The Babysitter at Rest
Page 6
“Cry for my little penis, you stupid fucking bitch,” he says, maybe playing one of our old sex games. He continues to work on a scene of himself in a matador’s costume with a crown of marigolds atop his head, several slayed bulls at his feet. I cry for the painter’s little penis. I’ve been told I could have been a professional mourner had we lived in a society that allowed mourning. I wink at the small penis as I cry, letting it know we are playing a game.
“Do not tease me,” the painter says.
“This is no tease,” I tell him.
“I remember you,” the painter says. “I have loved great women: French women, Mexican women, blonde women, spiritualist women. You can get lost in a spiritualist pussy for hours. You were not one of the greats partly because your looks are average, but primarily because you did not bed other great artists—painters or writers or sculptors or anyone great. That may have affected my ability to become a great artist myself.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Did you ever have babies? When we were lovers you painted ghost babies in carriages.”
“No, I did not,” he says. “The great love of my life with whom I wanted to have children left me because of the penis.”
“I still have a scar from where you burned me with a cigarette,” I tell him. I show him the scar beneath my armpit. “This is lasting and I cherish it, though I quit smoking some time ago because of the Surgeon General’s warning and an accidental wildfire. I don’t recall what your penis felt like inside of me. You went down on me a few times, but only in the early hours of the morning and only when I wore white cotton underwear. We drank opium tea together. You said you did not want to corrupt me.”
“You were so dumb,” he says. “Your pubic hair had not come in at twenty-two years of age. Your nipples were the most nascent pink; I’ve never been able to recreate the right color with my paint. Now I am confined to this chair because I was consumed by thoughts of fucking when I was supposed to be a devout Buddhist. I had taken certain tantric vows that I reaffirmed and broke daily over a six-year period. It turns out there’s a price to pay—I’ll remain on this stool for twice that length as punishment.”
“I’m dying,” I tell him. The painter continues to paint.
“If you want me to paint your deathbed scene, I’m afraid that ship has sailed. After that artist from Chino got famous for his deathbed scenes, it kind of ruined it for me.”
“Do you watch these tapes to pass the time?” I ask.
“The only one that works is VG & G: A Love Story. Luckily it’s my favorite film. The scene where Gauguin and the ghost of van Gogh have a threesome with the fourteen year old Tahitian girl is my favorite part.”
“We watched this once, together,” I tell him. I stroke his oil paint beard. “You looked in the mirror behind the television as we watched. You painted your self-portrait while you masturbated onto my asshole.”
“That very portrait hangs in my gallery. I captured my image at the moment of ejaculation perfectly. The gesture is a great artistic accomplishment. My own image is all I paint now.”
Upon the field, near the field goal, there is a small three-walled, roofless gallery in which dozens of self-portraits of the painter are hung. All of them are in his style, none of them great. My IV bag has emptied of fluid and has started to draw blood into the bag. The painter tells me he must get back to work.
I say goodbye to the painter and return to the hospital through the empty strip mall dentist offices. Back in my half room, the roommate moans.
I have always been an insomniac and in this place there is much to think about in the early hours of the morning. I think of the ways I am trying to become a more self-aware or fully-realized person, for harmony. If I am honest with myself, there was always a limit to my potential. If I am honest with myself, any man will fuck you if you let him masturbate onto your asshole. If I am honest with myself, I don’t know what I did with all or any of my days. If I am honest with myself, it is a relief. Angel food cake is my favorite food. Nothing was as good as I’d wanted it to be. I have always had an adulterous mind and as a result would not make a good wife. I prefer the missionary position but only in cases where the man is much, much larger than myself, more like a giant than obese, and smothers me to a point where I cannot breathe and begin to lose consciousness. If I am honest with myself, I only think about sex for the fantasy of attention or obliteration rather than pleasure.
Over the next week I am wheeled about the hospital. Early one morning, before sunrise, I am wheeled into the MRI room and lifted onto the bed of the machine. The operator talks to me through the speaker.
“Just relax,” he says.
“I am relaxed,” I say.
“Relax further,” he says.
“How?” I ask.
“Breathing.”
“I am breathing.”
“Kegels,” he says. I do some kegels.
“I’m done,” I say.
“More,” he says.
I only pretend to do more.
The operator plays Béla Bartók through the speakers. “This will take quite a while,” he says. But all things here take quite a while.
On a rainy day I’m brought to a room marked Gynecological Exploration and laid on a flat table, then strapped down. The table is adjusted with a crank to a ninety-degree angle so that my pelvis and legs are raised. “Hydrosonogram,” a doctor tells the room full of students. My hospital gown is lifted to my breasts and forceps are inserted into my vagina. “Vaginal probe,” the doctor says. I feel a cold metal rod enter me. “Come have a look,” the doctor tells the students. The students approach wearing headband flashlights. “An unusual vaginal cavity,” someone says. “Crystal-like stalactites,” says someone else. “Curious,” I hear someone say. “This is my first uterine cavity,” a voice, somewhat excited, comments. “This is my favorite uterine cavity,” says another. A catheter is placed up my uterus and then I feel a balloon-like apparatus being inflated. “More solution,” the doctor says. The balloon gets larger. I feel my uterus may explode. “My uterus is going to explode, or is it my cervix?” I say. The crowd laughs. After I am lowered and unstrapped, my hospital gown placed in its original position just below my crotch, the students shake my hand. One slips me his number. Another has a visible erection through his coat while he pulls diaper-like underwear over my pelvis. “Heavy bleeding may occur,” he tells me. I can’t be sure, but I think I’ve been here, in the hospital, at least a few weeks. I think of my cat, of my apartment, for which I do not have this month’s rent. Maybe I can make a credit card payment to my landlord over the phone in case they find a diagnosis, antidote, or cure for my condition. Maybe my cat has found a new home.
Following a seventeenth X-ray in as many days I am placed in an armless body cast in the room marked Casting, Mummification & Other. The doctors, having looked over all of my previous X-rays and test results, think it’s the best thing. “We can’t be certain, but all of your bones are broken,” a doctor tells me. “Had any falls down large staircases or out windows of tall buildings? Maybe hit by a truck? Brutally beaten with a cast iron pan or a brick?” The casting takes twenty-four hours during which time I watch the local channel’s Old Interviews with Great Locals marathon. A woman in a light pink cape, hair done in a large bun that resembles a mushroom cap, who excels at beginnings though she is great at all points in a process, speaks to a host. “Begin in time,” she says. “The place to start is always clearly defined by a first action.”
In the Psychiatry & Other wing I’m wheeled into a large room with heavy orange carpets and brown furniture. The attendant locks the brakes on my bed. An egg-shaped, balding man with a large beard and a high-pitched voice sits behind a desk writing notes in a ledger. “Your history,” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“A depressive personality, fear of open spaces, unprovoked crying spells, extreme self-doubt, and a nervous heart, as evidenced by your recent test results.”
“Yes,” I say.
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“Was your mother this way?”
“She was, though I’ve never been as bad as her.”
“Your condition could be entirely psychosomatic,” he informs me, “much like your mother’s fear of dying on an operating table.”
“She did die on an operating table,” I tell him.
“According to the records, she told everyone in the hospital she was going to die on that table. It was labeled suicide by self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“My mother committed suicide?”
“We feel you may as well. I subscribe to the notion that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, primarily where flaws are concerned.”
“I’d like to know your lifetime accident and mishap history,” a new doctor says while sitting upon my bed. He has a tape recorder and microphone with him to interview terminal cases regarding lifetime accidents and mishaps for an art film he’s making using patients as subjects. He tells me he gets actors to reenact the histories of patients, films them, then projects all the films at once, each story crossing over onto other screens and stories, culminating “in a symbolic and actual orgy between all characters/patients/actors.” The artist/doctor says his project, titled The World as Will and Representation and the Desire for Penetration, stems from his observation that all of life is the pursuit of wish fulfillment and wish fulfillment is inherently always sexual in nature. “Genesis of the accident or mishap stems from thwarted wish fulfillment as a result of our Puritanical lineage,” he tells me. “The accident or mishap operates as a valid event or precursor for the action of ill fortune in hopes we may end our suffering and inability to achieve fulfillment through events following the accident—embarrassment, illness, death—rather than allow our desires to surface or act upon them.” I am incredibly flattered an artistic and medical person would want to use me for his film. The artist/doctor tells me he’s an artist over a doctor and that there are so few artists who are actual doctors it makes him unique amongst his contemporaries. “I refuse to limit myself; self-censure through limitation in both action and imagination due to societal rules, expectations, or familial upbringing is the direct cause of the tragedy of the individual,” he says.
Because of my condition, I’ve been assigned a religious counselor. “I’m here to offer you the assistance you may need to make peace before your time comes,” the religious counselor says.
“Once, my friend and I made a girl with cerebral palsy drink a concoction of coke, spit, and fire sauce,” I tell him. I have always liked the idea of confession. I’d like to be forgiven.
“I’m not a priest,” he says.
“Another time, with some neighborhood kids, we made an older boy with Down’s bike over broken glass on his training wheel bike. It popped his tires and he cried. Everyone laughed. I pretended to laugh so no one could tell I was crying. But maybe everyone was crying.”
“I’m more accustomed to general conversation topics like ‘What happens to the soul?’—to which I answer things like ‘What do you think?’ And then I sit and listen or give that impression.”
“What do you think happens?” I ask. My mother taught me to be accommodating to everyone at all times, but especially to people with roles and titles. The religious counselor walks to the window and stares out at the brick wall.
“I think there’s extreme fear and then nothing,” he says. “Blackness. Out like a light.”
“So make it count?” I say.
“There is a lot of pressure to do things,” he says. “What did you do with your life before your illness?”
“Nothing,” I say.
The religious counselor clears his throat and stands next to the window looking onto the brick wall. “You are not given much time,” he says, his back to me, his tone taking on a stage quality. “And then you realize things too late, of course, and the time that remains is not enough time to actively change anything, to build anything, to do anything differently, better.” He turns toward me and looks in the near distance, his eyes not quite focused on the curtained partition. “You are left with the knowledge that things could have been done differently, better. There was no need to panic. Or worry. Or manipulate. Or despair. You could have tried. You could have worked hard. But mostly you could have done things differently, better,” the counselor says. He looks at me, smiling. “How was that delivery?” he asks, his voice returning to normal. “Those are the lines in a local play I’m auditioning for.” “Very convincing,” I say. I think he will get the part. “Do me a favor and fill this out.” He leaves a survey atop my body cast. The first question asks, Did our Religious Counsel leave you with a sense of comfort and security as regards your passing? On a scale of one to five, five being “strong sense” and one being “no sense at all,” I check five. Out like a light.
I must be bathed so I am removed from my body cast in the Sanitation wing. My body is shriveled and weak. My ribs, protruding, and my wrists, so thin, are somewhat beautiful. The nurse informs me I’ve been diagnosed with auto-pregnancy, which she says has nothing to do with the fact that I’m dying. My uterus stores sperm then fertilizes an egg every month. “Like an internal sperm bank,” the nurse tells me. She explains that there is sperm inside me from every man I’ve ever slept with so the father of the potential fetus could be any one of them at any given time. The nurse informs me that I miscarry early on each pregnancy. “Maybe that’s why I feel a great sense of loss at all times,” I say to the nurse. “Maybe,” she says. When I’m put back in the body cast I paint babies in the likeness of all the different men I’ve slept with upon my chest, stomach, and thighs. The night nurse, with a cherub print on her scrub shirt, enters my curtain while I paint with my nightlight on. “How cute!” she says. I tell her I am painting my sons. Over the hospital’s loudspeakers they play the recording of a hurricane that’s recently been released as an album and is number one on the charts. Static. Wind. No voices.
On the local news it shows my neighborhood, destroyed by the hurricane. People sit on top of crumbled buildings playing music from solar-powered radios and eating bagged lunches that have been dropped from helicopters. The camera pans by what looks to be the remains of my old building. It has burned to the ground. A newscaster interviews a neighbor who told me, one day when I was returning home from the grocery store, that he’d like to wiggle his thumb around in my ass. The reporter asks my neighbor about the content and quality of the bagged lunches provided by the Nation. “Baloney sandwich. Peanut-butter crackers, the orange kind. A Jell-O cup, blue. It’s pretty good.” My neighbor gives a thumbs-up, wiggles it.
My newest diagnosis from the psychiatrist is prolonged sexual fantasy. He gives me a sustained wink and then unzips the long crotch of his polyester pants, keeping his penis below the desk. He masturbates in his leather chair then comes onto a little rubber asshole he grabs from the top of the desk. When he is finished I am wheeled back to my room.
The artist/doctor comes to visit me. He comes to visit me often now. He brings me new paints and brushes for my body cast in order to encourage my attempts at creativity. He looks over my chart and makes a few notes in his art notebook. He’d like me to elaborate on one of the accident and mishap recordings he’s been listening to with the actresses, about the time I split a fellow student’s lip in an outburst of anger after I’d found him eating candy from my backpack. It was an accident because I’d not intended to split the boy’s lip. He’d had to get stitches. The artist/doctor wants to know more about the moment when I’d decided upon violence, so the actresses might better understand the scene.
“Were you angry?” he asks. The artist/doctor pats the hairs that stick out from the hard cast covering my head.
“I suppose I was. But mostly I think it was sugar addiction.”
“You loved sweets,” he says. “You were afraid of not having candy.”
“It would’ve been easy to buy more. Fifty cents.”
The artist/doctor brushes the breasts of my cast. It is somewhat loving.
“I haven’t been eating,” I tell him, mostly because I am hungry. “The hot sauce burns my mouth and throat.”
“I hadn’t guessed an eating disorder, but it’s quite clear now that anorexia can be added to your diagnosis. And bulimia, going by your rotting teeth. There’s no telling how wasted away you are under that cast. We’ll reprogram you for that in the Sleeping Room, too. It should only take about ten days with both programs.”
The artist/doctor comes to visit me before I’m to go to the Sleeping Room. I tell him I’m afraid of sleeping for ten days with the messages of the psychiatrist playing in my ears, that the psychiatrist’s egg shape is unnatural. The artist/doctor rubs the legs of my cast. He offers to paint symbols on my cast to protect me from anything harmful. “I’ve been dabbling in shamanism,” he says. “I excel at everything I do and the shaman thing is proving to be no exception.” I am impressed. “I have never excelled,” I say. He describes ridding a neighbor’s home of her ex-stalker’s spirit. “The stalker was a former friend of my neighbor, a woman who had been breaking into her house and sitting on her couches, looking over her bills, reading her personal journals, and placing her genitals on various household items while my neighbor was at work. The stalker later committed suicide and made a point of haunting my neighbor. I made a powder of conch shell, lily of the valley, white sage smoke, and a guard dog’s saliva, put it in all the windows, at the doors and then, at the stroke of midnight, read from journals of the stalker/haunter/deceased that I’d picked up at the estate sale in front of the stalker’s house. I chose especially poorly written and embarrassing passages so as to shame her. At first it made the spirit violently angry; she smashed mirrors, threw electronics in the toilet. I then said a few incantations and she left, just like that. I banished her to a realm in which she will never stop aging and never complete any work—she was a struggling playwright. Perhaps it was a cruel sentence. I’ve since become sexually involved with my neighbor, though I’m unsure about the ethical boundaries of shamanism. I assume it is like most things; rules are in place, but made to be ignored.” The artist/doctor/shaman uses gold paint from my palette to paint various circles, triangles, polygons, and cycles of the moon on my cast. He paints an eight-pointed star on my third eye. “Strength,” he says. “Infinity,” he says. “All things are nothing but manifestations of being,” he says, spitting on my forehead. I look at his work on my cast with pleasure. I have always wanted to be protected.