to room.
    What kind of a day has it been.
    The kind of day when you start out with six different prescriptions, pass through the torpid implausibility of recuperation and end up leaving the damn laundry to pace in the glare of a miserable afternoon.
    Summer in the city, and everything feels like hot steel wool on bare nerves. This is the last place I want to be, out on the pavement under the neon emergency sign. Last but one, anyway: I’d rather prop up the wall from here than inside those doors, where the chemical lights wash out the walls and all sense of proportion. Hospitals are sort of like the mob, and I’ve been pulled back in on someone else’s account. I have to wonder whether I'll ever really leave the hospital.
    I doubt it.
    Not today, when the air reeks of traffic, nicotine, and death. Not today, with the sky reminding me that I started out here, the stops I've made since only previews to my final return. So I stand waiting outside Emergency, out by the ambulance rank where EMTs grab a quick fix before heading back out to cruise the weak and the unlucky. Vultures of mercy.
    Really, we're all waiting to be returned to sender.
    I'd like a cigarette–  to join the rest of the addicts in a communal vice–  but it isn't allowed. Smoke inhalation depresses the immune system and slows recovery. So I am not smoking, or drinking, or abusing my body in any of the ways to which I have been accustomed. I'm just standing out here, mastering an urge to be sick conjured up by sense association and muscle memory, primitive physical triggers.
    It's the smell. Everything comes back.
    Through there the reek of antiseptic brings back the fog of anesthetic; nauseous and unfocused, like sleeping with stomach flu. Students in the halls, marks on clipboards, abbreviations, examinations and results: imaging and labwork, a human being stretched out on paper and cut into illegible notations. Sectioned out and biopsied with pens and film, scalpels and duller instruments, until the file was thicker than me, and far more solid. I grew more transparent with every clouded x-ray, less tangible with every physical. I think I somehow must have faded away completely, before they discharged me: I feel transparent still. And everyone can see through me.
    You learn so much about yourself, behind those doors. You learn a kind of nonchalance, and so, conversant with its arcana, I developed a peculiar faith in medical science. I trust them to fully treat the symptom: here I am, avoiding the cause.
    The sun is finally sinking down, though the pavement will radiate heat long after it moves on. I'm living off the heat, as much as it needles me and as much as I soak my collar for it. I won’t wilt under the baleful baroness eye of the sun– starting to set now, low and yellow and everywhere you look, increasing traffic accidents  and rousing the vultures from their nest– because it's keeping me upright. The heat soaks through me, hitting places close to the bone that haven't felt warmth, or cold, or anything, since the spring which I must have missed. It's easy to lose seasons, mostly the short ones, on your back under the unchanging fluorescents. It's easy to go in from the rain only to come out under the brassy bowl of a heatwave.
    Or beat the heat and walk right into winter. So here I am hoping that the tricky fall I carried in there walks out while it’s still warm. Just a fall can get blown all out of proportion, just past those doors. It’s happened before, under different skies and different neon signs: the diagnosis and name of the recommended specialist, the most effective course of treatment, casual expert voices speaking of periods of adjustment and using words like weapons– badly.
    The ambulance drivers have the time to give me odd looks. I return them as best I’m able and go on waiting. And adjusting. Maybe this is what they meant. I am not accustomed to hanging around waiting. I've had to learn, though, and have not found the lesson enjoyable. Waiting is for the saints and other dead: according to my doctors, I have not yet joined their ranks.
    Outside under the awning, bathing in the intermittent light of the ambulances brings back other visits to the main office, none of them mine. My own stories never start out here in front of the doors, or in waiting rooms or triage centers: I wake up in a ward somewhere, already pinned down on somebody’s clipboard, one hell of a specimen in jar. A network of reoccurring dreams, feeding off of repetitive realities. Here we have sturdier stuff; paperwork, uncomfortable chairs, phone calls, brain-eroding nonstop television. Two hundred channels and nothing to watch but the door they took your friend through.
    Sometimes, you get to watch your friend, in the middle of the night in a crowded city having lots of fun and consequences. I’ve had a lot of weird nights: they stack up like cards in different suits. Standing out here, without a cigarette to my name or the courage to turn around, memories are crossing themselves, winking at me from behind each other in a game of find the lady.
    Shuffling the deck throws up a deuce from last fall. It was darker, cooler: well past midnight, our night out had ended early because of someone’s idea of a good time. It wasn’t ours. That night, wedged between the evening and the morning hours, I sat in one or another of the hospital’s courteously provided uncomfortable chairs, looking at anything I could find. Hospitals are boring. Some are very boring. Even when one of your friends is lying in a  bed, bouncing between delirious and sarcastic from the speedball someone slipped her, you can run out of things to hold your interest.
    There was a guy in the next bed over: another overdose. For five hours he sat up in the reclined bed, limp and motionless, staring at something not even he could see. This wasn’t how he’d planned to spend his Sunday evening either, but there we were all in this together, alone. He at least looked comfortable with needles, the colors on his arms glowing under a layer of sweat and iodine. One needle too many had given rise to a whole new set, and the fresh IV port clashed with his decor. Someone had called his parents, I don’t remember when: time gets stretched out and bunched up with the fresh sheets and dividing curtains, marked by the sounds of inanimate machinery reporting vital signs.
    I remember his parents. Sometimes I think that when the circumstances and the city have been forgotten, I will still remember his parents. While his father faced him, holding the hand with the sundial tattoo, his mother stared at her own folded hands, just as blank as her son. Flickering between the two immobile faces, I could see the resemblance. She could have been praying, or retreating into denial, or thinking about everything she couldn’t have done to prevent this. From where I sat, they shared a meditation if not a mantra; the only difference between them was that occasionally her expression twitched. His father just looked strained, waiting for some sign of life or recognition or cognition from the son obliviously in front of him.
    The wind is starting to kick up, now, as the sun finally fades away. Pacing can’t keep me occupied, or outrun that sinking feeling that rides along with fear, experience, and other lies. I’d hoped to be gone before the stars came out, but between paperwork and paranoia I know I won't. Around me the EMTs change shifts, or don’t, grinding out smokes and zipping up: as the city cools off, their job heats up.
    Later tonight, when it gets so late it’s early– and everything old is new again– the bodies in blue jumpsuits will come back, mobile after too many hours, walking like they're trying to make it onto those gurneys. Four o’clock in the morning is a hell of a time for anyone to be awake, much less making deliveries to the downtown knife and gun club. It is not a nice place to visit, and you certainly wouldn’t want to live there. Time loses any meaning, becomes duration, and joins infinity somewhere past the talking heads on CNN’s twenty-four-hour information dump. Around four a.m., you can believe they’re making it up. Maybe they are.
    Cut off from facts, fiction sets in, auguring omens in the sanitary halls, conjuring demons in the elevators. What was just a head wound, the result of a nasty fall, becomes a concussion, becomes internal bleeding, becomes irreversible brain damage, becomes coma, becomes death, and there is no check to imagination out in the waiting room with sitcom reruns from 1972 and last month’s People. Reason says a couple stitches will fix it and then we all get to go home, no more waiting rooms or grainy reception, no more blank doors and institutional corridors. Reason, however cool, gets outrun by fevered fantasy, another sickness harbored here.
    I remember that. Waiting outside all the action in some clinical anteroom, I tried to keep busy and my mind off of things, distract myself from what I couldn’t see. It didn't work any better then, when I was still preoccupied with something more important than myself. Alone at some ungodly hour, I wandered through the hallways that were available to me, not closed off with weighty signs and unswinging doors. At some unremarkable time ahead my friend would, in fact, walk out on his own, all sewn up and ready to go get woken up every thirty minutes for the next day, but while his fate was still being decided by the helpless idiot of my imagination I paced, wandered, tried to catch up with my fears or lose them in the maze.
    For a moment I succeeded, before he came out of anonymous doors and we left into the night, tangled in the empty hallways. Sometimes, when I’m alone and tired and all out of hope or fear, I get caught there again, in between places. Nothing is real except the sick-sterile corridor, filling my vision, drawing tighter toward a door at the far end: an emergency fire door, translucent glass for all the good it does. But the fluorescent light reflecting off the floor and the shadows in the doorframes distort space, and it does not seem sensible to me that this hallway ever ends.
    Summer in the city, and all the flags are hanging down.

• Posted at Sunday, February 22, 2009 03:15 PM
• In Short Fiction Category | Permalink