The Last Time I Died

by Joe Nelms

  Why would she take that?

  60

  The pain in my side is killing me.

  It’s dull and sharp. Both. And it won’t stop. So bad it wakes me up. Can’t Cordoba give me something for this? Shouldn’t I have a morphine drip or something?

  Wait, why do I have a pain in my side?

  I drift in and out of consciousness for a minute or an hour or a day until I can finally stay awake long enough to move my creaky arms. Each is stuffed with broken glass and I know my melted rubber face contorts with every rusty muscle fiber that gets put into service. I move my left hand far enough to run it over my side where I ache.

  Stitches.

  Feels like about eight inches of tidy sutures running along my side. Diagonal. Just above my hip. Those were not there when I went under. I’m still groggy from the anesthetic. Not thinking clearly. Did something happen? Was there an emergency that she had to perform surgery to correct? What could she have been doing down there? What organs are in that area? Not my heart. Not my lungs. Not my liver.

  Where am I? Am I in a hospital? This is some kind of recovery room but not like I’ve been in before. Wasn’t I just in Cordoba’s living room? Did she have to call 911? Fuck, what if they figured out I was the guy who keeps trying to kill himself and I was transferred to a psych ward? That screws everything up.

  Why would a psych ward be doing surgery on my lower back? And where is Cordoba, anyway?

  But this can’t be a hospital. The room is too big. It smells antiseptic but doesn’t smell like death is around the corner. Definitely not a hospital.

  This must still be Cordoba’s place. Okay. I’m in a different room.

  The fog of anesthesia is clearing and I remember being put under.

  I did it.

  I beat the fucking reaper. I had myself systematically killed and brought back to life in what I’m choosing to believe is a replicable procedure. I am Frankenstein with a victory laurel. Formerly a bag of bones and organs and muscle tissue bereft of life force until the good doctor shot me up with god knows how many volts and I came back to life. Dead. Then alive.

  And that kiss. What was that? Right before I died she leaned in and kissed me. With her tongue. There’s so much to process.

  The stitches.

  Why the fuck are there stitches in my side?

  Cordoba walks in and checks the monitors without so much as a hello. Detachment, they call it in medical school. I wonder if she has a borderline personality. She must. Who else could do this work with such cold efficiency? I can appreciate her intellectual curiosity and unbridled ambition, but when it’s not coupled with empathy what does that make her?

  —What happened?

  My voice sounds like I gargled sand.

  —You tell me. Were you successful?

  Oh, right.

  It takes a second for the newly recovered memory to flash behind my eyes. I need to get this down soon. I’m trying to ignore the kiss and her detachment and what must be her raging case of crazytown to avoid losing what I came back with. There’s only so much room in my head.

  —Yeah.

  —Good.

  —What happened after that?

  Why are there enough stitches to indicate a major unauthorized procedure happened while I was under? Surger-rape.

  —You paid me.

  What is she talking about? Would it be so hard to answer a question with a straightforward statement? Now we’ve got to play this game? She knows what I’m asking. I need to sketch. I need to get this down. I don’t have time for this shit.

  I paid her. What could that mean? You cut into my backside looking for my wallet? I paid you by letting you poke around my innards to satisfy some bizarre curiosity you have about—

  Oh.

  I know why the stitches are there. She wasn’t fixing me. She was taking something out. Something someone badly needed and was willing to pay a lot of money for. Something I could spare. She’s the middleman. I am a commodity.

  I know what she means but I need her to say it.

  —How did I pay you?

  —Your kidney.

  —You took it.

  —I sold it. I told you I don’t work for free. You’ve got another one.

  That’s a hell of a way to negotiate. How can I argue now? That organ is probably already pumping piss out of some diabetic in Russia by now. Besides, it’s not like she’s going to get it back for me. And I do have another one. I should be outraged. Indignant. Furious. But none of those will get me any closer to my goals and at best will result in an insincere apology. Better to be practical. Better to move forward.

  —What if I want to do this again?

  —You’re covered. Kidney goes a long way these days.

  Ah. I rub my hand over my stitches. Well, why not? I didn’t have any big plans for my kidney. And now I’m playing with the bank’s money. Enjoy the piss, Ivan.

  —How long have I been out?

  —A week. I kept you sedated and pumped you with some stuff I made to speed the recovery process.

  Some stuff she made.

  —So, did you find what you were looking for?

  I want to ask her about the kiss but I force myself to focus on what’s really important here. Maybe after I sketch. The mother-father-wallet-screaming-crying memory is chiseled into the wall of my mind but I know it won’t last. I have to preserve it immediately. She seems genuinely interested but if I’m explaining anything to anyone it’s to myself. I’m not wasting a second on anything that doesn’t help preserve this precious mental cargo. Fuck the kiss.

  —I have to draw something.

  All I want to do is sleep, but every moment that passes means my memory fades farther back toward wherever it once was. She pauses long enough for me to realize that she thinks I should be sleeping, not drawing. But she must know I’m not going to close my eyes again until I sketch because she indicates a pad and pencils next to the bed.

  —Thanks.

  She cranks the bed up to a sitting position as I pull the pad onto my lap and start working. Moving my hands is exhausting and the muscle control involved in creating accurate drawings is intense but I’m afraid I’ve already lost plenty to the week of recovery. The images I get down are crude and childish in comparison to my earlier work, but they’ll have to do. I decide to substitute words and arrows for details I can’t capture perfectly. I spend the rest of the day sketching, stopping only when I can remember no other angles or nuances. By nightfall there are thirty-four new drawings.

  Cordoba walks in and places a syringe and a glass vial of what I presume is magic recovery meds on the tray next to me.

  —You go home tomorrow morning.

  I have nothing else. I’m not going to a job. I have no wife. I am alone. This is now my life’s work. The magic meds are my new best friends. My booster club. My pit crew. And Cordoba’s creepy lab is my castle. Frankenstein’s lair.

  —How soon can I do it again?

  —Three days.

  61

  The next time I wake up, Cordoba is gone.

  I call out loudly several times but there’s no response. And no note. Just the syringe and a vial of magic recovery meds she left on the tray, now rubber banded together. Hint, hint: Get the fuck out, Kidney Boy.

  I feel better than when I came in, in spite of losing a major organ. I’m aching and crusty, but there’s a fire burning inside me now. My body feels ninety-five and my mind feels twenty-six. A sweet hum in the back of my head tells me this is going to work out. I think this might be what hope feels like.

  I dress as fast as I can, which in reality is quite slow. God, dying hurts. The wound where my kidney used to be is still sensitive. I feel it with every move I make. On the other hand, it’s been a week already so how much of that is psychosomatic? Probably a lot. I’d love some meds to put that pain to sleep but I’m betting the recovery serum I’m headed home to inject will cover that.

  I can’t get that kiss out of my mind. I wish that I
could, as it serves no purpose aside from confounding me. Was that some sort of goodbye thing in case I didn’t make it? She’s never expressed an emotion in my presence before and she barely knows me.

  Plus she was masturbating. Hmm.

  I find Cordoba intimidating. Impotence-inducing intimidating and, even if I could get it up, I’ve got more important things to deal with than a one-night stand with a mad scientist. And that’s not to mention how fucking weird it is that she chose the moment I was dying to lay that on me. I suspect she thought I was out. Maybe I was. Maybe I made the whole thing up. A heroin induced delusion. I know that’s not true and it makes her creepier than ever.

  I can see through an open door there’s a hallway to somewhere. The rest of the loft that I’ll never see. The other half of her life. I guess part of me is still human because it’s tempting to take a quick look around before I head out. Open her drawers, riffle through her mail, check her browser history. Get a deeper understanding of who she is. Is there a family? A boyfriend? A girlfriend? Pictures? I can’t see her having any of them, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. From an anthropological standpoint, a little look-see through Cordoba’s personal effects couldn’t be anything but fascinating.

  Last time I snooped through someone’s stuff, I found a stack of unopened letters from my father. Had to be a hundred of them jammed into the back of Foster Mother’s closet. Not sure what her plan was. To give them to me when I was an adult and it was too late to have a relationship with the man? To wait until he quit sending them and then burn the lot en masse? To save me the pain of a bi-weekly reminder that my father killed my mother and was staring at the walls in a concrete box instead of teaching me how to use a stick shift? She probably didn’t think it out beyond getting them out of everyone’s sight as soon as possible. She was always a coward.

  I had convinced myself that he hated me and stopped writing after his initial barrage. For the first week I got letters from him every day. They were always waiting for me on the kitchen table when I got home. Foster Father sniggered and shook his head to make sure I knew he thought my father was a loser. But I loved getting them. Loved them so much I ripped the envelopes open right in front of Foster Father and savored every word. Reading them was the only time I could hear my father’s voice in my head. I was scared and confused and this was the safest interaction I could have with him. A one-way conversation that I could replay as often as I liked.

  Not that I would have written him back. Or maybe I would have eventually. When I found the stack in the closet I read one of the letters at random but that was all I could handle. It didn’t really matter anyway. He had died three months earlier.

  Cordoba’s open door stares back at me. The hallway leads to a bedroom. It must be a bedroom because I think I see the corner of a comforter. There has to be a closet back there somewhere. I’m sitting in her secret illegal operating room that’s practically out in the open. Whatever is stuffed in the back of her closet must be exponentially worse. I’m not going to look.

  I roll up my drawings carefully, grab the meds, and leave. The sooner I recover, the sooner I can die again.

  62

  *It’s ten months ago.

  I walk through the office trying to avoid eye contact with anyone who might say something to me or, worse, ask me a question.

  I’m at my desk. I have seventeen voicemails and sixty-five unopened e-mails. What the hell could be so urgent? I’m an estate attorney for Christ’s sake.

  The e-mails are the usual bullshit about meetings and marginally important questions that would be so much clearer if the asker had gotten off their fat ass and walked down the hall to ask them in person. As I scroll down they get more and more shrill. Where’s the Holman file I promised? Why wasn’t I in the staff meeting? Why am I not answering my phone? Where am I?

  Babies.

  On top of all that it looks like the date and time on my computer are off. About a day ahead.

  I check my phone to reset them correctly. It says the same thing.

  Today is Wednesday.

  I thought it was Tuesday.

  I would have sworn it was Tuesday.

  What happened to Tuesday?

  I’m wearing the same suit I wore Monday. I stink. I haven’t shaved.

  This is my first sober blackout, at least to the best of my knowledge. Maybe there have been others but I don’t remember. That’s the point, right? I stand in front of my humming desktop machine trying to understand what happened. Trying to remember. Last thing I can recall is leaving the office Monday evening. Nothing special. It was a fairly grueling day as usual, but mostly because I now find my work a contrivance of this modern age that’s defined by the finicky and petty. I left Monday night. Hailed a cab. Black.

  It’s a clean black. A seamless transition between thirty-six hours ago and one minute ago. As if a surgeon came by and nipped the intervening time out. Gone.

  I check my phone to see if there are any outgoing calls that might jog my memory. Nothing. Plenty of incoming messages, all from the office. None marked as listened to.

  I left Monday night. Hailed a cab. Black.

  I shut everything down and leave.

  Two hours later I’m standing outside an apartment building on the Upper East Side.

  It was a bad idea to come here like this. I’m drunker than I would like to be and I have no plan beyond asking her to come back. Maybe I’ll beg.

  I ring the buzzer and wait.

  If you bothered to track down the bartender with the wonky eye and the gray teeth at that Lower East Side bar I can’t remember the name of, you could ask him about the night I told him about the girl who was going to have my children.

  Obviously, it was Lisa, and I doubt the bartender would remember me slurring my prediction through the haze of my umpteenth martini as I watched her score an eight ball for us from her dealer who delivered, but I did it and he heard it and if she and I had stayed together longer I would have been one hundred percent correct. And then she would have never left. Not if we had a kid. Lisa was like that.

  I knew. This was a few years ago. We weren’t even dating at the time and I knew. Maybe I’ll tell her the bartender story and see how that goes. I think I might have told her that one before.

  A younger couple comes out the front door. They’re in the middle of a fight and so wrapped up in themselves they wouldn’t notice if I darted in behind them before the door shuts.

  No.

  That would be bad form.

  She’ll let me in or she won’t.

  An hour later I stop ringing her buzzer and go home. It was a dumb plan.

  63

  (Dear me.)

  It would appear that the absurd little schemes of our man are beginning to pay dividends. Just look at the old boy trudge down the street. Such determination! Such focus! A fugue state of ataxic self-importance. A midden of ego. It’s a far cry from the preening jackass he presented himself as only weeks ago.

  Our man can barely maintain an upright posture, for heaven’s sake! He is weaving. Careening even. And yet, there is the unavoidable impression that he is unstoppable. Indomitable!

  Let’s review his most recent history. Two productive excursions across the transom of the afterlife to collect bounty of immeasurable personal value followed each time by an immediate return trip to his barracoon of living and breathing with the rest of humanity. The pressing question on our collective minds is exactly how long he can continue this grueling cycle. The human body can withstand only so much abuse and there can be little doubt that the old boy is pushing his physical being to its design limits. It is unnatural. Untenable. Surely, the awl of God’s pride will be making its point known in the near future. What a foolish little man.

  But save yourself the trouble of cautioning him. He is resolved to move forward regardless of the price tag. Intentionally blind to obvious caveats. Purposefully deaf to well-meaning advice. Willfully ignorant in the face of common sense.

 
And on he marches. Head down. Chuffing audibly from the effort.

  Pay close attention to the pride of gentlemen walking past our man at this very moment. There are three in total. The alpha male of the group allows himself a double take and his face clouds as he can’t help but think to himself that he recognizes ‘that bum’ from somewhere. He slows and watches with knitted eyebrows and furrowed forehead as the old boy toddles past. But no, he says to himself, the chap I’m thinking of was of a most robust demeanor. Strapping. Not shriveled and stooped and hobbled. Not reeking of last week’s gin and this week’s body odor. No, no that couldn’t be Christian Franco. Perhaps a distant relative or simply a random stranger who bears striking resemblance. A distressed doppelganger. Imagine the chances! Oh, the fellows back at the office will have a hearty laugh at this encounter.

  He says nothing and moves on, but only a few steps later, unable to shake the conviction, he turns again to have a closer look. Based on the erratic behavior of the hobo in question, the intrepid gentleman is well aware that he is putting himself at great risk of receiving a scurrilous tongue lashing, if not a homemade knife to the gut, but proceeds with his impromptu plan nevertheless.

  Our man’s name is called out but to no avail. And again, only louder and with a degree of petulance. The gentleman has begun to feel the thrill of challenge dripping down the back of his neck. What began as simple curiosity has become a game he is unwilling to lose.

  Christian! he calls out, but the old boy continues his grunting trundle away from our new friend.

  Christian Franco! he calls out to this lower-caste occupant who appears to be ignoring his advances. Oh, the cheeky gumption of petty men. How often does a nonaction become misconstrued as a challenge? A silence interpreted as a threat? Nothing as something? It is no more than flapdoodle and malarkey, but this is the nature of adult males.

  The gentleman’s compatriots have returned to him, after noticing their leader missing from the pack. He explains the conundrum he finds himself in.