Bloodsuckers
Tess stands. I expect her to tell me that she’s heading back to work, but instead she reaches for her wallet.
“I’m going to the cafeteria. You want anything?”
I don’t. She follows the nurse out of the room, and I watch Betsy suck at my skin. She feels like a caterpillar, without the legs, without the promise of wings. The hospital is quiet but I know there are patients recuperating in the neighboring rooms – a car accident victim and a woman who fell down the stairs. I overheard the nurses talking about them outside my room. I haven’t seen either, but I imagine them constantly: a man, maybe fifty, still spry but showing signs of age with his leg strung up in a sling. He’s married, but it’s his mistress he’s longing to see. It was her he was talking to when he hit the other car – making plans for their weekend away. She’s married, too, but she assures him her marriage is dead. He’s believed her all this time but now he’s not so sure. When will she visit?
And the other: a single woman, close to thirty but she looks younger – a naughty librarian type with short brown hair and hot-for-teacher glasses. She was groggy from the cough medicine she had taken the previous night when she missed the top step of her stairs and tumbled down headfirst. She broke an arm, a few ribs, and perforated one of her lungs. Two days later she still has a cough, and every time she feels it coming she makes a low groaning noise because it hurts like hell to let it release.
And then there’s me. In tribute to the dozen or so medical questionnaires we’ve filled out over the past few days, I will define myself by way of numbers: age thirty-eight, father of one, married for seven years, with three fingers testing the limits of modern science after an unfortunate meeting with the blade of my seven and a quarter inch circular saw. One six-hour surgery, two days in a San Francisco teaching hospital, and seventeen leeches that have reduced the swelling in my fingers by approximately forty percent. Considering that carpentry is not only my hobby but my job for three months of the year (teaching English occupies the other nine), this accident registers as a solid 6 on the 1-to-10 scale of embarrassment.
When Tess returns, Betsy has doubled in size and a thin stream of blood is trickling from my finger. After Betsy is done, I’m to let the blood continue flowing until the nurse is satisfied that I’m not clotting too quickly. Just let it ooze.
“You wouldn’t believe who I ran into in the cafeteria,” Tess says, setting down a large cup of the coffee she now guzzles but never used to touch.
I wait, keeping an eye on Betsy’s curved body. I have a sudden urge to stroke her slimy little back but I’ve been told that could make her regurgitate, so I keep my free hand to myself.
“Jacqui Martin. You know, the one with the –” she does a cupping motion under her breasts. “Her dad fell in the shower and broke his hip.”
“They must not have had one of those nonskid pads in there.”
“You’re missing the point. He fell. In their house. And broke his hip.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“Yeah, but are you hearing me?”
I consider a few different responses, but my most recent dose of painkillers has started to make my words feel thick, like mud, and I know that whatever I say will be an abstract, if not entirely incoherent representation of my actual thoughts. When I don’t reply, she sighs and begins to rifle through her purse.
Her movements feel hurried, although I’m not entirely sure that they are. It’s as if I’m watching her from inside a sloshing fish bowl, but instead of obscuring my vision, the water intensifies the clarity of my surroundings. I’m a goldfish traveling in slow motion when the rest of the world continues on at full speed, unaware of my metamorphosis of time and being.
