Dylan Nice: Other Kinds

We were quiet for a long time. Birds flew and called. The water lapped and I opened my eyes. She was close. I knew where she was so I began not to think about it. I slept. The wind got cooler and blew across my back. She started to move.

“Don’t you feel cold?”

“No,” I said.

“I am,” she said.

We dressed and walked to the bus station. There were red mountains past the tan buildings. I couldn’t feel anything of what I might mean. We sat and waited. I watched birds on the ledge of a fountain and I began to sleep. Out there was a city on its continent and all I was going to do was leave it. White cabs circled past us and slowed near our bench.

This was a thing normal people do: they bring their dogs over and then the dogs play together while the normal people have a drink and talk about a vacation they just took or a cake recipe that turned out fabulous. I resented these types of behaviors, allowed no room for them in my life. But I was dogsitting for friends of mine who lived in a nice house on the edge of town. The friends were a couple, both poets, and had gone to Portugal for two weeks to visit other friends, also poets.

I woke up late, around eleven, smoked a cigarette shirtless in the backyard, and cleared away some of the beer cans I had left sitting out on the porch the night before. The dog, Max, liked to take his morning dump during a walk instead of in his backyard.

We had had dogs growing up — mutts given to us by people without the resources or desire to spay or neuter their pets. Our lawn back home was strewn with piles of dog shit so strangely colored and rancid, they evidenced some clear inadequacy in the dog’s home life. The dog that was coming to visit Max today was owned by an influential couple who blogged and contributed articles to well-read economic magazines. He was a big, sleek breed. He looked expensive.

Max and I got a few blocks in and I was sweating through my clothes from a wave of heat that had come early. He took the position in front of a brick house and dropped something healthy, then walked to the end of his leash and turned around to watch me pick it up.

We walked farther and stopped at a corner grocery store where I went in for more cigarettes. Smoking was something I let myself do when I was alone. I’d been alone awhile, about three years.

I liked girls from money, but they wanted to dress me in polo shirts and take me to beaches with lifeguards on duty. In response, I mocked their iPods and the co-op grocery store where they shopped. I had met this new girl a few months before, this well-dressed blonde who had a compact body and laughed easily. I found things wrong though, things I couldn’t begin to address. She had a waterproof iPod player in her shower and plans to bear children by twenty-four. Still, this girl, Emily, and I liked each other for no good reason and never at the same time.

Max was panting loudly when I got back outside to untie him from the bike rack. Everything around me looked bleached, the brick buildings, the grass. It was nearing ninety-five degrees, and the heat made me feel my body so immediately that my nervous thoughts began to bleed out. I decided to call Emily later, ask her to come see the dog, make the first deliberate attempt to get her close to me in weeks.

I pulled Max hard on his leash past joggers and hipsters on old Schwinn bicycles.

The bloggers and their expensive dog were coming for the dog playdate at one. I kept the house clean, secretly admiring the poets’ shelves of books, the tasteful color of the walls that suggested education, the lack of brand-name foods in their cupboards, and I wanted to make sure there was little evidence of my own lifestyle. No ashtrays, no plates coated in processed cheese. I liked the two that were coming over: they were good-looking, cynical, and bitter in a way I liked to think I had invented.

I turned on the hot water over the sink and picked up an empty glass off the counter. I held it under the water, rinsing it out, running my fingers along the lip of the glass when everything moved suddenly. The glass came apart from the pressure of my hands and the force of my grip pushed the broken edges into my right fingers. I didn’t feel pain, but the blood was instant.

I bled on the floor for a moment while I gripped paper towels and clenched at my forearm with my other hand. Max stared at me from the couch. I walked out onto the porch to bleed over the edge, and then seeing how much blood there was, I realized I had to look at the cut. How much it didn’t hurt worried me because my pinky was showing meat. The gash was long and wide and inside it was the same shade of red as uncooked steak.

I called Emily with my one good hand.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”

“I need to go to the emergency room,” I said. “I’m cut good. It’s a deep cut.”

Then I called my guests to tell them the playdate was not something I could do.

No one in the emergency room appeared to be having an emergency. There were a few old people and a kid across from us who was clearly in the pain of something psychological. He was a scrawny guy in a ball cap and jeans frayed at the cuff. He reminded me of the kids I used to smoke with on the dirt road behind the post office back home.

“I know what I need,” he said. “If they’d just give me a slip of paper I’d write it down for them.”

My name was called before his.

The paper towel was stuck to the cuts when the doctor tried to pull them away. There were two: the knuckle on my ring finger also had a chunk taken out of it. The doctor was a brunette woman who talked fast in monotone — she seemed like she might wear waist-high jeans with a chain on her belt loop when she got off work. She arranged for me to have x-rays to make sure there were no “artifacts” in my fingers.

I waited for the radiology people, bleeding, seeing how long I could get a gurney wheel to spin using my foot. The door was open and a man in a blue T-shirt and a black and white tattoo on his arm paced in front of my room and talked to himself in a low, distressed voice. I sat there, blood soaking through my bandage, thinking how this was a familiar place, the hospital, waiting for something not to be wrong anymore. I spent my childhood injured, bleeding, poisoned, sitting in clean white rooms while someone who knew exactly what he was doing looked at me, asked me questions, tried to fix what had brought me there.

The x-rays were over and the brunette doctor cleaned my cuts but couldn’t stop the pinky from bleeding. She brought in another doctor, a curly-haired woman who opened the gauze.

“This wound is arterial,” she said. “See the beat. Bomp Bomp Bomp.”

She looked up at me.

“You’re a guy who when he does it, he does it right,” she said. “This is not good.”

“Should we call in the hand team?” the other asked.

“Try and pull one stitch through the end of that artery. That should close it up.”

The first doctor tried it, but the bleeding kept up.

“I don’t think this will do it.”

“It will,” said the other, and then looking at me, “Don’t worry, you won’t lose the finger.”

They had me lie down after the third attempt to seal the artery failed. I was losing color. The blood was pooling on the table. More doctors were brought in, pressure was applied, directions were given. I could feel the needle pull through the inside of my finger. They stood back, gave it a second, and decided they had done it, the artery was closed. The first doctor put three stitches in the pinky and one in the knuckle. The receptionist at the checkout desk charged me fifty dollars and told me to have a nice day.

I told Emily on the way back I just wanted to sit inside her air-conditioned apartment and watch a movie, but balked at that notion when I realized Max was still at home and the last thing he’d seen was me bleeding all over his house. Before the accident, I had looked in the basement for a window-mounted AC but only found a box fan.