Benediction

by Arnold, Jim

  “Where’s your outfit?” I asked. “They’ll figure out you shouldn’t be here.”

  He laughed. “That’s just not something I’m gonna fucking worry about.”

  Startled, I raised my head as someone grabbed my hips and lifted them slightly roughly. Context was everything, as this normally sexual move clearly was not. It was Dr. Kim.

  “I’m just lining you up,” he said.

  A female hand gently pushed my head back to the table. “Mr. Schmidt, just breathe normally; relax for me, OK?”

  I closed my eyes and allowed Wayne’s tongue to reenter my mouth, and I tasted what I’d missed so terribly for so long. Connie somehow got into the room, too—Wayne probably brought her in—and I felt her jump up onto my lap, pushing Dr. Kim out of the way. Protectively, she splayed her little, long and furry body over my torso, and promptly fell asleep.

  * * *

  He had a killer bod; that much was real—I could detect a gayish swagger through the scrubs. Politically incorrect stereotype, and shame on you, I thought, though briefly. He never stopped, or even slowed down long enough for the slide viewer to snap a photo for later retrieval.

  To be honest, he didn’t look at me once.

  Didn’t help that I was flat on my back and couldn’t raise my head. He had a tan; that much was certain. In January, that had to mean Christmas in Rio or Maui or someplace other than San Francisco.

  I heard chat about the weekend. That’s right, it was Friday, now Friday evening, and I was lying in the bluish room again, covered with blankets, a slight and vague weight on my stomach, different from Connie. Medical tape pulled at the hair on my arms where the tubes went in. My eyes itched.

  I was not happy that the tan, buff, oddly green creature totally ignored me. It didn’t really surprise me that I was already cruising, just after major cancer surgery and despite the fact that if everything had gone well in the operating room, my penis was catheterized and would be for three weeks.

  I couldn’t feel anything down there, but I knew enough to know what this floating sensation was. I was pumped full of hospital-grade painkillers, and these drugs were fine.

  I looked for Wayne, and Connie, too, licked my upper lip to find his taste again, but all I saw was blue. They were probably waiting outside with Karen. Wayne and Karen, talking about me, concerned, walking Connie up and down Geary Boulevard, the cars all accelerating their way downtown as the usual Friday weekend revel kicked into high gear.

  * * *

  It was dark outside. I’d turned my head to a window as I floated down a hallway. Odd how the steering mechanism of the gurney clearly responded to my telepathic commands. A young black man, quite disinterested, held on to a side rail and provided forward momentum.

  “Am I catheterized?” The words came out slowly and were slurred, but they came out.

  He looked at the paraphernalia coming out of my midsection and simply said, “You’ll have to ask your doctor, now, won’t you?”

  Actually, fuckface, if you’d just lift back the covers and take a quick look, we could answer this right now.

  I would have looked myself if my arms could move, but they were constricted by tubes. Then it slipped from my mind. I felt so incredibly nice.

  Karen stood at the entrance to what I presumed was my very own hospital room door. She clapped.

  I gave her a battle-tested but weary smile and a thumbs-up, like what I imagined a sweaty Nascar driver coming in for a pit stop might do.

  “He said it went just fine!” she gushed. “Dr. Kim—he said the operation took care of the problem—the cancer.”

  Jake was next to her. “I’m so glad to see you,” I said.

  He rubbed my arm. “I should’ve taken the day off.”

  As awkward as it kind of was, the three of us went into the room together.

  * * *

  Night now. I turned my head again and they’d gone, and Wayne was back, sitting there next to me, holding my hand.

  “Had to leave Connie outside. Staff could smell her—sometimes things like that cross over,” he said. “I tied her up to a no-parking sign outside.”

  “She won’t like all the traffic. She’ll be scared out there.” He may have been dead, but he was still insensitive.

  “What, like she’s gonna get hit by a bus or something? She’s already dead, man.”

  It was this kind of snippiness inherent in Wayne’s personality that caused me to break off our relationship innumerable times when he was alive. It was disappointing this character flaw was still very much present in his ghost.

  “It would be nice if she were here. There’s room on the bed.”

  He ignored that and turned serious, or as serious as a dead Wayne could be. He leaned in and whispered, “I can tell you this much—they got most of it, but you’re going to need more treatment.”

  * * *

  The eyes bore into mine like headlights. I squinted, then tried to cover them with my right hand, which was impossible because of the tubes and tape.

  “Just checking in on you, Mr. Schmidt. How you feeling?”

  This was not Wayne. Past the flashlight I made out a short, fat African American woman in gray scrubs and an oversized blue sweater.

  “OK, I guess, considering,” I mumbled.

  “Considering what?” Dark Night Nurse placed a warm, matronly hand on my forehead.

  “Considering I’ve been cut open and sewn back up and you just woke me with a flashlight in my face,” I said.

  “Would you have preferred that I switch on the room light? Right, I didn’t think so.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut.

  “Do you have any pain?”

  I didn’t want to answer because I’d decided in a split second she was a bitch and I hated her and wanted her to die.

  “I’m using this.” I held up my patient-controlled analgesia pump button and pushed it, and it delivered a bolus of synthetic morphine into my arm. Fuck her. It was four a.m. and I was getting stoned.

  A urine bag was attached to the other end of the catheter tube—which I’d been doing my best to ignore—hung on one of the bed’s side rails. Dark Night Nurse checked it. “Seems to be working like it should. How does it feel?” she asked.

  “I can’t really feel it,” I said. “Unless I move; it tugs. More pressure, not pain.” I hit the drugs pump again with my thumb.

  In her singsong voice, she informed me I could go back to sleep. “I’ll be back tomorrow, Mr. Schmidt.”

  * * *

  I must have slept some, because when my eyes opened next the gray fog that typically hung over this side of San Francisco was visible, pushed up against the window. For the first time I noticed that I’d managed to snag a truly private room. It was probably a mistake but I’d keep quiet. If I drew any attention to it, most likely they’d move me.

  Dark Night Nurse hadn’t lied. She soon appeared in the doorway sans flashlight and pushed in a squeaky cart that held a meager, liquid breakfast tray and a small medical apparatus.

  She pushed the cart up against the bed rail. “Good morning, Mr. Schmidt. How we feeling today?”

  “A little sleepy,” I said.

  “Good.” There was that hint of the sadist-how-can-I-torture-you-today smile.

  She handed me an orange juice, then picked up the green plastic device.

  “This is a spirometer. It’s going to help you get all the ickies out from the anesthesia. My hope is this will prevent…pneumonia,” she said.

  I peeled the foil off the plastic OJ cup and watched as she held the spirometer up to her face.

  “You just breathe in here, with your mouth, your lips wrapped tight around this tube, and make sure to keep the little square guide here”—she poked at it with a stubby finger—“between the arrows. Then you hold for a couple seconds, and then exhale, through your nose. Simple.”

  She placed the device on my chest. “Go on—try it now while I’m here so I can make sure you understand my directions.”

&n
bsp; “I’m hardly awake.”

  She glared at me.

  It was a battle I wouldn’t win. I put the tube to my lips and wrapped them around it, tightly. At least this was an action I’d had some experience at. I looked up at Dark Night Nurse, whose name tag I’d finally read as Myrna.

  I sucked in the air, and the accordion-like bellows inside the spirometer contracted. It was all I could do to keep the little square guide between the arrows as I held my breath. I expected I was turning purple and was going to pass out, so I exhaled forcefully. With that came a deep cough from the very pit of my lungs.

  I felt the incision pain stab me for the first time as I hacked away on my bed, the spirometer dropping to my blanket-covered thighs. Instinctively, I pressed a hand over my abdomen between my navel and where my pubic hair was before they shaved it.

  It felt thick—raised—as if there was something there that shouldn’t be. Something hard and bumpy, under the blanket, under the bandage. I’d felt the catheter pull on my penis several times in the night and had immediately pushed my patient-controlled analgesia button for my painkiller bump.

  My eyes watered.

  “Very good work, Mr. Schmidt. I want you to do five of those deep breaths per hour, and I’ll be checking on you tonight, so don’t think you can get out of it,” Myrna said.

  “I want to go to the bathroom, wash my face, brush my teeth.”

  She arranged the various tubes so I could walk the few steps to the bathroom with my candy machine on a rolling pole. The urine bag hooked over a lower rung.

  I stepped onto the floor for the first time since the operation and felt like I’d aged twenty years overnight. An entire area of my body—from my tits to my thighs—felt alien, as if someone else’s sorry torso had been transplanted and mine hijacked.

  Myrna’s hand was unexpectedly on my elbow. “I’ll help you over there,” she said.

  “I think I can make it, really, I’m fine—OK?” I moved away. It was all I could do not to slap her fat little shiny face.

  She backed off a half step. “I’ll be right out here, if you need me.”

  I maneuvered the pole, the tubes, and my new torso into the tiny white bathroom. I had to blink at the reflection in the mirror. My hair looked like shit, plastered against my gray forehead. There were broad semicircles of morphine or sleep-deprived discoloration around my eyes.

  The tap water came out cold. I had beagle breath, was in desperate need of some emergency oral hygiene, but what I really wanted to see was what Dr. Kim had done. I pulled up the tunic and saw the outer edges of some wine-colored bruising covered up by a large rectangular gauze bandage, which was completely stained reddish brown to yellowish white.

  It was attached to my stomach by a couple of strips of translucent white tape. Since they’d shaved me there, it was easy to pull it off slowly, silently and with minimal pain.

  I had to see, with that curious drug-induced detachment of a third-party observer.

  Oh, God.

  There was an incision about six inches long from just below my navel to the top of where my bush would normally start. Dr. Kim had closed it up with staples. It was mostly a straight-line incision and jogged slightly to my left side at the base. The cut line was red, but it looked like skin flaps had been folded over, like you do with the turkey after you’ve stuffed it. Around the incision there was bruising. That whole part of my body was…lower. Everything below my navel had dropped a couple of inches toward the floor.

  There was a tube sticking out of my torso on my left side, just under the cut. The drain—yes, drain—collected into another plastic pouch, reddish watery liquid from violated places deep inside my body.

  Finally, there was my penis or what I guessed was my penis since it was still attached to me and in the correct spot. The tannish catheter tube emerged from my urethra and wound around and around and finally emptied into the urine bag Myrna had hooked onto my candy pole.

  My cock looked insulted and shocked. The catheter had apparently been jammed in there, and it was bloody, bruised around the tip, and appeared to be about half its normal size.

  “How you doing in there, Mr. Schmidt?” Myrna rapped her tight little fist on the door.

  I taped the bandage back in place, lowered the gown, leaned against the sink and pushed the button on my patient-controlled analgesia device. I turned on the faucet and splashed some cold water onto my face to wash away the hot, salty sting in my eyes.

  12

  Jake’s cousin Billy had this place down in Palm Springs that he rarely used, referred to as his “fuck-you investment.” Billy worked for the state up in Sacramento, in some sort of buried and bureaucratic legislative accounting capacity that I could never quite understand. He’d done well in the Internet stock run-up and then started losing, as everyone seemed to, but the one thing he held on to was this getaway pad.

  Arabia Lanai was a condominium development from the 1970s wherein all units faced a central, pale blue pool, as if the residents would want to ape the cast of Palm Springs Weekend 24/7. Every unit had a pink, Swiss chalet—like peak as the focal point of its design, which was odd, as it stood on a desert plain where it never snowed.

  Billy offered his place for my recuperation, and I’d jumped at the idea.

  * * *

  Myrna finally left me. I figured it must have been only because her shift was over. Everything still hurt, and I’d convinced myself that my vision in the bathroom was but a temporary manifestation that would quickly heal over and disappear. Life would then be as before.

  Dr. Kim arrived shortly after noon. It was Saturday, so I was surprised.

  He took my right hand. “How are you feeling today, Mr. Schmidt?”

  “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel after something like this,” I said, then quickly pushed my candy button. My lower torso burned and the catheter pulled on my cock.

  He poked lightly here and there, lifted up the gown, started to undo the tape I’d just put back on.

  “It doesn’t do any good to keep pushing that button, you know. It’s timed to only give you measured doses of painkiller.” I detected a smile. “Otherwise, you’d OD.”

  He put on a glove and lightly touched the incision area, tapping on the staples here and there. “These come out in about three weeks, same time as we remove the catheter.”

  “Jesus,” I said, to the ceiling.

  He looked at me directly. “It takes that long for your urethra to heal. We had to cut it and suture it back together.”

  “I’m dying in suspense here, Dr. Kim. Let me ask—are you some kind of Korean Jew?”

  He looked startled. “You’re referring to Irving?”

  I nodded.

  He gently placed a fresh gauze bandage over the ugly area and taped it on. “My parents had just moved to this country. At the hospital in Los Angeles where I was born, my father asked the doctor—who was Jewish—what a good American name for a boy would be. Thus, I became Irving Kim.” He pulled my gown back over me and sat down. “I’m an atheist.”

  “Just wondered,” I said.

  “We got it all, Mr. Schmidt. I think that your problem with prostate cancer’s been taken care of.”

  Um, what about the huge gash in my stomach; how about that tube coming out of my bloody cock?

  “That’s good; I mean, that’s incredible,” I said.

  “There’s always a slight possibility that some cancer cells may be left around the margins of what we removed, but the pathology report will tell us that.”

  I pushed my button again. “What happens then?”

  He paused.

  “Radiation.” He put the blanket back over my chest. “Wouldn’t worry about that now, especially now. Your only job is to recover from the prostatectomy. I’ll see you in three weeks.”

  * * *

  Jake would take a couple of days off from window design heaven and drive the Mercedes the 525 miles from Douglass Street in the Castro to Sunrise Way in Palm Springs. He�
�d leave me and my car there and fly back home.

  Catheterized, I had to sleep on my back or all hell would break loose down below. There was a certain perverse delight in the realization that for the first time in many, many years, I’d be able to sleep an entire night through, not once waking to get up and pee.

  It was important to Dr. Kim, Myrna, the other white-coated staff, as well as Karen and Jake that I get up and walk around as much as I could. I’d been weaned off the patient-controlled drug drip while still in the hospital—Myrna had relished the job of telling me that they were taking the IV out on Sunday and after that I’d be on Vicodin, strictly controlled by her.

  In the ensuing days the incision pain largely went away, and the catheter pain, the pain at that very center of maleness, just got worse. I was determined to take the Vicodin only as prescribed or even less, hoping the amount would outlast the pain, so I’d have some left over to party with down the road. I watched the clock, desperate for the next dose, and tried to find a least-offensive position for my penis and its rubber extension.

  For home use, I had a large plastic urine pouch that sat on the floor and hooked around a belt when I moved from place to place. For forays out into the world, there was a smaller, nicely streamlined bag that attached to my thigh with straps. Both models emptied conveniently via a handy bottom valve.

  It was a bit like being on vacation. I was going to Palm Springs and nobody from Safe Harbor would bother me. I could walk—slowly—to Castro Street on a sunny Tuesday morning and not worry about anything at the office. Downhill was more painful than uphill. Every step would be agony if the catheter pulled the wrong way.

  * * *

  The liquor store was open, and I bought the bourbon, a quart on Tuesday because a fifth looked too small. On the slow trudge back up the hill to Douglass I contemplated places to hide it from Karen and from Jake. They’d smell it on me regardless. Unless, maybe, I was extremely careful. This charade could have a severely limited life.

  I couldn’t bear to see a devastated look in Jake’s eyes, so I made sure in the next few days before we set off for Southern California that I didn’t drink anything a minimum of three hours before he was scheduled to come home.