KATACLYSM: A Space-Time Comedy (14 page)

“Man, I could go for a nice hot drink right about now,” said Eric Silver as he accompanied Emily to the in-patient ward.

The two residents plodded along one of the hospital’s many long corridors.  Emily took a sip of coffee from her jumbo travel mug.

“Wanna sip?”

“No thanks,” said Eric.  “You know I don’t drink coffee – and don’t give me that look, I’m not the only doctor on the planet who doesn’t, there’s this one guy in Pittsburgh…”  His cellphone pinged to alert him to new blood test results.  “I could go for a tea, though.  God, I haven’t even eaten lunch.”

The pager at Emily’s hip began to play SOS by ABBA.  She checked it.

“Dude, it’s almost past dinner time.  What’s going on with you?”

“I don’t know.  I just haven’t had a moment to rest.  I haven’t seen a call-room…haven’t seen my locker since Saturday night…actually, I just remembered I have some tea…”

“Emerg is paging us.  Let’s do this consult first and then we’ll finish rounds.”

The two residents turned around and began to walk in the opposite direction.

“Why don’t we just stop at Starbucks and buy you a tea?”

“It’s not the same,” said Eric.  “I have some really good stuff in my locker.  You know, it’s just up ahead.  Is it ok if I pop in and grab a teabag on our way?”

“Sounds good,” Emily replied, reflexively adjusting her hair elastic while they walked.

But as they turned the corner, her expression changed.  At the far end of the corridor, they saw a pair of men in lab coats in the middle of a heated conversation.  The man on the left was short, fat and red in the face.  An animated fellow, he gesticulated wildly while apparently telling a story to his colleague.  The man on the right was tall, sweaty and nearly anorexic.  He appeared quite nervous and looked as though someone had unexpectedly jammed a lime into his mouth.

“What’s wrong?” asked Eric.

“That’s Dr. Pee and Dr. No Pee,” whispered Emily as she slowed their pace.  “They’re the two senior staff urologists.  I was on their service for a month when I was doing surgery as a clerk.  Did I ever tell you about them?”

Eric shook his head.

“Dr. Pee is the one on the left,” she said pointing to the fat one.  “That’s not his real name obviously, but that’s what everyone calls him.  He specializes in obstructive uropathy.  He’ll treat anyone who has trouble getting the water flowing.  Detrusor sphincter dyssynergia, neurogenic bladder, BPH.  You name it, he treats it.  And boy does he do a good job.  He loves to cut.  From what I saw, he pretty much cuts out everything.  I’d say ninety-nine point nine percent of his patients end up completely incontinent.  His patient satisfaction rating is in sub-basement F. I don’t think he’s even allowed to operate anymore but they keep him on staff because his brother is the president of the hospital foundation.  He’s already filthy rich and I think the only reason he still hangs around here is so he can torture Dr. No Pee with his stories.”

As they got closer, Eric caught some of what Dr. Pee was saying.

“…and so the resident said that an ileal conduit was the indicated treatment.  I said, where did you come up with those statistics pal, the New England Journal?  I said, screw that, I’m just going to go in and blast the damn thing out…”

The tall thin doctor looked around, seemingly for help. His eyes met Eric’s.  At once, Emily grabbed her companion and pulled him down another corridor.

“What are you doing?” said Eric.  “My locker was right next…”

“We can’t go that way, Eric,” replied Emily.  “If they saw me, we’d get sucked into one of their arguments forever.  We’d never make it to Emerg.  That other guy was Dr. No Pee,” continued Emily.  “He’s the human embodiment of the word conservative.  Jerry Falwell is practically a gay hippie compared to that guy.  He’s afraid to do virtually anything and Dr. Pee constant baits him about it.  He sees patients who leak.  I’m not quite sure what he does to them but I swear, when he’s done, I don’t think a drop of urine ever passes out of their urethras.  They all go into retention and, I think, eventually renal failure.  He’s single handedly keeping the dialysis industry thriving in Boston.  We can’t go that way, Eric.  You’ll have to get your tea later.”

“Jesus.”

The tall, sleek little green alien stood on the observation deck of his giant sales ship, looking down upon his massive showroom.  A multitude of long, brown tentacles shot out of the top of his head, braided themselves together and settled down on his shoulders.  Under the imposing figure’s hairy mess of tentacles sat a microscopic phone which slid into his ear and allowed him to remain in perpetual contact with all of his distributors.  A red, floating view screen hovered next to him gathering dust.  When possible, the spaceship salesman preferred not to speak face-to-face.  His business was an art.  And to show too much of himself was to lose his competitive edge and to invite misunderstanding.

“Listen Luv,” the alien salesman said patronizingly into his earpiece.  “I can’t do you less than two hundred thousand.”

In an attempt to be helpful, the hovering view screen floated in front of him and flashed the words ‘lower pricing limit 135,000’.  The salesman batted the screen away and turned in the other direction.

“Right…yes…I know times aren’t great but…I know…but my shareholders will kill me if…yes…uhuh…I know I don’t have any shareholders, it’s an expression but…ok, well just try and get back to me on the two hundred and twenty five thousand…the what?...oh yes, my mistake, two hundred and ten thousand…huh?...If you say so, my dear, I wouldn’t have it any other way…two hundred thousand and, let me tell you, I won’t accept a penny more…you just get back to me ok?...great…love ya…ciao!”

With a nod of his head, the alien hung up the phone and refocused his attention on the floor below.  More than a thousand copies of his most expensive and ambitious spaceship were stacked neatly in rows occupying nearly every corner of his flagship.

His latest design was a true creation.  Anyone who looked at it was, at once, entranced by the silky black chrome which permeated every aspect of the vehicle’s veneer.  Patterned after a black hole, any light hitting its surface from any angle would get lost in it as, hoped the alien salesman, would all of his customers.  The ship had already earned rave reviews from the critics and had sold well in the major markets.  But the real test would be the ship’s sales in the periphery, a relatively untapped resource, where aliens didn’t have the same kind of earning power or disposable income as the consumers in his usual haunts.

The salesman had only just begun his whirlwind tour of the outer zones, but he was already concerned about falling short of his profit projections.  At that moment, however, he was far more concerned with the silver blemish that sat in the sea of black on his showroom floor.  He squinted at the silver saucer as the ship’s three occupants emerged from its hatch and began to wander among the rest of the merchandise.  That ship’s one of mine, he thought.  Grabbing a clipboard, he began to march towards the elevator, the ends of his regal white robe trailing behind him.

Within a few seconds, the alien salesman had descended to ground level and was striding hurriedly along the cheap showroom carpeting to catch up with Paroophoron and the two humans.

“Welcome,” he called to them.

“Sir, please,” said a panicked Flower to the stranger.  “We need some gas right away.”

Now that he had their attention, the salesman in the white robe came to a halt, smoothed his robes and leisurely sauntered over to the group, choosing to ignore Flower entirely.

“Why have you brought us here?” beeped Paroophoron suspiciously.

The salesman sized up the tiny alien.

“You must have set off our ‘run out of gas’ alarm,” he replied matter-of-factly.

“‘Run out of gas’ alarm?” Jude piped in quizzically.

“Yes,” said the salesman with a slight curl of his lip.  “Anytime anyone says the words ‘run out of gas’ within two galaxies of this ship, it sets off the alarm and we come and collect you…as a service to our future customers, of course.”

“Hang on.  I know you,” said Paroophoron unmoved by the other alien’s pleasantries.  “You’re the swindler who sold me this piece of junk.”

Paroophoron gestured towards his silver spaceship.

“Piece of junk?” said the salesman whose tentacles flew up above his head in alarm.  “That, sir, is one of my most treasured crafts.  It was painful for me to part with it, but I did it because it was best for my customers and they always come first.  Why, it came with one of the finest leather interiors known to this side of the universe.”

“Yeah right,” sneered Paroophoron, “and the ship somehow managed to brutally annihilate that interior exactly one day after the warranty expired.”

“Excuse me…” interjected Flower.

“Well,” said the salesman adjusting his robes defensively and ignoring Flower.  “I encourage all of our customers to purchase the extended warranty to avoid such difficulties.  I simply can’t be held responsible if people don’t take my sound advice.”

“Please spare me,” replied an increasingly testy Paroophoron.  “We both know that if I had bought the extra insurance, the leather would simply have lasted until the day after the extended warranty expired.”

“Sir, please…” cut in Jude as he saw Flower’s face turning red with exasperation

The salesman continued to ignore the humans and decided to change the subject. He turned to inspect his inventory.

“There must be something here that I could set you folks up in,” he said surveying the hundreds of identical crafts.

“What do you mean, ‘set us up in’?” said Jude anxiously.  “Just get us some gas so we can be on our way.”

“Sorry my friend,” said the salesman with feigned regret, still facing his ships.  “Company policy.  Everyone leaves in a brand new ship.”

“You must be joking,” said Paroophoron.  “I can’t afford one of those monsters right now.”

“Oh come now,” said the salesman in a hurt voice.  “I can go as low as two hundred and seventy-five thousand.”  He turned to face the trio.  “Family rate,” he added.

“Forget it,” said an angry Paroophoron.  “I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Fine,” replied the salesman.  “But then you’ll just have to wait until…”

“Wait!” shouted Jude.  “We can’t wait.  It’s an emer…”

“Will you please just listen,” said Flower, tears now streaming down her face.  “We need to get to Earth.  We need to get to Earth right now or else…”

“I’m sorry my dear,” said the salesman.  “But we’re on a very tight schedule and I’m afraid that we…hang on a second.  Did you say Earth?”

“Yes, Earth,” shrieked Flower.

The salesman rifled through the pages on his clipboard.

“Well, I’ll be…what are the chances of that?”

Paroophoron and the humans stood in puzzled silence.  The salesman looked up.

“It must be your lucky day, luv.  I haven’t been to Earth in ages, but it just so happens that it’s our next stop.”

The warm weather that had blown in on the weekend offering a mid-winter reprieve to the people of Boston was gone and forgotten.  It was now well below freezing outside as Max Trenton dragged his battered old record player up a ladder and onto the roof of his small townhouse.

He set the player down and plugged it into an extension cord he had already fed through one of the upstairs windows.  Flicking a switch, the turntable began to whirl.

“Woowee!” he shouted, his breath creating a small white cloud in the cold air.  “That is just the cat’s meoowww!”

He turned the record player off and consulted his watch.  It was exactly seven o’clock in the evening.  With just under three quarters of an hour to spare, the physicist had completed his preparations.  Alongside a table with some modest refreshments, he had set up two plaid reclining beach chairs in the middle of the roof, one each for himself and his wife.  The chairs were turned in the direction of the Bunker Hill Monument though it was difficult to see anything in the cold darkness.  This didn’t bother Max in the least.  He was confident that he would see the explosion.

“Max, honey!”

The physicist looked down to find his wife poking her head out the window.

“What is it, Brandy?” he called down to her.  “Why don’t you come up and join me?  Oh mama, it’s going to be a good one.”

“I don’t know what you’re blabbering about Max,” replied Brandy.  “It’s not a ‘good one’.  It’s too cold to go up there.  You’re crazy.  Have you been taking your lithium?”

“Suit yourself, baby.  I’m doin’ just fine.”

Brandy shook her head and disappeared back into the house.  Max was intent on enjoying his last moments on planet Earth.  He sat down on one of the chairs, pulled a plastic mug off of the table and took a sip of some homemade iced tea.

Eric Silver was finally on his way to his locker.  After playing what seemed to be a long, losing game of medical charades with a patient in the emergency room who only spoke Tagalog, he had given up and written some admission orders.  This had bought him at least a few brief moments of solitude.  Wandering down one of Massachusetts General’s many indistinguishable corridors, he came to a familiar unmarked door.  Inserting his key into the lock, he opened the door to his call room.

At once, he was hit with a familiar musty smell.  The small room contained a cot and night table, a broken television, a broken fan and a small sink with some hand towels.  He turned on the tap and splashed lukewarm water onto his face, taking a toothbrush and an electric shaver which he had been keeping in the pocket of his lab coat and setting them on the side of the sink.  He was just about to leave for his locker when something on his tiny night table caught his eye.

He walked over and picked up the orange card.  It read:

The cleaning staff at Massachusetts General Hospital value your opinion and would like to serve you better.  Please rate our cleaning and list any suggestions in the space below.

Eric would have happily obliged if only the ‘space below’ hadn’t been filled by a goopy wad of used bubblegum presumably left there by one of the room’s other regulars.  He tossed the card in a trash bin as he exited the call room, slamming the door shut behind him.

Eric began marching towards the residents’ locker room but, before he could take five steps, his pager went off.  He ignored it.  If it was really important, he thought, they would page twice.  Thirty seconds later, his pager went off for a second time.  Angrily stabbing at the buttons on the little black interruption box with his right hand, he found that he was being paged to the ward.

“What do they want now?!” he said a little too loudly, drawing stares from a young couple who were walking by with a frilly newborn gift basket.  Normally Eric would have smiled and apologized, but on this evening he just turned and stomped off.

On arriving at the ward, one of the night nurses dressed in blue scrubs met him outside the nursing station.

“Hi Doctor Silver,” the man said cheerfully.  “I paged you about our patient, Mrs. Lieberman.  I was taking her vitals and she was having some chest pain.”

Of course it had to be her, thought Eric.  Mrs. Lieberman was decidedly the resident’s least favorite patient.  She was a soft admission, a ninety year old who was medically stable but, since her last stroke, only spoke using Bridge bidding terminology.

“How can she be complaining of chest pain, Ralph?  Is she speaking English?” Eric said with all of the enthusiasm of a blind man who had been tricked into helping someone parallel park.

“Naw, man,” replied the nurse.  “But, trust me, I can tell.”

Eric had finally snapped.  He made some unintelligible grumbling sounds at Ralph as he headed straight for room fourteen bed two.

Before entering, Eric squirted some alcohol-based disinfectant onto his hands and rubbed them together crossly.  Walking in, he reflexively pulled the curtain around bed two and then looked at his patient.  Mrs. Lieberman was lying with her gown rolled up over her head.  Eric pulled it down.

“Hello Mrs. Lieberman!” he shouted in her good ear.

The frail old lady’s gaze shot up at Eric’s face, apparently searching for something.  Her eyes scanned back and forth across his eyes and she mouthed some indistinguishable words.  With a satisfied nod, she decided to respond to her physician.

“One no trump,” she stated resolutely.

Eric leaned closer to Mrs. Lieberman.

“Are you feeling any pain in your chest?”

“One no trump!” she shouted back.  “One no trump!”

Mrs. Lieberman repeated this phrase over and over again until, after about a minute, Eric decided to skip ahead to the physical exam.  He put his stethoscope on her chest and tried to listen for heart sounds but her repeated calls of ‘one no trump’ were making it impossible to hear.  He lifted the diaphragm of the stethoscope off of her chest to give his ears a break.

“One no trump!” she shouted again.

Eric frowned at her for a moment.

“Oh all right,” he said testily.  “Two clubs.”

The lady stopped screaming and looked perplexed.

“Two clubs…two clubs,” she whispered screwing her head up in thought.  Given that the woman couldn’t even tell him her name and probably had no idea where she was, Eric was skeptical that she had any idea what she was thinking about.  Nonetheless, he took the opportunity to listen to her chest again.

“Three spades!” she screamed just as he heard a muffled lub-dub.  “Three spades!”

“Alright Mrs. Lieberman,” said Eric giving up and shoving his stethoscope into the pocket of his lab coat.  “I’ll come see you a bit later, okay?”

With a renewed sense of futility, he drew back the curtain, walked to the door of the room and pumped some more disinfectant onto his hands.

Just as he was about to leave, Eric heard Mrs. Lieberman speak the first non-Bridge related word of her hospital stay.

“Wait!” she called with a note of distress in her voice.

“Yes Mrs. Lieberman,” replied Eric.

“Were you playing Stayman?!” she asked.

“Goodnight Mrs. Lieberman.”

Max Trenton lifted a pair of roach clips from the ashtray sitting in his lap and took one long final draw of the finest quality imported Jamaican Black.  It was seven thirty-nine and there was time for just one last song.  With the flick of a switch, Max’s favorite Three Dog Night record once again came to life, this time plugged into a brand new two thousand dollar speaker system so that everyone around could enjoy a good tune before they were blown into oblivion.  Max cocked his head back and let out a slow, thin wisp of smoke as the song began with a steady chant.

Eli's comin'…Eli's comin'…Eli's a-comin'

On his way out, Eric leaned his head into the nursing station.

“Hello?” he called, scanning around for his nurse.

Ralph, who was sitting five feet away, finished scribbling a note into one of the charts and looked up.

“What’s up, boss?”

The crabby resident tossed a black object at the nurse.

“Dude, I don’t want your pager,” Ralph said with a chuckle.  “I think I have plenty of things to do as it is.”

“Listen Ralph,” Eric said without a hint of good humour.  “I’m going to my locker and then I’m going to make myself a cup of tea in the staff lounge.  I’ll be back in half an hour and while I’m gone, if someone pages me, tell them to page Emily, tell them to page the staff, tell them to page the president of the hospital, tell them to page the Pope.  As long as they leave me alone, I don’t really care.  Whatever happens…and this is the most important part…I don’t want to hear about it unless the world is coming to an end.”

With the moment they had been waiting for rapidly approaching, Terry and Greg could hear the music from Max Trenton’s speakers far off in the distance.

Eli's comin', better walk,

Walk but you'll never get away, No, you'll never get away

“He will come…” Terry intoned, searching the sky above the Bunker Hill Monument.  “He will come.”

“We’re going to die…” a perspiring Greg had begun to yell, drowning Terry out.  “We’re going to die.”

“Look!” Terry shouted, pointing to a shimmering dot in the heavens which had suddenly appeared and seemed to be getting larger.

Eli's a-comin' and he's comin' to getcha

Max saw it too.

“Well I’ll be damned!” he shouted, standing up from his beach chair.  “Hoo hoo!”

The roof was shaking with every blast from the subwoofer and the electrifying piano, rising to a crescendo, filled the night air.  Brandy popped her head out of the upstairs window one more time.

“Jeepers Max,” she tried to holler over the music.  “You’re waking the whole neighborhood.”

“Don’t worry honey,” he called down.  “I’ll be done in a minute.”

Get down on your knees

The alien spaceship salesman stood placidly on the bridge of his ship, watching the Earth grow in size on his enormous view screen.  His three guests stood behind him looking on apprehensively.

“Approximately one minute until we reach Earth,” the ship’s helmsman called over his shoulder.

Jude checked his watch.

“We might actually make it,” he whispered into Flower’s ear.

“It all depends on where we touch down,” said Paroophoron overhearing Jude.

“We don’t have a prayer,” said Flower miserably.

The alien salesman combed his tentacles neatly and shoved his clipboard under his arm.

“You know I still can’t let you leave without making a sale,” he turned and muttered to Paroophoron.

“Oh come off it, will you?” replied the little green alien.  “It’s intergalactic robbery if you ask me and besides, I already told you I don’t have the money.”

“I’ll accept a personal check if you have two forms of ID,” the salesman hazarded trying one last sales pitch.  “You know the End of Days isn’t just a spaceship, it’s a work of art.  Never before has a ship…”

“What did you call it?” Flower interrupted suddenly.

“The End of Days,” said the salesman proudly.  “It took us forever to come up with the name but it’s worked out perfectly for our marketing campaign.  It looked great in big bright letters…” The salesman pretended to draw out an imaginary banner with his fingers. “‘We’re having the universe’s biggest blowout.  The End of Days is here for a sale of apocalyptic proportions.  Everything must go!’”

“That’s what the man said on Sunday,” Flower whispered.  “He said the End of Days is coming.”

The salesman looked perplexed.

“What man?”

No-no, no-no

Lord, I said no-no, no-no, no-no

“There!” Terry pointed.  “There it is.  You see!  Ha ha!”

The leader was jumping up and down in a crazed frenzy, shaking his fist at the approaching spaceship.

“I told you!  I told you!” he shouted while he consulted his watch.  “Twenty seconds and he arrives in a spectacular explosion.”

But no one was there to hear him.  With less than a minute to the impending nuclear detonation, Greg finally made up his mind that he had stayed long enough.  He took off, running down the steps from the base of the monument and sprinted through the streets of Beacon Hill, knowing full well he had no way to escape.

Hide it – hide it

You better - hide it

Perspiration obscuring his vision and panic stricken, Greg decided that he didn’t want to see the explosion.  With what he estimated were only a few seconds left, he darted at random from the street towards a small house he was streaking by.  Lowering his shoulder, he crashed through the front door and into a tiny drawing room.

Somebody - hide it

You got t' - hide it

Greg was surprised to find a half-naked middle-aged woman standing at the centre of a round carpet being sized up by a man in a Nehru jacket.

Oh, my - hide it

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh

“Come in, my friend,” the mystic said to Greg.  “Looks like you could use some help.”