Beneath the wool of her coat Myrna’s skinny shoulder feels like the knobby end of an old man’s cane. Who knows what people must think, the way you stumble towards the road, hiding your bloody face in the crook of your sleeve?
Some of the voices sound alarmed. Some laugh. Amidst the bustle around you, you wonder if the fishermen are about to come up behind you again.
“Which hospital do you want to go to?” Myrna’s asking you.
“I don’t care.”
“What’s your insurance?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What do you mean, you don’t remember?”
“I haven’t been to the doctor in years.”
“You’re such a putz, Neville. How can you not go to the doctor?” She hooks her arm under yours.
You stand beside her at the curb. Bicyclists flash in front of you and sweaty joggers pound by just behind you. What is the reason? What crisis are these people preparing for?
From above your bloody sleeve you peek out while she tries to hail a cab. The few that slow, accelerate as soon as they’re close enough to get a look at you, and after a few minutes Myrna leads you to the seawall. She puts her hands on your shoulders and gently turns your back to the road. You’re leaning against the parapet now, listening to the ocean slosh, to the gulls that mock you; seeing nothing beyond the fabric of your bloody sleeve. But finally—who knows how much time it’s been—she’s calling you over. You turn to see how she grips the open door of the big orange cab. And there’s an ethereal glow around her. It isn’t only her. The taxi too. A perception, which may or may not be caused by your injuries, that certain objects are glowing, giving Myrna and the taxi a magical aspect, as if she’s clinging weightlessly to the last remaining spaceship on the roof of the last embassy. If the driver tries to escape, he’ll have to drag her screaming in her mint stockings across the universe.
You’re sitting in the seat behind him now. Myrna’s on your right. She’s telling him to take you to the Saint Sulpice.
“You must be new,” Myrna says to the driver as the cab begins to roll.
“Why?” he asks, rotating his roguish brown face with the soul patch all the way around to frown at her even as he makes his cab go faster.
“Only a new driver would pick up a mess like this,” Myrna says.
“What are you saying?!” Your own whiny voice surprises you. “You want him to kick us out?”
“I picked you up because you looked interesting,” the driver says. “I’m a writer.”
“Really?” Myrna says. “I’m a writer too. What do you write?”
The driver picks up a clipboard from the seat beside him and reads from it even as he merges across three lanes: “People like seeds… seeds blowing… blowing along the streets. Their minds float unperturbed… in a colossal network.”
“I get that,” Myrna says. “I totally get what you’re saying. The organic system being hijacked by the digital. It’s true.”
The driver laughs. “I guess,” he says.
“There must be some terrific material out here.”
“Yeah. Like the time I picked up a guy with blood gushing out of his face.”
“It looks worse than it is,” you say.
Myrna turns to you. “You don’t know that, Neville. Brain swelling can be fatal.”
You don’t say anything.
“What do you write about?” the driver asks as your chance to respond slips away.
“Currently I’m writing a book about hell,” she says.
“That’s something I’m interested in. Maybe you and I should get together.”
“You’re too young for me.”
He does look young, young and rumpled, with crazed nappy hair that appears to have been sawed off randomly in fistfuls. He’s wearing a too-big blue checked sports-coat. His gold earring features an iron cross—another glowing aspect—that dangles from his right ear.
He laughs. “I’m not asking you for a date. I meant to share our work.”
“You don’t think I’m attractive?”
Something sinister prevents the light from changing at Howard Street. There are no streetcars, no cross traffic. There’s a fixture on a pole with an illuminated red X, and a gang of tourists are walking nonchalant in front of the taxicab. The grand boulevard curves northward like a scythe.
“It’s not that,” he says.
“I’m a perfect size zero. I have perfect skin, long legs, completely healthy hair which is very rare,” she says to him.
“Those are impressive statistics.” He doesn’t turn around this time.
You decide to moan. You have a right.
“I just want to know,” she asks. “Do you find me attractive?”
The driver remains mute.
“It’s an existential question,” Myrna says finally.
“I don’t think it’s existential. I think it’s personal.”
“It’s a personal existential question. Do you, or do you not, find me attractive?”
“I think you’re very attractive,” he says. “But you’re not my type.”
“What’s your type?”
“Someone with an arm as big around as a broomstick.”
You moan a deeper moan.
“What are you trying to say?” she asks.
“I’m not trying to say anything.”
You begin to gargle with your blood ostentatiously.
“Shut up, Neville,” Myrna says. “We’re trying to have a conversation.”
“What happened to him anyway?” the driver asks at the exact moment the red X that has so-far shined in temporal relation to your brain’s swelling, turns itself off and a green left turn signal illuminates on the pole.
“He saved the shark,” Myrna says as she rubs you fondly on the shoulder. “He’s my hero.”
“It was a shark attack?”
You’re bouncing over the streetcar tracks. Your ribs howl silently.
“No. He was beaten up by some hippie fishermen.”
“I don’t get it,” the driver says.
“He fought off the hippies so that I could reunite the shark with the ocean.”
“That’s very poetic,” he says.
“It’s poetic justice,” she says this as the driver swerves to barely miss the fez-wearing man on his bicycle with the matching fez-wearing dog in its basket. Only the face of the dog registers any alarm.
“I’ve known lots of hippies,” the driver says. “They never hurt anyone. It’s not in their culture.”
“I might take umbrage with that,” you say.
“Umbrage! That’s such a great word,” Myrna says.
“I know,” the driver says. “I have to write that down.”
You’re about to cross Market Street by the Federal Reserve and the driver begins jotting things down on his clipboard. A limousine that the cab just cut in front of is honking.
“Can’t you go any faster?” you ask.
“Just a sec,” the driver says. He sets the clipboard down in the seat next to him and begins to inch forward. Then he stops and stares archly into his rear view mirror which causes the limo driver to lose his mind. You don’t look back again because you feel the murderous hostility emitting from the limo’s horn. At the last possible second, the cab accelerates through the intersection leaving the limo driver at the light. “Ha!” he says before turning his attention back to Myrna. “We should get together.”
“Give me your number,” Myrna says. “Are we going to be in one of your stories?”
“I’m considering that right now.”
The emergency entrance to Saint Sulpice Hospital is blocked by three cop cars and an ambulance.
“Can Shark Boy make it from here?” the driver asks.
“Shark Boy?” You cough more blood onto your shirt front. “I’m doing my best not to get blood on your seats, you know.”
“It was just a joke, Neville,” Myrna says. “Humor is our only consolation in this world.”
“I’ll drink to that,” the driver says.
“Consolation for you I guess,” you say as you push the door open.
You leave Myrna behind to chat up the driver while you stand and steady yourself on the open door. Two policemen, guns and walkie talkies, are almost in front of you, leaning on their cruiser while they shoot the breeze. You stagger past them, staunching blood with your sleeve. You thread your way through ambulances and toward the big sliding door emblazoned with the word, Emergency, in foot-tall Helvetica 55. Thankfully, it opens automatically.
You’re only dripping blood intermittently as you lurch into the short hall that leads to the waiting room. A sign’s marked wait behind the line, attached to a little pole. Two people are ahead of you.
The man at the window holds a large white teddy bear which he’s using to stifle an attack of sneezing as he leans against the Admissions window behind which a bored looking sixty-something taps at his keyboard.
The next man, the one immediately in front of you, is evidently speaking to his psychiatrist on the phone. He has a pot belly, scoliosis, and knobby knees that stick out of his cargo shorts. “I want to dial down the Al-pra-zolom, and dial up the Gaba-bit-in-him,” he screams into his phone. “No. With the Valium. Right. How do I know it’s too low? Because I’m driving much better than usual!”
While your blood is adding dots to the speckled linoleum, you manage to find your insurance card in a lesser pocket of your pressure-curled wallet, partially adhered to a BART ticket with 80 cents remaining. You’ve reached the window now and you hand it through the aluminum dish-out beneath the bullet thick glass. The clerk takes it gingerly by the corner—he’s thinking about HIV of course—and inserts it into the slot in a putty colored machine near his elbow.
“Name,” he asks. The back of his hand is glowing.
“Neville Furman.”
He’s typing madly with extraordinary energy—far more keystrokes than the 13 letters that make up your name. After ten or more seconds of this, you watch his right thumb tap the spacebar in a long slow sequence—four beats and a rest over and over. He’s got gaudy rings on three fingers of each hand. Besides that, he looks completely conventional in his grooming. He wears the requisite blue smock of a hospital employee. His headphones are the kind with hooks that encircle part of his ears.
“What are you listening to?” you ask him.
“Mulatu.”
“Mulatu?”
“Live from the Tigre Lounge.” He still refuses to look up at you.
You can see the specifics of your identity displayed on his screen.
“Copay twenty-five dollars,” he tells you. “What seems to be the problem?”
“I’m bleeding from my head.”
“Head wound,” he says, drawing out the wooooo sound musically, in harmony with whatever it is Mulatu’s doing.
He gives you back your card, your change, and some laminated pink papers recently expelled from the putty-colored machine. “Have a seat.”
There are two connected rooms with ceilings of different heights, around fifty stamp-molded cream-colored seats, each scaled to hold one individual butt. The rooms are empty for the most part, with just five people scattered about: the coughing man, the man who wishes to adjust his psychopathic drugs, an old couple with hats and overcoats who look like they stepped out of an archival photo of European refugees, as well as someone, a man, whose bright pink sports shoes are all you can see protruding from around the corner.
There are so many empty seats it’s hard to choose, but the coughing man is in the second room, and you want Myrna to see you if she comes in, so you sit a few steps away from the registration window. You lean back, slumped with your head against the wall, wondering if she’ll join you, or if she’s flown away with her new found friend. You wonder if she’s called the office to tell them why you haven’t returned from lunch. You worry enough to dig into your pocket for your phone, even as you try to wipe away the blood that trickles down your forehead.
It’s when you set your phone on your lap that you notice your shirt tails are soaked in blood. You look like an extra from a slasher film, but your phone on your knee glows with a picture of Mr Nobody looking out your apartment window into a world where cats roam free.
a-j-a you type with the unbloodied edge of your left pinky finger and “Ajani Isabella” comes up. You bring the phone to your ear.
“From Nascar to push up bras, from life saving drugs to thousands of products that make you smile, GSB makes America’s greatest brands even greater! Follow us on Twitter.” There’s a pause and a computer generated Suzie Bright voice says, “Ajani Isabella, Project Manager.” Then, at long last, the beep.
“Ajani,” you say. “This is Neville. I don’t know if Myrna called already, but there was an accident and, well, I’m actually at the hospital, so… I guess you’d better find some freelance help this afternoon and maybe tomorrow too. Okay?” You’re not sure what else to tell her. As you hesitate a crowd of people with no discernible common denominator wander into the room from the street. “The Max Factor job jackets are on the floor next to my chair,” you offer in a helpful tone just before you hang up.
No one in the group stops at the admissions window. There must be thirty of them and you watch them cluster in spaces between the seats and mill around uncertainly.
Their apparent leader is a small middle aged Asian woman dressed in a navy blue suit with white running shoes. Her black hair is permed into tight ringlets, and she’s wearing enormous dark glasses with gold frames that make it impossible to see her eyes. With the help of a man in a green sweater, she stands up on a centrally located chair while her followers coalesce in the standing room around her.
“We find ourselves in a typical ER waiting room,” she begins. She stops to wait for the last of the stragglers to come into the bigger room. “This way,” she urges. “Don’t be shy. But also don’t touch anything! Necrotizing fasciitis, also called flesh-eating bacteria, is only one of the superbugs commonly found in American hospitals!”
Some of the people who’d sat down on the plastic chairs decide to stand. A woman grabs her child off the floor.
The leader goes on: “Here, you’ll find, in this urban setting, average people, citizens—black, white, green, Asian—receiving the very highest quality medical care regardless of the reasons that brought them here. They’re all waiting to receive treatment without fear of discrimination.
She uses strong, almost piercing diction and you think she must be used to speaking to even larger audiences. “You can see,” she continues. “Fluorescent lighting that is very harsh. The interior design is hard-edged and basic. The architecture, as I mentioned outside, is known as Brutalist. It is typical of the 1970s construction style. Did anyone care one iota about energy efficiency in 1975?” She hesitates to let the significance of her question sink in and then laughs when no one responds. “Why not?” she asks as she scans the crowd. None of them seemed to have any idea what she’s getting at and she slaps her arms against her sides before continuing. “After the victory in Vietnam, resources were poured into hospitals like this to show people of USA that Number One Health Care in the World is right here! It’s not in Communist China. It’s not in Castro’s Cuba. It isn’t in Laos or North Korea or Cambodia or Tokyo or Nagasaki or Iraq. No! It is not in any of the countries bombed to bloody toothpicks by B-Five-Hundred-and-Fifty-Twos. No! The best health care in the world is right here under our nose. Or, should I say, our fluorescent lights!” She laughs her lonely laugh.
“Look around you. Nothing is notable. Nothing. That’s why we call this place Institutional Modern.” Two or three people in the group crane their necks in an attempt to study the room. “Here, you will find average citizens—people—receiving high quality medicine regardless of the reasons that brought them here. This is a city hospital. This is not a country hospital. Do you see a farmer or a pig?” She puts her hand over her brow in the pose of someone looking far into the distance. “No! What you see are drug addicts, prostitutes and others who practice dangerous self-destructive lifestyles. They are waiting. Waiting for what?” Here she pauses again. As much as she loves the Socratic method, the crowd seems ambivalent and bored. Some face away from the speaker, chatting among themselves. One couple is unfolding a colorful map of Fisherman’s Wharf with a cartoon seagull. “Anybody?” she asks, sweeping her eyes across the few faces that still watch her.
A bald man with a toddler on his shoulders raises his hand. “Are they waiting to get called in to see the doctor?”
“Yes! Thank you! They are waiting for a competent doctor. They are waiting for a kind doctor. They are waiting for a caring doctor. They are waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting!”
A red-faced man in jeans and a backpack turns towards you and raises his camera. It’s a professional-looking camera with a neck strap, not a phone, an anachronism with a telephoto lens of the sort you see on the sidelines of football games. He’s six feet in front of you on his knees firing it like a gun, taking hundreds of identical pictures in rapid succession. Two young girls in matching outfits appear next to his shoulders on either side. Their phones, with matching bright pink covers level with their faces, are pointed at you as well.
You’re waving your hands in front of your face when Myrna bursts into the room. “What the hell is going on, Neville?!” she cries. “And who the fuck are all these people?!”
I feel like adding some blood to my avatar in solidarity with Neville.
I love all the faces in your illustration, some almost clear and some just a suggestion of a face.