At the Hospital, Again (Again)

I woke up surrounded by a deep blue ocean.  My head was swimming, and, for a moment and for whatever reason, I thought I was a fish, floating aimlessly through the sea, bobbing about to that subaqueous gurgling as dappled sunlight filtered through in pillars from above, and then, slowly, the sensation swept over me that I’d performed an elegant and piscine roll onto my back, and as I drifted along I reached out my fin to brush against the ridges of rippled sand, which, to me, looked like a vast and seemingly endless patch of wrinkled corduroy, and then I wondered how the fuck I knew what corduroy was if I was a fish, and then the sand quickly turned cold and metallic and the bubbling sounds morphed into electronic beeps and boops, as I realized that next to me was a large machine and that, from it, tangles of wires were routed to smaller machines and, above me, a strange, circular light, like a giant eyeball at the end of an extended arm, gazed at me with its dark and probing inner pupil, its iris a dim and milky yellow.  Still woozy (obviously) and slightly skeptical of my surroundings, I risked a question, an opening of my mouth—just slightly though, lest I invite in a deluge of salt water—and I said Hello?

No answer.

The act of speaking, though, sobered me a little—hearing my voice, feeling the slight vibration of my vocal cords, not being inundated by the sharp tang of the ocean—as it let me know for a fact that I was not underwater and, therefore, was absolutely and positively not a fish.  I tried it again, louder this time.  Hello???  Stronger vibrations dismantled more of the cobwebs, dissipated more of the clouds, and it was at that moment I realized I was in a hospital bed, the blue in which I was enclosed not the ocean but a curtain on a track.  This second inquiry into the abyss was answered, and the curtain was yanked aside in a shrill whine, which was like a Brad-Point boring bit being drilled through both of my ears and meeting in the middle, pulverizing to a pulp whatever the hell takes up residence in that part of your skull.  I wanted to scream at whoever had pulled back the curtain, was fixing to, except that when I set my eyes upon the perpetrator I saw that it was the lovely Dr. Kelley Tablebottom, all scrubbed up, hygienically and fashionably.  She looked beautiful, her skin glowing, her brown hair falling in waves, and I was too happily dumbfounded to speak, but there must’ve been something in my expression—an idiotic smile, creepy, bulbous eyes, perhaps slobber leaking from my mouth—that convinced Kelley I remembered her, that I wasn’t a vegetable, and she greeted me by saying that my brain wasn’t entirely shot to shit.  Something in her voice caused me to lift my hand and softly inspect my forehead with my forefinger, which was a bad idea because I was met immediately by a throbbing ache.  I winced but regained my composure and continued my inspection, which was madly confusing because while my fingers could feel the steeply raised skin of a tender protuberance—and while I wrestled with the possibility that though I wasn’t a fish there was a good fucking chance I was a unicorn—everything in me was telling me that my skull was not jutting out but had in fact been caved in.  Kelley laughed.  “Yeah, you took a pretty good knock.”

Of course, I got around to asking her what the hell had happened, why I was in the hospital, what was the story behind this fucking knot on my forehead, and Kelley came over to stand by my bed and gave me the skinny.  Put simply, Seamus wrecked the ambulance, which, I’m sure you’ll be stunned to hear, he was not allowed to drive, as evinced by a department and metro-wide mandate issued over a year ago.  Turned out, Seamus suffered from profound vision impairment (20/600), yet he refused to wear glasses or contacts, which he swore was due to a documented disability and an honest phobia about putting things near and in his eyeballs.  Not that that mattered.  Disabilities and phobias aside, if you couldn’t see, you couldn’t drive—especially a fucking ambulance—simple as that, which, thankfully, is how the department saw it, too.  So, Seamus’s banishment to trunk monkeydom was entirely reasonable and was not, as he’d led me to believe, due to Mike and Carl’s being dicks.  I told Kelley I had no idea he couldn’t see.  

“Oh yeah,” she said with a snort.  “That retard’s as blind as a bat.” 

Her comment sort of jogged my memory.  To quote the great Celine Dion, it was all coming back to me now.  So, Kelley obviously knew I was in the ambulance with Seamus when he wrecked it, but did that mean she also knew about everything else that had happened with him—the Chinese buffet, the toilet paper, the forks, the failed prank?  And, if she did, was I a retard by association?  Perhaps not even by association—was I just a plain retard, no association necessary?  Since she’d brought up the topic of blindness, I pivoted, tried to delay any and all discussion as to why I was in the hospital, and I asked Kelley if she remembered my friend, the Reverend Father Alabaster Fudge, the one who was just in here on account of his choking on the bone of a saint?  Well, not sure if I told you, Doc, but the reason the bone was in his mouth in the first place was because he’d stared at the sun too long during the solar eclipse the other month and fucked up his eyes and went all near-blind and then was somehow convinced that if the bone touched his tongue he’d be cured.  Basically.  Of course she remembered him, she said, laughing—the oddball priest, duh!—and then she told me that it was funny that I’d mentioned him, like it was almost as if the knock on my head had allowed me to see the future, because he was actually here right now to see me!  And then, right on cue, in walked Rev. Al, out of his hospital gown and in his priestly streetwear. 

“Ah, Sterling,” he said.  “I came as quickly as I could.” 

I greeted him with a nod and joked about how the tables had turned, our roles now reversed, but Rev. Al was having none of it.  This was serious business my being in the hospital, clearly no time for joking around, and then, like a total buzzkill, he confirmed my earlier fears about whether Kelley knew the full story.  I guess I’d been hoping that, as a physician in the emergency department, the details weren’t entirely necessary for her to perform her doctorly duties—that was gossip for the nurses, the Mikes and Carls (and I guessed priests?)—but then Al started going on about how I should’ve known better, associating myself with the likes of Seamus and stealing ambulances, vomiting on restaurant floors, pulling juvenile pranks.  I didn’t bother adding any context or clarifications—like, what the hell, I didn’t make myself throw up??—because I was too busy dreading that if Al knew the details, however slightly inaccurate that they were, then so did everybody else, including Kelley.  As Al rambled on, his talk having transitioned to the topic of sin and forgiveness, I stole a look at Kelley to see how she was taking the news, to see whether I could gather in the sharpness of her eyes, the concavity of her frown, just how much disdain she felt for me now, how low I’d sunk in her estimation, the flashes across her face which would no doubt be saying why did I give this guy a chance?  But instead of furious eyes or a disgusted frown, the features on her face were wrestling with each other, like she was fighting with everything she had to hold in a giggle that was threatening to burst out of her.  She pinched her nostrils and composed herself, caught my eyes with her own, and flashed her lovely smile.  I didn’t want to risk jinxing it.  I felt like there’d been some error in the matrix and that any utterance from me would cause it to be remedied, and swiftly, so I shut up and didn’t speak.  I was happy to let Al continue whatever the hell he was on about.  Like, surely, if there was anyone from whom I needed to ask for forgiveness, it wasn’t the Big Man Upstairs but the poor folk at Newest Hunan and whoever had the misfortune of cleaning up our mess at the Luxor Gardens.  Eventually, though, he finished by saying, “And, of course, Sterling, Ms. Spigot and I will take wonderful care of you during your recuperation.”

At this, I broke my resolution of silence as I looked over to Kelley for assistance.  She saw the confused terror in my eyes and gave me the good news first—that I’d suffered a grade 2, possibly grade 3, concussion, but that, aside from the horn on my forehead, I seemed okay externally.  And then the bad news—that, despite my outward appearances, there wasn’t really a way of knowing how I was doing internally, at least not yet, so I’d need near-constant monitoring for the next couple of days.  Well, I was fixing to say, isn’t it grand then that I’m already here, in the hospital and receiving the best care in the world from the lovely Dr. Kelley Tablebottom?  But before I could say anything, Kelley gave me the second set of bad news, informing me, in no uncertain terms, that, due to my status—which I assumed meant unemployed and uninsured—my staying in the hospital would cost several thousands of dollars.  (The American health care system, everybody!  A guy can’t bash his head on the dash of an ambulance without it costing him an arm and a leg!).  Well, Al had volunteered to take me back to the rectory and to serve as my temporary caretaker.  Upon hearing this, I immediately felt the wooziness washing over me again.  I’m sure it stemmed from the concussion mainly, but the thought of being holed up in some creepy room in the church rectory with Al and with Ms. Spigot and her wooden teeth cast over me a vertiginous paralysis, which was quickly joined by a disorienting hissing that was coming from either my ears or my brain.  Waves of grey crashed over me, and the last thing I remembered before the lights went out completely was Al hovering over me like a fucking unholy specter, his mouth moving but forming no words.