2.

Tubes and cables branched dendritic from my arms, fingers, and face like plastic roots linking me to the sterile collection of stainless-steel furniture and clean plastic fixtures. My hands and arms, growing clear plastic tubes, were a patchwork of medical tape and clear plastic adhesives holding various ports and terminals in place. Free from the normal silver, steel, and chrome accoutrements of my familiar jewelry, my own body was suddenly foreign to me, adorned in sterilized plastic, vinyl, and rubber accessories, my limbs seeming to move of their own volition. Covered in a white cotton blanket I was a consciousness separate from corporeality. A woman in scrubs continued to ask me questions, although I didn’t know how long I had been answering.

“I am Andrew Thomas Cross. My birthday is eleven thirty nineteen seventy-six.” I was speaking even as I recognized the tattoo on the inside of my left wrist.  “I’m at Overlake Hospital,” I said. I attempted to sit up, but gravity and medication held me pinned to the bed. She wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my left bicep and gently pressed on my chest to keep me pinned into the hospital bed. “And do you know why you are here?” The cuff inflated, humming slightly. Another cuff on my right ankle inflated as well. The one on my bicep eased incrementally, clicking with each fractional release. The thing on my right ankle seemed to breathe. The answer floated up, an answer from some drug-induced magic eightball interface with the world, a triangle of apocryphal prophetic information rising through an inky liquid. “I broke my leg,” I said.

She recorded notes on her clipboard, checking numbers on the heart monitor.

“Where is Teresa?” I asked, trying to sit up again.

“Who is that?” she asked.

“The girl.”

“I’ll notify her that you are awake.” She finished recording the numbers on the heart monitor and removed the blood pressure cuff. “Just a few more questions, though.” She flipped through pages on her clipboard until she got back to the questionnaire. “Are you currently experiencing any hallucinations?”

I glanced around the room, still entirely remote from my reality. I had never spent much time in hospitals, and then, generally just to visit someone or to have my face stitched back together. I managed to avoid hospitals, churches and courtrooms for most of my life. I didn’t pop over the counter pills. I didn’t even like aspirin. I had no frame of reference for a place so pristinely clean and devoid of all character. There was no grime.

Years before, I overdosed myself on mind expansion and illicit street drugs. I did a few sheets of acid in a couple of weeks and snorted a few grams of pure MDMA off the corner of my desk to test its quality and finish an impossible manuscript. Without my second skin, however, there was no membrane to separate me from the sterility. I was essentially defenseless. Looking around the room for a hallucination, I was looking for colors, lights or sound. I was looking for the synesthetic synergistic combination of all three with a subconscious astral uplink to a wellspring of wisdom flowing from my pineal gland straight to the animus mundi. This place was entirely blank, but I couldn’t separate myself from it. “No. no hallucinations,” I said. The room was devoid of anything to hallucinate on.

“Are you hearing voices or unusual sounds?”

The room itself seemed to have an amniotic atmosphere of mechanical sounds. Compressors hummed to inflate the booty on my right ankle. The heart monitor beeped ever so subtly with each spike in my heart rate. The bed itself hummed with the impatience of a mechanical typewriter. Everything was plugged in and waited to be of use; plastic and steel surfaces designed to be easily sterilized after each use. From the hall I heard even more of the same distant alarms chiming, beeping sounds, buzzing sounds, humming unused electrical appliances that formed the unseen anaerobic soundscape of white noise which surrounded me. “No, I don’t think so.” I wanted to pull the tubes from my face and arms. I felt constricted, suffocated and lashed into this strange environment. “Can we call her now?” I asked.

“Call who?” She looked away from her screen for a moment, regarding me clinically.

My eyes were still crossed. I did not know or recognize this woman. She was something frozen in a semi gelatinous residue of various intravenous drugs; a sort of indelibly sterile collection of visceral data frozen in a clear limbic Jell-O mold reality. “The girl,” I said. I surveyed the selection of tubes and cables tying me down to my Gulliver’s travel bed of immobility. “My girl,” I said, just to clarify. There would be a lot of cords to yank to right myself.

“She’ll meet us on the way to your room.” She checked a box on the clipboard. “Are you sweating, or experiencing chills?”

Whatever drugs they had me on, they seemed to be the reason why I couldn’t separate myself from the whitewashed world around me. I felt nothing. It was not a numbness, but rather that my consciousness had become a dry vapor spread out through the room, spilling out into the halls. I was faintly aware of everything in my vicinity and entirely unconcerned with any of it. I was diminished to a sort of ultimate neutrality; reduced to a barcode and set of diagnoses. “No,” I said. “I feel fine.” That was really the only way to express it, not as a feeling at all, but as a lack of being.

“Please hold your arms out in front of you so that I can examine your tremors.”

I held my arms straight out in front of me, a mediocre specimen pinned to a gurney, prepared to dive from the depths of formlessness into an ambivalent oblivion.

“A little shakey,” she said.

“Yeah, well, see if they can send a cocktail waitress around.”

The nurse looked up at me, maybe for the first time and regarded me with a smirk. Maybe everyone here was against my rampant alcoholism, but I was guessing that they were all going home to a beer or a glass of wine after work. It’s easy to judge a guy who sweats forty proof, but I wasn’t exactly in a state of denial about my drinking habits, and I wasn’t in a position to judge anyone else on theirs. The only people I judge about drinking are those people who don’t drink at all. They scare the hell out of me.

Teresa met us in the hall as they rolled me out of the surgery recovery room. She still carried my blue plastic bag of peeled off personality and her own purse and book. She kissed my face and gave me her hand to cling to. Although neither of us would like to admit it, there is something innately stressful about being stuck in a hospital.

The surgeon’s warnings of death and dismemberment weren’t ignored, but we both had our strong faces on for each other. Ideally, we’d be climbing into bed, curling around each other, petting one another and cooing softly like proper primates grooming. Instead we were trapped in this brightly lit petri dish of an environment, ignoring the urge to escape this strange requisite passivity. A tech helped push me down the hallways, Teresa trailing behind, trying to stay out of the way. We eased into the elevator, squeezing another nurse or tech back into the corner. The bed itself took up most of the space. Whatever cocktail of drugs they had me on, it was enough to keep me subdued. I clung to her hand and quietly examined the tendrils of plastic tubing spreading from my body out to various destinations around the bed. The tech wheeled me down a short ramp and around a corner, down another hallway that was brightly lit, with a large nurses’ station to one side. I waved languidly, like a beauty pageant winner in a hometown main street parade. A few of the nurses waved back. I was high as hell.

The tech swung my bed around gently and backed us into the room. He bustled about, setting me up for my stay, plugging in various cables, flipping switches to reactivate the compressor that worked the neoprene booty on my right foot, checking the IV that ran over my right shoulder, supplying me with saline, antibiotics, and Dilaudid. The tech emptied my catheter bag and replaced it, filled a large plastic sippy cup with cold water and ice chips, and pulled a collection of controls onto the edge of the bed. The remote to the TV, a nurse call button, a console that adjusted the bed, a phone that dialed hospital staff directly or called the cafeteria to order meals for delivery. The tech made it clear that I wouldn’t be moving for a while. “If you need anything, anything at all, please push the call button.” He pointed to the big blue button with the generic genderless person icon on it. “If there’s nothing else that I can get you…” he backed towards the door. I glanced around at the collection of cables, chords and tubes binding me to my bed. I shook my head. “I think I’m all set.”

As high as I was, I had no idea what I needed. I hadn’t stayed in a hospital since I was a kid and back then, it was a CPS situation, not a severe injury. My brother and sister and I thought of our hospital stay more like summer camp. We weren’t seriously injured. We didn’t know why we were there. Crippled and laying pinned into a hospital bed, I was painfully aware why I was there. As the drugs started to dissipate, I began to recognize the clear tubes and cables that stretched from various parts of my body. An IV dripped saline over my shoulder. There were now two ports in my right arm. I had to assume that one of them was specifically for the Dilaudid they had injected me with. There was a cuff on my right leg that inflated and deflated periodically with a long tube running from that. I had an oxygen tube running into my nose. The catheter tube ran out of the end of my dick. A piece of medical tape held a sensor to my finger. Teresa watched the heart monitor blip. A wave of pain changed my pulse. She whispered softly in my ear to calm me down.

I pulled the white cotton blanket back from the framework bolted to my leg. The external fixator looked like something that I might have bolted to my motorcycle. Inch wide diameter aluminum shafts painted flat black, ending in bolts and ball joints, a framework of injection molded black plastic adorned in red wingnuts and various bits of chrome. It belonged to a motorcycle, bolted to the side like a luggage rack bracket, or possibly a cargo case brace. Instead, two pairs of 1/8 inch threaded bolts ran from a series of adjustable chrome bushings drilled through the plastic, set screws holding them in place, the bolts bored straight into my thigh and calf, the gauze gone bloody, but the bolts firmly anchored to my bones. The thigh muscle twitched and seized, grating against the threaded rod. The more it twitched, the more it hurt, and I could feel the post-operative pain medications wearing off.

“Just my luck,” I said.

She petted my head gently, watching the blip on the heart monitor slow as she relaxed me back into the bed. “What’s that, Baby?” I clutched the rail of the external fixator, acutely aware of the steel piercing my thigh. “I go to work on my motorcycle, and I’m the one who ends up with aftermarket parts.” The fixator did look like something that belonged on my bike, at least. “It might need a little rust, though.” I smiled, gritting my teeth. Her eyes flit briefly to the monitor and she squeezed my hand a little tighter. It was hard to mask my pain when she could follow the bouncing blip.