White Noise

[Eh.  A rough draft (not even proofread!), needs work, and sister story to Twenty-Four.  There’s an advertisement to American Players Theatre–I’ve been there many times, and it’s lovely–that keeps dropping down and annoying the shit out of me.  I’d consider going OD-plus, if things like what happened early this morning, wherein the site stopped communicating and I lost about three hundred words, stopped happening.]

[This is largely truthful in nature, the main narrative describing (exaggerating, elaborating, extrapolating, exacerbating the exasperating) a stay in the hospital.  In real life, I was admitted for multiple ulcers, perhaps as many as ten, bleeding simultaneously in my stomach, for which I was made to stay five days and administered eight units of blood.  I attempted to describe my demeanor from that experience.  In real life, a dynamic by which few of you know me, I am often quite silly, and often fluctuate unpredictably between the serious and humorous.  I like to sing stupid songs while I do stupid things–I have a classic about slicing mozzarella cheese at work–and my intelligence correlates inversely to my proximity to a house cat.  To summarize, very rarely am I an embodiment of my writing; while I obviously contain within me that which creates and that which is created, it is not me in its entirety.]

[I have been gone awhile (by recent standards), and as such, have much reading to do.  Hope all is well.]

[Mitchy.]

Light is loud, and it crashes down on you like a deluge of water until you are soaked through to bleached bones.  When I was a child, I watched a video feed from a space station, and the sunlight smashed across the surface of the earth like a tidal wave.  As if some invisible and monstrous hand, more energy then substance, more molecular cloud than popping, crackling star, had tipped over a wonderfully large bucket brimming with light and life, and then it spilled evenly across the dizzy planet.  The whole scene thundered with light.

The hospital bed smelled too clean, and the thin, dimmed fluorescent lights were too quiet.  An "Extenze" infomercial looped endlessly on the television, and I was quickly tiring of the same schmucks and their concomitant pretty girlfriends describing their genitalia.  I’d awoken feeling sick, and now fruitlessly searched for the Gatorade my friend has thoughtfully brought me the night before.  I couldn’t get up to look, if only because I didn’t want to page the nurse, and I sure as shit didn’t want to handle the IV so I could stand–all the tubes and the seeming seriousness of it all intimidated me.  The catheter in my arm really creeped me out, too, so I avoided looking at it.  With practice and self-control, mind you, the visible can become invisible–until it kills you, of course.

If life was a rabid dog, he was its chew toy, with infected teeth marks inside each elbow.  "Please," he begged me.  He sat in a makeshift lawn–patchwork grass and thriving dandelions, underground bees’ nests and wood violets–knelling the death rattle of a pair of threadbare Marc Jacobs jeans.  He was gaunt and pallid and disgusting.  "Please," he repeated, "I’m fucking starving.  I’ll do right by it this time.  I swear."  I kept my silence close.  He left with a "fuck you," and I knew he meant it.  He didn’t realize, however, that we’re both fucked.  We’re all fucked, the only variance being in who fucks us and how hard.  He’d fucked himself.  And life isn’t a rabid dog.  It’s a puppy who hasn’t been trained, an infant who can’t tell right from wrong, a toddler you lead by the hand and love regardless.

Dammit, do I feel sick.  Where the hell is that nurse pager thingy?  Get some anti-nausea jazz up in these veins of mine.  I rolled back and forth in my bed, being careful not to disturb the free flow of saline solution.  It’s amazing, really, how a hospital can give you four units of A-positive, but you’re comfortable so you don’t give a shit.  But then you feel nauseous, just a little pukey-might-happen-but-also-might-not, and then you caterwaul for the nurse to come running.  Seriously.  Where is it?  This is getting bad.

"Hey, buddy, you awake?" I asked the man in the bed behind the curtain next to me.  I knew he wasn’t, so I decided to keep asking the question louder and louder until I received any sort of answer.  "What, dude?" came the groggy response, and I could hear the shifting of his sturdy frame on his foam mattress.  Five skinny fingers appear on the hospital-light blue curtain, and it shifted a few inches.  I could see his face, now, and it evinced irritation.  "Yeah, sorry, man.  Just feelin’ super sick and I can’t find my pager.  Could you page the nurse?"

"Fuck, bro.  Can’t it wait?  It’s four o’clock in the AM.  I don’t want that shit keeping me up."  By the end of his sentence, I was crouched over the side of the hospital bed and puking, a deep red and viscous vomitus that was both sweet and ferric.  "Shit, man," and he was definitely alarmed.  I looked up, and I could feel the puke running down my nose and dripping from my chin.  "See?  I’m sick.  Be a dear and page the nurse."

To her, love was a stray cat.  The closer she’d wander, the faster it would bolt.  They’d keep each other in sight, but never could she catch it. 
She stood in the doorway.  She was crying; although she had tried hard not to start, she now resolved to do it as discreetly as possible.  "Why don’t you love me?" and I could tell she was mad at how pathetic that sounded, because her face hardened like fired clay and, before storming out the door, snapped, "Fuck you!"  Which is silly, because as we already know, we’re all already fucked.  And to me, love isn’t a stray cat.  I am a stray cat, and love is a human, a wonderful, healthy, good-hearted woman, and each time she wanders close, I bolt.  I keep it close enough to see, to admire and describe, but never can it catch me.

My head throbbed, unable to contain all its emptiness.  I was tired. The man quickly snagged the plastic rectangle of controls off a hanger behind his bed (probably where mine belonged–just a guess), and a decidedly sleepy and definitely indifferent voice–the hospital admitted us for observation, but considered us low risk–disembodied and hanging in the room, spoke.  "Yes?"  For some reason I couldn’t finger, I was giddy.  "Are you a robot?" I questioned, my eyes wide in awe.

"Seriously, go to bed," she responded, but before she could get off the line, my ailing neighbor shouted, "He just puked blood, ma’am.  A lot of it."

I frowned at him.  "Really.  Ratting me out?  What are we?  Seven years-old?"  I returned my attention to the voice.  "Ignore him, ma’am. It was grape Gatorade.  I had grape Gatorade earlier, and just decided I no longer wanted it–I’m a Cool-Blue kinda guy.  Let’s get some sleep, break on through to the other side, and die of hypovolemia in the middle of a saccharine dream.  Do robots have heaven?  Is Johnny 5 there?"  I thought for a moment.  "Wait, no, Five’s alive.  Sorry, it’s been awhile."  The room blurred and the busy lights buzzed, screamed, and burst like an uncontrolled demolition.  The man next to me was staring concernedly–I could tell from his face, but the rest of him faded into the dark details.  I smiled, saying towards him softly, "Hi, face." 

"Dude, man, you’re fucked up."  I laughed, pitched like a dog whistle.  A woman came running into the room, her eyes wide and her hair frazzled.

"Just lay back," she told me.  "A doctor’s on the way.  What’ number level is your pain at?"

"Hey, I know you.  I’m glad your voice found itself a human body.  A voice can get you into trouble, and a body can, too.  You’re ripe for all sorts of cucumbers."

"Lay back, please."  She reiterated before pausing.  "Cucumbers?  You mean I’m ripe for all sorts of pickles?"

"A pickle is a cucumber with vinegar, and you’re sweeter than that."  My smile was vacant and infantile.  "Aren’t I charming?"

Mercifully, she chose not to answer.  "What is your pain at?"

Pain is relative, a subjective measure by which our bodies interpret a stimulus and our minds interpret our bodies.  It is an inherent apparatus of classical conditioning that Pavlov couldn’t have designed better.  The worst pain I’ve ever experienced was a kidney stone, and that was excruciating.  They never diagnosed his pain.  The toxicologist blamed the Dilaudid and heroin, but I blamed it on an inability to afford a doctor’s visit and a legitimate prescription.  He’d given his pain to us, now, scribbled it in a ledger, and multiplied it down the line.   

I laid back.  "Yes," I insouciantly informed her, and then promptly vomited more blood down my chest..  The nurse froze, hands on my IV bag, shocked and dismayed.  My blood-slicked hands turned palms up as I shrugged patronizingly.  "Do something…maybe?"  She sprinted from the room shouting, "Code blue!  Code blue!"  My head felt light and my eyes heavy.  The taste of blood wrapped my tongue like a warm blanket.  "Isn’t a Code Blue for cardiac arrests?" I asked the voice, but the voice had left.

My fingers slipped on the bloody keys of my phone as I texted a friend.  Bad news.  I’m a goner.  The robot voice floated to a new home.  All my love.  Go Packers.  There was blood all over my hospital gown, transforming flimsy white cotton into a wet red rag.  Two doctors and two nurses marched into the room.  A nurse strapped a bantam plastic oxygen mask onto my face.  A hushed conversation behind the curtain and a second IV in my other arm.

I strained to hear.

"Do we want to call him now?"

"Yeah, sounds best.  Get him in, get it done.  I don’t want this kid bleeding to death.  I’ve got a family reunion tomorrow, and if he bites it it’s on me."  Bite what?

If death was a lion tamer, he was held at chair length in the center ring.  They circled back and forth, the crack of the whip echoing the snap of his steely jaws.  He glared down at me, brows drawn over his eyes, forearms slicked in sweat and shining in the ruckus bar light.  My nose was broken, I was sure, and the blood ran freely through my mustache and beard.  "Fuck you," he growled, his nonexistent tufted tail thumping against the overturned bar stools.  I was tiring of that phrase.  Yeah, I know it already.  And death isn’t a lion, it’s a mute staring at you across a train station terminal–you’re sure that he’s telling you something, but you’re listening too hard to hear it.

"Alright, I’ll get ‘im on the line and tell him."

Hold it.  They’re standing behind a curtain, right where a hospital bed used to be.  What happened to my neighbor.  "Hold it. What happened to my neighbor?" I complained.  "Not really a talker, a foul mouth, and he liked his sleep, but I was just starting to get to know him."

A nurse studied my face, obviously trying to decide if I was delirious or gently mocking.  I’ve never not been either.  "I’ve never not been either."  She frowned in confusion.  "Never not been either what?"  I arched my back in discomfort, and felt the length of it crack and shift like a bridge across a fault line–I was trying to get my earthquake insides, rumbling and roaring, to take a minute off and relax.  "Never not been either what?" she repeated before snapping gloved fingers near my face, trying to get me to concentrate on her.

I stilled myself on the bed.  What the hell was she talking about?  She shook her head before putting a syringe in the back of the new catheter in the back of my left wrist.  "What is that?  Truth serum?"  I gasped.  "What if the world disappears?" 

"No," she said.  "It’s Zofron–an antiemetic."

"Ah, the anti-puke."

"Yes, the anti-puke."

They gave me two more units of blood, bringing the tally to six. A different nurse, obviously sleepy-headed and a little disheveled, walked into the room.  Her scrubs featured a calico cat battering a ball of yarn about.  As she arrived at the side of my bed, I grinned at her.  "Mrow."

"Mrow?" she queried.  "You mean ‘meow’?"

"Have you ever heard a cat, ma’am?  They obviously say ‘mrow.’  As someone sporting cat scrubs, I’d expect you to know that."

"You’re a smart ass," she said, but the crinkle around her eyes robbed it of venom.

"I know."

She continued.  "We’ve called the surgeon in.  We’ll knock you out, do an endoscopy, see if we need to any more surgery, alright? "  I shrugged, sanguine indifference in a hospital gown.  "Once we figure out where you’re bleeding from, we can stop things like these from happening."  A sudden, irrepressible thought occurred to me, a wild flight of fancy–what if bleeding is my natural state?

I used to be an athlete, many years ago.  Tennis and football.  Footballwas a lark, and at times straight terrifying, both in its plot and its dramatis personae.  Tennis, though–I love tennis.  I lettered all four years of high school, but I was a practice player.  I knew what to do and how to do it, and could execute perfectly in the nonchalance of practice.  Matches were stressful.  I would tense up, and, as a result, lost the majority of them.  After my final defeat at sectionals my senior year, I swung my racket–a racket that had seen countless opponents, seemingly infinite swings in the quicksilver spring Wisconsin sun–like a baseball bat into the ground.  The graphite shattered with a shocking crash, and I knew at least a hundred people were watching me.  "Get it?" I asked my coach, who wilted beneath the hot discomfort.  "It’s a roman à clef!"  My cackled laughter crackled like madness made electric.

An officious woman in a beige pantsuit briskly swept into the room.  "Hi.  I work here at the hospital and need to ask you a few questions."  I sat up in my bed, instantly intrigued.  "Questions?  I am ready," I announced with aplomb.  "I insist that you begin.  En garde."  A clipboard clasping several yellow sheets rustled in her hands.  She glanced at me, and I nodded impatiently.  "Alright," she began.  "Do you have an executor to your estate?"

"No, I do not have an executor to my opulent, sprawling estate," I answered cheerfully.  "My sommelier will have to suffice."

"No, then.  Do you have a last will and testament?"

"Yes."

Our eyes met.  "Really?  Is there any record of it?"  I laid back into the sweaty, bloody, lukewarm confines of the bed to consider her question.  "Oh, I don’t know, ma’am.  Maybe somewhere."

Confusion.  "Maybe?  What do you mean?"

I chatted happily away.  "Well, my mother may still have it, but I can’t be sure.  When my parents moved, things got moved about and misplaced.  It’s no matter, though, because I remember it quite well. Verbatim, even.  Let’s see–‘I, Mitchy Olson, bequeath all my worldly belongings to Bosworth, my cat.  I was five years-old, then, but thankfully my mother provided the legalese.  Kind of a morbid activity for a…"

Her deafening sigh interrupted the skimble-skamble.  "No, then.  Would you talk to a priest?"

"What does he need to talk about?" Her head dropped as she shuffled her nearly empty papers back to equilibrium.  In an emotionless tone, she told the nurse, "Let the office know when he’s making sense again, please, or if a relative arrives."  As she left, I called out to her, panicked, "What if I’m dead by then?  What will I do with all these answers to your questions?"  But the doors swung shut behind her.

"Are you making fun of us?" the nurse demanded, a balled fist on her heavy hip.  But now I could barely hear her.  The night clouds had opened like a robe, and its most private parts–the blinking stars and staring moon–washed out language in a rush of white noise.  A jacket nocturne, covering the warbling birds and trilling crickets that weave in and out beneath it.  "No matter," she continued.  "It’s time for you to take a trip upstairs."

A few minutes elapsed, and then gurney wheels coasted over the linoleum.  The fluorescent tubes above me begin to merge and spread, until the entire ceiling glowed and pulsated, hissing and humming and murmuring and whispering.  I gave a low moan and plugged my ears.  The technician mouthed something at me, one hand on the gurney handle and the other holding the IV.  Removing my index fingers from my ears, I wiped sweat-soaked hair away from my eyes.  "What?"

"What’s wrong?" she asked, slowing the gurney to take a hard corner.  "The lights.  They’re…" I searched for the word.  "The lights are onomatapoeia.  They sound the way they look." She patted me on the shoulder, keeping her attention at the red diodes above the elevator changing their number.  "You’ll be alright," she assured me, discounting whatever I said as the mad children of a fever dream.  "I promise."  The capillaries in the whites of my eyes began to pop, and the corners leaked blood.  "Where’s the robot nurse?"   I calmly inquired, "because I want to be there when her faceplate falls off."  She did a double take–the first cursory and laden with perplexity, and the next worried.  "Oh my god.  Here," she said, placing cotton over my eyeballs and taping them in place.  The ceiling lights quieted.

A different pair of feet clacking on the tile floor fell into formation beside my gurney.  "I feel like I’m in a parade!" I announced, before launching a rendition of "It’s a Grand Ole Flag."  I heard whispers behind me.  "Maybe you should just sedate him now…"  What?  WHy?  Am I problematic?  Am I a wild child?  I"m doing little…

Sweetness is but one of five basic tastes.  Contrary to common belief, taste receptors for all five lie scattered across the entirety of the tongue.  I recall being young, on tiptoes at the kitchen counter, meticulously grounding Ceylon cinnamon sticks into powder.  Then, with the pointless care that only a child could display, I spread it evenly across a burnt slice of toast.  Not too much, mind you, out of respect for the bread.

The lights were blurry and the sounds were muffled, and I couldn’t make out the edges of either.  I was warm on the outside and cold on the inside, and I was damp.  No, I was wet.  I shifted my weight, and felt a strange tube or cord pull at my stomach.  Screaming medical machines were sounding the alarm, and I heard confused voices hovering, moving about, rising and falling like tides in their frustration.  The fogs of colors condensed into shapes, and I remembered with detachment where I was.  A female, presumably a doctor, shouted, " Four more units of A-positive!  Stat!."  Another male voice, presumably a nurse, responded.  "Doctor, he’s bleeding faster than we can transfuse, and his pulse is at one-ninety.  His heart is working overtime, like a bilge pump forcing blood out of his body. We’ve already given him nine units."

"Ah, that’s the problem, then!" I interjected, throwing my arms above my head in victory, and the blood on them splattered about the room and people standing above me.  They jumped, startled, having not expected me to wake.  "Nine is symptomatic of superlative change!  Ten means rebirth.  I think I probably need a tenth unit…stat?  Stat."  The doctor peered down at me, a peculiar combination of bemusement and irritation.  "Are you making fun of us?" she demanded.

"Yes.  No."  I took a deep breath.  "Actually, I’m not sure."  The words were silver light.  A nurse hung a tenth unit on the IV, and somehow–miraculously, really–the bleeding stopped.  The doctor laughed.  "You know what?" she said.  "Fuck you."

"No," I replied.  Fuck all of us." 

The matronly nurse toweled blood off of my midsection, clucking with empathy.  "I’m sorry, hun," she said.  "Life is hard, huh?" 

I nodded.  "Yeah, it is, but as time takes you away from it, as you segue from life into life, it’s bright and loud and impossibly sweet.  You just have to wipe off the blood."