Lidia Yuknavitch - Dora - A Headcase

Special Olympics is applauding wildly. What a performance. Fuck it. You gotta give the guy his props. I know it’s a risk, but I don’t care. I walk straight up to him like I’ve known him all my fucking life. “Comrade,” I announce.

“GULL,” he sings up at me.

I raise my hand up in the air in front of him.

He raises his.

I high five him a hard one, then salute, clicking my heels when I turn to leave.

As I walk away I whisper, “Everybody fall back. Rendezvous at the Jag. Go.”

Ave Maria wheels her cart around the corner and abandons it. Little Teena thanks the ER desk ladies for their time. Obsidian rests her mop against a wall and walks away. I stand up and run soap opera dramatic style down the hall like an emotionally distraught woman unable to take it anymore. Wherever they are taking my bellowing lad, at least he had this.

In the parking lot inside the Jag we all four hunch around the laptop, its LCD light glowing up at us. On the screen, Sig’s ER room looks fish-eyed and claustrophobic. And you can see some monkey fur around the edges of the shot.

“Fuck almighty,” Little Teena says, “it looks like we’re looking through a vag.”

What we see next is a silver needle that looks big enough to be a rhino tranquilizer gun. The white coat points it at Sig’s dinger.

“Good christ,” the little cartoon Sig shouts from the computer screen.

“Holy fuck,” Obsidian says.

“Youch,” Ave Maria says, sticking her hands behind the bib of her candy striper uniform.

I just feel … itchy. A little like I’m watching a senior shit himself. My upper lip sweats. My head is too heavy with Farrah. And for some weird reason? My twat is throbbing.

When they stick the needle into his cock his face seizes up like his penis might blow fire. I suck in air and clench my hands between my legs. He closes his eyes and groans and sways. He grips the sides of the gurney. The skin of his member is red and purple and swollen. My head hurts. My ears are hot. Sig moans and throws his head back. I see blood suck up the throb of his cock and slowly travel into the hull of the syringe. I pull my hair.

What. The. Fuck. I’m all creamy. Like need a new pair of panties.

The word “shunt” gets batted about by the doctor and nurses. There’s a flurry of white as they spring into action. Sig shouts “Why don’t you goddamned medievalists just use leeches?” He’s attempting to flee the scene. Blue-suited almost-nurses are holding him down. I realize I’m gripping my own thighs hard enough to leave marks.

“Can you zoom in?” I say, surprised by the coldness of my own voice.

I watch the scalpel inch closer to the head of his penis. As the blade carves a tiny red smile into the tip of his dick, Sig screams bloody murder.

Ave Maria hits a high note.

The urologist gasps.

“FUCK!” I shout.

Sig’s cock — I shit you not — shoots blood across the room, a jet of red spraying the white coat of the Dr. A tiny blob of it making it all the way to the monkey camera. Ew.

Now I know why we need the word bellow in the English language, because the sound that comes out of Sig? Bellow.

There is a moment of silence inside the Jag.

“Cut,” I say. “Open the goddamn windows.” We all take deep breaths.

“Ida,” Obsidian goes.

“That’s a wrap,” I say, rubbing my hands together and wiping sweat off of my upper lip. “Did you guys see that shit? That was some fucked up shit.” My voice sounds a little manic. I’ve got strange business in my underwear. Ave Maria is rocking and humming “The StarSpangled Banner,” softly.

“Ida,” Obsidian repeats.

“Let’s blow this pop stand,” I say, but Obsidian grabs my head in her hands and points my face toward the window of the Jag. “What?” I say. “We gotta get this footage on a timeline.” I notice my voice and hands are shaking.

“Ida,” she says, holding my big Farrah head in her hands, and then she gently turns my head and directs my gaze to a man on a gurney being unloaded from an ambulance next to us, “Isn’t that your dad ?”

IT’S HARD TO LOOK AT YOUR DAD WHEN HIS SKIN IS THE color of cigarette ash. It’s hard to watch him fighting to breathe right with hospital crap all up his nose and stuck to his face and chest.

Mostly though it’s hard to wait the long wait of emergency rooms. There’s nothing — and I mean nothing — to “do”. You sit on the shitty-ass Naugahyde chairs and read the shitty-ass Home Decorating and Sailing and Newsweek magazines and watch time stop. The clocks are fucked. They don’t move like regular clocks, I swear.

The other people here look like shit on a stick, too. Bags under their eyes and hope shoved a little too high up in their chests. They hold Styrofoam cups of dirt-tasting coffee and wear the same clothes for days. Their hair looks like utter fuck. The women stop wearing makeup and the men stop shaving.

I can see my Farrah wig shoved down into the bottom of my backpack. Mere hours ago I directed the action. Now I just feel about two feet shorter and like my mouth is filled with metal. I think I bit my fucking tongue. Without my Farrah wig, I feel like somebody’s lame-ass bald little sister. Christ. I bet they all think I’m a chemo case.

My father’s heart attacked him.

I know I’m saying it bassackwards but it seems more honest this way. In a regular heart attack, the blood supply to the heart gets hosed. Heart cells die. In my dad’s case, I think there’s more to it.

My ass vibrates. It’s Little Teena. He texts: “r u ok?” I stare at my iPhone in my hand. My hand is shaking. Great. I’m not even eighteen and I’m already a middle-aged neurotic. I text back: “ok. e.r. sux. need vcdn.”

Emergency rooms. Yeah. I try to remember the layout from earlier. Surely there’s away to score something around here. Where where where did I see the single-dose medicine cabinet?

This waiting room smells like day-old fart. Unfortunately, there’s a loser across from me in the waiting room whose coping mechanism is nonstop talking. I cut shapes into the sides of my cup of dirtwater with my fingernails. I try not to clock the ass-wipe across from me blathering on about how his wife wants to raise their kid so much differently than him. His wife he’s separated from. Jesus did she make the right move.

“It’s about values,” comes out of his pie hole. “You gotta get your kids’ minds right early.”

This guy wants to send his kid to a Christian Khmer Rouge camp. I swear to god, if there was a god, I’d kick this jack-asstic Christian motherfucker straight in the nuts. But there is no god. If there’s anything, it’s an anti-god. With a very perverse sense of humor.

I’d go back in to see my dad but I have to do it in little doses. It makes me feel like crap. The sounds of hospital gadgets. The smell of beating back death. Besides, his head looks weird all hooked up to hospital crap.

I’M SIX.

I am with my father at the edge of an estuary that is a bird sanctuary. Marshlands and birch and ferns stretch out before us, divided by small cool streams weaving through grasses and sand.

My father reaches into his brown-brushed corduroy father pants that smell like Irish Spring soap and Good Life cologne — a sharp spicy amber fragrance that lends itself to a blend of citrus, lavender, sweet spices, and sandalwood I know from reading the label in his man bathroom when he’s not there — he reaches into his pocket and pulls something out and says “I have a present for you.”

My father gives me a Kodak Instamatic Camera. I know because he puts his father pointer finger under each word and then we say the words together: “Kodak. Instamatic. Camera.”