Tuesday, March 30, 2004
back again.
edited.
a story that got me into school.
1 out of 6 and counting so far, but my motto for the world of grad school academia since january has been "fuck em" so...
....3 2 1 ficiton
Gabriel Houck
625 Riordan Terrace
Towson MD 21204
Short Story, Untitled
I.
So the weirdest secret about me is that when I jerk off I think about when I was 8 and my parents took our family to cape cod in November for Thanksgiving and I spent the afternoons chasing crabs along very cold beaches. I think about black sand caked to my chilly, pale feet, and maybe remember watching the dark ocean horizon at sundown that seemed to eat up the sea into some deep and terrible night. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to be really old - tucked away in my bed, surrounded by nurses and dusty pictures of happy faces - waiting anxiously to quit and find out what the fuss is all about. Sometimes I think about my next-door-neighbor girlfriend from back east when I was 5, or about the time when my brother drank a glass of bleach by accident and mom made him puke all over the laundry room floor. And sometimes I think about sex.
“Tell me your weirdest secret,” she says.
She is painted in orange hues by the streetlamps in the stadium parking lot; we are lying on the giant inflatable cushion of the high-jump pit, and I have her head nestled softly in my right arm. Her skin is rough from sunburn, her brown eyes are hard to see in the shadows, and her voice natural and pretty. Her breath smells.
“I wish I would have gotten into more fights with my brother growing up” I say, watching moths cloud around the lights overhead. I wonder why I’ve said this, but she doesn’t ask for an explanation.
“More fights. Okay then.” She smiles and shifts to unstick her bare legs from the plastic cushion, and I don’t respond.
“I’m surprised you came up with something so fast.”
I’m still thinking about what to say next, and an empty space crawls into our conversation, slipping past us with the distant howl of police sirens. I roll a little closer to her.
“I came up with it fast because it was something I was thinking about earlier and I guess you just caught me off guard.” I wait, but she doesn’t say anything right away. I decide to bring the conversation back to more comfortable territory.
“Forget it then,” I say, “I suppose you’ve got a good secret you’re waiting to tell me, so I’m not trying to compete.”
This works better.
“No fair,” She laughs. Her lips are centimeters from my left ear. “Compete with me.”
Compete with her.
“Well, I don’t think I’m really in love with my girlfriend,” I say, barely listening to myself as we push inexorably closer to each other. My eyes are closed and I am suddenly watching myself in the darkness on a series of flickering television screens. On the first one I am lying in the high-jump pit with this girl, alone in the stadium in the oppressive night air of late summer in Baltimore, selling myself heart and soul for her rough skin, her bad breath, and her heavy brown eyes. On the second television screen I am in a cold blue room piecing through love letters and screaming at pictures of my girlfriend from her cousin’s wedding. On the third I am standing at the base of the stadium lights, overexposed in orange and white, watching the moths’ rabid, endless orbit.
“That’s not a secret” she giggles – she is tickling me and limbs are touching now. Her hand has found its way into mine and I hold it like it belongs there. “You wouldn’t be here if you really loved her.”
“I wouldn’t be here if I were a decent person, either,” I say.
“Don’t say that,” she whispers – a hand is lightly brushing the hair on my forehead. “I’m here too, you know”
“It’s true…” I say, and I trail off again, wondering what about it is true. I find myself suddenly wishing that we could see the stars beyond the pollution of the city lights.
“I don’t think you’re a bad person” she says “I think you’re kind, and interesting, and honest -” She pauses to make sure I am looking at her now.
“…And confused, but that’s not a bad thing. Here, let me tell you my weirdest secret.”
Her lips are brushing the side of my face when she talks and I stop hearing her. I hold her hand tighter and she is kissing my ear. The pictures on the television sets in my head begin to wobble and fade until I can’t see them anymore, and we both sink into the depths of the mattress. Now there are no more secrets, no more brothers, girlfriends, stars, or moths. If this were happening in a movie, the camera then pulls away from us, swinging slowly across the darkened panorama to the pale streetlights above the stadium lot. Since it happens in my memory, we go back to her place and hang out with her roommate until she goes to bed and then fuck quietly on the couch with the lights off.
*
Sitting in the waiting room of an ER is a lot like sitting in an airport. I can’t sleep, I can’t sit still for very long, and I can’t bring myself to pay attention to the television, which is sealed in a smudged plastic casing in the corner and which appears to be permanently stuck on a talk show. Voices crackle back and forth over the PA system, and intermittent alarms that sound from somewhere in the hospital duel with the come-and-go of ambulance sirens as they pull into the driveway outside. It is all background noise however – soft static to the quiet, sniffling pall that holds the room in its chilly grip. For now, I burn away the minutes with eyes half open, staring at moving pictures of my memories that dance one by one across the drywall opposite my seat. As I come back to reality, I dimly realize that I can remember the girl in the stadium’s full name – middle and all.
Another alarm goes off deep within the building and it echoes harshly through the halls to the waiting room. There is very little conversation going on around me, and as for the rest of the shivering mass of people – I assume they are forced to follow the sordid tale of friendship-gone-bad that is unfolding at low volume in front of a live studio audience.
There is a flu scare going on in Baltimore, and every other human being packed into this waiting room besides me is wearing a flimsy cotton face mask that stains wet and discolors just beneath the nose. The walls of the waiting room are lined with strings of shiny green tinfoil garland, and a Christmas banner drawn in crayon by the children from the pediatric ward outlines the nurses’ station sign. Like every hospital, the lights are on too bright. The neon casts a fish-scale sheen across the dark hands and faces around me. My arms glisten in the chill, and shadowy, deep-green veins snake up and down my pale wrists as I stretch and look around. It is 6:30 PM on Tuesday, December 19th, and I have been waiting for about an hour.
*
Drew is the reason I am here, and he is talking to the paramedics who picked him up in the ambulance. They, along with a nurse and a police officer, have been sitting in the white room adjacent to the check-in desk since I showed up, and I have been left to my own devices for far too long. I phoned Anne at work when I arrived and told her what had happened. She did her thing where her voice drops two octaves to talk about something serious, but she didn’t cry or freak out, and she promised she’d go by our apartment first and feed the dog. I’ve left two messages since then on her cellular phone to check her progress, but she didn’t answer – probably because she never picks up when she’s driving. It’s a safe habit I suppose.
When Drew finally walks out of the room with all the nurses and paramedics, he looks amused. His pudgy cheeks are drawn up into a Buddha smile, though his eyes seem strangely dark beneath his thick brow. His curly hair is matted to his forehead, and he’s carrying his hat as he walks over to me.
“You don’t have to stay,” is the first thing he says to me, sitting down and fidgeting with his watch. His normally soft features now look pulled and rigid; his look has suddenly changed.
“Forget that,” I say, trying not to stare too much. “I don’t teach tonight so it’s not like I had much else to do anyway.” To this, he flicks a smile like a lizard tongue, and then his face snaps back to its taut position. I still can’t see his eyes, and after a moment I stop trying.
“They really need to change the channel,” he says, and I nod. I realize later that he’s not looking at the television, but instead he’s positioned himself with his chin in his hands, watching a group of kids with white masks poking the fish tank by walk-in entrance. A paramedic approaches me and asks to talk. It is now my turn to go into the little white room.
*
The last time I was in this ER was when I was in the band, and it was also because of Drew. He and I had drunk too much whiskey one night after a performance, and he’d broken my nose with his elbow during a scuffle. I remember the wave of embarrassment that came just after it happened, and I remember feeling dizzy and completely overwhelmed as I bled all over the place. I was the older guy and I was the bigger guy, but in front of a gathering group of students who were all warming up to the idea of a good fight, I had just had my nose split open. It was a humbling moment. Still, after a lot of yelling and a lot more bleeding, he and I went to this very same hospital, just a few short blocks from our house and I eventually got things sewn back into place.
I told my folks that I’d run into a shelf in the dark. I told my friends that I owed that kid a broken nose of his own, for the pain and the hassle I went through. I told myself that I forgave Drew for doing it, but secretly I felt that the next time we fought I would make him remember how much it had hurt. Now, all of a sudden, I understand that I am still angry about the whole thing, and as I step into the room with all the paramedics and the nurses, I am wondering what I am going to tell them – and what they want to know– about Drew.
II.
When I was seven we visited my grandmother for Christmas at her assisted-living home in Teaneck, New Jersey. I only ate five things when I was seven – bread, yogurt, cheese, pizza, and chicken. Everything else was too complicated, too exotic; the smells of the world at that age were so tangible and overpowering that I couldn’t stomach anything but the plainest of foods, and I remember distinctly the smell that began to creep through our rental car’s windows around exit 9 on the Jersey Turnpike.
When we got to the assisted-living home, I was the first one out of the car. The parking lot smelled chemical-sweet, and the wind that whipped through gray-green tree trunks along the walkways was acrid with exhaust from the highway. The lobby stank of carpet cleaner, and the dining room of Lysol. We ate dinner with my grandmother quickly, but I barely touched my plate – there was something in the grilled cheese sandwich that didn’t taste right, so I went hungry. Later that night we spent a few more excruciating hours sitting in her pristine living room, my parents talking quietly and I staring off into my own imagination. As it was about time to leave, my grandmother called me over. As I went to her, however, the smell was overwhelming. I remember seeing her, my mother, and my father all sitting on the couch, watching me as I shook my head and refused to come any closer. She smelled of an awful perfume, of body gas, halitosis, and underneath it all was some undefinable, sublime odor that crept into my lungs and seized my limbs and held them steadfast. They tried commanding me to come and give her a hug but they might as well have been trying to get me to jump out of an airplane. We left abruptly, and it was the last I saw of my grandmother. My mother went to the funeral the next fall, and I stayed home, went to school, and ate leftovers for a week with my dad.
“Tell us about your friend Drew,” the first paramedic asks. He has the neck of a football player, and a woolen cap pulled neatly down to his thick eyebrows. I can’t figure out why he is smiling when he talks to me, and why I am smiling back. I guess it’s nerves.
“I’m not sure what you want to know,” I reply, “I wasn’t with him tonight when all of this happened. His boss called me at home and told me an ambulance had picked him up because he’d been hurt.”
“When did you talk to him last?” Again, the football paramedic, though he is no longer smiling.
“Maybe three or four days ago – he did leave a message on my machine yesterday that sounded pretty odd. I assumed he was drunk because...” I trail off as I think all the pairs of eyes watching me, trying to put together an image of who Drew and I are. The nurses are both standing by a cabinet full of gauze and tubing; one of them has a clipboard and is writing something. The cop looks bored.
“Do you think he was drunk today?” asks the paramedic. “Maybe on any drugs?”
“No, he was at work today,” I say quickly. I can see where this is going now. “He doesn’t do any drugs.”
“Are you sure?”
“Very.”
“How long have you known him?”
“A long time – maybe six years or so.”
“And he doesn’t have a history or drug use? Hallucinogens, LSD, Cocaine…anything?”
I pause and think, although it’s mostly for show.
“He drinks… I mean, we drink. A lot sometimes. And when he was in school he did a lot of uppers to stay awake and finish his work. But that was all caffeine – Aderol, Ritalin, things like that.”
“Do you think he does any of that now?”
“I have no idea.” A long pause follows. “Look,” I say, “you know more than I do at this point. I just got a phone call out of the blue. I haven’t even talked to him yet, but if you let me that’s what I’d really like to do now.”
*
He isn’t in the waiting room when I come back out. The guard at the desk tells me that they’ve put him under observation, and he has me sign a paper and copies my ID before handing me a plastic bag. In it is a cellphone, a set of keys, and a pocket knife. I sit restlessly with Drew’s things in my lap, waiting for the nod from the nurse so I can go to the in-patient area, but it seems like I have been cast back into the wilds of the waiting room and forgotten. Fifteen minutes later, as my patience reaches its limits, Anne hurries through the sliding doors, all wide eyes and flushed cheeks. Even now, she is absolutely stunning.
She is a diminutive wisp of a girl that appears at first like an unfinished brushstroke – vibrant and active. She carries with her an aura, an allure that attracts one’s gaze to the edges, angles, and curves of her form, broadcasting then the perfection and purpose of her creator to curious eyes. Barely five feet tall, she is balanced gracefully in large platform shoes, her small frame wrapped in color-coordinated warmth up to a bright red scarf that she pulls quickly away when she approaches. She can only shake her head at first, and I give her a long hug to calm both of us down.
“Where is he?” she eventually asks, her large eyes searching the room even as she pulls back from me. I don’t answer, but watch her as she moves. I cannot fully describe Anne the way I’d like to – her very presence speaks volumes more than I could write. Every detail of her image has a manicured purpose. When she speaks, her nervous energy flickers and flushes in ruddy streaks beneath the coats of makeup delicately braised across her sharp features. Her words are tempered with deep breaths and intentional pauses, long-studied efforts to disguise the effervescence and urgency of her unusually-high voice. Without a wrinkle or laugh-line, she smiles and dazzles her audiences with practiced grace and slightly over-postured humility. Through her deliberate demeanor, however, her eyes sparkle and stab, claw, kick and scream to be noticed – to be heard above the quiet precision of her speech.
She has now returned to her “calm and in control” setting, and is asking me a battery of questions about what happened. I tell her what I know, which is very little, and soon discover she hasn’t gone home to feed to the dog as I’d previously asked. We hold each other for a while, rocking back and forth, oblivious to the room around us. I tell her that it looks like I may be in the hospital for a long time, and that she should go home to deal with the dog. After some extensive coaxing she agrees. She takes Drew’s bag of belongings and gives me a long kiss on the cheek before gliding back out the doors into the steaming darkness of the Baltimore night. I sit back down, squeezing into a chair between a family of bundled children and a sleeping couple whose white masks have slipped off and fallen to the linoleum floor. The static of the waiting room returns, and I am suddenly very, very alone.
*
When I graduated college I felt like somebody had interrupted an intricate dream I’d been having to thrust me abruptly on to the sidewalk in my boxer shorts. The cliché of breaking a situation down into the phrase “there are two types of people in this world” is the only way I can recall exactly how it felt to be staring un-structured life in the face for the first time.
One type of person – the type I am not, and the type I rarely get to know – never misses a beat after graduation. They may go on to a graduate program, an engineering job, medical school, or the military, but they are the ones who buy college yearbooks and disappear into peoples’ collective memory as that guy, or that girl – their identity summarized by one or two impressions and secondhand stories.
The other type of person is the type who never really leaves when they graduate – they may stay in close contact with friends, get their own place, work a job near the university even, but they never fully disappear from view. This person still goes to the old bars and coffee shops. This person’s life got tangled up in the rigging on the way out of school, and they are left hanging on the outside edges. They are sometimes comfortable with their decision to stay, but that is the exception to the rule. Much more often, they are quietly desperate, moving from one social circle to another - all the while feeling older as each new group of younger acquaintances pass. They devolve from an identity that no longer keeps its shape outside of the incubating walls of college. Of this type, I know many people.
III.
“I haven’t slept for days,” he says, when I open the door.
The scene is bizarre, and it feels like I am looking onto a stage or a movie set. I am trying to think as fast as I am taking everything in, so as not to dwell on what is going on around me, but it requires a lot of talking. Drew is being very cooperative in that respect.
“So look,” I say after a moment, “you know where you are, right?”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay.”
“Yes, I mean. Yea, I know where I am. I came here… I brought myself to the hospital on purpose.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it wasn’t… they didn’t bring me to this hospital. I brought me here. I have to get healthy...”
My head is pounding and I am literally piecing through every available cell in my brain to figure out what is constructive to say next. I glance out to the hallway as a nurse walks by with a gurney in tow, talking far too loudly to someone on a walkie-talkie. I shut the door and turn back to face Drew.
We are in a concrete cell, and the walls are cold and smooth – the color of pewter, nicked here and there with tiny flecks of sparkling quartz. The floor slants slightly towards the middle of the room where a metal drain is fixed in an indentation. A brown, plastic, twin-sized mattress lies against one wall, without a sheet or a frame, but Drew does not want to sit on it. There is a camera encased in plastic aimed at us from the wall above the large metal door.
Drew is wearing only a hospital gown, tied loosely in the back, and he is huddled against the wall opposite the entrance. The thin, anemic light from the single bulb above throws deep, creased shadows across his face, and his hair is oily and disheveled. He is sitting Indian-style, and he is turned slightly to one side to keep from exposing himself. Thick gauze bandages run up his inner thighs and out of sight beneath his gown.
“When did I see you last?” he asks suddenly. Before I can reply he is muttering to himself, and nodding his head over and over.
“I saw you Friday, Drew. Friday.”
“I hadn’t slept in two days when I saw you,” he laughs, the shadows of his eyes and cheeks undulating as he speaks.
“Have you slept at all since?”
“No. I can’t drink myself under anymore either. I can’t… I mean.” He trails off again.
“Drew,” I say, trying to steady my voice, “what did you tell the doctors?”
He laughs, and keeps nodding his head. He is looking everywhere in the room but at me, and is now tapping his hands against the bandages on his legs.
“Drew…”
“I told them I’m done with it. I’m done with all of it. That shit job, that life, that person, those books, that apartment, those things…They aren’t me. I want to be done with them, but not with me…”
I let him take a breath, and he looks up at the light, his face rough like a charcoal sketch on bright paper.
“There are too many things… too many people with control over things in my life, and I’m not one of them. I need to stop hurting myself. I need to leave, to start over again, to get out of here.”
“That’s good,” I say half-heartedly, “you can do that, buddy. We’re all going to do that sometime. Move on, get out of here - you know.”
“I tried to tell the doctors about these books I’ve been reading,” he continues, “but I don’t think they understood what I was talking about. I’ve been reading, but I haven’t finished yet – and my apartment, my job… my life wont let me. No sleep, no peace, and no end to the books… I mean, something had to give.”
I take a deep breath and see if he’s going to continue, but he is muttering what sounds like riddles and metaphors to himself. A streak of brownish-red begins to stain the edge of his bandages on his left leg, and he starts to pick at it before continuing.
“Anyway – it looks like I’m going to be here for a while,” he says, “so I left you my phone and keys. I’m sorry you got called, I kinda didn’t plan this very well.”
“I’ll take care of everything; that’s not a worry anymore,” I say
“I mean, I was planning for it. But I didn’t know this would happen today”
“Really, Drew, there’s nowhere I’d want to be but here now.”
“You’re a good friend,” he says. His fingers now have blood on them from the bandages. I don’t say anything to this because it is bull.
“No seriously. You are a good person.” He pauses and wipes the blood onto his cheeks before continuing.
“I wouldn’t have come here for you I don’t think.”
“Hey…”
“No, I wouldn’t.” He seems to shrink as I watch him, to contract into a ball of light and shadow.
“I wouldn’t,” he says again.
I watch the blood on his fingers and I think about how mad I was about my broken nose. I think about late summer nights with pretty girls, and I think about Anne. I think about the last time I lied to her, the last time I screamed and yelled and she threw a dinner plate at me. I think about all the things I hate in the world. I think about my father, and the first summer I spent away from home. Then I think about moths, and I think about cold gray beaches that melt into dark, limitless oceans.
And then, suddenly, I don’t think anymore.
“Drew,” I say, settling down on the cold concrete across from him. He finally looks back at me, and his eyes light up in their shadowy recesses.
“Tell me what happened.”
edited.
a story that got me into school.
1 out of 6 and counting so far, but my motto for the world of grad school academia since january has been "fuck em" so...
....3 2 1 ficiton
Gabriel Houck
625 Riordan Terrace
Towson MD 21204
Short Story, Untitled
I.
So the weirdest secret about me is that when I jerk off I think about when I was 8 and my parents took our family to cape cod in November for Thanksgiving and I spent the afternoons chasing crabs along very cold beaches. I think about black sand caked to my chilly, pale feet, and maybe remember watching the dark ocean horizon at sundown that seemed to eat up the sea into some deep and terrible night. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to be really old - tucked away in my bed, surrounded by nurses and dusty pictures of happy faces - waiting anxiously to quit and find out what the fuss is all about. Sometimes I think about my next-door-neighbor girlfriend from back east when I was 5, or about the time when my brother drank a glass of bleach by accident and mom made him puke all over the laundry room floor. And sometimes I think about sex.
“Tell me your weirdest secret,” she says.
She is painted in orange hues by the streetlamps in the stadium parking lot; we are lying on the giant inflatable cushion of the high-jump pit, and I have her head nestled softly in my right arm. Her skin is rough from sunburn, her brown eyes are hard to see in the shadows, and her voice natural and pretty. Her breath smells.
“I wish I would have gotten into more fights with my brother growing up” I say, watching moths cloud around the lights overhead. I wonder why I’ve said this, but she doesn’t ask for an explanation.
“More fights. Okay then.” She smiles and shifts to unstick her bare legs from the plastic cushion, and I don’t respond.
“I’m surprised you came up with something so fast.”
I’m still thinking about what to say next, and an empty space crawls into our conversation, slipping past us with the distant howl of police sirens. I roll a little closer to her.
“I came up with it fast because it was something I was thinking about earlier and I guess you just caught me off guard.” I wait, but she doesn’t say anything right away. I decide to bring the conversation back to more comfortable territory.
“Forget it then,” I say, “I suppose you’ve got a good secret you’re waiting to tell me, so I’m not trying to compete.”
This works better.
“No fair,” She laughs. Her lips are centimeters from my left ear. “Compete with me.”
Compete with her.
“Well, I don’t think I’m really in love with my girlfriend,” I say, barely listening to myself as we push inexorably closer to each other. My eyes are closed and I am suddenly watching myself in the darkness on a series of flickering television screens. On the first one I am lying in the high-jump pit with this girl, alone in the stadium in the oppressive night air of late summer in Baltimore, selling myself heart and soul for her rough skin, her bad breath, and her heavy brown eyes. On the second television screen I am in a cold blue room piecing through love letters and screaming at pictures of my girlfriend from her cousin’s wedding. On the third I am standing at the base of the stadium lights, overexposed in orange and white, watching the moths’ rabid, endless orbit.
“That’s not a secret” she giggles – she is tickling me and limbs are touching now. Her hand has found its way into mine and I hold it like it belongs there. “You wouldn’t be here if you really loved her.”
“I wouldn’t be here if I were a decent person, either,” I say.
“Don’t say that,” she whispers – a hand is lightly brushing the hair on my forehead. “I’m here too, you know”
“It’s true…” I say, and I trail off again, wondering what about it is true. I find myself suddenly wishing that we could see the stars beyond the pollution of the city lights.
“I don’t think you’re a bad person” she says “I think you’re kind, and interesting, and honest -” She pauses to make sure I am looking at her now.
“…And confused, but that’s not a bad thing. Here, let me tell you my weirdest secret.”
Her lips are brushing the side of my face when she talks and I stop hearing her. I hold her hand tighter and she is kissing my ear. The pictures on the television sets in my head begin to wobble and fade until I can’t see them anymore, and we both sink into the depths of the mattress. Now there are no more secrets, no more brothers, girlfriends, stars, or moths. If this were happening in a movie, the camera then pulls away from us, swinging slowly across the darkened panorama to the pale streetlights above the stadium lot. Since it happens in my memory, we go back to her place and hang out with her roommate until she goes to bed and then fuck quietly on the couch with the lights off.
*
Sitting in the waiting room of an ER is a lot like sitting in an airport. I can’t sleep, I can’t sit still for very long, and I can’t bring myself to pay attention to the television, which is sealed in a smudged plastic casing in the corner and which appears to be permanently stuck on a talk show. Voices crackle back and forth over the PA system, and intermittent alarms that sound from somewhere in the hospital duel with the come-and-go of ambulance sirens as they pull into the driveway outside. It is all background noise however – soft static to the quiet, sniffling pall that holds the room in its chilly grip. For now, I burn away the minutes with eyes half open, staring at moving pictures of my memories that dance one by one across the drywall opposite my seat. As I come back to reality, I dimly realize that I can remember the girl in the stadium’s full name – middle and all.
Another alarm goes off deep within the building and it echoes harshly through the halls to the waiting room. There is very little conversation going on around me, and as for the rest of the shivering mass of people – I assume they are forced to follow the sordid tale of friendship-gone-bad that is unfolding at low volume in front of a live studio audience.
There is a flu scare going on in Baltimore, and every other human being packed into this waiting room besides me is wearing a flimsy cotton face mask that stains wet and discolors just beneath the nose. The walls of the waiting room are lined with strings of shiny green tinfoil garland, and a Christmas banner drawn in crayon by the children from the pediatric ward outlines the nurses’ station sign. Like every hospital, the lights are on too bright. The neon casts a fish-scale sheen across the dark hands and faces around me. My arms glisten in the chill, and shadowy, deep-green veins snake up and down my pale wrists as I stretch and look around. It is 6:30 PM on Tuesday, December 19th, and I have been waiting for about an hour.
*
Drew is the reason I am here, and he is talking to the paramedics who picked him up in the ambulance. They, along with a nurse and a police officer, have been sitting in the white room adjacent to the check-in desk since I showed up, and I have been left to my own devices for far too long. I phoned Anne at work when I arrived and told her what had happened. She did her thing where her voice drops two octaves to talk about something serious, but she didn’t cry or freak out, and she promised she’d go by our apartment first and feed the dog. I’ve left two messages since then on her cellular phone to check her progress, but she didn’t answer – probably because she never picks up when she’s driving. It’s a safe habit I suppose.
When Drew finally walks out of the room with all the nurses and paramedics, he looks amused. His pudgy cheeks are drawn up into a Buddha smile, though his eyes seem strangely dark beneath his thick brow. His curly hair is matted to his forehead, and he’s carrying his hat as he walks over to me.
“You don’t have to stay,” is the first thing he says to me, sitting down and fidgeting with his watch. His normally soft features now look pulled and rigid; his look has suddenly changed.
“Forget that,” I say, trying not to stare too much. “I don’t teach tonight so it’s not like I had much else to do anyway.” To this, he flicks a smile like a lizard tongue, and then his face snaps back to its taut position. I still can’t see his eyes, and after a moment I stop trying.
“They really need to change the channel,” he says, and I nod. I realize later that he’s not looking at the television, but instead he’s positioned himself with his chin in his hands, watching a group of kids with white masks poking the fish tank by walk-in entrance. A paramedic approaches me and asks to talk. It is now my turn to go into the little white room.
*
The last time I was in this ER was when I was in the band, and it was also because of Drew. He and I had drunk too much whiskey one night after a performance, and he’d broken my nose with his elbow during a scuffle. I remember the wave of embarrassment that came just after it happened, and I remember feeling dizzy and completely overwhelmed as I bled all over the place. I was the older guy and I was the bigger guy, but in front of a gathering group of students who were all warming up to the idea of a good fight, I had just had my nose split open. It was a humbling moment. Still, after a lot of yelling and a lot more bleeding, he and I went to this very same hospital, just a few short blocks from our house and I eventually got things sewn back into place.
I told my folks that I’d run into a shelf in the dark. I told my friends that I owed that kid a broken nose of his own, for the pain and the hassle I went through. I told myself that I forgave Drew for doing it, but secretly I felt that the next time we fought I would make him remember how much it had hurt. Now, all of a sudden, I understand that I am still angry about the whole thing, and as I step into the room with all the paramedics and the nurses, I am wondering what I am going to tell them – and what they want to know– about Drew.
II.
When I was seven we visited my grandmother for Christmas at her assisted-living home in Teaneck, New Jersey. I only ate five things when I was seven – bread, yogurt, cheese, pizza, and chicken. Everything else was too complicated, too exotic; the smells of the world at that age were so tangible and overpowering that I couldn’t stomach anything but the plainest of foods, and I remember distinctly the smell that began to creep through our rental car’s windows around exit 9 on the Jersey Turnpike.
When we got to the assisted-living home, I was the first one out of the car. The parking lot smelled chemical-sweet, and the wind that whipped through gray-green tree trunks along the walkways was acrid with exhaust from the highway. The lobby stank of carpet cleaner, and the dining room of Lysol. We ate dinner with my grandmother quickly, but I barely touched my plate – there was something in the grilled cheese sandwich that didn’t taste right, so I went hungry. Later that night we spent a few more excruciating hours sitting in her pristine living room, my parents talking quietly and I staring off into my own imagination. As it was about time to leave, my grandmother called me over. As I went to her, however, the smell was overwhelming. I remember seeing her, my mother, and my father all sitting on the couch, watching me as I shook my head and refused to come any closer. She smelled of an awful perfume, of body gas, halitosis, and underneath it all was some undefinable, sublime odor that crept into my lungs and seized my limbs and held them steadfast. They tried commanding me to come and give her a hug but they might as well have been trying to get me to jump out of an airplane. We left abruptly, and it was the last I saw of my grandmother. My mother went to the funeral the next fall, and I stayed home, went to school, and ate leftovers for a week with my dad.
“Tell us about your friend Drew,” the first paramedic asks. He has the neck of a football player, and a woolen cap pulled neatly down to his thick eyebrows. I can’t figure out why he is smiling when he talks to me, and why I am smiling back. I guess it’s nerves.
“I’m not sure what you want to know,” I reply, “I wasn’t with him tonight when all of this happened. His boss called me at home and told me an ambulance had picked him up because he’d been hurt.”
“When did you talk to him last?” Again, the football paramedic, though he is no longer smiling.
“Maybe three or four days ago – he did leave a message on my machine yesterday that sounded pretty odd. I assumed he was drunk because...” I trail off as I think all the pairs of eyes watching me, trying to put together an image of who Drew and I are. The nurses are both standing by a cabinet full of gauze and tubing; one of them has a clipboard and is writing something. The cop looks bored.
“Do you think he was drunk today?” asks the paramedic. “Maybe on any drugs?”
“No, he was at work today,” I say quickly. I can see where this is going now. “He doesn’t do any drugs.”
“Are you sure?”
“Very.”
“How long have you known him?”
“A long time – maybe six years or so.”
“And he doesn’t have a history or drug use? Hallucinogens, LSD, Cocaine…anything?”
I pause and think, although it’s mostly for show.
“He drinks… I mean, we drink. A lot sometimes. And when he was in school he did a lot of uppers to stay awake and finish his work. But that was all caffeine – Aderol, Ritalin, things like that.”
“Do you think he does any of that now?”
“I have no idea.” A long pause follows. “Look,” I say, “you know more than I do at this point. I just got a phone call out of the blue. I haven’t even talked to him yet, but if you let me that’s what I’d really like to do now.”
*
He isn’t in the waiting room when I come back out. The guard at the desk tells me that they’ve put him under observation, and he has me sign a paper and copies my ID before handing me a plastic bag. In it is a cellphone, a set of keys, and a pocket knife. I sit restlessly with Drew’s things in my lap, waiting for the nod from the nurse so I can go to the in-patient area, but it seems like I have been cast back into the wilds of the waiting room and forgotten. Fifteen minutes later, as my patience reaches its limits, Anne hurries through the sliding doors, all wide eyes and flushed cheeks. Even now, she is absolutely stunning.
She is a diminutive wisp of a girl that appears at first like an unfinished brushstroke – vibrant and active. She carries with her an aura, an allure that attracts one’s gaze to the edges, angles, and curves of her form, broadcasting then the perfection and purpose of her creator to curious eyes. Barely five feet tall, she is balanced gracefully in large platform shoes, her small frame wrapped in color-coordinated warmth up to a bright red scarf that she pulls quickly away when she approaches. She can only shake her head at first, and I give her a long hug to calm both of us down.
“Where is he?” she eventually asks, her large eyes searching the room even as she pulls back from me. I don’t answer, but watch her as she moves. I cannot fully describe Anne the way I’d like to – her very presence speaks volumes more than I could write. Every detail of her image has a manicured purpose. When she speaks, her nervous energy flickers and flushes in ruddy streaks beneath the coats of makeup delicately braised across her sharp features. Her words are tempered with deep breaths and intentional pauses, long-studied efforts to disguise the effervescence and urgency of her unusually-high voice. Without a wrinkle or laugh-line, she smiles and dazzles her audiences with practiced grace and slightly over-postured humility. Through her deliberate demeanor, however, her eyes sparkle and stab, claw, kick and scream to be noticed – to be heard above the quiet precision of her speech.
She has now returned to her “calm and in control” setting, and is asking me a battery of questions about what happened. I tell her what I know, which is very little, and soon discover she hasn’t gone home to feed to the dog as I’d previously asked. We hold each other for a while, rocking back and forth, oblivious to the room around us. I tell her that it looks like I may be in the hospital for a long time, and that she should go home to deal with the dog. After some extensive coaxing she agrees. She takes Drew’s bag of belongings and gives me a long kiss on the cheek before gliding back out the doors into the steaming darkness of the Baltimore night. I sit back down, squeezing into a chair between a family of bundled children and a sleeping couple whose white masks have slipped off and fallen to the linoleum floor. The static of the waiting room returns, and I am suddenly very, very alone.
*
When I graduated college I felt like somebody had interrupted an intricate dream I’d been having to thrust me abruptly on to the sidewalk in my boxer shorts. The cliché of breaking a situation down into the phrase “there are two types of people in this world” is the only way I can recall exactly how it felt to be staring un-structured life in the face for the first time.
One type of person – the type I am not, and the type I rarely get to know – never misses a beat after graduation. They may go on to a graduate program, an engineering job, medical school, or the military, but they are the ones who buy college yearbooks and disappear into peoples’ collective memory as that guy, or that girl – their identity summarized by one or two impressions and secondhand stories.
The other type of person is the type who never really leaves when they graduate – they may stay in close contact with friends, get their own place, work a job near the university even, but they never fully disappear from view. This person still goes to the old bars and coffee shops. This person’s life got tangled up in the rigging on the way out of school, and they are left hanging on the outside edges. They are sometimes comfortable with their decision to stay, but that is the exception to the rule. Much more often, they are quietly desperate, moving from one social circle to another - all the while feeling older as each new group of younger acquaintances pass. They devolve from an identity that no longer keeps its shape outside of the incubating walls of college. Of this type, I know many people.
III.
“I haven’t slept for days,” he says, when I open the door.
The scene is bizarre, and it feels like I am looking onto a stage or a movie set. I am trying to think as fast as I am taking everything in, so as not to dwell on what is going on around me, but it requires a lot of talking. Drew is being very cooperative in that respect.
“So look,” I say after a moment, “you know where you are, right?”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay.”
“Yes, I mean. Yea, I know where I am. I came here… I brought myself to the hospital on purpose.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it wasn’t… they didn’t bring me to this hospital. I brought me here. I have to get healthy...”
My head is pounding and I am literally piecing through every available cell in my brain to figure out what is constructive to say next. I glance out to the hallway as a nurse walks by with a gurney in tow, talking far too loudly to someone on a walkie-talkie. I shut the door and turn back to face Drew.
We are in a concrete cell, and the walls are cold and smooth – the color of pewter, nicked here and there with tiny flecks of sparkling quartz. The floor slants slightly towards the middle of the room where a metal drain is fixed in an indentation. A brown, plastic, twin-sized mattress lies against one wall, without a sheet or a frame, but Drew does not want to sit on it. There is a camera encased in plastic aimed at us from the wall above the large metal door.
Drew is wearing only a hospital gown, tied loosely in the back, and he is huddled against the wall opposite the entrance. The thin, anemic light from the single bulb above throws deep, creased shadows across his face, and his hair is oily and disheveled. He is sitting Indian-style, and he is turned slightly to one side to keep from exposing himself. Thick gauze bandages run up his inner thighs and out of sight beneath his gown.
“When did I see you last?” he asks suddenly. Before I can reply he is muttering to himself, and nodding his head over and over.
“I saw you Friday, Drew. Friday.”
“I hadn’t slept in two days when I saw you,” he laughs, the shadows of his eyes and cheeks undulating as he speaks.
“Have you slept at all since?”
“No. I can’t drink myself under anymore either. I can’t… I mean.” He trails off again.
“Drew,” I say, trying to steady my voice, “what did you tell the doctors?”
He laughs, and keeps nodding his head. He is looking everywhere in the room but at me, and is now tapping his hands against the bandages on his legs.
“Drew…”
“I told them I’m done with it. I’m done with all of it. That shit job, that life, that person, those books, that apartment, those things…They aren’t me. I want to be done with them, but not with me…”
I let him take a breath, and he looks up at the light, his face rough like a charcoal sketch on bright paper.
“There are too many things… too many people with control over things in my life, and I’m not one of them. I need to stop hurting myself. I need to leave, to start over again, to get out of here.”
“That’s good,” I say half-heartedly, “you can do that, buddy. We’re all going to do that sometime. Move on, get out of here - you know.”
“I tried to tell the doctors about these books I’ve been reading,” he continues, “but I don’t think they understood what I was talking about. I’ve been reading, but I haven’t finished yet – and my apartment, my job… my life wont let me. No sleep, no peace, and no end to the books… I mean, something had to give.”
I take a deep breath and see if he’s going to continue, but he is muttering what sounds like riddles and metaphors to himself. A streak of brownish-red begins to stain the edge of his bandages on his left leg, and he starts to pick at it before continuing.
“Anyway – it looks like I’m going to be here for a while,” he says, “so I left you my phone and keys. I’m sorry you got called, I kinda didn’t plan this very well.”
“I’ll take care of everything; that’s not a worry anymore,” I say
“I mean, I was planning for it. But I didn’t know this would happen today”
“Really, Drew, there’s nowhere I’d want to be but here now.”
“You’re a good friend,” he says. His fingers now have blood on them from the bandages. I don’t say anything to this because it is bull.
“No seriously. You are a good person.” He pauses and wipes the blood onto his cheeks before continuing.
“I wouldn’t have come here for you I don’t think.”
“Hey…”
“No, I wouldn’t.” He seems to shrink as I watch him, to contract into a ball of light and shadow.
“I wouldn’t,” he says again.
I watch the blood on his fingers and I think about how mad I was about my broken nose. I think about late summer nights with pretty girls, and I think about Anne. I think about the last time I lied to her, the last time I screamed and yelled and she threw a dinner plate at me. I think about all the things I hate in the world. I think about my father, and the first summer I spent away from home. Then I think about moths, and I think about cold gray beaches that melt into dark, limitless oceans.
And then, suddenly, I don’t think anymore.
“Drew,” I say, settling down on the cold concrete across from him. He finally looks back at me, and his eyes light up in their shadowy recesses.
“Tell me what happened.”
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