by Dan Kennedy
“That Karl Rove book! I have to say, the guy’s got a knack for…”
“Here’s the thing, I don’t have insurance at this point, so how much would something like this be in cash? Could I do it for ten or fifteen grand if I took it out of savings?”
“Hard to say. Could be twenty grand, could be thirty, could be more if it takes more than once, it’s just hard to say.”
“Okay, I’m going to do some checking around.”
The subtext of the exchange was something like:
“I’m one of those millions of people you read about in America.”
“No insurance?”
“Exactly. But I could swing ten grand in cash.”
“That’s weird, I can’t hear you for some reason. I see your mouth moving, but no sound is coming out.”
“Never mind, I’ll just go to India or something.”
The van is on its way. The paradise of tiny bottles, room service, and window blinds fades into the rearview, and the road becomes less enchanted as the palms on the property end and the main drag of Nusa Dua begins. Painted plywood billboards cracked by beautiful days and the occasional hurricane blur past and advertise half-assed roadside bars made of cinder block and lumber and offering the chance to drink something strong from a bottle with a cobra in it. Or you can do a shot and eat the egg of a cobra, or you can get drunk then wander the warm roads and dirt paths at night until a cobra bites you and you die with a swollen black leg. The DVD shops show up in clusters like komodos to a kill. One offers a dozen Hollywood hits on DVD for $12.99, the next offers a dozen for $10.99, the next two offer a dozen for $9.99, and the very last one on the end offers a dozen for $12.99—the same price as the first one, but they have more flashing lights than the first shop, plus there are pretty girls out front waving as you go past. Souvenir shacks blur past, too, but the souvenirs can barely be seen from way out here in the traffic pattern’s snarl of vans and taxis. Motorbikes scream a steady chorus of nen-nen-nen-neen-neen, engulfing the shuttle van like a storm of red, white, and black locusts ready to strip crops of tourist green. The impression of the gift shacks’ inventories at this speed is: small skulls of wood, cobra head key chains and paperweights, cobras in bottles of something, big lizards made of wood, small lizards made of wood, more big lizards made of wood, and certainly somewhere a cobra head glued to a lizard made of wood if one had the time to slow down and look for it. There are massage joints and spas, too, many offering something called the Bali Mystical Warm Stone Treatment, certainly a euphemism for something, the brain surmises. At any rate, strange the way the eyes key in on a sign that offers something so close to what the body needs at the moment. The body needs the Bali Not-So-Mystical Stone Removal Treatment and the hospital on the horizon has just that.
There’s this thing the cab drivers here do, this moment where they know they’re about to swing a hard right turn, and they slow a bit, almost close their eyes a little, as if to make peace with the fact that when the right is swung, the motorbike swarm may or may not part and that is up to something bigger than all of us. The choreography of it goes off without a hitch, a right turn that works like Stravinsky and the van is off the main drag and down toward BIMC Hospital, looking, so far, exactly as it does on the brochure; a building that was intended to be a low-slung, concrete resort hotel until something went sideways and a shipment of medical equipment arrived a few months before the grand opening. One checks in without the pageantry of area resort hotels, that’s the first difference one notices. Outside, medium-cute girls, roughed up by the hours, smoke Djarums and steady themselves for the shift ahead; long drags and glances up at the cloudless vivid blue; the bedpan-and-gauze beat is better than dancing in front of a DVD hut or selling fake Cartier on the beach to tourists.
In the waiting room, a little window of glass frosted at the bottom slides half open and a woman, clearly no fan of ceremony, shoves a clipboard up onto the smooth, cool counter and more signatures are in order. Between clearing customs, crowds of short con men rushing up, being swarmed by women with drinks seeking signatures, and fast shuttle vans navigating throngs to arrive at the hands of bored administrative types waiting to usher you along discreet corridors, the head wanders to what it must have been like to be a Beatle in Japan circa 1967. Even more so since the pain isn’t present in the nuts or back this morning. Clipboard one signed, all five pages, clipboard two signed, all three places, a locker key issued, a seat offered up in wait, dented and dog-eared gossip magazines of stars you’ve never seen. Soon enough the body is gowned and ushered along a purgatory of hallways and into the room, and then Matthew falls madly in love with a man.
This man is maybe fifty years of age, admittedly plain-looking at first glance, with an unremarkably benign bedside manner, but in full control of a little cart and rack that administers something that’s been attached to the needle left in the left arm. The body lies staring at a ceiling and the brain wonders what daydreams are real, and the man smiles kindly at something; at everything for some reason, Jesus, enough smiling. The table has more brains than the body lying on top of it at the moment. The table has told the technician where the stupid black dot has moved to and Matthew is pushed a bit over to the left, asked to scoot down just a touch, bumped an inch or so back to the right, and then bull’s-eye: The table’s X-ray eyes tell the technician on Matthew’s right that the little gel-filled electronic tit under the lower back is aimed at the money spot. The man/love interest on Matthew’s left takes another look at his screens and flow, thinking about whatever it is anesthesiologists/lovers think of at times like this. The two men then look at each other and the table looks up at the two of them and nods, indicating that its screens, levers, and currents are ready to be cocked for nine thousand or so fast little weird ticks; tiny kicks that should cause subsonic demolition in the ureter. Ureter. Ureter. Ureter. Ur. You’re. Your.
“Can you feel the machine, the ticking? Can you feel any discomfort there?” Matthew’s future husband asks.
Inside the head, a refrain, Say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say…
“Yes.”
“Okay, let me increase. You let me know when you’re comfortable; we want to be sure you’re not feeling pain.”
Don’t leave me. Ever.
The only thing that the head is trying to figure or explain is who the woman is who just walked right into the room and sat down to eat a plum and watch, like she had wandered from a kitchen into a living room. The lips tried to form the words. The head asked in silence a thousand times, Who is that?, but the mouth wouldn’t have any part in getting the words to come. The beep on the monitor slowed, the warm flood hugged the veins, blood became love, and everything was fine for the very first time since before turning nine and getting the news that the parents weren’t coming home from that second honeymoon, and hoping somehow that it meant the second honeymoon was going to last forever in heaven. The stuff in the blood is really working wonders on the past now, any rough spots in the road up to this point softened into mud; enemies melted into people who had only ever tried to love you and just messed up. Somehow the idea comes on strong that every day is sunny, even when it rains, if you just go high enough up, there will always be sun.
The woman sitting there smiling and eating a plum—she might be the source of all of this well-being and resignation, as far as the head can tell. The table ticks and punches at the rock in the guts, the machine to the left beeps steady measures of a heart still marching on in perfect meter, the woman looks up and her eyes squint a beautiful smile and her cheeks suck in a little at what must have been a tart spot in the plum. The lips are the ones; the nose is the one; the eyes are the ones; the breasts are the ones. People or machines could kick at Matthew forever, so long as this love smiled on him the way it is right now, almost vibrating like this. The heart speaks up plainly: I’m ready; I’m done here now. It’s been so hard since you’ve been gone and I’ve
never said so. I’ve tried my best since the day they gave me away. I want to come home to you now. The heart races at a weird full-speed arrhythmia while the two men flanking Matthew can be heard in some kind of panic about the new jazz-time signature on the machine, beep, beepbeep, beepbe—bap, bee, p. The heart races happy, sky swelling into the room from a giant glorious crack in the roof.
Matthew musters everything he has, cons synapses in hopes of gaming the system; to con the man in control of the morphine flow from the cart and rack. Matthew fakes a pain with a push left; arches up like it can’t stand the feeling of the process even though it is numb and almost gone. The head tries harder than it ever has; pushes a grunt to feign discomfort; tries to make the men flanking the body think that there’s not enough heaven in the room and that pain is still being felt, and that this is the truth. The light gets brighter, the music gets louder; earth is going to be gone for Matthew if this grift works; if this grunt and squirm tricks them, it’s the end of this dull and sad dimension. Even the head had to admit that this is starting to feel like magic; somehow a nine-year-old is looking down at the longer, bigger, older thing it had become. The boy wishes and begs, in a sad fit of temper, to be done dragging this body through earthly days, to be through with spending the rest of his time disguised as this man on the table below him.
But it doesn’t matter how hard you hope to never come to, they all rush to get oxygen on you, they call others in to slide the man from the table, to a gurney, to a bed, and before the head knows what hit it, they’ve moved the body and the brain and the heart into this other room to recoup. The nose breathes big, pure, silvery white clean hits of oxygen, the heart feels a world of warm yellow and orange turn all matter-of-fact and blue again, and the head tries to explain away whatever it recalls of the situation in the other room.
29
The Buffet Is Having Problems. So Is the Business Center
MATTHEW HAS TWO SAVVY TRAVEL tips he can dole out to the first-time visitor to Bali. The first is that one shouldn’t attempt to navigate the seafood buffet in the golden afterglow of minor kidney trauma, jet lag, near death, morphine, and Tylenol 4 with codeine. The head narrates the scene with the hysteria of a small-town neighbor talking about a house fire, but it might be justified here in the Club Level dining situation, the culinary equivalent of the VIP section, really. A stunning lattice of concrete pads that seem to float on ponds. Each square connected by teak bridges, the emerald waters beneath lush with flora of the region and bright orange-and-white koi, their colors dulled just a bit until they rise to the surface, for a silent chorus of hello kisses in this brilliant mirage of travel and leisure. The ears swore they heard a voice that was not Matthew’s—a voice saying that life has been trying to show him places like this for ages now but that he seemed tied to routine and determined to resist.
It all seemed like a giant welcome to better living until a buffet table being politely descended upon by above-average people jumps up at Matthew like it’s spring-loaded; like a prank reserved for rubes in here on a free upgrade. A giant wooden bowl of crabs jumps at the face and plants itself right on and into it. The head says: Oh, shit, the pills have gained ground and turned the place into one big seafood fun house. At first, the humiliation is too much to bear. The head wants to end it all, wants to disappear; it wasn’t a bad idea, that idea in the hospital today of conning a sweet anesthesiologist into administering enough to slow the body down forever until the mortal shell was on permanent vacation. Then the heart rallies verve, understanding too clearly that days are limited and one day gone, and that it was absolutely a bad idea to hope to leave the planet early from that hospital today. Sure, the blood is thick with chemical debris fueling this spirited revelation, but there’s also a certain inspired mood that comes of being at a seaside resort after a sunny day spent indoors falling in love with an anesthesiologist whose American name is Steve, while the beautiful ghost of your young mother looked on with her blessing.
And that’s the mood Matthew is in, plus yes, Tylenol with codeine and a big Bintang beer—but the foundation of the mood, it has nothing to do with the pills and Bintang. The effect is that one is finally too exhausted to continue spending life’s very finite remaining balance being polite and afraid; hold it all together long enough and one is finally cornered into confidence. And on that day, you may find yourself flat on your face in a bowl of tasty crabs. When this happens, eat the fucking crab! If chemical gravity and sway has landed one’s face in the bowl, then it is no fault of one’s own; it is simply the great, big, delicious mistake of science and medicine.
Will guests look on? Yes, they will look on; for that matter guests are looking on right now, right this very moment. Go ahead, pull your head up in between taking bites, and look at them; there they are, fattened by years of steady flow, staring back. Normal people are everywhere now, it seems. There must’ve been a time when it wasn’t so. The head is through with worrying what they think: That’s right, folks, stare all you want, this is the splendor and horror that’s available to you; hell, it’s coming for you. You only have to wait; it’s that easy to sign up. All you need to do is let years march on the way they do, slow in their brutality with you, forcing your hand, getting rid of all your stupid plans.
Matthew stops eating for just a minute, turns and musters saying something to the man backing away from the buffet table, right to the water’s edge: “Don’t look so appalled, lady—you wish you were doing the same thing. You’ve been living for people you’ve never met; people who won’t be by your bed when you take your last breath.”
Another trophy man next to a trophy wife, this one at the very end of the long table, still piles a plate full, looks up suddenly at the commotion. Matthew hears himself saying this: “That’s right, get a taste of that before I get over there. Because when the bear gets there, it’s over. It’s done, that shit’s mine. I’ll spend the first bite on your arm to back you down. This combo they’ve got me on for nut pain is savage and strange. I’m a bull, all kicked in the sack and agitated to the point of fighting; I never had it in me like this. I was always a flight guy, but you can’t be and survive, not in America, not anymore. Maybe in your Australia you can turn the other cheek, get by in that desert of yours on rotten meat and dreams, but it isn’t that way where I live. Around the world, thugs storm mosques and discos, so I’m taking this. Under God’s sky, tiny hearts stop beating on ultrasound screens, or worse, kids are born with diseases that should’ve been cured a billion dollars ago. None of it’s fucking fair—they don’t tell you that when you’re young, they let you catch on slowly, maybe by the time you’re thirty. If you knew how stacked the deck was when you were young, you’d stab half the neighborhood in a fit, so they let it ride awhile, they watch you and see if you’re getting it yet. They feed you sitcoms and cartoon strips about desperadoes with funny glasses and big bald heads and expressionless faces in cubicle graves, so you feel better about being fucked by days that you refuse to take as your own. So I’m taking this tortellini seafood salad as my own. And I’m taking your gin. Yum, yum, yum, the bear got into camp, motherfuckers. The bear was upgraded; the bear brought an American Express Platinum to a MasterCard Gold fight. And a bear’s gonna eat, you know what I mean? I got here selling shit in parking lots. But I got here, didn’t I? And now you have to face me.”
What Matthew is actually slurring in a loud whisper is this: “This—the noodle… pasta thing? Fuuuuuck. Mmm.”
The trophy wife is smiling—smiling! Her eyes lit with delight that she’s trying to hide whenever it seems like the trophy husband might look her way by chance. She’s the only person not frightened, inconvenienced, or disgusted, and nobody notices. So, right, the first savvy travel tip is about these buffet situations, and the second savvy travel tip is this: One should not attempt to print, sign, and FedEx contracts for coffee-mug distribution in gigantic American urban outfitting chain stores from a hotel’s so-called business center under the sway of a long, strange d
ay. Because even though it all works out just fine, there are myriad humiliations awaiting, including but not limited to having a cute young woman wipe drool from the margin of a contract you are signing. Aside from those two tips, do as you will while in Bali, mystic land of enchantment.
There was so much email. Weeks old, even older, some of it. Replies were attempted and some even sent—a nap between the buffet situation and the visit to the business center had made things a little easier to navigate. There was a woman in there too, bored to tears, stuck in paradise manning a hotel’s business center. Not much was said; the mouth had done its work for the day, and a sterling performance at that. There was the business of hellos exchanged and the woman didn’t say anything past that, really, just looked at Matthew and looked away whenever he glanced her way. The post-buffet stretch was tough to read, and either a language barrier was at play or she had heard about Matthew’s new approach to resort dining and was unsure about saying much to Matthew and triggering an episode of some sort. It’s nice, though, to have that kind of distance from people when trying to think straight; one can’t be too hard on oneself for creating a little space on vacation like this; for putting a few layers between one’s self and the upper-middle-class riffraff.
There was an email from Tim, a personal advisory of sorts. Tim’s life-coach act, when he lapses into it, is now undermined by living in a park with a leathery, shoplifting, amphibious hashish fiend and another man wearing a dead animal for a robe and giving the world the silent treatment. The message was a bold chorus of one man, though, and it was a big gesture, Tim likely having taken the time to duck into some concrete Injun Trading Outpost and Café staffed by white people to send word on an ancient charged-by-the-hour PC. It’s not the first time Tim has said to move on from Kristin, but mostly the ears and eyes have been trained pretty well to not register Tim’s previous suggestions in the arena of love. For a month or two after his head was shaved by the sex worker with the violent disposition and the suitcase of prosthetic penises or whatever she brought to bear on him, Tim was pretty quiet when it came to advising anyone in matters of the heart. But now he’s back to having elected himself the harbinger of personal growth. The email from Tim was the usual stuff, but maybe not, at least in that things seemed to be wrapping up.
