Wait a minute, he said to himself, the old resilient skepticism washing over him, we’d better play along with this a while before we decide to get too foolish.
They talked of things, actually TALKED - her old boyfriends, her penchant for airplanes, fast cars, going to nursing school because it took her away from the acrimony smoldering in her household... With Ironsides it was slam, bam, on to the next. Whatever conversation there was, was laced with the brilliant tonalities of disdain. This one even asked about the accident.
“What is your name?” he said.
He’d never cared about names and wished he hadn’t been so abrupt to ask just yet. Something might get displaced away from this smooth beginning. The question wanted to retract itself the instant he put it out there.
“Maybe you’ll have to find out,” she said.
Zing-o. Got me, he thought. Eddie, let’s try to keep your yap shut.
She’d read his history. She knew about his accident, the ambulance ride from the ER to the regional neurosurgical hospital, the stabilization surgery, the plan of healing. She even knew about his blues piano. She preferred jazz to blues herself, but could take a little funky blues now and then if the mood was just right.
“You haven’t killed me for the motorcycle bit,” he said.
“You almost did that yourself.”
For a long while the only sound was the occasional slap of her hands on his skin. Eddie got the idea that notwithstanding the details he already knew about her she was a private woman. Inscrutable. Would be hard to figure.
“Time’s up,” she said. “Anyway, Doctor Musselwhite’s here.”
“Oh Jesus,” said Eddie before he could stop himself.
Musselwhite was the man with the bedside manner of a warthog and the proud owner of lots of medieval torture toys. He was one of those skippy students who must have been absent the day they handed out compassion in medical school, and since he didn’t have any, he didn’t know he was missing anything. Naturally, he went into orthopedics.
“Musselwhite, Plague-and-Blight, what do you have for me today?”
“We have to move that pin.”
“Oh, Jesus. What pin?”
“The one in the wrong place.”
And just for emphasis he jiggled the steel rod driven like a wayward spike straight through his leg.
“Oh, Jesus. I can feel that, you know.”
“That’s why we’re giving you a local.”
“A local?”
“Yeah, yeah, local. Relief, he said. Rolaids got nothing on a well-placed local. Takes away the pain.”
“I’m for that.”
“Beats the hell out of general and that way you can stay
awake.”
“Thanks a lot, doc.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Musselwhite was already gloved and gowned and eager as a boy with a mouse in a cage hovering there with his long needle and the big syringe with lots and lots of Novocain in it. He poked a few holes near the pin, filled them full of numbing fluid and then jiggled again. “Feel that?”
“Oh Jesus!”
Musslewhite laughed like he was surprised at a draw card in a game of poker. “Guess it’s gonna take a little more.”
“If you please.”
He did that. Then moved the pin to the satisfaction of what discipline Eddie couldn’t tell and didn’t want to know. Anyway, they all left.
The whole thing was exhausting. He fell into an unusually deep sleep and washed it all out of his brain.
“I had a boyfriend once who rode motorcycles.” Nurse angel-hands was back.
“Still alive?”
“Oh yeah.”
Silence for a while. She began her work.
“I love riding behind a man on a motorcycle,” she said. “Nothing sexier than that.”
Eddie kept quiet.
“Motorcycles and airplanes,” she said. “Long trips with no plan.”
“Geez, you sound like the Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance all over again.”
“Maybe. But I take care of too many you suckers to go that way any more.” She paused. “Everybody quits sooner or later.”
“One way or another.”
It was the first time he had talked about the chopper since the accident. It gave him a sense of release in which there was a shared comfort, like having a drinking partner, or playing the blues along with someone.
It was going to take him a long time to find the notes on the keyboard again, he thought. The little monsters had a bad habit of wandering at times, boy. A lot to catch up on.
“God, you’re tight,” she said, slapping his thigh.
“No shit.”
“No, I mean all through here.” And she ran her hands up to the hip joint, along the pelvic bones around to the buttocks.
It caused him to think of sex again. That painful subject.
“I know your name,” he said.
“You do not.”
“Ye-ah.”
“What is it then?”
“Well, I sent my spies out on a mission.”
“You didn’t.”
“They were gone three days and then they came back.”
“Yes?”
“Three days.” And he gave her a sideward glance.
“You’re stalling.”
“Rumplestilkin is your name,” he said, sing-song.
She laughed long and hard. “That’s another story,” she said.
“Maybe.”
She caught her breath. “Fiona,” she said. “My name is Fiona.”
He let it stand.
She let it stand.
He heard it echo through the air off the white, bathroom-tile walls sustained on the strength of its own music. He liked the feeling it gave to the room.
“Fiona,” he said at last. “Nice.”
She slapped him on the leg. “Time’s up,” she said and left the room.
He slumped into fantasy, gazing back to his black holes on the ceiling but this time with a somewhat brighter spirit. What had been ominous shapes mostly arising from associations with nightmares and bad trips became forms that resonated more with shapes in the natural world - trees, streams, the thin wrist of a girl.
He could hardly endure Fiona’s days off. In her absence he made up conversations with her, tried out interactions like movie clips in his mind, ending up so far from reality he broke out in a sweat.
“Do you miss your sons,” she asked.
Along with the first wave that washed over him was the realization she was back with him again, on the second, a hit that rocked him so thoroughly he had no time for defense. It began somewhere in his chest and bolted upward to his face, which, if he could have seen it, might very well have been turning several shades of red. He shuddered and choked, fighting something larger than him - then he convulsed in a sob.
“Jesus,” he said at last when the racehorse finally settled.
Fiona stopped the motion of her hands, keeping them on his chest, where she waited.
“Didn’t know what was there, did you? “
“Guess not.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“I had two step-brothers,” she said.
She stroked his chest a little, aimlessly at first. “I guess I miss them too.”
“That’s never happened to me before. “
“What?”
“Whatever that was.”
“Maybe that’s why you play blues.”
“Maybe so,” he said, but a deeper realization was just now seeping into him.
Fiona finished her work in silence, leaned into his field of vision, nodded, and was gone.
> Eddie was ballistic in a tight suit. What he was feeling reminded him of pneumonia at seventeen, fevers so high he had “sensations,” as his mother called them, room rocking disorientations on a high rope, the farmlands of Wisconsin rocking below him, a spinning ball expanding and contacting in his hands, a sense of falling... swinging from anger to frustration, from rage to despair. He felt that fear that had frightened him to feel and let it pass to the other side of the room. He entered gratitude and then backed into rejection. Hours passed. When she returned he was still reeling.
“You’re still tight down here,” she said.
“No shit!”
“No shit!”
“Talk to my masseuse, she might be able to explain it.”
“Your masseuse is talking. And she doesn’t like what she’s seeing.”
Eddie couldn’t tell if she got the connection between his stiff legs and what went before or if she was simply skipping deftly into another realm. Surely, she would know.
“Well, at the risk of another 24 hours of hell, I guess you’ll just have to do something about it,” he said.
She looked at him a long time. Her eyes were both hard and misty. “Maybe I will,” she said.
She began with a vengeance. She went deeper into the quads than ever before, wrapped her hands around his thigh all the way to the hamstrings in back and played them like a five-dollar guitar... she wasn’t satisfied.
“Stop me if you need to,” she said.
Eddie closed his eyes.
She slipped her fingers under his briefs along the front of the hip joint, massaging the tendons that run to the base of the pelvis, diving into the descending v-shape of the underbody. She placed her thumbs in the groove between torso and thigh and slipped downward until, curving his underside, they started upward again around the aching arc of his buttocks.
Eddie was aware of something new.
“Just as I thought,” she said.
“What?”
Fiona sighed and then paused a few beats.
“I’m not sure I can tell you.”
“I’m the only one here.”
“Yeah, but... ”
“Why not? Far as I can tell you’ve never held back before.”
There was a long silence. “You need a local,” she said.
“A local?”
She didn’t answer. As if answering was not an answer.
“Stop me if you need to,” she said.
She pulled his briefs away from his body releasing him to spring upwards.
Tears came to his eyes. He couldn’t help it.
He felt her hands move over him. They were warm and oily. She pressed her thumbs against the underside of him making him surge like a rising wind.
“You Ok?” She asked.
Eddie couldn’t speak.
She waited for him.
“More than ok,” he whispered.
She giggled. “All right,” she said, and pulled his briefs down mid-thigh.
Eddie couldn’t see what she was doing and didn’t want to. And maybe it was better anyway to concentrate on the sensations her hands made of him. His meters pegged. His imagination, in training without knowing what it had been training for, was operating at peak.
She worked him, rocking his pelvis as far as his restraints could allow - tightness from bones seeping into hands and feet, to arms and legs and from there, drained like maple sap to his torso, down the deep center where she stood, calling him forth.
He felt a hot wetness on his tip and thought for a moment she had wrapped him in a warm wash cloth, but then a little sharpness... a little rasp flicking... a strand of hair... finally, he knew what she was doing.
His eyes which had gathered the dark spots of his sky into a universe of his own making, closed to a place behind seeing, opening inward on a world long quiet and still, trembling now with the awakened spirit and chill of springtime. He could feel his roots tingling in the watery nectar of pleasure. He sank to his center and stayed there as his universe broke open.
Fiona left quietly.
He slept.
In the days that followed they laughed about the local. Made little wordplays on it that slipped around the understanding of the rest of the staff as they appeared and disappeared like ghosts at his bedside.
Eddie knew better than to ask. She gave him one when her mysterious sensibility determined his body needed it and her generosity of spirit was good and ready. She knew what it did for him. She could see it in every aspect of his body. For her part she said it made her feel close to a man. That was all she ever said about it.
His body healed. And they who put him there where he was came and took him down, unpinned the specimen from the specimen board and he walked and he talked and he returned to his habitat.
“That can’t be the end of the story,” he said.
“Isn’t that enough?” I said.
My friend stirred his bourbon and branch like it was an excuse for not leaping over the table and roughing me up.
“Jesus, you can’t just leave it there and expect me to get a good night’s sleep.”
I considered leaving it there anyway. It might be spoiled by continuing on. Besides, what could be better than to learn a new and much more imaginative meaning for the oh-too-dry term “local?” Isn’t the message greater than the players who bring it to life?
“I want to know what happened, he said. You can’t just walk away from an experience like that and ever be the same.”
“Oh, he was never the same.”
“Come on, Jesus! Where does this go?”
Maybe I would go on a little, if only to show that at some rare time, in some extreme place of isolation and despair in which the weight of loneliness is so great it exceeds our capacity even to comprehend what is happening, we can be drawn to extreme acts of grace, supreme gestures which could not have happened anywhere else, under any other circumstance.
I looked at my friend, staring at me, quaking with anticipation.
“Eddie told me this story one night after I accompanied him on jazz bass at the Stuck Pig and as a result of that endeavor of questionable sanity, I accompanied him through several Boilermakers as well. I had the same reaction you did. I demanded to know what was going on between them now. Were they fucking? Was she still giving locals? What’s the possibility that such incredible intimacy and generosity might stay alive in the outside world, fraught with all its complications and its shifts of character and circumstance? Are we ever the same as those mysterious parts of our personalities that show through when pinned to a Stryker Frame?”
“Well?”
I paused, considered, and then went on. “Eddie told me they were seeing each other. In fact, he said he would introduce me to her because we were both invited to a dinner with friends the following Saturday night.”
“Ohmygod! You would come face to face with the Angel of the Local herself.”
“That would be part of the problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he’d told me the story.”
“Yeah, but... ”
“So that by the time I met her I already had knowledge of their goings on. Maybe others did too. Do you see?”
“Beginning to.”
“She was very desirable. Something about her made her attractiveness exceed even the natural beauty that was hers. Even after Eddie’s affectionate descriptions I was astonished. But she was self-conscious. A little embarrassed. It was a tonality that didn’t match with the strong-courageous image I had of her.”
“She was not the person in the story?”
“Oh, I’m sure she was that person. Very much so. But don’t you see? Their history was only what is was when they were where they were.”
�
�Now you’re making no sense at all.”
“Listen, they tried to make it as a couple. Went out. Slept over. They were good together. But different. The helplessness that had drawn them together was itself helpless in the face of the new strengths of his recovery. Maybe there were abrasive parts of his personality she could not see when he was so beaten down, unforshadowed parts that, for example, might go around telling everybody he knows about the time he got a local in the Neurosurgery ward. Do you see? The man under the cage of bondage had emerged, unbonded in a walking world, without the paralysis that modified him.”
“They were strangers?”
“They were strangers to the world that made them.”
My friend looked at his Bourbon like he wanted it to dissolve away the parts of the story he hadn’t wanted to hear, alcohol, the universal solvent for the unpleasing and the dissonant, as if downing the whole tumbler in a sudden furious gulp would make for him and the players before him a happy ending.
“When I met her that evening I saw her from the eyes of someone who knew her story and I saw that she saw in my eyes and the eyes of Eddie’s friends the reflection of that story... and by that, the knowledge the story had been too strong to hold secret. She picked up the raised eyebrow when they asked Eddie, ‘well now, how was it, lying there so long, tied up like that.’ And ‘wasn’t it so lucky to have such a nice, attentive nurse.’ You see, I think that put the magic of the events they shared in a strange, unflattering light.”
“Anyway, she didn’t like the feeling it gave her, and the added burden she felt to explain something. Explanation was never part of it. ‘It’ was best where ‘it’ did not have to be explained... at home where it happened, misunderstood anywhere else.”
My friend had downed his Bourbon but looked no brighter.
I reflected on my decision to continue this story, admiring how it had stood unblemished by what was to come after and almost wished I hadn’t continued. But then the story, even so, was still a small miracle, even as it stood in sharp contrast to everything around it.
“They split,” I said. “I was sad when I heard it, but I could see how cruel time might be to that delicate beauty, blossoming only in the circumstance of its making. And I still wonder how she is. I feel great affection for her. And sorrow. Every now and then I think of her, years later, resolute in her knowledge there would never be any wondering why she did it, as if the place for wondering had been removed long before it began, so that she might always feel only that bright force which made her open the terrible privacy we carry in our lives, waiting so long to be opened.
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