Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

  XXV

  A viscous liquid percolated in my throat. Groggily I opened my eyes. Wilting lilacs in a plastic vase came into view.

  —Look who’s awake.

  A backlit middle-aged nurse with a man-nose bent over me. I felt scaly and turgid, coated in a tepid gruel. There was a seething pain, but far away, as if in a second body. Tubes protruded from both arms. I was sheathed in hospital blankets as flimsy as rice paper.

  —My name’s Chelsea. Do you know where you are?

  —On the set of a hospital drama?

  She blinked softly.

  —No, darling, this is a real hospital.

  I believe, Your Honor, I may have already mentioned how I’d always been terrified of losing my footing and falling from the regular society into either the prison society or the hospital society, and I can’t emphasize enough how my superawareness of these two overpopulated and underresourced hells have shaped my nightmares since boyhood. And now I had finally fallen.

  —You were in a car accident.

  That made no sense. The last thing I remember I was parked on a side street, being gawked at by teary, terrified preschoolers, the hand brake on, ignition off, keys bunched in my hand, sirens heralding the arrival of ambulances, and although I was drifting into unconsciousness at the time, even the horrendously uncoordinated and terminally unlucky can’t crash a parked car. What the hell happened?

  From the corridor I could hear a male nurse tell another how he loves his dog but the bitch sheds hair like she’s had chemo.

  Life, then.

  I tried to raise myself from the bed.

  —Hold on there. You’ve been unconscious for two months.

  She let the import of that passage of time sink in. A man lay in the bed beside me, his bruised eyes half closed, a tube in his throat, his mouth wide open but rendered so useless it couldn’t even yawn. Welcome to the realm of the disgusting, he seemed to say. I thought: If by chance I get out of here in one piece, what shape will that piece be? The nurse laid out her equipment on the bed with callused hands; she wrapped my arm with a rubber tube before unveiling the gigantic syringe from my nightmares.

  —May I be blindfolded, please? I croaked.

  —Sorry, darling, we don’t do that.

  I turned back to the body in the adjacent bed, hoping my grunts of pain comforted him. Certainly his coughing comforted me, even though phlegm was the least exotic fluid in the place.

  The next time I opened my eyes I saw a head of crazy hair.

  —How do you feel? asked Mimi.

  —Like I’ve been molested by a stage hypnotist.

  On the other side of the bed, Stella picked up my hand and pressed it to her tear-glistened cheek. Both women?! A grim omen. I fell asleep again and when I awoke, Liam was sitting in Stella’s place. His sad face conceded that my downward spiral had crushed his downward spiral. Ah, the pyrrhic victories of old friendships. Again I closed my eyes and when I opened them Morrell had replaced him in the chair.

  —Poor deathless, imperishable creature. Maybe your will to live is inexhaustible after all.

  He brushed hair away from my forehead. It seemed as if anybody who wanted to could caress me willy-nilly. Two doctors swept into the room like Mongol armies. I knew instantly which was the most experienced and professional of the two; he was the one who didn’t ask how I was feeling.

  —Lift your head, he said. His voice was low and melodious, like he was about to break into a Gregorian chant. He gently pressed his fingers into the back of my skull.

  —You know, you’re lucky to have escaped any serious brain injury.

  —It hurts to breathe, I said.

  —You were on a ventilator.

  —You were in critical condition for a while there, the other doctor added, and then proceeded to describe in detail the operation I underwent, which I chose not to understand. Instead I imaged myself tied to a spinning wheel in a circus tent as clowns in surgical masks flung razor-sharp knives.

  —After the injury, your brain swelled up. Your head could hardly contain it. That’s why we had to keep you in a coma.

  I could see Morrell wincing, picturing my engorged brain.

  —Anything else bothering you?

  —My shoulder hurts.

  —Well, other than the pain, it’s of no clinical significance.

  I couldn’t think of a response to that, but it seemed to me like the kind of phrase that could define a civilization.

  —You lost a few teeth, you’ll have to have some pretty serious dental work, the first doctor said.

  —Other than that, the other chimed in, you fractured your left sinus cavity bone, you have several broken ribs, a fractured pelvis, and you broke the ulna and radius bones in your left arm. We put in six steel pins that will be removed when you heal and a metal T-plate that should be there permanently.

  There was a heavy silence. They were dancing around a taboo, staggering their revelations; I knew the last one was about to come. I sensed it—a fate vastly worse than death—and instinctively tried to shift up the bed, as if to higher ground. The doctor took out a pin and pricked my body from the tip of each toe up to my neck, asking me to describe the feeling, whether it was sharp or dull, or nothing at all. My toes were unresponsive, my legs unresponsive, my thighs unresponsive, my knees unresponsive. They asked me to flex my foot, my ankle, to raise my leg. I could not. They used a hammer to test my reflexes. No knee jerk, no ankle jerk, no plantar reflex . . .

  I felt at the end of my life cycle and already my thoughts dove straight back to suicide, to self-removal. I had instantaneously composed a suicide note—Dear World, I’ll show myself out. Thanks—by the time the first doctor half-squatted on the edge of my bed and spoke the words.

  —You are paralyzed, he said.

  —It’s unlikely you’ll ever walk again, said the second.

  The light grew bright and my brain felt speared with the cold shock of a permanent loneliness, as if loneliness were a very, very, very long javelin that just keeps on going through you, and I couldn’t breathe or make out the faces peering at me and caught only phrases from the doctors such as “incomplete paraplegia” and “crushed T-5 and 6” and “the absence of motor and sensory function” and “the zone of partial preservation” while my own thoughts were actual, distinct ear-splitting voices of varying ages and sexes and races speaking all at once: The blind get great hearing, the deaf a super sense of smell. What do the paralyzed get again? And: Does paraplegia ever just, you know, blow over? And: Who would have suspected that at such an advanced age of adulthood you can become someone so entirely worse? Tough break, pal.

  Mimi, I noticed, was kissing my hand.

  —I think he’s in shock, she said.

  People wait their whole lives to tell you you’re in shock—any layman can apparently diagnose this.

  —One more thing, the doctor with the priestly demeanor said. The police would like to talk to you.

  —Why?

  —I think it’s best they tell you about that.

  Then they turned away and walked out without saying good-bye, as if to say good-bye would have degraded everyone involved.

  It might have been the overwhelming reality, or the overpowering morphine, but there was a distinct fade-out, an ebbing and subsiding of awareness, and hours later I was jerkily reinserted into consciousness, squinting through harsh light. The room was a chaotic thoroughfare; someone two beds over was being noisily defibrillated, and by my curtained bedside Morrell was nursing a coffee and wielding an ungodly frown of pity.

  —Adorno said it’s barbaric to write a poem after Auschwitz. What can one say to that man, except for Don’t be so sensitive!

  —What?

  —Ax, meet frozen sea, he said, and dropped a black spiral notebook on my lap. I opened it up. On the first page was a poem written in Morrell’s unmistakable cursive:

  Dear Aldo,

  Put pen to paper and mind to air.

  Let it shape you, let down y
our hair.

  Be a poet, be not afraid to just go,

  Go it alone and wade in waters deep

  And keep your calm, you might as well

  You are in hell and cannot keep yourself from harm.

  Love, Angus

  He had seen my framed haikus in Mimi’s bedroom; they’d triggered his astonishing memory that I had in class (thanks to Leila) demonstrated knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and Spanish poets—how the hell did he remember that? He then quoted extensively from his own book, the chapter “Tribulations and Creativity.”

  —Don’t waste time rebuking God or cursing injustice; rather, transmit your lived pain as solace or amusement . . . If they are also artists, the truly unfortunate have a wealth of material. And you know what else? Plato said there is no invention in a poet until he is inspired and out of his senses, and here you are, on morphine.

  When I protested that I wasn’t a poet he assured me it didn’t matter, that the muses were themselves artists, and besides, he said, like a true poet, my most redeeming shortcoming was my ability to commit 100 percent to a bad idea.

  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the rest of my stay in hospital is a five-month nightmarish blur of chaos and panic and wretchedness and agony that comes to me in indistinct fragments; it turns out that poetry is the most accurate and concise method to summarize this period so resistant to summation. A few days after Morrell’s suggestion, I had several hallucinations of Veronica’s bleary ghost hovering above my hospital bed or on the outer side of the far window. These visitations were short-lived but served to remind me of my sister’s own passion for free verse, and inspired me to do as she would have herself. Of course, I am relatively ashamed of the long poem I scribbled but I don’t repudiate it. I’m not disloyal. What the hell, I wrote poetry and I’m glad I did. And here I enter my lived truths as exhibit D, conceived during months of in extremis and therefore resistant to falsification. Please excuse the pervading sadness of my dredged soul as I beg the court’s open mind to allow me to read a little testimonial segue here, this work that might for all we know shed further light on Mimi’s murder:

  XXVI

  Good news, Buddha, I’m finally in the now!

  (Absolutely. Worst. Now. Ever.)

  I’m only forty and already on

  my backup generator. My backpacking days are over

  unless I’m the one in the pack.

  The best compliment I can hope to hear:

  his vital signs are good.

  Everything bad in life will be worse from now on: insomnia, diarrhea, hangovers. Every problem

  is the least of my problems.

  I used to work as an ensemble, now I live

  like Trotsky died.

  God seized all my assets.

  The door that was always open

  is now a wall.

  Even fight or flight will take time.

  I would totally wish this

  on my worst enemy.

  Now would be a great time

  to get raptured.

  One Daisy Duke nurse in this sea of manhands wipes me with a towel

  you wouldn’t dry a dog with.

  You’re scheduled for an MRI, urodynamic study and crop rotation,

  she says, before rushing off to deal with the oil spill in bed seven, Lot’s daughter in bed five, the squiggly thing in bed eight, the axolotl in bed nine.

  I catch her eye and make a check please sign in the air.

  She says, Your stool sample has been sent to a psychic who helps police with missing persons.

  It feels like I’ve swallowed cacti, electric eels are going to the toilet over my major organs, and I’m experiencing meteor showers.

  Wielding a large-bore needle: Doctors like priests expect you

  to renounce your pain, she says.

  I vow to sit out rehabilitation. If I want to promote neuroplasticity,

  I’ll hire a publicist.

  She says, A man who lives his life in pain will end up a torturer.

  And if you feel agony for too long a period you are treated

  like one who hears voices.

  Late-night, I wake in floodwaters, therapeutic time windows shutting. The spinal cord is not a rip cord, God,

  but I hope you landed safely.

  She says, The medical establishment will as a matter of policy and without consultation prolong your days until everything you are you’ll owe to human ingenuity.

  I ask, Did the malediction mention me by name?

  She says, While psychiatric wards are patrolled by small fistfuls of Christs, the spinal ward is all Jobs.

  I say, Listen. Hear that silence? That’s the sound of my forebears wondering why they bothered.

  She says, Look around. You haven’t been singled out for persecution after all.

  That burned.

  Who the fuck are these people, these nurses? I can’t fathom where they could have gotten this cavalier attitude towards the human body: in their upbringing?

  She holds my hand. Knows how to make me feel better.

  She says, You can’t imagine

  the home catalogs you’ll be receiving!

  • •

  Transferred out of ICU into a vulcanized-smelling green-lit thrumming chamber of competing soap operas

  —certain trains of thoughts are a death sentence and watching television is like holding pressure on a wound—

  My roommate, 3/4 of a guy named Dan, is being executed piecemeal. He lies on his bed folded like shirts. We have our differences:

  he oozes, I clot.

  His wife presents him with memorabilia from home.

  (Tins of biscuits. Mug. Photos. A football banner. Surfing posters.)

  Who knows how deep those saliva threads go? He says to the doctor, Just when you finally have time to stop and smell the flowers, your nose is bandaged. He says, What did you come across in my trenches and ravines? And: Keep it to yourself if you’ve found larvae! And: Don’t tell me the surgeon left his keys in the bladder with the engine running?

  It is well known in the medical profession that some patients desire nothing but a jocular relationship with their doctors and if during the course of the session they share one good quip that patient is satisfied with his care.

  The doctor enters: Presto! We had to remove your

  whirligig.

  On the upside: We’ve cured your

  sleepwalking.

  And you’re safe from bodysnatchers.

  I say: Don’t name a disease after me. Name one before me and see

  if I run into it. I say: I’ve racked my narrative

  for signs of hubris.

  And I realize this is not a period of convalescence. I took my death drive

  on a death drive and now my legs can’t wait to wither

  and my IV arm is thinner. Why they don’t alternate I have no idea.

  I think they prefer the one that’s closer to the door, says 3/4 of a guy

  named Dan, pupating there on hospital sheets.

  He doesn’t understand that medicine makes you sick like psychiatry makes you crazy, that one should not be afraid of your persecutors but be terrified of saviors with butter fingers, of grave, life-threatening miscommunication blunders between departments or the inexperience of trainee nurses learning on the job, often between English classes—don’t hate me for not understanding in my haste to be afraid!

  (Thinking of that serial-killing nurse on 60 Minutes, those contaminated French

  blood transfusions, those poor Quaid kids!)

  They use a crane to wrench me out of bed for reasons of occupational health and safety, the crane moves too slowly and shit drops out of me onto the floor. A doctor comes in and says: Try and only sneeze on the toilet if you can. Your sphincter muscle is no match for hiccups. I wince: Sounds like a practical life. He leaves with: Someone will be in shortly to discuss poor sperm motility.

  Can I have post-traumatic stress disorder

 
when the trauma is ongoing?

  I’m not just post-operative but post-clawed and whored out to student nurses. Do you mind if she watches? I do. I fucking do.

  Camera-ready catheters on fact-finding jaunts, green froth from orifices you don’t want to know about, mouth flooded with metal.

  Childhood-summer-length moments between painkillers wearing off and coming on,

  Excavators in hospital couture with divining needles predisposed to miss

  the artery.

  I dwell on poor Tantalus

  the God of Clinical Frustration.

  I fire like a gun with a cork in the barrel.

  In the face of my twice-sliced-laterally amigo’s corn-fed guffaws I growl, You too belong in the shop of your maker.

  Where did my sense of humor go?

  He’s laughing now but 3/4 of a guy named Dan never mentions when he didn’t want to be pruned of a sprig here or there,

  he wanted to die but they wheeled him howling into the operating theater anyway.

  Together we can almost cobble together

  a single shadow.

  • •

  Short-staffed hospital called in a local seamstress to close you up. She did terrific work. What embroidery! (A nightmare) I wake to see

  3/4 of a guy named Dan listening to the Sermon on the Mount on his iPod read by James Earl Jones. The tannic yellow of the wound through the bandages is making me sick, Dan Wethercot says. Morrell brings me Baudelaire: I felt all the beaks and all the jaws. Maria Hamilton prays to God to wipe the hard drive and restore me to my original settings. Clive sings “Humpty Dumpty.” It’s so zeitgeisty to be disabled right now, Louise Bozowic says. Disabled is the new gay, Marc Jeffrey agrees. This slew of awestruck next of kin carried in on gusts of pity don’t shrink back but press their faces close and look at me as if I’d died long ago, sometime in prehistory. I thought I was disfigured beyond recognition but everybody calls me by name. Tells me how brave I’m being. Meaning I am not clutching at their shirtsleeves begging them to smother me with a pillow. Stella’s head on my lap, Mimi holding my hand, Liam smiling kindly, Doc Castle jabbering, Morrell patting my foot, Dee Franklin drawing a picture that Morrell compares to Géricault’s portraits of the insane. Mimi stands on a chair, taking photos. I tell her it’s dangerous in a hospital lest the flash go off in a surgeon’s eyes. Elliot phones: Genesis 9:2. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Stella helps Clive make a papier-mâché leg for 3/4 of a guy named Dan. I’d love to use you in an installation, Frank Rubinstein says. One day we will grow a kidney from your own cells and transplant it without fear that your body will reject it, Doc Castle assures me. He seems to think a person won’t reject himself. I shout, Doc, you don’t know me like I do!