How Long Have I Been Away?

Right now I feel my skull descending against the heel of my hand and I listen to the unending drone of the I. V. pump issuing fluid into my veins, mixing with the blood, carrying my blood through my cursed body.

This is where I sit now, the Infusion Services part of the hospital, where most patients come for their chemo treatment--a club of patients, here, in which I feel I am an invading impostor, pretending to be sick. Yet, my problems are real, and need some sort of explanation, because there is no name for my little problem, nor title, only misunderstood, even by my personal doctor.

This morning, when I walked in here, everything that is wrong with me, is wrong with me. This leg straining under David Smith’s overturned log truck. These unrecognizable intestines. They are compressed from within, in varieties of sections like a dozen overused prophylactics, braided together in places and shanked in rubber bands and stretched out to Size Flabby in other places. These guts, they plead with an effort to prolapse, to perforate, to surface and I am so often reaching over for a fetal coexistence with it. I am in a stupor of dreams and shaking because of a lack of the simple water in my head and in my heart because these alien intestines refuse to absorb and I feel not awake or I am as a drunkard, here, and all things looks dusted and shimmering, a crowd to my brain cells crushing in to strangle even these, my thoughts.

To myself I argued with resistance, to take another tablet, maybe fifteen, of these narcotics. I have waited long and in fear of the dependence it has brought me, my anxiety’s thirst, or my pain’s dominance. I can distinguish both and separate fools these are, competing, shouting. One hammering never to dullness. The other really is like an anxiety with voice. I can feel it in my muscles and tendons, aching, I hear it. And for some strange reason it crawls down my back and into the tissues of my buttocks to pick me up and walk me along and down the vinyl covering of this reclining chair. And I ask my buttocks, why he thinks he needs these narcotics. Isn’t it enough that my guts above you are in need and that leg below you? And my head aches to give its complaint to all the other parts. And so I finally give in to all the noise of pain.

Still here, now calmed, pain dampened. Always, I am confronted by the background sounds of this hospital I’ve long lived in; this second home I’ve returned to, all my years. Next to my head is the familiar running of the I. V. pump. Its music plays on in a never ending set of two notes with an unusual time signature of 3/3; one quarter A Sharp, followed by a whole note in some low C. I have asked myself why it is a comforting sound. I do not know why I am comforted by this, this genre of Industrial Rock(?) Maybe it means I am still on, still working, still Rockin’. Today it will play until I am refilled. Today I am here for a three hour song. At other times I’ve been here for a week of this music--three times this year.

Still here, and more sounds. I can listen to the murmur of talk near and in the halls and discussions of vital life sustaining decisions shared and the trivial things of lunch or planet. Somewhere is a television playing. Always, the acoustics of hospital hallways can bounce a show out of one room, down the hall, and into my room and underneath from under the bed. Sometimes I will close my eyes and listen to the show in progress, my ears rubbernecking the floor, decoding the echo of voices and song. This morning I can make out a show with incessant voices, funneled, exacting syllables in which a male voice is barking every word. I think it is from a different time. The laughing is different; newer somehow; more like a laugh of novelty rather than today’s laughter of jaded and expected boredom. I must conclude we are watching a television comedy from the 50s.

Still here, now two bottles of I. V. Fluid. I mentioned to my I. V. Therapist, “I didn’t know I have been unconscious this whole time.” I am think of the past week, maybe three. Have I really been this dehydrated? It always amazes me how dehydration creeps up from behind and snatches from you your life force. How long have I been away?

 

Under Light and Shade.

 
My Rose, my Wife. She has today suggested threats of leaving me; unless, every day, I put the junk I write out there. And since I am still obsessed with her, such dread is a gun to my left temple, “Okay, okay, I’ll do it. Hey, don’t push that thing. It hurts.”

Here’s my angle on things: Last night took its time with me. I laid here so tired and in pain, so full of thought. At Two in the am I gave in to one of those Phenergan. Works great for nausea, but it also puts you to sleep for too long. Somewhere, I slept. I did awake at times--when Rose got up. I told her I would rise with her, to do anything she needed. I then, I think, heard her say I should go back to sleep, to which I said, I’m sorry, to which she told me to not be sorry, with an insistence she was sure of. I was back to sleep in seconds.

Into the morning and afternoon I slept; waking for moments of drink and pee. Regretful of the time, I came to life and it was somewhere around three in the afternoon.

When later my Rose came home to rush through the packaging and card-writing campaign for Joe--our cool friend in Eureka--to get it on a truck by night. At the Post Office, they told Rose that for ten bucks it would get there the day after Joe’s birthday; for thirty they could guarantee that it would arrive the day after Joe’s birthday.

This was also the subject of sleepless thought. Rose had written a letter that pushes the envelope and out. What was once unknown has now been revealed. But what has been shown? What has not been told? Words and their telling can sound off in a multiple of tones in a single sentence. If it is not exact or the declination off by a degree, the target gets missed.
When the words are put down and sent away, not yet to be read but apart from the one who, in pain, writes it; how can we know the immediate response--how the reader’s eyes can transform one reflection of static motion into the same but different light. Or the muscles of their face configure in their own defined terms, communicating phases and phrases they themselves do not know...

...And I lost it at configure. That full-on jaded thought faded when I walked away. Later. Now. I picked up this put down, the paragraph ending in, know... now, maybe three hours later. I don’t know if it is gone or if it is retrievable. This tells me I must remain, entangled to the notion I was writing. To drop it and run to anything else is to perform harm, to warp the reflection, make what was to be into some other thing, now not the same; flogged, crippled, deformed... what was first whole and lovely of itself become something new, of its own beauty, where the flaws cease to be flaws, become a perfection all its own and ought to be. And now I look at it. It is sitting there under light and shade.