Steve Toltz - Quicksand

(Thinking of that serial-killing nurse on 60 Minutes , those contaminated French

blood transfusions, those poor Quaid kids!)

They use a crane to wrench me out of bed for reasons of occupational health and safety, the crane moves too slowly and shit drops out of me onto the floor. A doctor comes in and says, Try and only sneeze on the toilet if you can. Your sphincter muscle is no match for hiccups. I wince: Sounds like a practical life. He leaves with: Someone will be in shortly to discuss poor sperm motility.

Can I have post-traumatic stress disorder

when the trauma is ongoing?

I’m not just post-operative but post-clawed and whored out to student nurses. Do you mind if she watches? I do. I fucking do.

Camera-ready catheters on fact-finding jaunts, green froth from orifices you don’t want to know about, mouth flooded with metal.

Childhood-summer-length moments between painkillers wearing off and coming on,

Excavators in hospital couture with divining needles predisposed to miss

the artery.

I dwell on poor Tantalus

the God of Clinical Frustration.

I fire like a gun with a cork in the barrel.

In the face of my twice-sliced-laterally amigo’s corn-fed guffaws I growl, You too belong in the shop of your maker.

Where did my sense of humour go?

He’s laughing now but ¾ of a guy named Dan never mentions when he didn’t want to be pruned of a sprig here or there,

he wanted to die but they wheeled him howling into the operating theatre anyway.

Together we can almost cobble together

a single shadow.

* *

Short-staffed hospital called in a local seamstress to close you up. She did terrific work. What embroidery! (A nightmare) I wake to see

¾ of a guy named Dan listening to the Sermon on the Mount on his iPod read by James Earl Jones. The tannic yellow of the wound through the bandages is making me sick, Dan Wethercot says. Morrell brings me Baudelaire: I felt all the beaks and all the jaws. Maria Hamilton prays to God to wipe the hard drive and restore me to my original settings. Clive sings ‘Humpty Dumpty’. It’s so zeitgeisty to be disabled right now, Louise Bozowic says. Disabled is the new gay, Marc Jeffrey agrees. This slew of awestruck next-of-kin carried in on gusts of pity don’t shrink back but press their faces close and look at me as if I’d died long ago, sometime in prehistory. I thought I was disfigured beyond recognition but everybody calls me by name. Tells me how brave I’m being. Meaning I am not clutching at their shirtsleeves begging them to smother me with a pillow. Stella’s head on my lap, Mimi holding my hand, Liam smiling kindly, Doc Castle jabbering, Morrell patting my foot, Dee Franklin drawing a picture that Morrell compares to Géricault’s portraits of the insane. Mimi stands on a chair, taking photos. I tell her it’s dangerous in a hospital lest the flash go off in a surgeon’s eyes. Elliot phones: Genesis 9:2. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Stella helps Clive make a papier-mâché leg for ¾ of a guy named Dan. I’d love to use you in an installation, Frank Rubinstein says. One day we will grow a kidney from your own cells and transplant it without fear that your body will reject it, Doc Castle assures me. He seems to think a person won’t reject himself. I shout, Doc, you don’t know me like I do!

Morrell brings me Kafka’s Metamorphosis . I have never so identified with a fictional character. Elliot calls: Now she has to look after you too? Tell her you never want to see her again. She can’t take on any more. Stella’s uncle Howard talks bedside about thetans and engrams. I just had déjà vu of you sitting up in the bed, Mimi says, not understanding there’s nothing more underwhelming than being in someone else’s déjà vu. Elliot calls: Freud spoke of the ‘other mouth’, the Vedic of the ‘third eye’. Nobody speaks of a second spine.

The ward psychologist says, Sorry that fully functioning human-life thing fell through. What’s next? I wonder. Other than the angrier child of happenstance, who am I now? This is my after-event. Who would this new me be?

Mimi says, Be grateful for what you have. I say, What I have isn’t what it used to be. Mimi says, You need to transcend your suffering. I say, But I can’t transcend his, and that’s what’s killing me. ¾ of a guy named Dan says, Leave me out of it. Stella says, Be in the present then. I say, The present hurts like mad. Morrell says, The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain, quoting Marx. I ask everyone to leave. Now Morrell is crying, not about leaving me, but about Iris Murdoch watching Teletubbies at the end.

Even when you’re lying there in agony people come to you with their problems. You don’t get a break. The patience of the patient needs to be elastic, huge. You can’t judge people because their problems are minor! Stella was in a funk — she and Craig split up. But should she be ignored until she’s diagnosed with cancer? Should she shut up until all her children die? What if nothing else ever truly tragic happens to her? What then?

Wouldn’t it be amazing if the stranger I became after my horrific life event was compatible with the stranger Stella became after hers?

* *

Each night I am turned like sausages, manhandled in the murk of sleep. Hairy hands, enhanced interrogation techniques. I wake midroll screaming

for amnesty. One night at the hour when shadows take their furlough, the nurse came in with a look of flustered helplessness you don’t want to see on

the face of your care-giver. At my slanted angle I hinted for painkillers and she obliged: the morphine opened a door and I fell through to the very

equator of sleep yet still anchored by fishhooks to the crinkled skin of pain. I couldn’t breathe, as if someone with unspeakable strength had put a hillside

over my face. I woke to see a moving tent of gloom, a figure slipping out. Hospital rooms (unlike prison cells) are never locked and anyone can unfold

and drip anything onto the charred or mouldering bedridden oxen. Who slunk into the room to cudgel the patient? What ghosts are in a holding pattern above my

bed? Was ¾ of a guy named Dan groping the beige walls trying out his prosthetic leg? (Yesterday he was hobbling around the room with a dry mouthful of pills

looking for a glass of water. Unbearable .) Or was it Leila’s clenched ghost or the bat-caved voice that I heard in the car or old enemies,

disgruntled investors who have me finally where they want me? Or was it my mysterious visitor, the old woman with bright orange hair who came the

previous day? She smelled like baked goods and reminded me of my old dog Sooty (some said she barked herself to death — I think she overdosed on

ladybugs). She said, I brought you some flowers. I asked, Are you here visiting someone? She said, Are you happy with your care? I said, They

keep a hygienic cemetery here. She said, The surgeons have a good reputation. Yes, I said, they have their fingers in a number of pies. She

frowned — she didn’t quite know what I meant. I didn’t either. Unlike Japanese soldiers, doctors rarely fall on their own syringes, I clarified. Are

you in any pain? she asked. Yes, I said, but it’s of no clinical significance. She nodded wearily, as if she’d heard that one before. Maybe she had. Well,

can I bring you anything? Some gossip magazines? I said, Oh yes, what are the rich and beautiful people up to? She ghosted and never returned.

Now harassed at night by a murderer with no follow-through, call buttons and squeak of sneakers on the ammoniac shine, medieval groans that start up

like zephyrs and waft along corridors, harrowing nightmares of trees reconsidering their upright position and of surgeons using the ribcage for a