Dream Corpses: 2. Cosmic Inflation

In a dream, the letter came:

“My Dear, if I may, Coop:

“I am writing this during my lunch break and want you to know that I believe your story.

“Sometimes along the way we choose a path that leads to a series of non-lucrative employments and ventures which in turn fail to provide us with adequate health care benefits.  It happens and I understand what you are going through.

“Normally in cases such as yours our hands are tied.  So many people have such similar stories to tell, and our machines have been programmed in a language that does not allow for storytelling summation and analysis.  But let me say that I have tasted the blood of your words and have decided to take it upon myself to contact the V.P. of Operations this afternoon and personally plead your case.  I shall serve him your words raw and trust that he too tastes blood.

“Truly I sympathize with your situation, and this is one time that I shall not allow the machines to ignore our common humanity and print you a generic notice of intimidation.

“Thank you for responding in letter form about your financial state.  As I have stated many times, it is important to keep your creditors aware of your paying intent!

“Fondly, Samantha, Assistant to the Chair.”

The note was signed with an imprint of Samantha’s lips—so ripe, like fruit, and so detailed, like a topographical map.  In those lips, ridges and canyons, ponds and streams and highways unraveled through meadows of bachelor’s buttons, ushering me into the heart of a tropical darkness.

In a dream, the letter went, and now I live forever in the amber grains that shine upon the faces of the ladies at the billing offices.

I am, theoretically, a man.  I own no land, and whatever the numbers in my savings account say, that’s what they mean, and what they mean as regards the whole of my earthly, liquefiable assets.

My cooking and eating utensils consist of a frying pan, a soup pan, a cookie sheet, a plate, a teaspoon, a tablespoon, a fork, a butter knife and a steak knife.  I use the frying pan for an occasional egg over-medium and the cookie sheet for an occasional beef pasty; otherwise, the bowl and the soup pan figure most prominently in the preparation of my foodstuffs.

My wardrobe consists of seven pairs of under shorts, three T-shirts (one blood-stained), seven pairs of socks (two white), two pairs of jeans, two pairs of outer shorts (one khaki and one athletic), one pair of casual slacks, one pair of dress slacks, one belt, three button-down long-sleeve shirts (one professional), two sweatshirts, one sweater, one tie, one pair of tennis shoes, one pair of dress shoes, one spring/summer jacket, one scarf, one fall/winter coat, a pair of boots, a hat and a pair of gloves.

I wash my clothes every Saturday night.  Then I take a bath.

The truth is, I’ve seldom known pain of the physical variety.  If various and sundry gastrointestinal disturbances count, okay; put me down for those.  But how many times in my life have I almost been visited by a bacterial virus?  How many times has a microscopic viral creature strolled by the front lawn of my being, stopped beneath the streetlight of my wellness and pondered, merely pondered, a visit?  How many toxic viruses, how many potentially cancerous cells, this minute, lurk in the shadows of my good health?  I shudder.

My old friend Roddy, an employee of the correctional community most of his adult life, has all kinds of stories that echo pain; but one story stands out, a story told over a few drafts at the Blue Star Tavern in my hometown.

It happened once that a large man abused a small man in a cell.  Abused him affectionately in the night.  Permit me to say only, as a result, the small man was taken to a hospital for reconstructive surgery.  Roddy chuckled about that one.

To me, lucky man from a faraway land of trees and outhouses, such incidents haven’t existed and don’t exist.  I can’t chuckle.  Men don’t abuse men in prison cells.  And if they do, does it make a sound?

I’ve had a boil before, palpitations, tingling sensations, a fractured fibula, those things, and all have precipitated my journey through the emotional stages of one whose death has been forecast, culminating in a lesser-known, and therefore lesser-researched, final stage—Wild Fear.  I’ve passed hours perusing symptoms books in libraries and book stores, convincing myself I was on the short cut to death.  I’ve had bad visions, while asleep and while awake.  But through it all, I’ve held to the suspicion I’m but a babe in the forest of pain.

For the record, some months after the leg had mended and Peg had returned to empty space, I developed a stomach cramp that raged for three days and nights, achieving a climax of near-debilitating proportions on the third night.

After sitting for an hour in the hospital parking lot, debating whether to go home, I found myself on a polyester sofa in a waiting room with walls the color of cookie dough.  Across the room from me, an old man and woman and a teenage boy in a jean jacket and cowboy boots, fists clenching and unclenching on his knees, gaped at a TV mounted near the ceiling, where a local news anchor recapped the major events of the day.

With smiling burgundy lips (the only part that moved) and acres of auburn hair as thick and grainy as hay, she delivered a report on babies being butchered in a faraway land, then tunefully segued to the latest out of Washington on government testing of missiles.

And as we cut and zoomed to a close-up of an American missile smoking whitely toward the heavens, the anchor narrating on, the old man and woman, that strung-out boy and I, agog and gaping, an awful truth jolted me: my stomach was rallying on its own.

“Remove your pants and lie on your back,” bellowed a voice and a pair of hands in the emergency room.

I wanted to question, to reason with him, but his brutish manner overpowered me.  Reluctantly, I complied, feeling chilled, a bit brittle and undernourished, standing barefooted upon waxed tiles.

“Underwear, too.”

“Underwear?”

My voice, though barely audible, startled me in the hard light and sterility of that room.

He couldn’t have meant underwear.

But he said nothing, so engaged was he in arranging the implements of medical emergency, while I slipped quiveringly out of my underwear and onto a tissue-papered gurney.

“Knees up, please.”

Icy fingers pressed against the backs of my thighs.

About that time, a grave-faced doctor appeared in the glare of emergency lights, snapped on a pair of surgical gloves and positioned himself at the foot of the gurney.  His frocked midsection leaned gently but purposefully into my toes.

“Uh,” I mumbled, “are ... ”

How had it happened, me in that emergency room, pantless and quaking upon an alcohol-scented gurney?

“There may be a brief bit of discomfort,” was all he offered.

“Um ...  Er ... ”

Indeed it was the pointer finger—yes, indeed, the jelled pointer finger—that lodged itself, like a fish without judgment, somewhere in the region of my small intestine.  To this day, the finger remains, wiggling, seeking answers, working on mysteries.

Back in the waiting room, my comrades maintained their vigil beneath the blinking tube, whose volume, if I recall, threatened to pop the corpuscles in my head.  I sat up and took notice.  Arranged in armchairs around a fireplace, in the midst of a photo-flash storm, the President and other dignitaries smiled and moved their lips mechanically.

Just as I was preparing to break for the exit doors, the emergency doctor reappeared with a clipboard bearing my prognosis: “UNEXPLAINED ABDOMINAL PAINS,” inscribed in jumbo blue letters and circled at the bottom of a medical form.

Seeming unimpressed, he reeled off the possible origins of my former pain.  Meanwhile, the same unmoving anchor plowed onward through the day’s tragedies, ripe burgundy lips and helmet of auburn hair distending the screen above.  Somehow, in the course of my emergency, the anchor had become something of a guardian angel, my deliverer from the doctor with the finger, that grave-faced man feverishly mumbling my story into a pocket tape recorder.

After signing out at the emergency ward, I drove to a party store for a pack of Lucky Strikes and a pint of Sapphire.  Wet snowflakes like fuzzy nickels alighted on my windshield and melted away under the streetlights.

The climate in the party store was one of warmth and friendliness.  My tennis shoes sloshed through puddles on the floor tiles.  On the way to the cooler, I passed the periodical rack, where glossy covers of naked and semi-naked young ladies in assorted states of contortion shone boldly out at me, seeming to say, “Hello.”

I was grateful to be well.