| IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW YOU FIGURE IT OUT
You can know a person a million different ways, which is an unnecessarily numerical way of saying you can never know a person. That is, if knowing means exhaustive understanding of how they exist. And so it goes that a person never knows themselves. I used to think I was a promising cartographer, for example, but found that maps annoy the hell out of me. Know this, but never think it, actually, try to forget it, I do—it’s all interpretation guided by neurosis through the erratic but cozy medium of electricity. God help you forget it.
So the people we meet, the experiences we have, even our own image in the mirror every morning are in this heaving voltaic sea. There’s so much floating around out there, all you can ever hope for is a chance to dock yourself from time to time to this or that flotsam.
I tied up to Joseph while lying in a hospital with a bad disease. I had had this bad disease for a long time, but now it was really bad so that I couldn’t walk around, even hunched over, and pretend life would go on as before. Joseph had a bad disease, too. I would say that Joseph’s was worse to make him feel better. Joseph would agree with me to make himself feel better. Having a bad disease, by the way, is an effective means of calming that sea I was talking about and concentrating on one little wavelet, or a certain pattern of sea foam, or a single bubble before it paps. Now, I’m going to tell you what I learned from my mooring to Joseph because it’s the most recent, occurred in the calmest waters, and I’ll be able to spout it off relatively quickly. You see, I have this feeling it’s close (I know it; that cold finger teasing the switch) and then I’ll have nothing left to tell, to you all anyway. So listen up.
He always kept himself propped on three pillows, the electric bed jacked up to its most acute angle, glowing white sheets tucked hard around him (how many times did I wake to his grunts, “Tuck it more!”?) His fingers were fat dollops that flopped like fish wherever they rested (some mild form of epilepsy?), usually on his glowing white lap. In the seemingly uncomfortable position in which he lay, or sat, as it were, his globe of a stomach held the two mounds that grew from his chest, all of it covered, graciously, by a mintgreen tunic.
He always had food in his beard, which I would have blamed on the nurses had I not seen Joseph several times take from the drawer of the table where he kept his books an Altoids tin, had I not seen him open this tin and take out a pinch of food, some creamy vegetable stored from the last meal, and patter it gently on his full brillo beard.
I often pretended I was sleeping. This is, by the way, your best chance of catching the world picking its nose. He did not know I had seen him. I don’t think he knew. I don’t believe he would have cared, though he may have pouted. Joseph was a child.
The food in his beard afforded him, of course, limitless sympathy from the staff and, before I knew about the tin, from me as well. I thought he may be vomiting on himself and was too proud to admit it by wiping from his beard the little that had escaped. For almost a month before I knew Joseph through the tin, in the increasingly groggy swaths of pain and pleasant drugs (spaced as the green of a baseball field in dark and light), I listened to his tedious natter because I pitied him, nodding, though it hurt tremendously, to let him know I was attentively listening.
“I was dishonorably discharged,” he told me, some brown gravy crusted, flaking from his white whiskers, “but that was a lucky break. First they said I would be court-martialed. And do you know what for?” His face, scrub-red, his teeth yellow, savagely curved in a mouth grey with age, “They said ‘conspiracy to overthrow the government’,” he laughed, wave against rock, some sea lions taking a direct hit, “Like I give a shit about the government. You know what it was really all about?” He waited, nostrils bull-wide. I tried using my head to motion, Yes, out with the answer, while I was thinking I didn’t give a shit and wanted more than anything another dose of morphine and a nap. But he wouldn’t take it. He just sat there, nostrils gulping air, gravy flaking to his mintgreen mounds, so that finally, with much pain, I said, “What?” “For hanging out with all the blacks,” the last letter a tire leak, he paused again to allow gravity its hold, “I was the only white guy in my platoon that smoked grass (bullshit), so I made friends with the dark meat. Sammy didn’t like that. By God he hated it. So, thwwit,” he jerked his thumb towards the window, “out on my ass. Not that I would have cared. Hell, I wanted out. But they had me in a goddamn five-by-five cell over there, crawling with rats, bucket for shit, trying to figure out what to do with me.” With a wheezing nostril laugh, he crossed his arms, “So much effort over little ole me. I was just trying to stay high, you dig?”
Oh, I dig, alright. Who doesn’t?
Joseph went on to tell me how they eventually threw him out with the dishonorable, apparently unwilling to spend any more effort on ‘little ole’ him, how he decided to stay in the jungle instead of taking the plane back, “Place was dead to me.” How, while traveling a river “the color of unpolished brass,” soldiers with automatic rifles assassinated crocodiles that lay motionless, their eyes and nostrils like malachite sinking into the water as the boat passed, then thrashing when the bullets stung them, turning on their backs and drifting away, bellies white as Christmas.
At first the stories fortified me, despite the pain progressively worsening. I had no one else to talk to. For the first week there were visitors every day—family from Georgia, friends from all over. But when obligations were felt to be served it dried up quickly, and there I lay without a soul but my own weak beam, the flickering of the staff’s like squares of car light sliding on darkened walls, and Joseph’s, before the Altoids tin, a 60 watt hanging in an old building, electricity like a tide, sometimes too bright or too dark, but most often a simple and comforting glow.
The tin, when it was how I knew Joseph, was worn in miniature around the neck of every word, clanking against their flaccid chests as they flew to me from his food-crusted mouth. He began to sound like a bad high-school band practice,
“And so I’m in the hospital in Crete, don’t know a word of Greek, and they’ve got me lying in the hall because there aren’t any beds left,” his arms spread wide, puffed, shaking from ignored weakness, smiling with the flakes of cream-of-asparagus falling like snow or dandruff. The nurse brings a wet rag with her now so she can clean him up. She does it with soft and sweet reprimands like all women must. He submits like a three-year-old. My nausea is now always close and this gives the last bit of squeeze to the trigger, which is why I put my vomit trench in my lap when I hear the squeaks of our sneaker-shod nurse approaching. And the nausea and vomit compound with an even deeper feeling of sickness, a root-sickness if you will, because I know they both, the nurse and Joseph, thought the vomiting was my pitiful cry for affection. Thought I was jealous Joseph was getting so much attention while I lay there clean and well-behaved. This was clear to me because while vomiting I kept an eye turned to them, observed through alimentary tears the mixture of contempt and pity at my brash and immature wheedling. But this wasn’t so. I didn’t want to vomit. It hurt like hell, and what good could it possibly have done? I didn’t even like the nurse. She had an odd smell about her, like over-onioned salsa, and reminded me of an old Bulgarian woman that used to live beside me, scowling from her open door every time I walked down the hall. I wanted to shout to the nurse, “Open his drawer and take out the Altoids tin. Look what he’s keeping in there. You’ve been had, lady,” but I couldn’t because Joseph had become an institution in this suffering of mine, regardless of his dishonesty, his disgusting pandering, my new loathing of him. I had already accepted the Joseph before the tin and he and tin-Joseph were here to stay until a collective one of us died.
When he wasn’t talking, Joseph kept himself busy reading self-help books, usually spiritually-centered trash with titles like Knock on the Door, Tomorrow’s Too Late: How to Harvest the Day, He’s the Boss, and an assortment of outdoors magazines in which he kept pages torn from some cunt-heavy pornography I assumed one of his visitors had brought him. Occasionally, he would take out a legal pad and pen and begin writing with his lips purposefully pursed and his free hand flopping away. I imagined it was, blowhard I took him to be, his memoirs, or perhaps some imaginative journal. He could have been keeping a detailed account of the progress of my disease (now certainly more advanced than his), noting days of particular suffering, skin color, sweating, pitch and duration of moaning, facial expression, frequency of bowel movement, etc., etc. This all taken for new stories to be used on the next conversational prisoner that, by fate and bad luck, would take my place.
But, for us, silence was now the standard. Without words, it had become apparent that we were waiting for the other to die. There was no real malice behind it, simply boredom. For those hours that followed death would be a welcome bustle followed by episodes of grief, nostalgia, congratulations, and a noticeable relaxation in paranoia. Unfortunately, neither of us enjoyed watching television, the only entertainment that could truly exclude the world around us (good thing; Strength knows we wouldn’t have been able to agree on a channel). Even while engrossed in some novel or in some self-pitying trance, I could hear Joseph’s breathing, page turning, scribbling, masturbating, or that damned Altoids tin being snapped shut after his application. And I’m sure it was the same for him. He would, while flipping through an article on trout fishing or surviving a bear attack, illustrated by a hairless, shimmering pink cave, harrumph and give me an Elvis-scowl, obviously wishing I were not in the room, or possibly that I was dead so that he may gloat over my corpse before anyone found me out. I began purposely inflaming his annoyance, pure spite, by bringing forth tears (a simple trick; all one has to do is think of flames behind the eyeballs) until reaching a good run of sobbing. Joseph was not one to console. He fancied himself an extraordinarily strong individual—choosing to ignore his tin trick—and pretended to abhor weakness. The pretending was more to my advantage than his actually abhorring because he not only felt the disgust of abhorring but also had to fight his true nature, which was to begin sobbing himself and walk over, if he could walk, and embrace me. Oh, now, I know he felt no sorrow for me, but it made him feel beneath the layers of abhorring sorry for himself, reminding him of his own weakness that he desperately wanted to unleash and pamper. I had seen it in his eyes from day one, now that I think about it. He was ripe for a cry, but wouldn’t allow it.
How glorious those sobs were for me. The cleanest, most healthful sleep I had during those interminable months was after sobbing like that for an hour or so, inconsolable by nurses, Joseph tucked into his corner as tightly as possible, a fat nervous mouse faced with an oozing cockroach, unable to pounce and finish it off. I had the bastard then, unquestionably, and I forgot all about the me in the bed—dying, to be sure.
I came to know Joseph through his silence. I knew him best through silence because it was the only pure thing he had offered. In silence he was a sad old man with shreds of experience tacked to the corkboard of his brain, taken down randomly and stitched into some elaborate quilt of half-truths and outright lies. A bull-artist of that ilk. He mumbled to himself, looking out the window to the tarred roof, the great shining bulk of the air-conditioning unit filtering and chilling the air we breathed, and beyond the yellow lawn stabbed with flags, the prickling black of the asphalt, the tufts of pine forest, all surrounded by the great grey sky. He was, I believe, using it all as a screen for the projection of the bleeding-colored past, his adventure, travel, loves, wounds, everything he had struggled in his slapdash way to amass into a heap of life he could call well-lived, heaving with seraphs and demons wrestled with and discarded. And he was thinking, What is it now? Nothing. Images. I’m here in this small white room, applying creamed foods like make-up to my beard for the mother-love of strangers, with this pitiful man who weeps constantly as my only friend, all of those others with whom I ate, drank, danced, fucked, loved, worshipped, laughed, fought, they don’t think of me at all anymore. What am I now but those images? How do I go on?
This, of course, is what I assumed he was thinking. Chances are he was watching with relish some small animal being mutilated by a bird of prey, or fantasizing about one of his glistening caves, or just lost like a plankton feeder in some thought-sea with random bits washing in and out, unnoticed, unstudied, vaguely nourishing.
A stink began rising in the room that somehow eluded the usually intruding Balkan nostrils of our nurse. Was it only in my nose?
One sunny day, while I was sobbing and Joseph staring out the window, a great smack of air rattled the windows. “Great Jesus,” Joseph screamed. I looked over and saw in the dimpled light through the window the shadows of two, three, four more jets tear across our static view. They must have been from the Air and Water Show. I had long stopped looking at calendars and clocks. For when that Visitor comes near, Time puts on his hat and takes the train to Phoenix.
“Those bastards fly too close. Too close,” these were the first words in weeks that could have been meant for me, though they were most likely heart-overspill for the chilled air alone. What he meant was, according to me, I now want to be in one of those jets, taking me somewhere far away and exciting. If they can’t do that for me, they could at least have the decency to stay the fuck away from here. I began sobbing again, in earnest.
My dying was coming along, though a bit too slowly and at times not painfully enough. Pain was distraction, and prisoners of most cast will tell you distractions in any form are welcome after a while. I started refusing the morphine, I removed the IVs for hours at a time at night when I knew no one would check on us, I willed pain by stiffening my body and channeling certain areas, the most responsive being the heart. These things I did carefully, not wanting Joseph to know, thinking in my now clearing brain that I would be made a coward of the lowest pedigree in his, and then my, eyes.
And how disturbing that thought became. More often than not, I was seeing the world through his eyes, forgetting sometimes completely my body, my eyes, my brain shaping the world into images with ideas attached like wings. When I sobbed I could no longer take delight in it because I was loathing the sobber, and so the sobbing became always authentic and unwelcome. I remember looking out of the window one day and thinking, all that bullshit out there is a dirty rag over the wound of Altamont, the turning point, according to Joseph; loathsome material. I was growing a beard, but when did I start? I began wetting the bed at night, unable to sleep, twisting in my soiled sheets like some lunatic so that it took two or three nurses to untangle me the next morning.
A week later, a month later, yesterday, next Friday one of the nurses found the Altoids tin while the others were untangling me. Joseph was sleeping. The nurse, curious and weak as any human being, opened his drawer under pretense of sprucing the whole room, finding the tin along with the cunts hidden between rocks and pine. I’m not sure what led her to open the tin; perhaps that had been the smell—corrugated, fermenting layers of creams-of—but open it she did and our regular nurse quickly made the connection, finally solving the puzzle of Joseph’s incessantly crusted beard. To the gasps and murmuring, Joseph woke with a sea lion yawn. She was hurt and didn’t hide this from him, poking out her bottom lip and shaking her head slowly as she held forth the open tin. Joseph was devastated. He didn’t even try to explain. He merely relinquished the tin and crossed his arms, pouting with teeth more than lips. The magazines they let him keep, and the next day assigned a male nurse to our room.
I woke up one morning to the male nurse untangling my sheets and noticed Joseph shooting vicious glances my way. Of course. He would think it was me. He thought I had told them about the tin. Couldn’t he understand I was just as devastated? Already I felt me creeping back in, and I asked the nurse for a shave. While he was out procuring the lather and blade, I looked over to Joseph and shook my head. No, it wasn’t me.
“You bastard,” he said in a guttural whisper, and I realized then that I was smiling, inexplicably smiling.
“No,” I said, my voice a broken-reeded clarinet, my throat dry ice. I was losing hold. Something began falling inside me, felt like a viscous cloud settling in my bowels, then swelling, swelling.
The nurse came back and began to shave my face. I watched, as he scraped my cheek, Joseph staring out the window, his fat fingers dabbling along the sheet, a tear cautiously crawling over the hills beneath his eyes until he savagely destroyed it.
“I love you,” I said, the love punctuated by pain. I meant it. I loved this fat old child with crust in his beard. I always had. Loved him, loved, in fact, everything. It was all simple and pure in the throat, deepening, miles of it above and below me. I had loved it all without knowing the first thing about any of it.
“I love you, too,” the nurse said. And, oh, how I smiled.
|
