To Feel Stuff (5 page)

“Why would you think that you suddenly have the ability to see ghosts?” I asked her, looking out the window so that she couldn't see the fraud in my eyes.

“Because I was supposed to all along,” E sighed, then finally told me the family history that I had never thought to uncover.

Paxil CR: Get back to being you

 

The day after I heard you, the door to the infirmary opened at the crack of dawn. I saw two men. They were pushing what looked like a casket on wheels into my room.

When I tried to lift my head to see better, a sunbeam zapped me in the eye, so I went back down. The men shifted, scraped against the wooden frame of the threshold, grunted incoherent things. I was too groggy to ascertain the current situation, so I gave the left side of my face a small slap. The unfortunate thing was that I had forgotten about my bruise from the night before. White pain shot through my head. I jerked toward the window. Then white light went into my eyes, and it felt like a corneal stabbing. After that, my whole body recoiled and I snapped into the fetal position, trying not to think about how much that pose sucked for my lungs. They seemed the size and consistency of prunes. Throughout all this I said nothing to the men or to you, but I remember thinking, “Oh, fuck me” to the pain.

I heard wheels roll across the floor and Voice One say, “Let's get him parallel to the bed, and then I'll get his torso and you get his legs. Back up a little, the stretcher's going to catch on—” I heard the sound of metal scraping against metal. “Mike, we need to make the turn wider, so back it up a little.”

“All I have to say is, who knows what else can go wrong? I'll tell you now that it wouldn't surprise me if something did; that's not me being pessimistic, and I'm prepared for, for . . . everything bad,” said Voice Two. You.

“Do you want me to go around? I can come around on the other side and put my arms out like a second barrier.”

I knew that was Sarah, but didn't know where she'd come from.

“You could do that, why not?” added Voice Three.

“So, where do you guys hang out after your shift, anyway?” Sarah asked.

“Well, we either go home and sleep or we go to Dunkin' Donuts.”

“Oh, the one on Thayer?”

“Sometimes, I guess. There's three hundred billion of them. We just pick one.”

“Well, I'm really hungry this morning. Are you guys hungry? Do you want to go get doughnuts? Doughnut holes?”

My external pain was draining, so I uncurled myself and rolled to face the bed where the sound came from. It was in the shadow of the opposite wall.

That's when I saw you for the first time—in profile, from the left. My first thought about your face was that your eyes were set so deep that they made your nose look like a rebel for sailing out like that. Next I noticed the dimple in the middle of your chin, which is definitely a dimple and not a cleft. I thought you looked like you'd been shot with a BB gun there. The night of beating and snow had left long pieces of your hair plastered across your forehead. And before I even noticed the braces around your knees, I knew you were unfamiliar with the world of the sick. I had this quick flash where I pictured myself initiating you, sticking twenty rectal thermometers in at once.

That was as far as I got with the fantasy because suddenly, you turned your head and noticed me back.

From The Desk of Chester Hunter III

 

Shit, El, the first time we met you gave me the kind of stare that I imagine biologists use when looking into a microscope at a fresh strain of flu. You seemed vaguely interested but in no way concerned for my health, and definitely, definitely in no way threatened.

You were studying me, and that made me feel bold enough to study you back. You didn't look too unhealthy apart from the shiner on your temple, but I guess I knew that something must be seriously wrong with you because you were staring at me like I'd walked into your backyard and started building a mansion.

Or, I guess that doesn't even cut it, doesn't even begin to describe how instantly nervous I was in your presence. This is closer, though: it was like you were an old-timer, a regular who drank Guinness, and I was this guy who'd walked into your bar like a doof and asked for a Sex on the Beach with a tropical umbrella. The ambulance worker (Mike?) and Sarah walked away, and then suddenly we were the only ones left in the room.

God, I had no idea what I could even say to you, and I remember how unbelievably uncomfortable that silence was because I was racing through my mental log of thoughts, trying to find something acceptable. You, of course, just stared at me, because you're brave like that. When you continued to stare for about thirty seconds straight, I realized that I was going to have to initiate conversation. And then I had to take a moment to mourn the automatic nature of my old existence again, the way I was before the attack. I used to thoughtlessly walk into a party and have something to say to everyone, but now that I think back on it, maybe I just had something to tell everyone about me. The first time I looked at you, I couldn't even begin to guess what you'd want to know.

So even though I was on all those painkillers, I remember saying something very retarded. I said, “I learned tonight, and I don't mean to make this sound too emotional, but I learned that we're never really alone.” It took my brain so much effort to release that thought that it still haunts me.

You swung your feet over the side of your bed and leaned forward. “That's not true,” you said. “I was alone until about five minutes ago.”

Holy shit, I was taken aback by that. I tried to turn onto my side so I could read the expression on your face, to see if you were playing. I couldn't turn, though, because I hadn't learned how to maneuver my legs. “Is that a swipe at me?”

“No, not a swipe. Before you got here I was lying in this room alone. Now I am not alone because you are over there, in one of the other beds. I was making an objective assessment of the situation.” You said these things simply and purely, whereas with anyone else, they would have been delivered with sarcasm and bite. Your eyes didn't twinkle, and your mouth didn't curve itself into flirtatious shapes.

Then you asked me, “Were you here last night—in the infirmary?” and I sank even lower, thinking that over the course of one night, I had become so unremarkable that you couldn't tell me apart from another random patient. I told you, “No. I just got here now,” and wanted to know who you were confusing me with, and you just told me it was a “long story.” I left that alone, but I still think about it now. I always had the sense that there were a lot of “long stories” I never heard.

There was another silence then, and I borrowed some of your comfort with it to take the time to evaluate you. You were so miniature perched on the edge of your bed. Your arms were all bone—I hope you realize that's not an insult—but your face was complete transparency. I thought I could see everything inside of you, everything essential you were made up of, on your face. And then my world, which felt like such a jumble, met with yours, which seemed so clear, and I thought, “If you were mine, I would have a living compass.”

“So anyway. Anyway,” I said.

You smiled. “Are we moving onto a new topic?”

“We can.” I squinted and pointed across the room like—okay, to extend that bar analogy, which seems particularly apt to me—I was that drunk trying to name an actor in a late-night movie while sitting below your small, fuzzy bar TV. I remember asking at some point, “Hey, am I talking coherently? Because I'm on a lot of painkillers, and I can't tell. And I think you might have an unusual accent except I can't tell that either.”

“I can understand you perfectly, but I don't have an accent. That might be the drugs affecting you,” you suggested.

“Is it?”

“I would have to literally be inside your body to answer that.”

That comment killed me, too. “That's really true, you know.”

“Do you mind if I ask what happened?”

“Well, this might be hard to believe,” I said, “but a man ran out of a car and swung at my knees with a crowbar last night while I was singing Baltimora's ‘Tarzan Boy.'”

“Oh, that was you.”

“You heard about it?”

“No, I heard the sound of your bones cracking.”

You got up from the bed and opened one of the windows as far as it would go. You did this slowly, like a bodybuilder lifting a two-hundred-pound dumbbell. I understood the intense concentration going into the act, and I wanted to go over and put my hands over yours, come up from under you and support the entire weight of your body. Make a ladle of myself and lift the window for you, be a gentleman for once in my life. The day was so sharp and crystalline, or at least it was in my mind.

“You were only struck in the knees?” you asked.

I made woozy brackets of my thumbs and forefingers in front of my face (I was so, so drugged) and peered through the hole like I was watching it happen all over again. “I tried to stop him myself, tried to grab his arms, but he was like an eel. He rushed at me like he was determined. No. Motivated. And time after time I keep coming back to the conclusion that he was after me for a reason, except what could his motive possibly be?”

“Why wouldn't he have struck you in the head?” you asked.

“My head?”

“To punish you for your a capella singing.”

“Why would someone purposely want to punish an a capella singer?”

“Oh-ay-oh-ay-oh,” you replied quietly, running through the syllables so fast that I thought you said something else. That's why I said, “Yeah, I don't know either.”

And you clarified, “Actually, I said, ‘Oh-ay-oh-ay-oh.'”

Then you walked back to your bed, moving in slo-mo, and got down on your knees. I watched the curve of your back while you pulled out a brown canvas suitcase and flipped open the top. In your sea of underwear and bras was your vast collection of cable-knit sweaters, and I can still see you pulling out the pink one and a pair of 501s. You took a long pause before you got back up, like you had to wait for the blood to return to your head. From the floor you asked me, “What's the outlook? Did he get your patellas and popliteals?”

“Did he get my what—what?”

“Sorry. I'm asking if your attacker shattered your knee bones and the arteries that run behind your joints.”

“Oh. I guess, if I correctly understand what the doctor said, that I have multiple small fractures, but—”

The door to the infirmary reopened, and I met Vivian for the first time. I thought the drugs were really having a field day with me when she peeked in and a parrot squawked, “Nobody's available right now.” I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, thinking I was having aural hallucinations. And then I started thinking I was having visual hallucinations, too, because Vivian's eyes looked so abnormal to me. You know how they're so big and far apart that they look like they're about to slide off her face? Except once I sobered up, I realized that's just how they are. And she really did have a parrot on her shoulder. And it was just that kind of day, an eye-opening day all around.

You held up your hand and opened and closed your fingers with the speed of an arthritic. “Good morning, Vivian.”

“What are you doing up? I was just going to check on how you were sleeping.”

“I was talking to—”

You looked at me expectantly.

“Chess,” I said, pulling out the last
s
for a long, long while, because it was like I was hearing my name for the first time.

“Chess,” you repeated. “He's new.”

Vivian and her bird came into the room, Vivian's eyes flicking up and down my legs like laser scanners. Or maybe that memory is a created one. It's nerve-wracking because I'm starting to doubt myself as I write, wondering if I'm getting the truth down or if I'm making it even more distorted. But I guess that's the point of this.

Vivian said, “Hi Chess, nice to meet you. Hey, looks like you might be needing surgery. I hope you're not at Brown on an athletic scholarship.”

I was very, very taken aback by her pessimism. “But the doctor at the hospital said he'd have to wait and see before making any decisions and wait and see and wait and see?”

Making an “OK” sign, Vivian said, “And doctors never tell you anything just to keep your spirits up.”

“What? What? Let's wait and see,” I remember insisting.

C.C. McGaw started to talk over us: “I am a pretty bird . . . Pretty ugly!”

“Why's your bird here?” you asked, and I was relieved that you also thought it was weird.

“There's a huge fire a few doors down from me. I figured if my house goes up in flames, then C.C.'s going to be toast. You should see what's going on in the sky. It's pitch black over my house, except I can see the tips of these bright flames in the air, looks like hell, and . . .” Vivian's voice climbed higher and higher.

At this point my mind began swirling uncontrollably with drugs, so that I couldn't place the point in time where I existed. I was momentarily sure that Vivian was talking about a fire happening right there, right in the room, because as the sun rose higher and higher in the adjacent windows, the glass blurred with the orange it let through. My knees were hot, on fire too, and unfortunately I'd forgotten to do my laundry that week, so I was wearing an old pair of tighty whiteys. I specifically remember my dick sweltering, and I remember that my pubic hair felt like an electric blanket on at full blast. I was forgetting what came before that moment and had no idea what I was supposed to do to prepare for the next one, and time just felt like one gigantic emergency.

“The wind's been blowing ash on my porch. It looks like I'm living next to a crematorium,” Vivian said.