Now (Remnants)
When the car hits, it’s not true that you don’t feel it right away. You definitely do. First you’re walking across the street at two or three miles per hour and next you’re hit by a hulking mass of metal travelling approximately ten to twenty times faster than you; good old sturdy, union-made, American-manufactured automobile. Ford something-or-other. Thankfully a sedan and not an SUV or pickup. But you absolutely feel it. The bone break, impact on muscle, skin tearing on the asphalt, head bounces and you’re sure you have a concussion. Your teeth involuntarily clench and your ears pop and then ring like you’ve been standing front row at a rock concert, speakers and amps pulsating in your face. Strangely enough, it’s your teeth that hurt the worst. You’re sure you broke a tooth, lost a filling somewhere, and your eyes scan the ground quickly. You’re low enough to discern metal and glass from tooth fragment, jaw resting on the cold road. There are footsteps, first slow then fast, running speed. A voice or perhaps multiple voices ask “Are you ok” or some similar variation of a question that need not be asked in this situation. As if a pedestrian who was “ok” would voluntarily lie flat on the street along the raised arterial median, staining the pavement with black blood. The blood trickles in irregular patterns, mixing with glass shards and metal fragments, creating some kind of real-time performance art piece. It would make a good album cover, you think, but only for music of appropriate intensity and heaviness; atonal guitars and tribal rhythms. The glass sparkles in the low cold sun; like broken teeth in a bad dream. Someone tells you that help is on the way and asks if you are in any pain.
And that’s the truth of it there. And it’s the only thing that exists. You can feel the pain, but not articulate it. The human vocabulary lacks the language to properly communicate the essence of pure soul-killing pain. Sure, you could verbalize it in simplistic animalistic grunts of “fuck” and “shit”, and perhaps an extra, emphatic howl of “fuck,” but to verbalize anything at this point would only serve to acknowledge the pain and recognize its all-consuming power over you. You see the bone through skin, somewhere near your knee, and sure, it hurts like fucking fuck. But you need not grant it this glorification. And besides, you’re pretty sure your teeth are broken and speaking would not be wise, mouth filled with blood and saliva and rock.
You taste metal, like a mouthful of pennies. Your vision is blurry and then it is clear and then it’s blurry again. The paramedics ask you what your name is. It’s not important. There is tremendous commotion; all this drama and manpower for one person with one mangled leg and a few broken teeth. It all seems like too much; you want to be left alone with your thoughts and your pain. The cold hard ground is brutally comforting on your face, like an endless unforgiving icepack. The bartender is there, kneeling beside you, holding a gin and tonic to your lips and pouring it into your mouth gently. The alcohol burns your wounds and it is good. It distracts from the almost certain compound fracture in your leg. She leans down and whispers in your ear “Nobody loves you but me” and you know this is true. This is the truest declaration ever spoken to you. Her mouth filled with honey as it drips into yours. It tastes sweet and it tastes of wine and regret.
Before (Context)
The bartender stops the music. It’s two in the afternoon and the lunch crowd has dispersed. Only me and a couple other patrons occupy the barstools. But it’s still jarring when the music suddenly cuts out after the latest in a string of recent pop hits, punctuated by auto-tuned vocals and EDM bass drops. The bartender is scrolling through something on her phone, some carefully curated playlist of her own, and now that the bar is her domain for the rest of the afternoon, no longer burdened by the need to placate the paying clientele with familiar musical trivialities, she is prepared to assert her dominance through the power of song. She smiles, satisfied, and sets down the phone on the bar near a bottle of Whistle Pig Rye. After a delay of two or three seconds, the speakers begin blaring “Second Guessing” and then “Letter Never Sent” by R.E.M, back-to-back off the 1984 album Reckoning, and it almost brings me to tears. I ask the bartender to marry me. She asks if I want another shot of the usual and a beer. I do.
There is a burning in the pit of my stomach that can only be doused by another drink. She sets the whiskey down forcefully on the coaster in front of me, spilling a little on the bar and not bothering to wipe it up, and when I drink it I feel it burning all the way down, corroding my esophagus and stomach lining, metastasizing future cancerous polyps; malignant, benign, whatever.
The bartender will marry me and we will live together in peace and harmony on the beach until we die, not in the darkened bar on a derelict corner in February Chicago. Our hearts will be filled with joy and our lungs filled with song as we wave to strangers from a slowly moving parade float, celebrating our lives. Our love will be public, sharp, and dangerous. Ticker tape and razor blades. It will spark fires; spontaneous combustion, self-immolation. I see us dancing in slow motion, surrounded by flames and cheering friends. Our future is clear and inviting and inevitable.
“Nobody loves you but me!” I shout to the bartender, making myself heard above the music and other clamor. She hears me and pretends not to, face buried in her phone, but I see a poorly suppressed wry smile and I know she knows it’s true.
Later (Convalesce)
The bartender notices a handprint on the inside of the stainless-steel elevator door at the hospital. It’s the size of a child’s hand, larger than an infant, probably pre-school age. The handprint is three-quarters of the way towards the top of the elevator door, higher than a child with hands that small should be able to reach. She wonders how it got there. There’s probably a reasonable explanation. All hospitals are nothing but reasonable explanations; living, breathing, eating, dying, all reduced to basic measurements and advanced biometrics. Saline drip; clotted blood; urine burn; latest issue of People magazine in the lobby. Hospitals have mechanisms for calculating and quantifying any essential component of life and death. There is no mystery associated with anything in a hospital; only rational conclusions, supported with charts, graphs; numbers on a sheet of paper. Predictability and patterns. Everything sterile, austere, anesthetized.
In the ICU, he’s unconscious, barely there. There’s an IV going into his right arm. There’s a catheter emptying his bladder. His eyes are black and purple and swollen shut. His skin is a sickly jaundiced yellow. There are tubes in his nose, held there with tape, which appear to contain some brown colored fluid and it is not clear whether this liquid is flowing out of his or flowing in. It doesn’t matter – neither scenario seems promising. He’s on a ventilator, unable to breathe on his own, and a large breathing tube is shoved in his mouth. It’s clear that most of his teeth are missing, mouth forced open by the breathing tube. There are 27 stitches across his forehead and another 12 across his chin. The right side of his head is shaved and there’s a large bandage covering the area where they removed the portion of his skull to alleviate the brain swelling. There are wires everywhere hooked up to machines that persistently and predictably beep and click, the air filled with the soft mechanical hum of these medical apparatuses, forcing life into a broken body.
It’s a bright and sunny day outside, but the shades are drawn and an oppressive and claustrophobic darkness envelops the room, choking the daylight. The machines record seemingly every bodily function. There are numbers on the screen recording blood pressure and pulse and the functioning of his punctured lungs. Jagged lines, a random feed of flat valleys and sharp peaks, appear along the screen transmitting the continued viability of various organs. There’s a certain rhythm to the many beeps and clicks emanating from the devices, it’s nearly poetry, its subtle cadence almost comforting. The air is dry and the room feels cold one moment and then it feels stiflingly hot.
A doctor checks vitals, clipboarded and white-coated. He smiles wanly at the bartender.
“He’s still extremely critical. We’ll have to see if he stabilizes.” He begins walking toward the door and turns around, as if suddenly remembering something. “What’s your relationship to the patient?”
She pauses, thinking how best to answer this question. “Toxic,” she replies.
The patient’s wallet is on the nightstand next to the hospital bed. She picks it up and opens it. There’s nothing inside but a business card reading
“If you are holding this card, I apologize for my behavior on the night of ______________.”
Insert date here
Now, Again (Reckoning)
The bartender is vaguely aware of the sirens and flashing lights outside the window, but she’s too busy serving craft beers and bourbon shots to the buzzing happy hour crowd, growing larger the closer it gets to five o’clock. It’s not until a few minutes later, when she goes outside for her fifteen-minute break to smoke a cigarette, that she sees the man laying on his back on the pavement, paramedics attending to him, stabilizing his mangled leg. She knew him once, more than she ever cared to. She hasn’t seen him in years, when he used to frequent the bar, when she made decisions that she would later regret, her naivete exploited by his charm and judgment rendered questionable by cheap tequila. Does he even know the damage he’s done? The split lip, scraped fist, bursting into tears at all times of day and night. Therapy helped for a while, then it didn’t. “Years off my life…” she thinks to herself. She takes out her phone and begins loudly playing “South Central Rain” by R.E.M. as she approaches him at a determined pace, feeling truculent and pugilistic. A police officer steps between her and the man to stop her as she gets close, but when he sees the look of bewilderment and recognition on the man’s face, he steps aside and lets her pass. She crouches next to the man, and when the R.E.M. song stops playing, she holds her phone to the man’s face, playing a wedding video. Slow dancing, hand holding, formal attire. “Remember this?” she asks. His eyes are wide with terror and agony as he looks at the screen. “Remember this…” she says, this time more of a command than a question. The man begins trembling and then convulsing, foaming at the mouth, arms and legs twitching uncontrollably, until he vomits on the pavement and passes out. Confetti floats through the air around them like snowflakes, like ash from some nearby, unseen fire. The ground is freezing cold and the heat in the wind is unbearable and the confetti is serrated. The gathered crowd of onlookers sings oblivion hymnals in solemn ceremony, witnesses to this little obliteration ritual. “Nobody loves you but me” she whispers to him.
