Amp'd (14 page)

“But then there's the problem of what
I
look like naked…”

“Someday, that won't matter. When the right person comes along.”

“Missing her right arm?”

“Of course not!”

“Back when I still had the ability to clap, I met a ‘fetal amputee'—a woman born without her lower arm.”

“Please stop…”

“She was pretty amazing, and while I'm sure she faced her own unique challenges, they'd be completely different from mine. It's the difference between being born into a primitive desert tribe or being suddenly marooned there from Chicago to live like them. The giant lip plate alone would take getting used to.”

“Are you finished?”

“Sure, but only because I'm very, very hungover. Is there coffee?”

“Hours old.” She looks into her mug. “When you pour milk in it, it just turns kind of gray.”

“So the trick is not to pour milk in it?” I wash back two Vicodin with truly horrible coffee.

“The trick is to make a fresh pot.”

Jackie and I got through our childhood together by waiting each other out. If a dish needed washing or toilet paper needed changing or a pet needed feeding, the goal was to outlast each other. We lost turtles to starvation like the Mojave Desert. And so we sit across from each other, gunslingers staring each other down, sipping coffee that tastes like underwear.

It's warm in here and I'm sweating through my T-shirt and my arm really hurts. “I need to get stoned. Want to join me?”

“I am
not
sitting in your attic all afternoon getting stoned!” She slams her coffee mug down and gets up from the table.

“All right, take it easy…”

“Get dressed,” she orders. “We're going out to get stoned.”

*   *   *

I haven't been here in Crawlywood since I was fifteen, when Artie, Joel, and I used to walk the two miles just to disappear into its dark expanse, a distance that now seems a lot farther (Jackie and I drove) and a destination less vast (how could this have once seemed so endless and secret?). This is where we used to set off firecrackers, burying them up to the fuse in dirt and blasting tiny smoking craters, stacking pinecones into rickety structures before blowing them apart. I would even hold a firecracker in my now-missing left hand, out to the side as far as I could, letting it explode between my fingers. It stung only a little, followed by a tingling sensation, and several blasts would mean an afternoon of now-familiar ringing in my ears—small price to pay for the respect and awe of my pals.

“Did they sell part of this off?” Jackie coughs and passes the bowl back to me. “For development? It seems so much smaller.”

“The whole world is smaller than it was when we were kids. Think about how big the attic seemed, even with all their crap in it.”

“That's just a height thing, because we were literally shorter. This…” She gestures at our shrunken world.

“The distance between things was different,” I slurp, pulling on the pipe. “Think about how long summer felt. Endless!”

“Until it was over.”

“Everything moved so slowly, you could see it all: the grass, the bugs, the sky … you noticed everything. And how sluggish the grown-ups moved.”

Jackie sucks at the pipe. “How did we get to be sluggish grown-ups?”

I would also come here alone, driven by the pitiful demands of my first job: paid ten dollars a week to deliver Shop Smart coupon flyers door to door; instead of knocking on doors or stuffing mailboxes I took them deep into these woods and dumped them, every week, creating a landfill of smart-shopping bargains.

“They can say all they want that the universe is expanding,” I observe lazily, “but every day our world contracts like a leaky balloon.”

“We never had pot this good in college,” Jackie woozes.

“Science is amazing. Someday it will grow me an arm like a gecko. I mean, a real gecko arm, green and slimy with giant suction cup fingers I can cling to walls with.” Her eyes fill up with tears, and I want to blow myself up with the world's biggest firecracker. “Hey, I'm sorry…”

“No! It's not—”

She's choking now, and before I know it my eyes are tearing and then we're both gasping for breath. Jackie sinks to her knees and just as I land next to her, uniformed men in gas masks burst from the forest. The largest of them looms over me, and even muffled by his gas mask I can make out what he says: “Oh, shit.”

*   *   *

At the hospital, eyes are flushed and oxygen administered and explanations offered: it seems we had inadvertently wandered downwind of a training exercise by the local sheriff's department, and when the breeze shifted so did the tear gas.

“Not the first time this happened,” the EMT shares. “About a year ago, this place was full of mewling Cub Scouts. Tears and snot everywhere.”

“What the fuck are they training for?” Jackie spews snot and tears. “Do they think they're going to have to put down an armed insurrection?”

“You can't be too careful,” I suggest. “Wait,
yes, you can.
” Idiots.

“The local Scout Council sued,” the EMT leans in quietly. “And settled out of court.”

I turn to Jackie with the pleased expression of a wine taster having sampled a surprisingly delightful bottle: a nod, eyebrow raised, bemused lip curl. Then the EMT brushes my nub, and it feels like she scorched it with a blowtorch.

“
Ow,
God damn it!”

“Did that hurt?”

“Like hell!”

The sweat starts pumping, triggered by contact or a fright response. The EMT presses her palm against my forehead.

“You're burning up.”

“Too many layers,” I groan, pulling off my jacket.

“
SHIT!
” Jackie shouts, and I follow her eyes down to my leaky nub of a shoulder and know this can't be good.

*   *   *

The doctor tells me my fever is 104 and the infection in my shoulder is “serious.” He ignores me when I ask,
Will we have to amputate?
and proceeds to wonder aloud what kind of absolute moron would get a tattoo on such a delicate, wounded area. Mom represses any talk of dinosaur brains while Jackie, still red-eyed, grows even redder with fury, and while I think she may want to kill me, I'm certain she's going to cut Steve's balls off, and I'd rather be me with fever, infection, and balls.

They admit me overnight and jack an IV of antibiotics into my good arm while they clean and drain the pus from my bloated and bloodshot serpent head. Everyone who enters and exits reflexively pumps the hand sanitizer mounted by the doorway, rubbing hands like pensive flies. It makes me think of germs, and how hospitals are luxury accommodations for hideous, flesh-eating infections that wouldn't deign to live elsewhere; and I hope that the pick inserted into my forearm to receive twice-daily antibiotics was properly sterilized, because I'm down to my last arm.

The RNs leave me to suffer the glare of my family, seated across from me in three visitors' chairs, a tribunal of disappointment. It's quiet except for the distant hallway announcements calling a roster of doctors' names, and my hospital-mate wheezing for air on the other side of a curtain. The smells, the sounds, the sting of the IV, and the discomfort of a hospital bed are too familiar, and despite my guilt in reeling Jackie down from the rapturous joy of her party to the unpleasant depths of
this,
I'm not ready to be lectured.

“That stupid fucking tattoo,” Jackie seethes.

“We don't know that's what caused this,” Mom concludes. “Let's not jump to conclusions.”

“Were you even taking care of it? No, because you're stoned all the time. You know, as terrible as this was for you, I was really hoping you'd grow from it…”

Jackie will get no further than this, ever.

“People like to say you learn from adversity,” I stop her. “You know what I learned? I learned that it hurts when metal crushes your body. Is that useful? Will it help me be a better person? I also learned that anything can happen to anyone at any time, that your whole fucking life can change in an instant. I learned that people have the astonishing idea that they know what they would do if they were me, and equally strong opinions on how I should behave. I learned how selfish I am—in a good way—because I want to do what
I want to do
! I'm the one who got fucked, and I'm the only one that matters to me!”

I have to shout this last part,
matters to me,
because Jackie is up and out of the room at
fucked
and Mom is right behind her. The wheezing on the other side of the curtain grows louder, and then it stops. Dad remains seated, silently, perhaps weighing whether to linger in one undesirable situation or pursue the other. Then, inexplicably, he yelps, the loud hiccup of a tiny dog in distress, and slips two fingers between the buttons on his shirt.

“I think my defibrillator just kicked in.”

 

JOLTED

Apparently, the way an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator works is that it's programmed to detect cardiac arrhythmia (specifically, the irregular heartbeat that can lead to cardiac arrest) and correct it with a jolt of electricity. I have my own discomforting sensations—numbness, tingling, itchiness, phantom pain—but won't even hazard a guess as to what it must feel like to experience a sudden and unexpected jolt of eight hundred volts directly into one's heart.

“How the hell do they not have ESPN on the hospital TV?”

Dad jolts the TV, repeatedly, as if trying to bring it to life via remote control. Admitted for observation but, we're assured, with no cause for alarm, Dad has taken the place of my expired former roommate, whose demise I'm almost certainly responsible for, either by distress or epiphany, as if he might have agreed with my shouted argument that
I'm the one who got fucked
and
I want to do what I want to do,
and what he wanted to do was die.

“No idea what goddamn time it is. How come the cable box doesn't have a clock?”

If casinos don't have clocks so you can lose yourself in the mind-altering trippiness of gambling, hospitals rightfully exclude them for the opposite reason, against the numbing stasis that would only be heightened by the inert hands of a clock. (Other places you might not want a clock: middle school, prison, a loveless marriage.)

“And the food. You ate this for a month?”

Except for the first week when I got most of my nutrients through a tube, seven weeks—but preoccupied with trying to feed myself one-handed, the lack of culinary excellence went largely unnoticed. I liked the pudding, though, and my nurses would often sneak me a second. The ladies love a newly one-armed man!

“Pudding's okay…” Dad slurps.

If I don't get out of this bed, I am going to die. It will either happen or I will make it happen, willing it like my absent former roommate. Unfettered from my most recent dose of antibiotics, I'm free to roam. Feet find slippers and I make my way to the door.

“Where are you going?”

“For a walk. Don't want to get blood clots. Or bedsores. Or more suicidal.”

“I'll go with you,” Dad says, without personal neediness but what sounds like genuine concern for me, and my resistance wilts.

We teeter down the hallway, with its antiseptic smell, hushed din of consultation, blank faces, and the occasional slow-moving patient teetering toward us, a nod shared among the fraternity of the walking sick. Each room we pass, left to right, is a frozen tableau of illness: bedridden figure, sometimes accompanied by silent vigil-keepers; a multipanel comic strip without punchline.

“Explosive diarrhea,” I begin to imagine the maladies of patients as we pass their rooms. “Badger attack … Bar stool racing accident…”

“Stuck himself with the pins from a new shirt,” Dad joins in.

“Fell trying to hang his Christmas lights.”

“Serves him right; it's too damn early.”

“Frostbite, from too long in a vodka freezer.”

“Heatstroke from a sunlamp.”

“A sunlamp? What is it, 1950? Tanning bed!”

“Fine!” Dad growls.

“This guy burned his tongue testing a battery…”

Rounding the corner we come face-to-face with a small boy, about eleven, plugged into his rolling IV and standing with his back pressed against the wall as if holding it up—impossible, considering his weakened appearance: wilted frame, sallow skin, hair lost to chemo. He stares at my empty sleeve.

“What happened to your arm?” he asks, wide-eyed.

“Alligator attack.”

“Really?”

“We caught him. He's in my dad's bathtub. We're just waiting for him to pass the arm, and then we'll let him go.”

He laughs. “You can't get your arm back after it's alligator doody!”

“I hadn't thought of that.” I turn to Dad. “What's plan B?”

Dad shrugs, unable to keep up with this new subterfuge, probably mentally spent from our rousing game of Affix the Affliction.

“I'm here because my defibrillator went off,” he offers instead.

“What's that?”

“It's for when you fibrillate too much,” I reply. “Are you walking? Do you want to walk with us?”

He stares at the floor. “I came all the way from there,” he points toward the pediatric cancer ward across the other side of the elevator bank. “But then I remembered I'm not wearing any underwear.” He hugs the wall closer.

I reach behind me and pull off my underwear, stuffing it into the front pocket of my hospital gown. Dad leans on me for support and does the same.

“Let's moon some nurses,” Dad says.

Cancer Boy grins and joins us, wheeling his IV, three generations of stark-white asses shining behind us. We pass a series of rooms: “This guy suffered a serious wombat attack … This one? Ran with the scissors … Caught in a gamma ray blast…”