by Rufi Thorpe
“We wanna talk to you,” one of the other ones said, a boy named Jonah whom I had taken English with sophomore year. I remember we read The Great Gatsby. “Just come here, we wanna talk.”
I started toward them. “Listen guys, I—” But by then I was close enough, and Tyler socked me in the face. The pain was as sudden and real as when you bark your shin on a coffee table, and for a moment I could not understand what had possibly happened. He hit me again, and I went down.
Then I was on the ground, and they were kicking me, and they were shouting things and spitting on me and laughing. I had my hands wrapped around my head because my instinct was to protect my face, but this left my ribs and stomach open, though I was curled into a ball as well as I could. “Dude, I’m gonna pee on him,” one of them said, but I don’t think he ever got around to it. I was surprised by how much it all hurt. I was almost indignant that I was still so fully conscious, and that I was thinking things so calmly, wondering when they would stop, if there was anything I could do to hasten the end of this situation, hoping Terrence would come out, hoping Terrence would not come out because it would be so terribly embarrassing. Then suddenly, I heard his voice, and I knew that my cousin Jason was with them, and I thought: Oh god, they are going to kill me.
But then I must have really, finally, blessedly gone into shock, because I cannot remember the beating ending, only that I suddenly became aware that they were gone and I was lying in the parking lot and I should probably get up in case someone came and ran me over. But the idea of getting up seemed impossible, and I decided it was all right to lie there because I would see headlights if a car was coming. And then I think I slept, or something close to sleep, because I had the sensation of waking when Terrence found me.
“Oh boy, oh boy,” he kept saying. “Sweet mother of god. Hold on, buddy, just hold on.” I could hardly see his face because the streetlight was behind him, but I knew his voice, and I loved him, oh how I loved him. I knew he would call 911 for me, and I knew he wouldn’t leave me, and I knew that he loved me, just as he loved all God’s creatures, and in my head I pretended that I was a deer that had been hit by a car, and Terrence was the kind of man who would stop, who would pull over, and he was holding me because I was real to him, because my face, in its terrible nudity, demanded something from him. It was my otherness that so angered those boys, my unknowableness, my dangerous wrongness. They couldn’t understand me and it made them want to extinguish me, and Terrence couldn’t understand me and it made him want to save me.
And that was all it was: a difference, a genetic predisposition, some ancient snippet of DNA that made you want to fight what was different from you or else fuck what was different from you, and both strategies existed in our population. I pictured Terrence with a strange-eyed, unknowable Denisovan wife, and I pictured Tyler and those boys murdering his alien and wonderful hybrid babies, and I understood then about bashing infants on the rocks, about internment camps and gas chambers, about slave ships and plantations and shooting black young men on the streets, about all of human history, it seemed, and then I was gone for a little while and I wondered if, even hoped really, that perhaps I was dying, but then the ambulance came and it was like a dream ending, and I wished that I could have stayed in that parking lot with Terrence forever, just breathing and quietly bleeding while he held my hand.
* * *
—
I don’t remember a lot of what came next, but I do remember how bright the hospital lights were and I remember big flurries of everyone doing a lot of stuff to me and then other times when I was left alone for what seemed like a long time. I remember overhearing a conversation between two orderlies who were taking me from one place to another about how one of them had gotten a new dog, and they were so excited to meet the dog and I wanted to ask what kind it was, but when I tried to talk they weren’t able to hear me and just went on talking as though I weren’t there. We took what seemed to be four or five different elevator trips, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of Escher-like design the hospital must have to require so many different elevators. When we finally got to my room, the orderly bent over me and said, so softly that only I would be able to hear, “You’ve gotta get out of here, buddy. This isn’t a real hospital.”
Adrenaline sang through my body, and suddenly I was in a large white room, but I was lying on the floor and I was by myself. I couldn’t see anything else in the room, but I remember the floor was extremely cold and my back was aching from how cold it was, and I wondered if possibly I was simply lying on a sheet of ice, but somehow I knew I was not in a natural place, I wasn’t on a frozen lake, I was in a building, but some kind of otherworldly building with nonreal characteristics, and that is when I became convinced that I had snuck in somewhere I was not supposed to be, and that eventually they were going to figure out I was in here and I was going to be in unimaginable trouble. When I tried to think about who “they” were, I realized they were some kind of angels or aliens, beings from another level of reality, and I was not supposed to be in their area, and they would send me away, and in being expelled I would most likely die. I wanted desperately to sneak out while I still could, but I could not move my arms or legs.
When I woke up, there was a nurse near me, and I cried, “I’ve been in a car accident!” I kept telling people that, because I thought if they found out that I had been beaten for being homosexual then they would refuse to treat me. But no one would talk to me. The nurses and doctors kept having hushed conversations with one another, but they never addressed me or told me what was going on. At one point, I was in a huge shopping mall going up thousands of escalators. I bought myself a blazer as yellow as the sun and one of the nurses tsked that I was selfish. And then I remembered the orderly telling me I was not in a real hospital, and I thought: Of course! What kind of real hospital has thousands of escalators and elevators in it and sells yellow blazers!
My aunt Deedee came to visit me and told me she was incredibly disappointed in me. I wanted to tell her that Jason had been the one who did this to me, that it had been him and his friends, but that I had pushed him to it by means of sickening shade, that it was my incredible, ingeniously sharp tongue that had done me in, that my wit was dangerous and second only to Oscar Wilde’s or Dorothy Parker’s. She cried and told me the TV would be watching me and then she left, and I didn’t know what to make of that, and I became terrified of having the TV on because I thought the people inside it could see me through the screen.
Perhaps the most ridiculous part of all this is that Ann Marie kept coming into my room. She kept talking to me about Jesus and how he wanted to do this weaving in my internal organs, and how they were going to take a wire and put it in my veins and then explore my whole body with it, and Jesus himself was going to do this as performance art.
The sounds that I could hear from my hospital bed were extremely loud and I figured out that the nurses were Foley artists practicing making sounds. Crinkle, crinkle, crunch. Footsteps, footsteps, footsteps. They were working as nurses while they got their degrees as Foley artists so they could work in radio. There was going to be this big resurgence in old-timey radio serials because of podcasts. These nurses were so visionary! I rooted for them, but the sounds they made were also extremely annoying.
Anthony came at one point, and I became aware that my aunt Deedee was also in the room, and that shit was tense. “You guys are going to have to communicate via radio,” I kept saying. “So you don’t have to talk, but you can radio from inside your head, and then he can radio from inside of his head, like, Roger that!”
Anthony held my hand, and he kept crying, and he said he was sorry because he couldn’t be with me anymore, that he had been very foolish, but he just couldn’t risk his family and his marriage, he owed it to Hank. “I think that’s really on point,” I said. “You’re gonna get an A.”
I asked Aunt Deedee when she was gonna kick me out, but she said we
could talk about it later. I asked her how it felt to be the mother of a murderer, but she said, “You’re not a murderer.” She seemed to have no idea Jason had killed me.
By the time Bunny came, I was feeling a lot better. Aunt Deedee had been gone for maybe days, and the only person who regularly came was Ann Marie. I asked her what she could remember of her coma and she said nothing. It was like being asleep. I was so jealous. It didn’t seem fair that she could almost die so much more than me and yet have it suck so much less.
Bunny was so real in my room and for the first time in a long time I felt like I was awake. She touched me all over, she touched my face and I figured out I had bruises on my face because of the way it felt as her fingers skimmed the skin. She even sniffed my hair at one point. It was like she was a mother dog and I was her lost pup. “I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I don’t know what else to do,” she said.
“You can tell me anything,” I said. “I’m transparent as glass.”
“My dad has basically stolen my identity.” I thought for a moment she was saying that he was doing drag as her, and I thought that was so fascinating, but it was just that he had stolen her Social Security number. “He has like five credit cards in my name, and there is a bank account with thousands of dollars in it, and he took out a mortgage in my name. You know those apartments they are building up on Grand? I guess he wanted to invest in them with Mr. Phong, but he couldn’t get a loan because of all the IRS stuff, so he used my stuff. He said the credit cards were to build up my credit, that it’s actually a good thing, but it’s like—Michael, it’s like several hundred thousand in debt all told. And he’s like, of course I’m gonna pay it off—”
“Lies,” I said.
“Right?” she said.
“Your father sprouts lies, it’s like he was cursed by a gypsy, oh my god, I bet that’s what happened!”
“And then he said the apartment buildings were actually a surprise birthday present and he even made it seem like it was because of the Ann Marie stuff that he didn’t tell me about it then. Which made me feel, just, just fucking awful about myself.”
“What an amazing lie,” I said. “He’s so good at it.”
“I just don’t know what to do.”
“Listen, I’ve been in a car accident, so I might not be the best person to help you with this. I think I might be dying and stuff.”
“Oh, I promise you’re not dying,” she said. “Your surgery went very well and they say you’ll make a full recovery.”
“Really! Oh wow, that’s such a big relief. Is this a real hospital and everything?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m so overjoyed, I can’t even tell you. Where’s Ann Marie?”
“What?”
“She keeps coming in here,” I said.
“Ann Marie died,” Bunny said.
“No,” I said. “I swear she hasn’t. She’s around here somewhere. She was just here.” I was going to tell her about Jesus doing performance art in my veins but decided that would sound too weird.
“Michael,” Bunny said. “I’ve been worried about those apartment buildings for a long time. And now it makes me just sick that they’re mine. That my name is on the deed.”
“Does it feel like a lot of responsibility?”
She was crying suddenly.
“It’s just like your name, but in a different font,” I said to comfort her.
“No, it’s just my dad has been freaked out about those buildings forever. Construction is running way over budget and he got this shady electrician to do all the panels with parts he got from China and then paid off the inspector. And—it’s probably fine! I mean, they’re up to code in China! But what if it isn’t fine? What if people move in there and it’s not right?”
“The sins of the father,” I said.
“If those fuse boxes malfunction,” she said, “people could die.”
“You can’t stop people from dying, they do it anyway.”
“What should I do?” she asked.
“You could burn them down,” I said.
“The apartment buildings?”
“Yeah.”
“What function would that serve?” she asked.
“Why, it would be poetic justice. I’ve always wanted to burn this town to the ground, did you know that?”
The next time I opened my eyes, I was looking at my mother, who was standing by the right side of my bed. I was in an incredible amount of pain in my midsection. Machines all around me were pooping jujubes of sound. Slow robot claws were being extended.
“He’s up,” she said. Aunt Deedee was on the other side of me, sitting in the single chair in my curtained-off enclosure, and I swiveled to look at her. She looked tired and numb and sad. She was holding my left hand, which had lots of tubes in it.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Why are you sorry?” she said.
“For being so much trouble,” I said.
“Don’t be an idiot,” my mother said, chewing savagely on her already short nails. “We’re just happy you’re not dead!”
“You have new bangs,” I said. She looked at me and there was a flash, some kind of explosion of memory, an intimacy we used to share, a way we once were madly in love with each other, a world lost, a building engulfed in flames. “It looks good,” I said.
“Well,” she said.
“How did the car accident happen?” I asked. “I just—why was I even driving?”
“What, honey?” Aunt Deedee asked.
“I know I was in a car accident,” I said, “but I can’t remember it.”
They looked at each other and for some reason I knew that Aunt Deedee had told my mother that I was gay. And then I remembered. The dark parking lot and the floating bright rectangles of the streetlights overhead. The sound of their laughter, the smell of the asphalt and blood and then a waft of spearmint. One of them must have been chewing gum. I started crying. “I was supposed to tell her,” I said. “I was supposed to get to tell her.”
“Shh…” Aunt Deedee said.
* * *
—
“Do you know where you are?” a doctor asked me. His face was familiar and I wanted to tell him that yes, I was in a hospital where he had been my doctor for some days now and that I recognized his weirdly long upper lip. His cupid’s bow looked like a tiny waterslide.
“In the hospital?” I said.
“That’s right,” he said. “Do you know what year it is?”
“2010.”
“Okay, it seems like you’re a bit more oriented, so I want to just go over with you what has happened, what your treatment plan is, and where we can go from here. You were admitted to the ER with internal bleeding, a grade two laceration to the spleen, minor lacerations to the kidneys—” The doctor saw my attention start to wander and put his face weirdly close to mine, said, “Stay with me here, I need informed consent, buddy! After this there will be some forms to sign. There was some bowel and mesenteric vessel injury, two cracked ribs, and a grade one hematoma on your liver. We were able to go in nonoperatively and halt the bleeding in your spleen.”
“Nonoperatively?”
“Basically, in this case we inserted a wire into your vascular system through the groin and were able to stop the bleeding.”
“That sounds super bad,” I said.
“Actually, you’re very lucky,” the doctor said. “You’re young. You’ve got that good protoplasm. You’ll heal fast.”
“I can’t believe protoplasm is a real thing,” I said. “I mean, what a crazy word!” I was also thinking that Jesus really had performed art through my veins, and I was suddenly anxious about how much of my other memories were real. Obviously the nurses were not Foley artists. But had Anthony come to see me and told me he couldn’t be with me anymore? Had I t
old Aunt Deedee that Jason had been part of the group who attacked me? Had he even been there? I hadn’t seen him at first, but I had heard his voice, and I swear at one point I had seen his face, heard his disgusting laugh. I didn’t know how I would ever be able to trust myself enough to say for sure. A nurse had wrapped my fingers around a chubby plastic pen and was holding out forms for me to sign on a clipboard.
“Here,” she was murmuring, “and here. Here. And this states you do not have insurance. Here.”
“Wait,” I said, thinking that I did have insurance, but then I remembered Aunt Deedee had been fired from Starbucks and so our health insurance was probably gone. “So what happens if you don’t have insurance?”
“Well, honey, you’re still seventeen, so we can probably get you retroactively into Medi-Cal, but even if we can’t, you were the victim of a crime, so all your expenses will ultimately be covered by the Victim Compensation Board, as long as you cooperate with the police investigation.”
I was still seventeen, so I got insurance. Bunny had turned eighteen, so she’d be tried as an adult. Of all the arbitrary boundaries in the world, I marveled.
“We’re going to transfer you out of the ICU,” the doctor said, “to a regular room. We’re gonna hold on to you for a few more days, just to give that spleen some time to heal and make sure we don’t get any clots or blockages in your urinary tract from those kidneys. I do think the police want to have a word with you, and they’re out in the hall—are you up for it?”
“Uh, sure?” I had not thought about that at all, the legal side of my situation.
The doctor and nurse left, and a man and a woman entered my room. Some kind of switch flipped and suddenly I was sure all of this was fake, that it was part of some TV show or social experiment. These were not real detectives but people impersonating police detectives. It was so obvious. The man had mussed-up hair and was wearing a leather jacket over a button-down shirt that had a stain on it. The woman didn’t know how to dress at all, and her outfit was so extremely basic that only a costume designer could have produced it. They were both beautiful and yet ordinary-looking, with eyes that were too shiny.
