To See Right Again - Part 3

By David Quinn

I heard the elevator doors swing open and then closing as my gurney exited on the fifth floor and then felt the almost sensual caress of the moving air across my uncovered face.

There are certain things we’re all going to encounter and, like it or not, there’s no way of avoiding them, with the realization that we’re all going to experience the specter of death being at the top of the list. Dr. Iris assured me right from the start that my chances of dying were minimal; much less than the likelihood of getting run over or even of perishing in a plane crash. "Life is our business here," she said time and time again. "And as doctors, we’re very good at what we do."

Still another door opened and closed behind us and, finally, the gurney came to rest.

"On three," a strange voice whispered as I felt four sets of hands joining under me. And just like back in my room on the eighth floor, but in reverse, I was lifted and swung from the gurney to another cushioned slab about the width of an operating table. My eyes involuntarily jolted open and it surprised me to see the same thing I’d been looking at in the VA Hospital almost from the very moment of my arrival: twin air ducts on the ceiling.

Just like in the beginning, it struck me again that the Iowa City Hospital had been built like Levittown; an architectural phenomenon I first experienced while spending a week with my cousin Donald on Long Island. Each and every house built with the same set of blueprints and back then, in the early 50s, even the first-time homeowners seemingly from the same mold: Decidedly of a vanilla coloring.

But I was wrong. Dr. Iris and Cecile were still there toward my feet, but "Mike" and "George" had been replaced with two green-suited strangers: A round-faced Asiatic quite possibly from the Philippines and opposite him a very dark individual from either India or Pakistan. Moreover, Cecile and the latter could have been brother and sister. The first time I remember laying eyes on her, standing respectfully a half step behind Dr. Iris her mentor, it never struck me she was anything but White. But it was soon afterwards that she came alone into my room and all of her freckles had disappeared: replaced with an inscrutable black pitch. She started saying something and might actually have done so, but all I saw was a disgusted waving of her hands before her face and the only words I could make out were ‘Fuck You for what you did to my mother…for what you’ve done to me." And with that, she turned on her heels and disappeared.

There was a momentary fumbling with the Heparin lock on the back of my right wrist and I knew that everything was proceeding exactly as Dr. Iris had assured me it would: "You’ll be given Brevidil, a relaxant, electrodes in a metal band will be placed around your head and a thick rubber guard will be inserted in your mouth…And that’ll be it! When you wake up, it’ll all be over and you won’t remember a thing."

"Another muzzling of my mouth," I muttered, but she pretended not to hear. And since I was doing this voluntarily, what difference did it make one way or the other?

My eyelids drifted close again, capturing and holding tight to the smiling image of Dr. Iris, and I exhaled deeply.

But then it happened! Right from the beginning when they wheeled me into the room, there was the humming sound of a motor, like an engine warming up in neutral. Seconds after they gave me the relaxant, though, I heard the now-familiar swooshing between the vents on the ceiling above me. But this time was different: If at first all I could make out were bright colors, it was now the case that people were wearing them. I lay there blinking the images into focus but no sooner would we make eye contact when, like the first shot in a pinball machine, the figure would gyrate away and, at the point of becoming a complete blur, disappear with a sucking swoosh into the exhaust vent.

One of the rainbow blips seemed to have lost its sense of direction, though. I stared and stared at it, squinting to keep it in focus and it was then I knew who it was: Uncle Jim. The last time I saw him alive was the second night of our campaign in Charleston back in ’65 where we’d gone to organize the Blacks who still weren’t allowed to do anything more elevated or elevating than menial labor. I was still hung over from a wild time the night before but when I got to Jim’s room he was there "interviewing." And all he had on were his skivvies and a T-shirt. The candidate for the "secretarial position" was wearing even less: a black skirt that was so short you could see her white undies sticking out all around like a 3-d advertisement for ice cream.

At first he seemed frustrated and kept circling me like a hunter with a dangerous animal. "This’s ‘Jennifer,’" he finally announced. "She’s gonna… gonna…Kiss my nephew Dick," he finally commanded.

‘Jennifer’ slipped off her stool, tugging down on her skirt and announced that all of this was going to cost him double. "Do it," he commanded. And she did. The two of us seemed to ignite and I knew right then and there my uncle and I were made from the same mold. But it didn’t happen that way: At the last minute he separated us and told me that "Someday we’ll really catch up."

But we never did because he got me a job on the Coeur d’Aline carrying napalm bombs to Nam and about a month later he was dead: shot by his own men. I found that out the night before leaving when I got a letter from Aunt Miriam and a small package: Uncle Jim’s right eyeball. That was a long, long time ago but I still carry it around. Have it in my pant’s pocket right now, matter of fact.

Uncle Jim still looked his disheveled self but now, additionally, he was wearing a patch over his left eye. The right one like that time back when I was a kid and he popped it out on the dining room table: an open pit gapped with mucous bridges that would appear and disappear every time he blinked.

"Jim!"

The image halted a moment and then slowly spun around again to face in my direction.

"Dick?"

"Yeah, Jim! It’s me: Dick." Hearing the name I was born with for the first time in over forty years: what a jolt and blast into the past! "Peter," the post-deportation academic with nothing but squeaky clean literary publications: gone, all of that, in one fell wagging of a knowing tongue.

I wanted to tell him where he was, where I was and go on explaining what was what, but for the first time since becoming a patient in Iowa City’s VA Hospital, I felt something was wrong. "You know where you are, Jim? Hospitals are for the living, you know that?"

Moments sped by with no answer and all I could hear was my own breathing and the steady hum of the electroshock machine warming up. A metal band slipped loosely over my forehead and then began tightening to a point where I could feel its cold both in front and back..

"I can’t see," Jim finally answered. "Nothing at all. Who are they?" he asked suspiciously. "The other people I’m here with and can’t see?"

I averted my eyes to focus on the spinning going on around my uncle and the moment I did he started spinning again and disappeared with a swoosh into the cold air return. Even before he had come completely into focus, I felt sure I’d recognized some of the others and now that I’d learned how to stop all the spinning, it was true: There was the Norwegian Berit, my very first sexual girlfriend; Ann Marie, the Swede; Lizzi the Dane… Flo. Joan Livingston and lots and lots of Jennifers.

Interspersed among them were also the men of my life: Karl Hoope with stink soap in one hand and my knife in the other; Mickelsen with the scar on his arm from our knife fight in Galveston. Christiansen, our captain on Panintoil. Bernardo, Pedro and Rodolfo from our time in Spain and a host of others who looked vaguely familiar but if I had to name them…

Problem was that all of them were dressed up like kindergarten kids doing a show and tell from their grandparents’ attic: oversized hats, out-of-fashion shirts and coats, shoes big enough to shod horses with…. A circus or a theater, I didn’t know which, but if they hadn’t done this to themselves, somebody else was doing a major mess-up with all of them.

"Hi," I waved a little timidly. "Can’t you see how ridiculous you all look" I whispered hesitantly. But still nothing! Just as Uncle Jim couldn’t see, the others either couldn’t hear or they were expecting something better from me than a little fluttering of my fingers. It was right then I knew for sure the whole idea of coming to the VA Hospital to let them do their thing was a mistake: Like it or not this’s my life, my script, and I’m the one, the only one who should and can do something about it.

There was another swooshing off to the right and a smaller one following it from the left.

"Who’re all these people; the ones I can’t see? You never answered me?"

It was Uncle Jim again.

"Nobody you know, Jim. People from my past and seems like something’s the matter with them: they can’t hear."

Jim kept staring in my direction, but with his good eye in my pocket and with a patch over the other…. "And you?" he finally asked. "You’re seeing me and them? Hearing okay, eh? So what’s…?"

At first I wanted to pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about but if there’s one thing I learned in all the AA meetings I’ve gone to, it’s the importance of being honest: honest with myself and honest with everybody else. That, too, was something Jim had taught me from the very beginning: to tell it like it is. "We’re a lot alike, Jim," I admitted. "Been around and around the world. Done lots and lots of things that had to be done; that should’ve been done; had our run-ins with Management…and the two of us sold out when our pokers in the fire got too hot."

Jim didn’t say anything for what seemed to be a long time but I knew my words were getting to him because he kept going around and around in circles as though trying to find a single way to take two steps or more in the same direction.

"Had to," Jim finally admitted. "You can fight the good fight when you can see what’s what but from one day to the next when I turned around the only friend I had left was Johnnie Walker. Everybody else always seemed to be one step ahead of me and the way they were leading me wasn’t anywhere I really ever wanted to go."

He sighed deeply and his image started turning toward the cold air vent.

"I know where you’re coming from," I shouted and it must have worked because Uncle Jim turned toward me again. "I know how easy it is to sell out, Jim. I did it, too. Didn’t I just say that?"

I could feel the bite of a metal band around my head being adjusted and heard the voices of the two technicians whispering to each other. But my mind was racing and I wanted to pay attention to what I had to confess fully for the first and perhaps the last time.

Jim kept facing in my direction and the whole top of his body fell into a curve that more and more started looking like the circular part of a question mark. It was now or never, I knew, and more than anything I wanted him to believe me.

"I was drunk, I know, but I felt I had to get some fresh air so I started walking. I got to the Square in Macomb and circled around it. On the west side there’re a couple of bars and since it was close to midnight, they were still open. All of a sudden, from out of nowhere, this girl appeared and put her arms around me. She was about twenty…twenty-five, maybe, and good-looking."

"Will you take me home?" she asked. "I live out on West Grant."

"Can’t," I told her. "No keys and no car." But she felt warm and sensual as she pressed closer to me and I knew right away that, mentally at least, we were already in bed with each other.

"How ‘bout your house? I know where you live and it’s only a couple of blocks from here."

I stepped a bit to the side, taking a closer look at her just as some students poured out of The Café. "And you’re…?"

"Names don’t make any difference, do they? Just take me to your place, will you?"

We wrapped our arms around each other and started south along Lafayette Street, crossing Washington and Jefferson. In the residential section, she collapsed onto a lawn and pulled me down with her. Our lips bruised against each other and it was then I found she was braless. We rolled over and back on each other until the lights of a passing car lit us up and in a second we were on our feet again.

"The bathroom?" she asked as soon as we got home. She came out a couple of minutes later stark naked. A split second and I was out of my wind pants and the two of us were all over each other on the floor of the living room.

"Anything you want," she blew into my ear. "Anything at all. But are you safe? You got rubbers?"

"That was it for me, Jim. I’m anything but a Puritan and countless are the times a lady and I would be in each other’s pants just minutes after first looking at each other, but that’s the point. There’s something chemical about sex; something you can smell, maybe, and not even know you’re smelling it. Something like an explosion you’ve got no control over and the only thing you can do is give in and go with the flow. And when it’s mutual as it’d always been with me, up till then, there’re no questions to ask. No answers to offer. No excuses to make.

"I asked her again who she was and how all of this was happening, but either she didn’t have any answers or she just wasn’t saying. And at the same time she was trying to force me into her. But no go. I wasn’t feeling a thing, Jim, but she kept pulling and pulling at me and still nothing was happening. But she kept on and on and it was like a little toe in a silk stocking: Nothing at all was where it should be. But I did it, Jim. I did it, and that time was my first time. The first time with no feelings whatsoever…. And that’s why I’m here, Jim. I got raped. Just like with a prostitute; all business, and it was completely her business. Not mine at all."

Jim started whirling again and I thought for a moment he had disappeared in the cold air duct. But I was wrong. The Indian or the Philippino had leaned over me and was prying my lips apart. "This is going to hurt a little bit," he warned. And he wasn’t lying. The blue plug he was ramming into my mouth was covered with quarter inch high prongs like on a doormat and I felt I was going to gag.

"You’re making this up, Dick. It’s all in your head and your head’s sick."

That was almost the same thing Dr. Iris had told me right before I signed her release paper, but while her voice had been soft and understanding, this was now Jim speaking rough and challenging.

"I’m getting’ out of here," he threatened and this time I wasn’t wrong: He started gyrating and I knew he’d be gone unless I could…

How stupid of me! For forty-five, fifty years, maybe, I’d been walking around with Uncle Jim’s eyeball in my pocket. And it was still there because I could feel it. First you gotta see right, Jim, and then I’ll take care of the rest; re-write a new script where we’re the ones doing the doing, and to hell with what happens, hear me?

Jim leaned forward and I had the honor of putting in his right eyeball. That’s it, Jim. That’s it. Now you can see right again, so do it. Rip off that stupid patch they’ve put on your other eye and we’ll get started doing the same thing with all of the people who’ve come here. Somebody’s making a fool of us, putting us down, and we gotta put an end to it, you hear?

**********

Dr. Iris and Cecile entered Peter Stone’s room on the eighth floor of the VA Hospital in Iowa City, and it was like old times again. The doctor led the way and the physician’s assistant followed at a respectful distance of two or three feet.

Peter Stone’s recovery on the seventh day had been closely monitored and when he reached a level of consciousness in which they were reasonably sure he would be coherent, Dr. Iris was paged on the intercom. Cecile stole a quick glance at her mentor, but not a word was spoken between them.

The patient’s head and upper body were buffered with a healthy swathing of towels as a precaution against sudden and uncontrollable projectile nausea and his eyes, opening slowly, looked like a cartographer’s representation of Eisenhower’s superhighways as they span the face of America; horizontal and vertical red streaks so vividly portrayed that even the exit and entrance ramps could be seen. He was obviously awake and conscious of his environment.

"How’re you feeling, Mr. Stone?"

Peter’s bloodshot eyes rolled a moment from side to side and then focused on his interrogator.

"Your???"

"Dr. Iris, your physician. My colleague here is Cecile Beaufort-McKee. She’s something new to the medical profession: A physician’s assistant. And you, Mr. Stone, what do you do?"

"Do? What do I do?"

A long unbroken silence.

"Do you like to read, Mr. Stone? Write, maybe?"

"Read? Write? What would I read or write?"

"Stories, maybe, Mr. Stone. Any kind of stories. If you were to write something like that, what would you do with it afterwards?"

"Me? What would I write stories for? Afterwards? What would I do with them afterwards?"'

For the first time since coming out of recovery, Mr. Stone’s entire face: brow, eyes and lips seemed to function at one and the same time. And the end product was a guilty smile.

"I can’t write at all, Dr. Iris, so if I were ever to find such a thing with my name on it… Well, I have no doubt about what I’d do with it. I’d throw it away."

"Thank you, Mr. Stone. Cecile and I have our rounds to make, but we promise to come back and see you as soon as possible. Is that okay?"

"Suits me, I guess. Why not?"

The two women exited Mr. Stone’s room and walked about twenty yards down the hallway with nothing but a professional demeanor. Then they stopped and turned to look at each other.

"I think we’ve got a hundred-percenter this time.

"Two-hundred percent," Cecile agreed and as though in celebration, her freckles popped out like dandelions in spring. "And I’m so happy for the patient."

© David Quinn 2006

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