The black spike twisted and squirmed, the sky fighting to pull it back into place. It fought back. It threw mailboxes, dogs and doors, anything and everything, to keep hold of the ground. Dad finally waved me downstairs, then followed.
We crouched in our red and ratless storm cellar darkroom while God, all of God’s dogs and God’s biggest, fiercest angels kicked and screamed from outside. They tore the inside of our house to pieces and threatened to crush the house itself. They kicked in the doors, snapping them from their frames. They hammered at the rusty deadbolt on the outside entrance and they howled and shrieked at us to open up, raining concrete dust onto our heads, spitting hail through the cracks in our basement. The red lights flared on, then off, then exploded in a rain of white sparks. We couldn’t hear our own voices over their screaming but we never moved, we never let them in.
DEBRIS RAINS INTO MY EYES. I TRY TO PICK THEM CLEAN BUT FIND NOTHING.
The house isn’t shaking and God isn’t kicking the door down. I’m at the Firebird. The shower of dirt is a hive of phantom bugs picking at my skin with a million invisible mandibles. Someone swapped my skull for another during the night. It’s too big for my face, but too tight for my brain. The bones in my shoulders, elbows and knees vibrate within my muscles like rusty hinges. I drink from the tap until my stomach can’t hold any more, but my throat is still packed with cotton, my bandages stuffed with sawdust.
Shaving might as well be eye surgery, my hands quivering like they are. Something darts across my bare foot. Tiny claws and a pink leather tail. Spinal chills kick the phantom mandibles into overdrive. My hand slips and my razor drops into the sink, a layer of spent foam, wet stubble and fresh blood.
They’ve chewed through the damp baseboard beneath the sink. I grab a pair of dirty socks and stuff one into the rat hole and mop my bloody chin with the other.
Jack and the Beanstalk sit together like an old couple. Jack reads a newspaper. Beanstalk sits transfixed by the television static, a pair of headphones clamped to his ears.
“You’re in love, aren’t you?” Jack doesn’t look up from his paper.
I dig change from my pockets for the coffee machine. Maybe Jack catches me staring at his friend.
“He hasn’t spoken since Miles Davis died,” he says.
The coffee machine drones like an earth mover.
“You can’t be troubled,” says Jack. “I understand.”
A cardboard specimen cup drops from the chute, followed by a hot trickle.
“Did you find Desiree?” His paper is years out of date. The front page announces a U.S.-launched missile attack against Libya.
“Yeah, thanks.”
“And you’re in love. Am I right or not?”
“Sure. Sort of.”
“Of course you are. You reek of it.” He folds his newspaper, slowly and deliberately, so someone else can read about the manhunt for Gadhafi.
“It’s beautiful,” he says, “every time is like the first. There’s nothing like it.”
“Right.”
“And the currents?” The same patronizing, metronome voice. “Are they a menace, or simply a nuisance?”
The coffee tastes like dishwater boiled in a discarded tire.
“You don’t realize what’s inside the walls until you can hear it,” Jack says. “Miles of wire, humming with current. Power lines, transformers, radio waves, microwaves, radar. Do you have any metal fillings?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t checked.”
“Keep your vigil or those transmissions unravel inside your ears. You hear every phone conversation, talk show and radio jingle all at the same time and you can’t turn them off. It’s like being a god, omniscient and insane, both at once. That kind of love will drive you mad.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Careful is for tourists. You’re trespassing on too late. You’ve already said you’re in love.”
“I’ll pick up some foil, make a beanie. Tell me your hat size and I’ll kick one your way. Will that help?”
“No, it will not. Nor will your sarcasm and lack of courtesy.”
“I need to get going.”
“I’m trying to help you, 621. Anything you haven’t remembered yet, you forgot for a reason. Cut her loose. The heartache will be nothing compared to the noise in your head, if you do it now.”
I’m out the door when he shouts, “I’m the only friend you’ve got.”
What they call a gown is a paper bib the color of toilet cleaner that hangs to my knees. The first nurse weighs me, the second takes my blood pressure and a third listens to my heart. The fourth asks about the medicines I’m supposed to be taking but haven’t been. I imagine they build igloos or chisel ice sculptures between patients, and they mark the same clipboard and say the doctor will be with me soon. Two minutes each, over two hours.
A girl lies opposite me, a tube in her arm and another in her nose. The bandages around her head dip to cover her left eye. A woman sits with her beside a small beeping box and holds her hand. Near a fire extinguisher lies a man on a gurney. He is either homeless or dead, or both. Blood from his face and chest soaks through the sheets, growing darker and duller as I watch. They’ll have to be torn from his skin.
We’re in full view of the hospital staff, our bandages, blood and paper bibs, yet we’re invisible. The great antidrama of life among the stucco hives in the hills above the Firebird unfolds while we wait. Someone got engaged or spent the weekend away at a wedding, or a funeral. Someone lost money on a game, colored her hair, got his car out of impound or got laid. Someone applied to graduate school or drank too much. The mundane details both impossible and unreal compared to my last forty-eight hours.
The Hotel Firebird stinks with the fumes of humanity packed into a brick box, churning out piss, sweat, cum and blood, the liquid of living things. Houses the color of prosthetic limbs, nestled within the calibrated green hills of Shady Pointe, filter and flush that cocktail of stench with extreme prejudice. The odorless nothing I smelled in those hills and at the mall was nothing, neither foul nor antiseptic, but nothing nonetheless. I know, because the smell of nothing is all around here. Every measure is taken to discharge and disguise the smells and secretions of the living struggling for life. Death waits, bobbing in a sealed jar of formaldehyde as half the life here is half naked and wholly alone, ignored by the other half wearing pale green scrubs and living in muted brown homes.
Dr. Stanley examines me without making eye contact. He speaks to the clipboard or to my bandages.
“I see you’re in much better shape than when I last saw you.” He’s four years older than me, at most. His Adam’s apple distends like a mop handle pushing through the back of his neck.
“How are you feeling?”
“I’m cold.”
There’s a curtain to my left, two men talking behind it. One uses his voice for the first time since Death sang him to sleep and a medic slapped him awake, exhuming his rusted throat from the mud and weeds. The voice asks to be discharged.
“It says here your temperature is normal.” Dr. Stanley reads from the communal clipboard. “Fever or chills could be a signal of complications. How long have you been feeling cold?”
“Since I’ve been sitting here in my underwear waiting for you.”
He doesn’t say anything. His Adam’s apple plunges the length of his neck when he swallows.
An orderly steps from behind the curtain. He’s enormous, his