by John Jodzio
Here at the Spa, we can’t smoke and so everyone uses the patch. We rub our patches like maniacs, hoping that the nicotine will release into our bodies on our schedule. Dr. Molina tells us that it doesn’t happen like that, he tells us it is a timed release, that we can’t just force the stuff out of the patch whenever we want. We never listen to Dr. Molina. We never listen to him when he tells us to journal about our hopes and fears; we never listen to him when he asks us to tell him what is on our minds. We rub our nicotine patches like we haven’t heard a single word he’s said.
One night last week, Trudy, one of the girls here, stole a huge stash of patches from the nurses’ station and slapped them onto her body into a makeshift bikini.
“Woo-hoo!” she yelled. She was jumping around like it was spring break or something. “All right! Woo!”
We all stood around and admired her as she strutted down the hall at breakneck speed. She was using the hall as a catwalk and she couldn’t stop talking—blabbing on about her old boyfriend, about her hometown, about how she used to go to the beach all the time and wore a real bikini, not a fake one made of nicotine patches. After about five minutes of jumping around, she turned green and started puking. The nurses came and carted her downstairs to the emergency room. For a while, there was a rumor that Trudy had died, but then yesterday she came back to group, unrepentant, ready to do it all over again.
“I thought that my heart was going to explode,” she told Dr. Molina. “I was so damn excited about being alive. Who feels like that anymore? You tell me who.”
I dig my fingers into Erica’s shoulders now. She is surprisingly supple for eating so much metal and plastic.
“That bunghole Molina keeps telling me that I want a baby,” she tells me. “That I’m trying to fill up a void in my body by swallowing everything I see.”
Erica talks a lot about her ticking clock, how every day the clock gets closer to snapping into a million pieces, which in the end she would probably eat.
“Molina keeps telling me the same thing,” I tell her. “That I cut myself because I want a baby.”
No one has ever told me anything about a baby. They tell me that I need to finally admit that cutting myself is a problem. They tell me that this is a cry for help and whether I know it or not this was just the way I thought people would hear me the best. They tell me I was smart to ask for help, but that I asked for help in the wrong way. Ask for help in a way that you don’t hurt yourself, the women in the group tell me. Ask for help with your voice instead of with a paring knife.
“A baby,” I say to Erica. I start to laugh. This is very funny to me, a baby. I laugh a little too hard about my lie and accidentally fall out of my chair. Dee-Dee, one of the float nurses, is standing outside the lounge and sticks her head in.
“That looked like it hurt,” she says.
Erica and I sometimes watch Dee-Dee with her boyfriend. He is a security guard at the hospital. She waits for him in the parking lot and he drives up in a black security van. He slides open the side door of the van and Dee-Dee gets in. The van rocks a little. Fifteen minutes later they get out and we watch them straighten their clothes and pat down their hair. Then they go back to work. It is like this almost every night, so simple, nothing like a coma or a pregnant girl in the way of their good time.
“Just go,” I tell Dee-Dee. “I’m fine.”
Dee-Dee doesn’t leave though; she comes into the room and sits down next to us. She pulls a nicotine patch from her pocket and slaps it on her forearm and takes a deep breath out.
“I heard you were doing better,” she says to Erica. “I heard a rumor that they might send you home.”
That makes Erica laugh. After a few seconds of laughing, her laugh morphs into a cough. She’s covering her mouth and then all the sudden she spits something out into her hand. She opens her palm and sitting there is a AA battery.
“Really?” she says. “I’m going home?”
In group today, it is my turn to share. I start out sharing about how the summer is the worst time to be a cutter, how you have to wear long sleeves to hide the cuts, how it’s always so hot wearing long sleeves. I pull back my sweatshirt and flip over my arms. I hold them out to the group, show them the fat pinkish scabs that look like worms on the sidewalk after a heavy rain.
“That other person,” I say, “the cutter? That’s not the real me.”
Dr. Molina sits across from me, stroking his beard. Dr. Molina is a milder-looking Antonio Banderas, shorter pony tail, wider nose, millimeters from gorgeous. He has great lips, big and supple and what I would call giving. Like he might let you kiss them, instead of bearing down on you and forcing you to kiss like he wanted.
“What are you doing to cope with your triggers?” he asks.
I look around the room. We all sit in a circle in orange fabric chairs that make our asses sweat. Sometimes I wonder who sat here before us, sweated in kind. Where are they now? What are they doing with their lives?
“Lately when I want to cut, I focus on another physical sensation,” I say. “Like that lady suggested.”
Last week a woman came to our group to demonstrate different coping strategies. She showed us how you could slash at a plastic bottle or an old shirt, how you could rip a phone book in half or stomp around in heavy shoes until the need to hurt yourself disappeared.
“That sounds good,” Dr. Molina says. “But can you share the exact things you’re doing?”
I glance at Erica. She knows what I’ve been doing. She’s sees me leave each night. She sees me walk down the hall to Mike’s room. She knows that I take his hands and press them all over my body until the feeling to cut is gone.
“Yesterday when I wanted to cut, I took an ice cube and I held it in my palm,” I say. “And by the time the ice had melted the feeling had disappeared.”
When group is over, Dr. Molina stands next to the door and hands out pieces of butterscotch hard candy.
“Liz, can you come to my office for a second?” he asks me.
Everyone here is curious what Dr. Molina’s life is like when he leaves the hospital. Behind his desk, mounted on the wall above his head, are framed pictures of him in action—running a marathon in Hawaii, milking a cow in India. The one I like best is him climbing to the summit of KB2. He’s gripping a flag that he’s just shoved into the mountain. He’s wearing thick black gloves and his beard is covered in frost. It all looks satisfying and violent, his arms pushing that flagpole deep into the crusty snow.
“I could never do that,” I tell him, pointing at the picture. “I’ve got a pair of weak lungs.”
“You could,” he says. “You just need to prepare properly.”
I want to believe him, but I know not to. I take my piece of hard candy and spin it open. I put it into my mouth, feel the sugar leak down the back of my throat.
“Mike Phipps’s girlfriend tells me you’ve been a real help,” he says.
I bite down on the hard candy and it shatters inside my mouth. I stick out my tongue to look at the tiny shards.
“I am trying to save her some heartache,” I say.
Dr. Molina goes into his desk drawer. He pulls out four nicotine patches and slides them across his desk.
“Whatever you are doing,” he says “keep it up.”
The next afternoon, I find Lily curled up in a chair by Mike’s bed. The nurses have just given him a sponge bath and the room smells like apple.
“I take the bus here,” Lily says. “And I am so sick of it. Everyone on the bus keeps touching my stomach. Old ladies, kids, whoever. I try to hide from them but somehow they know I’m pregnant. They just walk up and start pawing.”
She leaves Mike and moves over to me, grabs my hand. It’s moist. It feels strange, like there aren’t any bones inside. I can’t stop thinking about the way I rake her boyfriend’s fingers over my body, forcing him to scratch me until I feel right again.
“I’m losing him,” she says. “He’s
dead, but then he won’t really die.”
I stare at Mike, wanting to pull the sheets aside, take in his entire body.
“He’s going to wake up,” I tell her. “You just need a little faith.”
Sometimes it looks like Mike is smiling, a sliver of a tooth showing through his lips. I want to tell him to quit. I want to say to him: not now.
“I brought you something,” Lily says. She moves over to the side of the bed and hands me a silver box with a bow on it.
“What is this for?” I ask.
“It’s just because,” she says.
I don’t get presents “just because.” The boyfriends whose names I tattooed into my skin rarely gave me anything. If they did, they gave me things that were clearly presents for them. A box of steaks, lingerie, a set of men’s golf clubs.
“Just open it,” she says.
I slide off the ribbon and pull back the tissue paper. It’s a new robe—light blue, terrycloth, beautiful and soft, and I lift it up and it unfurls.
A feeling comes over me then, a churning emptiness in my stomach. I put the robe back into its box and I set it down on the floor. I take my arms and I wrap them around my belly. I burp and the burp tastes like puke.
“Try it on,” she says.
“Later,” I say.
“No way,” she says. “Try it on now.”
I shake my head no, but Lily lifts the robe and gets me to stand up. She slides the terrycloth over the clothes I am wearing and she ties the sash around my waist.
“There we go,” she says. “That looks great.”
And even though there are no mirrors here, even though I can’t really see what it looks like, I can tell that she’s done a great job. I can tell that it fits.
That night, after visitor’s hours are over, I bribe Charlotte and I sneak back into Mike’s room again.
“You’re wicked,” Charlotte tells me before I enter. “But I still like you.”
“This is my substitute,” I say. “Some people use cigarettes. Or drink coffee.”
“I don’t judge,” she says. “Knowing what I know, I never judge.”
Charlotte has a bad limp. From what Erica and I have heard it’s from her former husband, who pushed her off a third floor balcony and then left her for dead. Who knows if that’s true, I think. Maybe she just has a bad hip. Maybe that’s the extent of it. Maybe it’s just genetics. Maybe it was passed down from the combination of her mother and father getting together and there was nothing anyone could have done.
I stand by the side of Mike’s bed. There’s a thin stream of drool running out the side of his mouth. I smell urine under everything that is trying to cover up the smell of urine.
“What are you waiting for?” I hear him ask me.
I pull the sheets back, but instead of getting in bed, I stop and stare at his body. How long will it take before it wastes away? A week, a month? How long before all the muscle disappears and his skin pulls tight against his bones?
“C’mon,” he whispers. “Let’s do this.”
His calves have shed their hair and they look thin and grey. His face is blotchy. I take my fingers and I gently pull open both of his eyelids. I shake my head back and forth in front of his rolling eyes.
“This has to stop,” I say.
On the way back from breakfast the next morning, Lily sees me outside her room and grabs my hand and pulls me in. Mike is propped up in his bed wearing a paper crown that says “Congratulations.” There is a big cookie in the shape of a heart on the bedside table. The cookie is no longer intact. Lily has started in on it, her little hand cleaving a piece from the butt end of the heart.
“The baby is really craving chocolate today,” she says.
She takes another piece of cookie and shoves it into her mouth.
“I figured we could celebrate,” she says. “I needed something—you know? Even if he doesn’t care.”
She breaks off a piece of the cookie and hands it to me. “They’re moving him today,” she says.
“Moving him?” I ask.
“There’s a bed open,” she says, “downstairs.”
I get up and move over to the window. Instead of looking out, I watch Lily’s reflection in the glass. I see the tears welling up in her eyes, getting ready to fall. I watch her wrap her arms around her stomach. We are quiet for a minute, chewing. I start rubbing the nicotine patch on my shoulder. I want to tell her that we are in love with the same man, that we are doing the same thing, just trying to use that feeling to get through the day.
“Sometimes he whispers,” I say.
She nods. She tells me she knows. “I can never understand what he’s saying.”
“I can.” I turn to look at her. “I know what he’s saying.”
I tell her that I heard Mike say he is happy to be starting a family. That I heard him say Lily is going to be a great mom. How they are going to buy a house and get a dog—a big lazy dog.
I say all these things to her and she starts to cry. Then she points to her stomach.
“Tell her,” she says.
I am reluctant, but I sit down next to Lily and I lean over and she pulls up her shirt and I put my lips there. And I start talking. Her skin is slippery with cocoa butter, but there’s a bit of salt, a bit of sweat underneath. I tell the baby what I’ve just told Lily. And then I keep going. I tell the baby other things. I feel a stirring under my lips, a shifting wave moving across the tautness of her belly. I do not stop. I keep talking even when a plane passes overhead and everything that I am saying is turned into something fierce and hissing. I say everything I know into her belly and when I run out of words I just start to hum.
I hear babies like that.
MAIL GAME
I was playing this mail game with a girl at work.
Hot potato, basically.
Except it was with this two-dollar bill.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Ha ha.
Neither of us wanted the damn thing. We hid it everywhere. Once, she found it in her underwear drawer at her house. That excited and bothered her.
Jimmy, she said, you are pretty damn sneaky.
At the same time all that was happening, I finished learning Spanish.
I had wanted to become a flight attendant—bouncing over the ocean, digging my toes back into solid land. The airline said Spanish would help.
Nope.
Look at you—they said to me during an interview—you are one huge mofo. You are way too big to go up, they said.
I still had all these post-it notes with vocab words stuck all over my place. The Spanish word for trash can—cubo de basura. The word for knife, cuchillo.
Those are the ones I could not forget.
During that summer, people came over and ate my food and drank my wine and tried to pronounce things off the post-it notes and even though I hated Spanish now, I corrected them.
Cuchillo, I would say.
Then slower. Cu-CHEE-yo, not cuch-ILLO.
See the difference? I would say.
Escucha y repita, I told them.
They left angry, my guests. They called me a pompous ass and kicked the sand candles that lighted my sidewalk.
The girl at work and I finally married.
I told her I might crush her one day.
Really? she said.
Really, I said.
I am so large and you are so tiny, so probably it will happen, I told her.
Really? she said.
One night, rolling around naked, we found some coins in our bed.
Who knows about these things?
They could have come from anywhere, far away, so close, pockets. They weren’t like a dollar bill. You write your name on a dollar bill and pay for something and someday when it returns to your wallet you can say—see, see, I told you so.
These were coins, though, coins, maybe ours to begin with and maybe not.
GRAVITY
Call it
a hobby.
Call it a hobby because a hobby is for utter enjoyment, right? And since there is nothing more enjoyable for you than to see someone brained with a small metal object, this is your hobby. You do not collect Hummels, you are not one of those scary autograph hounds shoving kids out of your way for a second of communion with celebrity, you don’t buy expensive retrospective toys trying feebly to rediscover your fleeting youth.
You drop small denomination coins on people standing on the street below.
Bonk.
You drop these coins from the eighteenth floor where your office is, from the law firm where you are a newly minted partner. The windows up here shouldn’t ever open, but they do if you know the trick.
There is always a trick. Sometimes you need to ask around to find out what that trick is, but there always is one. It turns out that in this case the trick is a tool. Pavel from Maintenance gave one to you. The tool looks like a crowbar, but skinnier and without the teeth. Pavel shoved it into this hole at the base of the window and twisted it like a screwdriver and the window spun magically open.
“This for instance, Mr. Stone?” Pavel asked you in his halting English. “For instance, fire? For instance, you need to jump safe?”
You and Pavel have talked about “for instances” before. You’ve been a “for instance” kind of guy from way back, you prefer when people have questions about what could happen, how things could go horribly wrong.
“Yes,” you tell Pavel. “Of course. Another for instance.”
Pavel is here all the time, not lurking or anything, but inconvenient just the same. You think everyone has left for the night and you are just about to drop a coin onto someone below when you hear his mop bump into the snack machine in the break room.
“In case of the fires, right?” Pavel asks you.
“Exactly,” you tell him. “Jump. Jump instead of burn.”
You’ve had things hit you on the head too. Once you had a bagel hit you on the top of the head in the middle of the street. It was late and you were drunk and tired and on your way to the train station. There was no one on the street, no cars, a nasty steam billowing up from the sewer. Then, out of nowhere, this bagel. After it nailed you, you looked up and pondered the skies. You yelled, “Hello?” When you slowly realized no one was going to cop to throwing this hard-ass bagel, you yelled, “Fuck!”