Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

Ava, the IV nurse, comes while Margaret is paraphrasing a submission — the story of a talking IV pump written by a seven-year-old with only half a brain — and bringing herself nearly to tears at the recollection of it.

“And if he can do that with half a brain,” I say, “imagine what I could do with my whole one!”

“Sweetie, you can do anything you want,” she says, so kind and so encouraging. She offers to stay while I get my PICC but it would be more comforting to have my three-hundred-pound Aunt Mary sit on my face during the procedure than to have this lady at my side, so I say no thank you, and she finally leaves. “I will return for your submission,” she says. It sounds much darker than she means it.

The PICC is the smoothest sailing. I get my morphine and a little Versed, and I float through the fields of the meditation channel while Ava threads the catheter into the crook of my arm. I am in the flowers but also riding the tip of the catheter, à la Fantastic Voyage , as it snakes up into my heart. I don’t like views, but I like looking down through the cataract of blood into the first chamber. The great valve opens. I fall through and land in daisies.

I am still happy-groggy from Ava’s sedatives when I think I hear the cat, moaning and suffering, calling out my name. But it’s the intern calling me. I wake in a darkening room with a tickle in my arm and look at Ava’s handiwork before I look at him. A slim PICC disappears into me just below the antecubital fossa, and my whole lower arm is wrapped in a white mesh glove that looks almost like lace, and would have been cool back in 1983, when I was negative two.

“Sorry to wake you,” he says. “Do you have a moment to talk?” He is a tired-looking fellow. At first I think he must be fifty, but when he steps closer to the bed I can see he’s just an ill-preserved younger man. He is thin, with strange hair that is not so much wild as just wrong somehow, beady eyes and big ears, and a little beard, the sort you scrawl on a face, along with devil horns, for purposes of denigration.

“Well, I’m late for cotillion,” I say. He blinks at me and rubs at his throat.

“I’m Dr. Chandra,” he says. I peer at his name tag: Sirius Chandra, M.D.

“You don’t look like a Chandra,” I say, because he is as white as me.

“I’m adopted,” he says simply.

“Me, too,” I say, lying. I sit up and pat the bed next to me, but he leans against the wall and takes out a notepad and pen from his pocket. He proceeds to flip the pen in the air with one hand, launching it off the tips of his fingers and catching it again with finger and thumb, but he never writes down a single thing that I say.

See the pony? She has dreadful hoof dismay. She gets a terrible pain every time she tries to walk, and yet she is very restless and can hardly stand to sit still. Late at night her hooves whisper to her, asking “Please, please, just make us into glue,” or they strike at her as cruelly as anyone who ever hated her. She hardly knows how she feels about them anymore, her hooves, because they hurt her so much, yet they are still so very pretty — her best feature, everyone says — and biting them very hard is the only thing that makes her feel any better at all. There she is, walking over the hill, on her way to the horse fair, where she’ll not get to ride on the Prairie Wind, or play in the Haunted Barn, or eat hot buttered morsels of cowboy from a stand, because wise carnival horses know better than to let in somebody with highly contagious dismay. She stands at the gate, watching the fun, and she looks like she is dancing but she is not dancing .

Suffer, pony, suffer!

“What do you know about Dr. Chandra?” I ask Nancy, who is curling my hair at the nurses’ station. She has tremendous sausage curls and a variety of distinctive eyewear that she doesn’t really need. I am wearing her rhinestone-encrusted granny glasses and can see Ella Thims, another short-gut girl, in all her glorious, gruesome detail where she sits in her little red wagon by the clerk’s desk. Ella had some trouble finishing up her nether parts, and so was born without an anus, or vagina, or a colon, or most of her small intestine, and her kidneys are shaped like spirals. She’s only two, but she is on the sauce also. I’ve known her all her life.

“He hasn’t rotated here much. He’s pretty quiet. And pretty nice. I’ve never had a problem with him.”

“Have you ever thought someone was interesting. Someone you barely knew, just interesting, in a way?”

“Do you like him? You like him, don’t you?”

“Just interesting. Like a homeless person with really great shoes. Or a dog without a collar appearing in the middle of a graveyard.”

“Sweetie, you’re not his type. I know that much about him.” She puts her hand out, flexes it swiftly at the wrist. I look blankly at her, so she does it again, and sort of sashays in place for a moment.

“Oh.”

“Welcome to San Francisco.” She sighs. “Anyway, you can do better than that. He’s funny-looking, and he needs to pull his pants up. Somebody should tell him that. His mother should tell him that.”

“Write this down under chief complaint,” I had told him. “ ‘I am sick of love.’ ” He’d flipped his pen and looked at the floor. When we came to the social history, I said my birth mother was a nun who’d committed indiscretions with the parish deaf mute. And I told him about my book — the cat and the bunny and the peacock and the pony, each delightful creature afflicted with a uniquely horrible disease.

“Do you think anyone would buy that?” he asked.

“There’s a book that’s just about shit,” I said. “Why not one that’s just about sickness and death? Everybody poops. Everybody suffers. Everybody dies.” I even read the pony page for him, and showed him the picture.

“It sounds a little scary,” he said, after a long moment of pen-tossing and silence. “And you’ve drawn the intestines on the outside of the body.”

“Clowns are scary,” I told him. “And everybody loves them. And hoof dismay isn’t pretty. I’m just telling it how it is.”

“There,” Nancy says, “you are curled !” She says it like, you are healed . Ella Thims has a mirror on her playset. I look at my hair and press the big purple button underneath the mirror. The playset honks, and Ella claps her hands. “Good luck,” Nancy adds as I scoot off on my IV pole, because I’ve got a date tonight.

One of the bad things about not absorbing very well and being chronically malnourished your whole life long is that you turn out to be four and a half feet tall when your father is six-four, your mother is five-ten, and your sister is six feet even. But one of the good things about being four and a half feet tall is that you are light enough to ride your own IV pole, and this is a blessing when you are chained to the sauce.

When I was five I could only ride in a straight line, and only at the pokiest speeds. Over the years I mastered the trick of steering with my feet, of turning and stopping, of moderating my speed by dragging a foot, and of spinning in tight spirals or wide loops. I take only short trips during the day, but at night I cruise as far as the research building that’s attached to, but not part of, the hospital. At three a.m. even the eggiest heads are at home asleep, and I can fly down the long halls with no one to see me or stop me except the occasional security guard, always too fat and too slow to catch me, even if they understand what I am.

My date is with a CF-er named Wayne. He is the best-fed CF kid I have ever laid eyes on. Usually they are blond, and thin, and pale, and look like they might cough blood on you as soon as smile at you. Wayne is tan, with dark-brown hair and blue eyes, and big, with a high, wide chest. He is pretty hairy for sixteen. I caught a glimpse of his big hairy belly as I scooted past his room. On my fourth pass (I slowed each time and looked back over my shoulder at him) he called me in. We played a karate video game. I kicked his ass, then I showed him the meditation channel.