The Worst Years of Your Life (33 page)

“He said you barely had enough brains to keep your body breathing. He said it's like your head's full of meat.”

Thank you, Crank, for how fast you turn a person upside-down mad! Luke began a scratching and grumbling spree, clawing at his cheeks and the inside of his arms. He kept at it until his brother returned and sat cross-legged, folding his hands nice in his lap.

“You talk to this girl?” Luke demanded right away.

“Sure I did,” said Pat.

“You say anything I should know about?”

“I might have made a suggestion.” Pat polished his head, sheepishly, with his sleeve. “But forget her. Let's get to work.”

Luke's chest heaved like some tacky romance starlet. His nostrils blew out like a bull in a ring. It worried Severa some. Had she pressed the guy too hard?

“Why don't you turn on the music in the truck first,” Luke said, supersteely. “I'll get you fixed up.”

Pat struggled to his feet. “All I do anymore is get up and walk,” he complained.

As his brother left, Luke dumped a half-spoon of lye into a bottle, added water, and shook until the pellets dissolved. A dark path appeared in Severa's mind—why fix liquid lye?—but she tried not to take it. She stared past the pit to where the downtown flickered pink, like it was on fire. When she looked back, Luke was pressing his blue lips together as he drew the straight lye into a syringe.

A hard Spanish rap boiled out of the truck. Pat jittered back, shaking his fists like maracas. Luke handed him the dirty shot and a length of brown tube.

“Hey, don't,” Severa started, but Luke clapped his hand over her mouth, hard enough to make her cavities ache.

“You can go next,” Pat told her, tying off. He got ready and pressed the plunger down. “I feel bad,” he said after the needle hit the vein. Then the plunger broke off in his fingers. He pulled the shot away. There was a mark where the needle had just pierced the skin. He stabbed at it with the broken syringe.

Luke let go of Severa and grabbed the shot and threw it into the lime pit.

“Don't waste it!” Pat groaned, white and woozy.

Luke wiped new tears from his eyes. “Oh Jesus,” he said. “I did wrong.”

Pat dragged himself closer and touched Luke's shoulder. “It's OK,” he said. “Just hurry and fix me one more.”

“My own only brother,” Luke moaned. “How could I?”

Severa knew the right move now was to bolt, before Luke turned and said, “Look what you made me do.” But when she rose to leave, he drew the gun.

“Take it,” he ordered. “Shoot me in my brain. If he goes, I want to go too.”

“Stop,” objected Pat. He tried to stand, then went ghosty and sank to the ground.

Luke spoke only to her. “Shoot me in my brain before I shoot you.”

Severa took the gun from him. Holding it made her hand so much bigger. She was so much bigger. Even raising the gun to her temple didn't shrink her. Even the barrel against her weak pulse.

“Not you!” Luke insisted. “Me!”

She'd always imagined a real peace would come just before kicking. Now she waited for it, toying with the trigger, but not firing. She waited for something, but nothing appeared. It surprised her. Was dying as black and white as anything? Until the very instant it happened, did you stay right here?

“Who's that?” Pat said suddenly, before falling into a full faint. Luke let loose with a sob and hunched over his brother in the sand.

Severa turned to see Somvay approaching on bare feet. Silver tape flapped at his ankles. His coat hung wrinkled and loose. The lipstick on his chin from when she'd kissed him now—of course—looked like blood. Still, he seemed calmer. She felt awful.

“I probably shouldn't have done all this,” she said, lowering the cold gun.

Somvay's cheeks glowed. Did the moon make him look like that?

“Will you again?” he asked.

“No,” she said. But then thought: How true is that? So she said, “At least not exactly in the same way.”

Somvay nodded and reached for the gun. Wary, she swung it behind her.

“Are you still drunk?”

His arm was steady. “Please.”

“Nononono,” Luke crooned. Severa checked him from the corner of her eye. Pat was flat out, maybe asleep, maybe something deeper. Luke brushed a stripe of sand stuck to his brother's head. His kissed his brother's nose. Then he stopped and glared at her.

“You better shoot me fast,” he said. “You better.”

“Don't listen,” she said, turning back to Somvay. “Talk to me. Tell me more about Laos.”

“Please,” he said, palm out. “I do not want to be here.”

The gun stayed in the small of her back. “Are you a monk anymore?”

Behind her, she could hear Luke lurch to standing. “Who's a monk?”

“He is,” Severa said, trying to change the air's flavor. “A monk,” she repeated, like just speaking it could chill the scene.

“Not now,” said Somvay.

Luke pushed past her and bellied up to Somvay. “If you're a monk, do something,” he demanded. “Wake him up. Bring him back.”

Somvay's voice was low and even. “You cannot return to a place unless you first leave it. First go away, then come back and learn more.”

Luke stepped off, sort of shocked, like he'd just seen sun after a whole week of moon. “You're telling me,” he began, “you're saying everybody's got to die before things get better?”

“The fuck he is,” said Severa. “What kind of monk says that?”

Somvay sighed. “I am no monk,” he said. “I am no more than a lonely man.”

A wet, horrible sound interrupted them. They all looked at flat Pat. Pink bubbles gushed past his teeth to his chin.

“Guy?” Luke was pleading with Somvay now. “You got anything? Any power prayer words you can say?”

But Somvay was saving his last word. He relaxed his shoulders and let his head fall. Severa felt her arm jerk wildly in its socket, spinning her around as Luke stripped the gun from her. He pointed the gun at his face. Then he took dead aim at her.

“You got warned,” Luke said, shaky. “Didn't you?”

Beside her, Somvay dropped to his knees. Severa shut her eyes and waited for the world to break. Just one more second and it breaks.

Run,
Somvay whispered.

So she ran. Through mud and pale-barked trees. Then she heard three shots, each ringing the same truth to her:
It's not me. It's not me. It's not me.

M
Y ROOM, 616, IS ALWAYS WAITING FOR ME WHEN
I get back, unless it is the dead of winter, rotavirus season, when the floor is crowded with gray-faced toddlers rocketing down the halls on fantails of liquid shit. They are only transiently ill, and not distinguished. You earn something in a lifetime of hospitalizations that the rotavirus babies, the RSV wheezers, the accidental ingestions, the rare tonsillectomy, that these sub-sub-sickees could never touch or have. The least of it is the sign that the nurses have hung on my door, silver glitter on yellow poster board:
Chez Cindy.

My father settles me in before he leaves. He likes to turn down the bed, to tear off the paper strap from across the toilet, and to unpack my clothes and put them in the little dresser. “You only brought halter tops and hot pants,” he tells me.

“And pajamas,” I say. “Halter tops make for good access. To my veins.” He says he'll bring me a robe when he comes back, though he'll likely not be back. If you are the sort of child who only comes into the hospital once every ten years, then the whole world comes to visit, and your room is filled with flowers and chocolates and aluminum balloons. After the tenth or fifteenth admission the people and the flowers stop coming. Now I get flowers only if I'm septic, but my Uncle Ned makes a donation to the Short Gut Foundation of America every time I come in.

“Sorry I can't stay for the H and P,” my father says. He would usually stay to answer all the questions the intern du jour will ask, but during this admission we are moving. The new house is only two miles from the old house, but it is bigger, and has views. I don't care much for views. This side of the hospital looks out over the park and beyond that to the Golden Gate. On the nights my father stays he'll sit for an hour watching the bridge lights blinking while I watch television. Now he opens the curtains and puts his face to the glass, taking a single deep look before turning away, kissing me goodbye, and walking out.

After he's gone, I change into a lime green top and bright white pants, then head down the hall. I like to peep into the other rooms as I walk. Most of the doors are open, but I see no one I know. There are some orthopedic-looking kids in traction; a couple wheezers smoking their albuterol bongs; a tall thin blonde girl sitting up very straight in bed and reading one of those fucking Narnia books. She has CF written all over her. She notices me looking and says hello. I walk on, past two big-headed syndromes and a nasty rash. Then I'm at the nurse's station, and the welcoming cry goes up, “Cindy! Cindy! Cindy!” Welcome back, they say, and where have you
been,
and Nancy, who always took care of me when I was little, makes a booby-squeezing motion at me and says, “My little baby is becoming a woman!”

“Hi everybody,” I say.

I
AM A FORMER
twenty-six-week miracle preemie. These days you have to be a twenty-four-weeker to be a miracle preemie, but when I was born you were still pretty much dead if you emerged at twenty-six weeks. I did well except for a belly infection that took about a foot of my gut—nothing a big person would miss but it was a lot to one-kilo me. So I've got difficult bowels. I don't absorb well, and get this hideous pain, and barf like mad, and need tube feeds, and beyond that sometimes have to go on the sauce, TPN—total parenteral nutrition, where they skip my wimpy little gut and feed me through my veins. And I've never gotten a pony despite asking for one every birthday for the last eight years.

I am waiting for my PICC—you must have central access to go back on the sauce—when a Child Life person comes rapping at my door. You can always tell when it's them because they knock so politely, and because they call out so politely, “May I come in?” I am watching the meditation channel (twenty-four hours a day of string ensembles and trippy footage of waving flowers or shaking leaves, except late, late at night, when between two and three a.m. they show a bright field of stars and play a howling theremin) when she simpers into the room. Her name is Margaret. When I was much younger I thought the Child Life people were great because they brought me toys and took me to the playroom to sniff Play-Doh, but time has sapped their glamour and their fun. Now they are mostly annoying, but I am never cruel to them, because I know that being mean to a Child Life specialist is like kicking a puppy.

“We are collaborating with the children,” she says, “in a collaboration of color, and shapes, and words! A collaboration of poetry and prose!” I want to say, people like you wear me out, honey. If you don't go away soon I know my heart will stop beating from weariness, but I let her go on. When she asks if I will make a submission to their hospital literary magazine I say, “Sure!” I won't, though. I am working on my own project, a child's book of sickness and death, and cannot spare thoughts or words for Margaret.

Ava, the IV nurse, comes while Margaret is paraphrasing a submission—the story of a talking IV pump written by a seven-year-old with only half a brain—and bringing herself nearly to tears at the recollection of it.

“And if he can do that with half a brain,” I say, “imagine what I could do with my whole one!”

“Sweetie, you can do anything you want,” she says, so kind and so encouraging. She offers to stay while I get my PICC but it would be more comforting to have my three-hundred-pound Aunt Mary sit on my face during the procedure than to have this lady at my side, so I say no thank you, and she finally leaves. “I will return for your submission,” she says. It sounds much darker than she means it.

The PICC is the smoothest sailing. I get my morphine and a little Versed, and I float through the fields of the meditation channel while Ava threads the catheter into the crook of my arm. I am in the flowers but also riding the tip of the catheter, à la
Fantastic Voyage,
as it sneaks up into my heart. I don't like views, but I like looking down through the cataract of blood into the first chamber. The great valve opens. I fall through and land in daisies.

I am still happy-groggy from Ava's sedatives when I think I hear the cat, moaning and suffering, calling out my name. But it's the intern calling me. I wake in a darkening room with a tickle in my arm and look at Ava's handiwork before I look at him. A slim PICC disappears into me just below the antecubital fossa, and my whole lower arm is wrapped in a white mesh glove that looks almost like lace, and would have been cool back in 1983, when I was negative two.

“Sorry to wake you,” he says. “Do you have a moment to talk?” He is a tired-looking fellow. At first I think he must be fifty, but when he steps closer to the bed I can see he's just an ill-preserved younger man. He is thin, with strange hair that is not so much wild as just wrong somehow, beady eyes and big ears, and a little beard, the sort you scrawl on a face, along with devil horns, for purposes of denigration.

“Well, I'm late for cotillion,” I say. He blinks at me and rubs his throat.

“I'm Dr. Chandra,” he says. I peer at his name tag: Sirius Chandra, MD.

“You don't look like a Chandra,” I say, because he is as white as me.

“I'm adopted,” he says simply.

“Me too,” I say, lying. I sit up and pat the bed next to me, but he leans against the wall and takes out a notepad and pen from his pocket. He proceeds to flip the pen in the air with one hand, launching it off the tips of his fingers and catching it again with finger and thumb, but he never writes down a single thing that I say.

“W
HAT DO YOU KNOW
about Dr. Chandra?” I ask Nancy, who is curling my hair at the nursing station. She has tremendous sausage curls and a variety of distinctive eyewear that she doesn't really need. I am wearing her rhinestone-encrusted granny glasses and can see Ella Thims, another short-gut girl, in all her glorious, gruesome detail where she sits in her little red wagon by the clerk's desk. Ella had some trouble finishing up her nether parts, and so was born without an anus, or vagina, or a colon, or most of her small intestine, and her kidneys are shaped like spirals. She is only two, but she is on the sauce, also. I've known her all her life.

“He hasn't rotated here much. He's pretty quiet. And pretty nice. I've never had a problem with him.”

“Have you ever thought someone was interesting? Someone you barely knew, just interesting, in a way?”

“Do you like him? You like him, don't you?”

“Just interesting. Like a homeless person with really great shoes. Or a dog without a collar appearing in the middle of a graveyard.”

“Sweetie, you're not his type. I know that much about him.” She puts her hand out, flexing it swiftly at the wrist. I look blankly at her, so she does it again, and sort of sashays in place for a moment.

“Oh.”

“Welcome to San Francisco.” She sighs. “Anyway, you can do better than that. He's funny-looking, and he needs to pull his pants up. Somebody should tell him that. His mother should tell him that.”

“Write this down under ‘chief complaint,'” I had told him. “I am
sick
of love.” He'd flipped his pen and looked at the floor. When we came to the social history I said my birth mother was a nun who committed indiscretions with the parish deaf-mute. And I told him about my book—the cat and the bunny and the peacock and the pony, each delightful creature afflicted with a uniquely horrible disease.

“Do you think anyone would buy that?” he asked.

“There's a book that's just about shit,” I said. “Why not one that's just about sickness and death? Everybody poops. Everybody suffers. Everybody dies.” I even read the pony page for him, and showed him the picture.

“It sounds a little scary,” he said, after a long moment of pen-tossing and silence. “And you've drawn the intestines on the outside of the body.”

“Clowns are scary,” I told him. “And everybody loves them. And hoof dismay isn't pretty. I'm just telling it how it is.”

“There,” Nancy says, “you are
curled
!” She says it like, you are
healed.
Ella Thims has a mirror on her playset. I look at my hair and press the big purple button under the mirror. The playset honks, and Ella claps her hands. “Good luck,” Nancy adds, as I scoot off on my IV pole, because I've got a date tonight.

One of the bad things about not absorbing very well and being chronically malnourished your whole life long is that you turn out to be four and a half feet tall when your father is six-four, your mother is five-ten, and your sister is six feet even. But one of the good things about being four and a half feet tall is that you are light enough to ride your own IV pole, and this is a blessing when you are chained to the sauce.

When I was five I could only ride in a straight line, and only at the pokiest speeds. Over the years I mastered the trick of steering with my feet, of turning and stopping, of moderating my speed by dragging a foot, and of spinning in tight spirals or wide loops. I take only short trips during the day, but at night I cruise as far as the research building that's attached to, but not part of, the hospital. At three a.m. even the eggiest heads are at home asleep, and I can fly down the long halls with no one to see me or stop me except the occasional security guard, always too fat or too slow to catch me, even if they understand what I am.

My date is with a CFer named Wayne. He is the best-fed CF kid I have ever laid eyes on. Usually they are blond, and thin, and pale, and look like they might cough blood on you as soon as smile at you. Wayne is tan, with dark brown hair and blue eyes, and big, with a high wide chest, and arms I could not wrap my two hands around. He is pretty hairy for sixteen: I caught a glimpse of his big hairy belly as I scooted past his room. On my fourth pass (I slowed each time and looked back over my shoulder at him) he called me in. We played a karate video game. I kicked his ass, then I showed him the meditation channel.