You open your eyes in the present tense. You’re looking at white acoustic tiles, gray curtains hanging from a track, an upside down view of a computer monitor with craggy green squiggles and big blue numbers that refresh every second or so. There’s the vague hum of electronics, far-away voices. You’re in a hospital bed. Gray plastic, gray metal objects fastened to the one wall that’s not a curtain; tubes and wires, a chrome stand with dangling latex bags. You raise your left hand to feel a sharp pull against the hairs on your arm where the needle in your vein is sloppily taped. A white plastic cap encases your index finger.
The curtains part at the foot of the bed and a woman bursts in. “There you are!” she says in a loud whisper.
This is a wide and enticing smile you’re unfamiliar with.
“Poor baby,” she says as she pulls the curtains shut again. “I had to tell them we’re married. Can you imagine, Neville? They wouldn’t let me in.”
You’re looking closely at her face with its wasted, exuberant look. Of the three piercings, the silver ring in her lower lip is the one you most dislike and so this certainly must be Myrna. But it’s not. It’s a dream. Certainly. Because it’s not only Myrna, but Myrna surrounded by tiny people—the superimposition of tiny people in a bluish sort of light. You close your eyes intending to return to wherever you were before. Achondroplasiaphobia, is the word you pronounce in your mind, not even recalling what it means.
You reopen your eyes but the little people obstinately persist, arrayed across her shoulders—seven or eight of them. They hover there like guests at a cocktail party, sitting and standing, some obscured by other ones. On the right side of her head, a severe-looking monk sitting cross-legged, slightly levitated, twice as big in scale as the rest, scowling; a Japanese sort of monk you think, with a bald head, wearing a dark gray robe with long dangling sleeves. He stares right at you. And beside him, smaller than the monk, but not so small as the others, a pale dark-haired, bare-shouldered woman with a long flowy dress reclines on air, one pretty arm extended with her cigarette holder. She glances back at you with bored disaffection. Your eyes flit back and forth between them, and Myrna stops mid-sentence. She’d been effusing about something; the taxi driver, how they cleaned up the blood together, how he understood everything she was saying, how the world had been suddenly transformed, and— “Are you all right, Neville? Can you see me?”
“What’s going on, Myrna?”
“You had an operation. I’m sorry. Hasn’t anyone told you?” She pauses as if to swallow. “They took out your spleen.”
“Spleen?”
“They said you didn’t need it.”
Your face must have a peculiar look. It must show something that you do not mean because both the reclining movie star and the monk are laughing at you. Some of the others too—the ones who are paying attention—a woman in a red cap holding a pole with a head impaled on it, a prim young girl in a plaid skirt clutching a stack of books with skinny arms—they all look at you and laugh soundlessly. And seeing them, you have the strange sensation that, in the plurality of these figures, there is the same tenor, the same vibration that emits from Myrna herself—her severity and dreaminess, her dogmatism and pining sexuality. But the actual Myrna, in contrast—Myrna’s eyes at least—which are too big for her wasted face, are filled with concern beneath her vampy makeup.
“Neville?”
You don’t answer her, but with your left hand, the one without tubes, you touch your face that still seems caked with dried blood over the stubble of your beard.
“What drugs did they give me?”
“I don’t know. I can ask.”
You hear a voice from the bed beyond the curtain, the voice of a little girl, a voice so small it’s barely audible.
“Water,” the voice says. “Please. I need water.”
Myrna stands up. “Let me find a nurse, okay?”
But she barely turns when the curtains at the foot of the bed are flung open and, that very thing, an enormous nurse, a woman nearly as wide at the hips as she is tall, hemmed in by her pink uniform, with breasts that crowd the open neck of her blouse like a pair of kaiser rolls pushing out of the oven; the lanyard just long enough so that her identity badge dangles over the the pair of them to announce her coming: Destiny Hidalgo, RN.
“I just want to say, Happy Frickin’ Friday!” she nearly yells. “How is Mr Furman this morning?”
She’s looking at you with dark eyes and a waxy smile, but you can’t hold this view of her because her shoulders are crowded with tiny people too, all of them naked, fat and jolly like so many Renaissance putti, prancing, jerking off, rolling down her cleavage like children rolling in the snow.
You’re speechless, petrified by your insanity, while Myrna, who apparently can’t see this torrid bacchanal, is speaking to the nurse in a scolding tone.
“He didn’t even know,” she says, “About the operation!”
Ms Hidalgo laughs with her painted nails covering her breasts. “That’s because he was under, girl,” she says. “Of course he didn’t know they were sawing on him.”
“What kind of drugs is he on?”
“Nothing but Katorolac,” Destiny says. “He wasn’t rated high enough for morphine.”
“Water, please!” says the dry voice of the child beyond the curtain.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Nurse Hidalgo says as she rips open the curtains with a gigantic flourish like a real estate agent airing out a dank apartment on Saturday morning. First the one and then the other are swept aside—zzzzaaaaaashhhh—to reveal, along with the full tableau of the cluttered recovery ward, the bed next door where lies the prone body of a middle aged man with a mountainous and terrifically hairy belly, drenched in sweat with his blankets pushed down below his knees.
“Water!” he says in his childish voice.
“I already told you, Mister Punto, no liquids. Doctor’s orders.”
She’s standing in the space between you and him so that the miniature orgy is ongoing only a couple of feet from your nose. A bent-over cherub pulls its ass cheeks apart with stubby fingers offering it up to a line of waiting suitors. But your eyes travel down to Mr Punto’s stomach, at the summit of which stands a three-inch doppelganger of Al Capone in his wide-brimmed hat, smoking his tiny cigar.
What in the hell is happening to you?
You’re in a state of utter panic. Virtually everyone—the nurses, the technicians, the doctors who occasionally poke their heads through the curtains—appear with their own peculiar, individualized contingents of small-scale people who dance around their faces, loiter on their shoulders, ever so slightly translucent, like holograms of an unsteady blue light.
You’ve lost your mind, either from the blows of the shark fishermen, or as a side effect of drugs they gave you before or after your splenectomy. “Routine,” a doctor with what looks like four little accountants with adding machines on his shoulders tells you: a laparoscopy, no complications. All you can do is cover your face with your hospital-issue pillow when anyone comes near. You try not to look. You’re waiting for the drugs to wear off, for the insanity to fade away.
An attendant arrives to change the I.V. bag, the tube jostles the needle in your arm, and you open your eyes. They’re waving and pointing at you from the orderly’s shoulders like drunks on a party bus. You can’t hear them, though you can see they’re laughing. They play peek-a-boo with their hands, mocking you.
You ask for a mirror and Nurse Hidalgo lends you her compact with Destiny engraved in glass. You search your shoulders from every angle. Nothing. Of course you’re relieved, but it also feels like resignation. It’s strange you’re the only person. But then, you’ve always been alone.
It’s the third day and Myrna comes back again. She’s taken up with Sam, the taxi driver, or at least she’s trying to, and you stare intently at the ceiling while she talks. She does her best to amuse you from the plastic chair at the end of your bed, ignoring the pleadings of Mr Punto, who every few minutes demands water, diapers, sleeping pills, someone to take a message to his wife; always in the voice of a little girl.
“The stupid writers don’t know a semi-colon from their duodenum,” Myrna’s telling you, probably influenced by the hospital ambiance. “It’s the usual, Neville. A botch job of dangling modifiers, split infinitives, punctuation outside quotation marks like passengers falling off an ocean liner.”
You’re informed that the word, Biointerchangeable, wasn’t properly trademarked and now there’s a lawsuit against LaudanumPM and the agency’s going to cut staff to pay the lawyers.
“The ACD on BelStar is a very manly woman, Don’t you think so?” she asks you this while, just beside her ear, a sad-faced little boy hugging a toy sailboat stares out at you intently. “Everybody says she’s muff diving the Cleopatra Cat Food AAE. You know, Sheila Whats-her-name? They always close the door to her office…. She happens to be married to a very nice man, Neville. It’s embarrassing to see them massaging each other like that at status meetings. As if!”
“As if, what?” you ask.
“As if there are no consequences.”
“Are there consequences?”
Myrna just stares at you primly. The monk keeps hovering with his eyes closed. “The Google Underpants account is a train wreck,” she says as she scrutinizes her fingernails. “The spec was supposed to be in micropee and we had it in kilapoops. Every single communication—”
“What?” you ask.
“You know, the Google Underpants account.”
“Google makes Underpants?”
“They sync with the glasses,” she says.
You raise your head to look at her. “You’re shitting me, right?”
“Come on, Neville. Of course I’m shitting you.”
“You can see the temperature of your BM instantly though,” she says while the crowd on her shoulders laughs uproariously.
You let your head sink back down. You can’t make up your mind if you want her to stay or go.
“Look at that, Neville.”
“What?”
Three boxes, like kleenex boxes, the only bit of color in the room, with the fingers of purple gloves dangling from perforated cut-outs, hang from a rack on the one solid wall. Medi-Touch. Powder Free. Sin Polvo. One Size Fits All.
“Should the T in “Medi-Touch” be capitalized after the hyphen?” Myrna asks you.
“That depends on whether it’s a title or a compound adjective,” you say in spite of yourself.
“There’s my old Neville!” Myrna laughs.
“You’re in a good mood,” you say, edging yourself up in the bed, feeling a sharp little pull in your incision.
“I know. I’ve been in a good mood lately. Ever since you got beat up.”
“Glad I could help.”
“Not because you got beat up, Neville. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. It was the shark.”
“You keep saying that,” you say.
“Everything’s different now. I feel like that. I think I’m going to get my new book published.”
You don’t answer.
“I think I’m going to find love,” she whispers.
“Help me,” Mr Punto calls out.
“Good things can happen to you too, Neville!”
“I’ve had an erection for over four hours,” Mr Punto cries in his girlie voice.
You look from one side of her head to the other. The monk has his eyes shut, his face in a relaxed sort of frown. The movie star twirls her scarf so that her cigarette smoke takes on a curling spiral.
“Why do you say that, Myrna? What possible difference could it make?”
“There’s a power in the world that lurks beyond the obvious. I just know it,” she says, and as she says it, you see the monk open his eyes ever so slightly and a smile creeps onto his face.
“I know that. But what makes you think the power’s on your side?”
“I’ve been dreaming about the shark,” she says.
As you watch her, the woman with the red cap, who must have teleported in from the Reign of Terror, sneaks up behind the movie star and silently screams. The movie star, oblivious, tosses her scarf in the air and begins to dance languidly atop long prosthetic legs.
“I was wondering,” you say. “Was the shark still alive?”
“Absolutely! I saw her flip her tail as she slipped into the ocean.” She wiggles her skinny wrist. “It was beautiful.”
“Her?”
“I know she’s female. We dream of each other.”
You’re quiet for a minute. “It’s weird you have this thing about the shark.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a vegetarian.”
“I don’t know what that has to do with anything! I’m a vegan because I can be. Everyone should be—if they’re human.”
“Sharks are vicious.”
“Not as vicious as people. Look at your face, Neville. Your nose is broken. You have two black eyes. Do you even know? Humans are devils.”
“They say everything would heal up all right,” you say.
“You should stop eating garbage.”
“What?”
“You should stop eating garbage and thinking garbage,” Myrna says. The monk rises to his feet and crosses his arms. He points his chin at you and scowls.
“I have to go,” she says, standing up.
“Please change my diaper,” Mr Punto cries.
As if this were a signal, Myrna brushes some invisible crumbs from your blanket and backs away with a little wave, eyes averted, and disappears through the curtains.
I think my hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is kicking in.
Didn't you say this was a rom-com? My question of whether it could get worse for Neville has been answered. And I learned a new word. I also learned that another way to say achondroplasiaphobia is lollypopguildophobia.