Oedipussy (13 page)

"Reaction anterior right thigh, approximately four inches from mid coxal?" He paused. "Todd, I am so sorry."

"No ... I know, I...understood what you were saying, but you can just tell me."

"Your mother and father. I don't want to me bringing you all of this news at once, but I also don't want to lie to you."

"I thought you were going to tell me that I can't-" and I looked at my legs.

He didn't say anything.

"While you were in the coma and recovering, we've been under the impression that you are not going to be able to walk."

"Oh."

"We are going to do everything we can, though. May I continue?"

"Yes."

"Beginning left foot."

My eyes were back on the ceiling. Twenty five years, and this ceiling. The only thing I could look at was this ceiling, even if I had opened my eyes.

Mother. Mother and father. The fountain of my existence. I knew they were gone.

It was immediate.

There was a feeling of momentum that began to grow in me that I was falling toward some abyss of terrible news. It was a horrendous terror at the bottom of a cliff, and I stood at the precipice with an understanding that these horrors would be screaming up at me like demons. An earthly hell, horrible and unimaginable, and banking toward me with all manner of industrious news of suffering, death, and new griefs that would open their mouths and swallow me whole.

It began with these spikes, prodding me and pushing me in places I cannot even feel - and that, a new horror, the horror of nothing or the horror of the lack of feeling anything. The horror of emptiness and apathy, numbness and dissolution. Dissolution of self, as my feeling creeps up with this tool writing a numb, bloody history up my legs.

This emptiness grew. It was a nothing that spread through my brain. It was a cancer of negative space. It was a hole, or a series of holes growing rapidly and exponentially, joining like bubbles to meld together in one dual-sphere of emptiness. One began in my heart. Cold. Cold nothing. Empty as lungs, a cavity of air and void of all emotion.

The ceiling. There. That is a constant.

Oh, and how I couldn't perform anymore? Like a real rock star? Who ever heard of the rockin' wheelchair man? The wheel in the sky is now the wheels beside my thighs, propelling me to nothingness and insignificance. I felt it in my legs.

My life is over.

"Ow!"

"Anterior left thigh in line with the right, about four inches mid coxal." Betty tapped tapped tapped her clipboard thing. "Do you have any questions?"

"Can I walk?"

"No."

"Are you leaving?"

"I will be leaving soon, but I will see you again. I need to write up a lot now that you're up. Meanwhile, you're getting a room. Your nurse will get you anything you need in the meantime."

"Can I have some paper?"

He nodded to Betty and gave me his pencil. The pencil was strange and made of some kind of wax. I tried to dig my fingernail into it, but the dent healed.

"...and a mirror?"

"There will be one in your new room."

We stared at one another for a minute.

He was a stranger.

"I'll be leaving and Betty will wheel you down to the third floor. From here we are going to get you moving and keep an eye on your gastrointestinal and renal systems as we transition away from the liquid diet and get you vertical. We will also be keeping an eye on your circulation. You'll continue on blood thinners to prevent clots from forming, but wean you off those eventually as well.

"Now we focus on undoing everything that we've had to do over the past twenty five years to keep you alive. Your parents have taken great care of you, though, and that is something to be thankful for. They listened to our interpretation of your GCS data, visited all the time, and followed us along with any new data or treatment changes. They always believed you would be waking from this. They were right.

"They also made sure everything would be paid for. The only thing you need to worry about here is getting better. We will keep you here for the least possible amount of time, and then get you over to rehab. Hopefully this is speedy and painless. We'll keep a close eye on you to make sure you have a speedy recovery."

"Thank you, doctor."

"Anything else?"

"No."

"At the very least, the good news is that you're not a heroin addict."

He left with Betty, and I stared at the ceiling. The pocks in the panels swam, moved, and dissolved.

The empty, the nothing, filled and extended beyond by body. The weight was the gravity of a supernova in a galaxy far away. I was the center; the dense, heavy mass of everything. As the explosion expanded in the form of my emerged consciousness, so did matter collect at the core of my ever-expanding void of nothingness. Heavy, heavy, heavy dense matter, and it attracted more.

Watching the ceiling, I could only think that nothing would escape the density of my despair; not even light.

"So, the remote is right here on this cord. This button is to call me if you need anything. This button is for the light above your bed. These work the television. The sound comes from the little speaker here."

The young, strawberry blonde nurse bent over the bed. Her breast lightly touched the top of my arm as she showed me the remote. I felt a stirring. It was good to know that everything wasn't broken.

"Where's the TV?" I asked.

"What?"

"The television?"

"On the wall."

I saw a terrible pastel photo of a vase of flowers, and a chalkboard on a pivoting hinge.

"Look." She pushed the power button, and the chalkboard came to life with a show.

"What?"

"Oh. Oh, I see. Yes. Yes, televisions are flat - they don't have the old ones anymore. Better for the environment. Look," and she showed me her clipboard. It was a little screen with my charts on it. There were no wires. She showed me how she could write on it with her finger, and switch screens like on Windows, but without a mouse. It was the same clipboards that Betty and Krishnamurthy were preoccupied with in the coma room.

"...and it just - you walk around with this?"

"Yeah, it has everything. Always updated on the network with everyone's records."

"The network?"

"Yeah, wireless. Did you have the Internet?"

"Yeah. There's a modem in there, or something?"

"A modem?"

"Hmm..."

"Listen, I have to visit the rest of my patients again. Press that button if you need anything, okay?"

"I thought that was a chalk board," I said, pointing to the television.

"Chalk board?"

"Before you go, the doctor said there would be a mirror?"

She flipped up a little box on my tray table, and sure enough there was a little glass mirror built in. Some things don't change.

"Thanks."

She left. I didn't even get her name.

I turned up the volume on the television. A newscaster was speaking.

I pulled the tray table up to my stomach and adjusted the height of the back of the bed with the controls so I was sitting up. My balance was strange. My legs were almost in the way, anchoring me down, and yet failing to be an anchor point. I felt like I was going to tip over and slump to the side. After leaning my butt over in one direction, I managed to stay vertical.

The mirror was a narrow sliver of silver, and required a little bit of tooling around to get my face into position to see it. A flash of skin, a toss of hair, and finally I was able to see a glint of myself reflected in the small rectangle.

It was horrifying. I teetered on the edge.

I first saw my eyes. Once blue, the eyes that looked back at me were grey and glassy. They looked like I had been staring at the sun, and crying, and sucking the life out of everyone's party and leaving it to distill and fade in the sunlight. The color was gone. Bags hung in heavy wrinkles around my eyes.

My cheeks were sallow, my eye sockets and jawline were skeleton-like. My skin hung into jowls on my thin face. It wasn't used to the new gravity. I looked tired - I was tired! I wasn't sick, but there was no question that there was a lack of tone and definition to my facial muscles. I had wasted away to nothing. I was nothing on the outside, and I was filling with nothing. I remained nothing but a skin soaked skeleton.

My teeth looked good. Untouched by any food for ages, they remained immaculate piano keys. They were somewhat discolored. There were wrinkles around my mouth, though. My mouth was crepe-paper skin tossed haphazardly on a frame of a face. Alas poor Todd, I knew him Horatio. I held my own skull on my neck.

I maneuvered my gaze up to the top of my head. My hair was a brambly wisp. Much of what was there had fallen out at some point. Single hairs danced in the air from my pate while a crown of sparse fur encircled the poor fading twilight above my ears.

I looked old.

The nothingness spread, and I felt old and that I had lost myself to the sentence of going too fast, too young. What was there to show for it but old age and trembling fear of whatever was left of my sentence on this earth.

What was left?

It seemed that I wanted to go back.

I wanted to go back to the incomprehensible strangeland of fame and youthful exploration of the fantasy dream state that I was living in for the past twenty five years. It seemed like only a couple weeks. It was my familiar world, filled with the dreams of my youth, and making it, and art, and music, and potential, potential, potential.

But this? This was another story altogether. I was nothing. I was broken and shattered in an empire of nothing. I would be leaving here in a wheelchair and learning how to live my life all over again. Not only that, but I had never lived my life as a...forty year old? I had never done anything to deserve this, and would I have had any idea about what I should have been doing? Or how? It was ridiculous.

I wanted to get up and run, but I couldn't. I could only stare at my old wrinkleyes, and a male pattern baldness that I had no choice but to accept.

"...coming up on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. President Bush wants to commemorate and defend his tactics in the years leading up to the wars in the Middle East..." the announcer said on the television. "...and there are new developments in the length the troop will be staying in Iraq after the second round of increases that President Obama ordered five years ago..." A black man signed papers and flashbulbs popped.

It was hard to believe they were still talking about Bush defending Kuwait almost thirty years later. But there was much to learn - a healthy method of coping with my new surroundings and driving away this growing astral nothingness that ate away at my existence.

My health, and the events of the last twenty five years.

There was a lot of programming on the little blackboard television. Most of my favorite shows were no longer on. Music was no longer on MTV, nor was The Real World. Television seemed entirely comprised of normal people going about their business and competing with other normal people to do a variety of normal things that didn't match real world conditions - and the winner got some kind of recognition? It reminded me of a show that a British exchange student that stayed with us for two weeks one year got in a shipment on videotape – Eurovision. But everything on television was like Eurovision. But plain. Plain Eurovision all of the time. Approvision.

When we watched Eurovision, there was something trashy that stood out about the songs in English. It was around that time that I dedicated my life to making music, pledging that my band would never sound like any of the wallpaper music on the junk tape that night.

But today there was no band. There wasn't even a tape. I had been told in conversation that there weren't tapes anymore. Or even CDs. It all came in the air, wirelessly. I learned vinyl was back.

What a strange world.

I learned a lot watching television and speaking with my physical and occupational therapists. While I learned how to lift myself in and out of my wheelchair and strengthen my muscles, I also learned that we had elected a black president. A black president. It felt more of a feverdream than the coma, and I was able to deduce that the years of his presidency were remarkably stable. I also learned that I mistook the president Bush that was in the newscast - that George Bush's son was also elected to be president, and that he started a perpetual war in the Middle East that was fought through the entirety of my coma.

I also learned that I was feeling more and more depressed. In this blackness and repetition, there was no end to the suffering that began the moment I woke up. I remained incarcerated in my body. I was feeling as though I had given up before anything started.

But I think it was because it never started.

Nothing in this world is guaranteed.

Nothing in this world is wonderful and sacred, and one must understand that to take the world for what it is, they need to take advantage of everything they can while they can. One mustn't compromise for anything. The world is beautiful, disgusting, heartbreaking, wonderful, tragic, wholesome, and an absolute whore. We're going to die anyway.

Twenty five years ago, I hadn't taken advantage of anything. I only scratched the surface, and my future was snatched from me regardless of the circumstances I thought I would be in only a few months from the accident. It was a fiction.

I would have preferred the fiery drug-fueled coma death to this.

But this... I was a man in a wheelchair. My existence surrounded everything I could and couldn't do in that chair. My hair, my appearance, my wrinkles and cacking voice would be nothing more than demerits to my character. I had never been so vain in my life as the moment I was resigned that I no longer had anything to be vain about. The enthusiastic and optimistic me was never coming back. Old, feeble, and crippled was my sentence.

And so, the nothingness grew. The light faded, sucked into the inescapable maw of a black hole heart. What was next? Death.

Over the next four weeks, doctors wanted to make sure that I was able to eat solid food and use the bathroom on my own prior to allowing me to leave to the next rehabilitation step.

I learned how to do these things.

I also learned that there was a trust set up for me that was paying for my medical treatment, insurance, and the family home and its upkeep. I just had to get better. I began looking forward to each marker and milestone.

My spirit improved when I was transferred to the rehab center. It was like a nursing home attached to the hospital. Most of my neighbors were the elderly and the terminally ill.

The place was depressing, masked in a design that barely resembled an Italian villa. The halls had beautifully constructed oval archways, elegant crown molding, and large exotic fish tanks. Foliage dotted the halls, and dining rooms were silverwared and tableclothed. Scratched beneath the veneer at every turn were little signs of hospital. I rolled everywhere on industrial linoleum tile, and occasionally passed a crane for lifting and hosing off patients. Plastic bumper rails bordered every wall so gurneys wouldn't destroy the plaster.

It was beautiful. It was horrific.

My roommate was Ester. Ester had a stroke seven years ago when she was eighty nine, and perpetually remained in rehab.

Ester got up every morning, put on her makeup in the mirror, and spent the rest of the day in her wheelchair kicking herself around our floor. She wore a solid inch of red lipstick around her mouth that nearly bordered the bottom of her nose to the top of her chin. Her eyeliner that appeared to be applied with a fat-tipped magic marker. It was sixties mod-clown-horror.

No one ever came to visit Ester. Photos on her side table featured two young couples and their children. Until the morning I finally addressed her, I thought she was mute.

"You really slathered it on this morning, Ester." I don't know why I said it. I was in a frisky and optimistic mood, eating my breakfast in front of the television watching the news cycle repeat for the sixth time.

"Yes."

She looked at me, her gigantic Joker-smile wildly careening from one end of her mouth to the other. Her lipstick was applied in a moving car for twenty hours. Her eyes literally popped from dark, skeletal sockets.

I stopped mid-chew, the gelatinous eggs sitting disgustingly against my pallet, shivering along with my nervous tongue. It was one of the first solid foods I could eat before I could leave the hospital. Whatever this egg product was, it wasn't anything to look forward to after eating through my arm for so long. I swallowed.

"I'm sorry, Ester."

"Yes."

"For some reason I thought you were catatonic or something. I don't know why. I think it's because you haven't talked with anyone the whole time you've been here. Not the nurses, not family, not me. Although I know I have only been here for a week, or so.

"Anyway, I'm Todd. I was in an accident, and then I was in a coma for a very long time, and now I can't walk. I need to figure it out from here. They need to make sure I'm healthy enough to live on my own.

"If you need anything, let me know."