Brainstorm

by Robert Wintner

  “You do?”

  “Yes. Maybe not exactly how you feel. But I was in here last year for three weeks. If the staff stayed here like I did and like you are, they’d understand.”

  “What was wrong with you?”

  “Collapsed lung. They don’t know why. I’m fine now. Believe me, you’re doing the right thing. I’ve never heard of anything for what you have besides surgery.”

  “You’re familiar with alternative remedies?”

  Leah blushes. “Not like you are. I wish I knew more. I’m learning. I can tell you though; they do this procedure every day, sometimes two or three a day. They’re really good, and your surgeon is the best. He’s so grounded. They’re all assholes, you know. Not him.”

  I think the hospital should can the shrink and hire Leah; in two minutes flat she’s brought us over, calmed us and helped us accept what we must.

  “Lawrence has no sense of humor,” I note.

  “You really don’t need that in a surgeon. Believe me, he won’t leave anything disfigured. In six months you won’t even see it.”

  “Six months?” Rachel says. “It’ll take ten years to grow back.”

  “No, it won’t. I’ve seen it. You’ll see. I have to go check my little guy. You two get some rest.”

  “I . . .” Rachel begins, then checks herself, then she concedes, “I have a headache.”

  It’s another four. Leah records it plus the Tylenol.

  We wait, as if for the headache to depart. Rachel is nodding off now, so I bend near for a sweet goodnight. I am saddened yet again by her fear of hair loss. I tell her to rest easy, I’m turning in but I’ll be back first thing. In the meantime I’m only minutes away. She insists that I take my time tomorrow. In fact I should plan to go out and do something else. I should have some fun.

  “You mean like cruise a few bars and go shopping?”

  “Yeah. Get out of here. I would.”

  “Well. I might. Later. But right now this is what I’m doing. So if you don’t mind, I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “I don’t mind. I just . . . I don’t want to . . .”

  “No. I don’t either. But here we are.”

  She sits halfway up. “I don’t want to do this.”

  “I know. I don’t either. Let’s take tonight off and review it in the morning.” To my surprise she eases back down, in agreement, I hope.

  In ten minutes I’m ten blocks away in my office on the ninth floor watching the city lights blink profusely, hearing the wind howl outside. I drink a soda to quell the nausea and a brandy to numb the pain. Tomorrow is only a handful of hours away, and I seek a different feeling, call it understanding or acceptance or something that might make sense, something that will let me know why this is happening. I can’t find it, can’t make contact with the reality surrounding us, yet I sense a continuing, other presence.

  I call my brother in St. Louis to tell him the news. He asks if he should fly out. I ask why. To help, he says. I’ll let him know, I say. If she dies or suffers a stroke in surgery, then yes, I’ll need help.

  But we’re cut off. I call back, and the line is dead.

  I call his cell phone, and he asks what the hell was that. What was what? He says his phone jacks popped like firecrackers and blew sparks out of the wall, and now he thinks his regular phone is fried. He wants me to call tomorrow. I promise to do so.

  A spirit is here, around me and in me. It taunts me, perhaps in response to my invitation, one on one. It howls at the gates. I offered a tussle. Now it cackles, ready to feed. Call me old fashioned, but I recognize the ethereal world apart, in which luck takes a header or a lift, depending on variables. My old Aikido teacher once said the dark ones made trouble for his ninety-five year old mother, until he made them go away. What did he do? He had no choice in the matter; he had to get rid of them. How did he do it? He yelled at them.

  So for the second time in a long, long day I challenge the laws of modern society in abeyance to the laws of a different nature. I open the slider and step into the breeze. My skin tingles in the clammy air—forty-two degrees and windy. I feel affirmed of the shadowy presence, and I erupt: “Get out! Out and awaaaaay! Go! Go! Go away!” I follow quickly with the sentiment that is most felt inside. “Eeeyyyiiiaaaahhh! Ahhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Go away from here! Go away! Eeeeyiaaa!”

  A few lights go on across the way. I’m shaking as I yell at the top of my lungs to get out, get away from here and go away. Go back to where you belong!

  I want to feel that something is changed, but I cannot.

  I go back inside and lie down. I drift on a new understanding of life and death these few thousand years it’s been around. I understand something other than what I want to understand. I think that among the gifts of the ages is the unspoken but widely practiced rule that old people don’t remind the young ones too often of the end and how it slams into you not all that long after you were only just nineteen, and all the days merge into one.

  And all the days of our lives are but a single breath. They pass at the end of a single day. I remember that part from the Yiskor service for the dead on Yom Kippur. I considered it an exaggeration for years—how can a life filled with proper wine, song, adventure and laughter pass so casually and briefly at the end? Yet here we are, facing the end.

  Oh, I’ll most likely survive tomorrow and a few years besides with minimal mortality and morbidity. But what about my friend, my mate, my alter ego and confidant? Is she not a part of me? She is, and I feel so worthless in my efforts.

  Only on Yom Kippur do the Jews let the truth be known to the young. Even reminded annually I never took it to heart. After all, Yom Kippur is a consciously solemn time in which gravity itself is the point. The truth of the quickness of the end is dispensed like a harsh medicine and is diluted by the pomp and certain knowing that soon we will eat. What else can a religion do, bring you down? Well, it does bring you down, but only in a deliberate way that is blessedly brief with an uplift at the end. This, on the other hand, remains unknown.

  I understand now; you can’t prepare for the end, you can only strive for calmness and repose. You might keep your mind clear. Then you go. Calmness is what I seek, and clarity, yet I cry again at the loss of the fun we should have had.

  But I’m pressing the issue, accepting the worst, which indicates the continuing presence of you-know-who. I set aside these thoughts of mortality and morbidity, which isn’t easily done without something to take their place. So I close my eyes and mount up, keeping time now with a different beast that pounds poetry beneath me. Rachel is on back, where she’s ridden thousands of miles, and through the night we cruise the countryside under the stars, sweeping the vast plateau.

  I’m neither sentimental nor optimistic, yet the dawn comes with certain knowing that things are changed. I open my eyes and feel the change. I rise like a tin man after a spring rain and shuffle to the slider. It opens on a continuing chill breeze and confirmation that the dark spirit is gone. I cannot explain what I know, but I hurriedly shower, dress and get to the hospital to share the news.

  Three people inside the curtain are busy. One is our nurse. Another is emptying the trash and sweeping and another is writing in a notebook. Our new nurse came on at the shift change and is a sobering, perfunctory presence in contrast to Nurse Leah, who stayed twenty minutes past shift change to keep her promise and assist with a hair wash.

  Rachel was in better spirits then but already suffers the new nurse. As he changes electrolyte bottles, she enumerates his faults. He has a dour outlook and is rough with her IV connections. He tangles the sheets and mumbles complaints. She told him to go away and don’t come back. He said he’d be out of this place in three more days, and he only wanted to get through them. She told him he was awful, and if he had to scowl all the time he shouldn’t be around people who need help, who don’t need a sourpuss so full of himself he can’t see farther than his own petty needs.

  Then he smiled and was nice, but it was too late; she d
oesn’t like him and doesn’t want him around. She fears this bitter fellow for his discouraging essence, which can envelope the weak and lamenting. I ask him what time his shift ends. He says eleven. I tell him great, we’ll share the shift. He reads me easily and minds his manners.

  Then again, a sourpuss on the ward may be a healthy distraction to the gang valve pumping the four leads in her jugular. A three-inch slice in her neck facilitated insertion, and a few sutures hold things snug so the hardware won’t frag loose on an emotional outburst. The package is wrapped in transparent tape. Rachel takes the beating, whining infrequently over what would make a strong man weak. But her internal struggle reaches new levels. As her eyes grow heavy with sad resignation, she achieves what the shrink would call acceptance, which he apparently thinks is good. To me, she seems on the verge of giving up.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she says.

  “I know you don’t. I don’t either.”

  “Take me home.”

  “You know I will.”

  “Now. Take me now.”

  “I can’t now. But I will. You know I will.”

  “I don’t care if . . . You know . . . I just don’t want to . . . die here.” Her facial muscles turn down like when she was a baby and couldn’t control them and expressed herself the only way she could, without words, because the words wouldn’t come out right, and besides, nobody was listening. Down to a frown she makes me want to change things, anything to relieve the load. Tears flow into heavy sobs now.

  She wrestles the dark spirit herself. Pain tightens my chest and throat, and I blurt the only words available to halt our downward spiral. “I peed on the floor at Home Improvement World.”

  “You what?” She wipes her eyes, checks the anguish and moves quickly to a brow beating.

  “Yes. They got me so . . . irritated, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “So you pissed on the floor?”

  “Yes,” I laugh now with a few tears of my own. “It sounds much worse when you say it like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, you know, I pissed on the floor.”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “You’re sick.”

  “I don’t think I’m sick.” I want to explain the short circuit in my perception of society, but the next realization is that short circuitry and not-knowing the why or wherefore of a thing can be part of a greater process. I want to recant—to beg off my claim and state the truth of pissing on the floor, but the idea is a far greater gift than the act could ever have been. I feel alienated as ever from the world of better living and fat women fantasizing soaking tubs and unplumbed toilets that beckon me for a piss. Yet I come home to the profound truth that events are nothing up next to the effect of a good story. So I offer pitiful affirmation of a numbing disconnection. “I really had to piss.”

  “That’s terrible!” she says.

  “I know.” I hang my head. “Terrible. But practical. I wanted to take a dump but held back. Maybe I’m not hopeless.”

  She scans for sick humor and may sense a bit, but I do share her concern. Goldfarb entering again spares us further scrutiny. I’ve made an impression on him too; his smile is tight, and he offers no apology. “I’m only putting this page in the chart. Thank you.” He slips his page in quietly and leaves.

  Rachel is calmer now. She regrets my behavior, telling me it was wrong and she’s disappointed. I agree that it was wrong and that disappointment was a factor for me too. “Yes, disappointed, but it was a small rebellion, and it did dilute my bigger disappointment. It was a distraction. I was acting out, killing the rules that drive me crazy.”

  “You didn’t have to go crazy or make pee pee on the floor.” She is curt and final.

  “You know I don’t like much in life.”

  “I know. It’s too bad.”

  “Yes, it is, but I’m disgusted.”

  “You don’t exactly help the situation.”

  “I know. But I can’t help it. I do like some things—a few cats, some dogs, my motorcycle, you—I love those things. I think I love them too much because I have so few places to put my love, so things stack up on me more than the average bear. So it’s tough. This is the toughest yet.”

  She takes my hand. She kisses it. “I’m only fourth on the list?”

  “It’s a strong fourth.”

  She smiles, musing on springtime, on the first sunny day in weeks, and look at where she is. I tell her it’s not sunny; that’s only glare. She points to a break in the clouds and asks what flowers are blooming in the garden. I forgot to notice, but the tulips should be showing, or at least the tulip buds. She picks up her knitting and knits. I open a book and stare off. We share this repose for a few hours until eleven-thirty, when the shift changes and the new nurse comes in.

  She says everything is on schedule. I tell her we were scheduled for eleven, and it’s eleven-thirty. She says scheduling here means only that things occur in sequence, but the sequence can change, and a changed sequence changes timing, because urgent traumas arrive non-stop. Sequence is not bound to a clock. So it’s good that we have some knitting and reading material. So we knit and nap till one, then two, then three. Rachel wants me to go.

  “Go where?”

  “Out somewhere. Have some fun.”

  “What’s with you and fun?”

  She points out that this is such a drag.

  “Yeah, well, life has its draggy days. Leave me alone, will you?”

  And with a sweep of the curtain, in comes the nurse to tell us it’s show time.

  Yes, I can come along. We’re only going now to pre-op, which will take an hour or so with general prep and the sedative administered prior to anesthesia. I’m apprehensive in general terms, like a fighter before a big one, and it’s not even on me. I succeed in hiding my fear, for my mate’s face shows the elusive calmness that the most diligent monks take years to achieve. She’s ready in all ways. I suspect this readiness has been there for years, is possibly genetic. The new nurse gathers loose ends, the books, pamphlets, knitting, make-up, berets and rubber bands. We’re not checking out, just moving on. The nurse stacks things near the chart, which I pick up and open. “Not supposed to do that,” she says.

  I smile. “Who is this information about?” I ask.

  She smiles back. Enough said. I turn to the last page, the one recently inserted by Goldfarb. It reads:

  . . . Both she and husband discuss an ‘AMA philosophy’ which feels overwhelming, impersonal and offensive.

  Now patient feels she has had conflicting information from other staff and is worried.

  PATIENT IS PARANOID.

  I back up a few pages and find the entry written by Lawrence of Neurology:

  Of note, we have discussed the nature of this operation (L. crani for aneurysm clipping) alternative treatments, and the benefits + risks (including, but not limited to infection, bleeding, and death) of surgery with the pt. + her husband + they have signed consent to proceed.

  Three signatures follow: Rachel’s, the neurosurgeon’s and Goldfarb’s. Another chart with one-word classifications sits near the computer. Another word is hand-written in all caps: PARANOID. How’s that for objective response?

  In mere moments we’re packed and ready, but the nurse tells us we must wait for an escort from the OR. I don’t say that we know where it is, because the staff is weary of us. And I don’t mind waiting a bit. On her way out the nurse turns the overhead TV on, so the most addictive drug known can sedate us for this brief interlude.

  The TV brightens on an Executive Chef from the Ritz Carlton on (Ah . . . ) Maui! The chef is a four hundred pounder with small liver spots but enormous panache. He packs a plucked squab from the hind opening with his famous garlic ginger plum sauce, which is thick as hot fudge. The bird’s head and feet are still on, perhaps for culinary drama to quell kitchen ennui. The feet are bound at the ankles so the bird can dangle from a bamboo skewer, and
into the hot box it goes for an hour at 350°. The big chef has failing teeth but can hardly suppress a famous grin for the famous verdict: Mmm . . . Scrumptious!

  The bird seems familiar, plucked and poked to the point of desecration, then hastily prepped for a slow bake at 350º by a short-order crew dedicated to excellence. We cut to an hour later and the result: an exotic entrée with empty eye sockets stretched ankles and pointed toes curled and golden crispy.

  Alas, our guide is here. He’s very fat and has bad teeth—not really; I made that up, though I want to stop time, so heartily do I fear its lapse. We move toward the exit in orderly fashion. Competing images suggest the unwelcome presence again among us—our route feels like the walk from death row to the little room of finality, or a bridal party heading from the anteroom to the great hall of reverence. I dispense with both; the images are all in me, dark and otherwise. I wait for the orderlies and nurses to go first, and I take inventory. Everything seems in order, except for the felt-pen board hanging between the windows, where I write: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they don’t want to cut you up. I hurry to catch up.

  We descend.

  Pre-op feels tense, beginning with the head woman whose name could be Dirk, who has the hair and face and aggressive demeanor of a professional wrestler. She pegs me and says, “You’ll have to leave now. We can’t have family in here.”

  “Yes. I understand.” But I don’t; it’s not a sterile environment, and I sense a man problem between us.

  “Now.”

  I step near and advise, “Back off.”

  She moves around me with a grunt. Nearby is a jovial scene, all the nurses, docs and orderlies scrubbing and joking, locking eyes or rubbing thighs or touching elsewhere, as seen on TV. What else can they do, despair?

  Next.

  All prepped for surgery, a patient rolls up on a gurney, pop-eyed and gape-mouthed as a sports fan at the playoffs. This patient is unconscious, but his eyes are open. This is why we can’t have family in here. The patient is intubated, with a plastic tube down his throat to avoid aspiration, or puking, which is fatal under anesthesia. This patient is left in front of us while his advance guides interface with his team. Rachel stares at him, then at me.