Under the Wolf, Under the Dog

by Adam Rapp

  I tried to sneak away. They captured me, though, and made me do the standing broad jump, but my feet were too heavy and I couldn’t even jump a foot.

  “Not very promising, Nugent,” they said. “Not very promising.”

  In the middle of the dining area, there was this nude, twelve-foot maniac guy. His nudity was pretty alarming. He was standing on top of a table screaming, “Drop the chalupa! Drop the chalupa!” but everyone was ignoring him.

  I eventually escaped and took my food outside to the picnic tables. Mary Mills and my mom were sitting in each others’ laps, all playful and girlish. My dad kept announcing that he couldn’t find his car keys.

  An alien robot was there, too. He materialized right out of the garbage. He was taller than the maniac, and he was holding a huge tulip. He was made of metal, but he had this totally human erection. I had the feeling that the robot’s erection was my erection, but when I looked down my pants, there was a small compact disc player. A Sony with G-Protection. I opened the lid, but it was empty.

  At first I thought Welton was the alien robot, but toward the end of the dream, I realized that it was actually me. And when I finally made this connection, it became like code-red crucial that I exchange my compact disc player penis for the robot’s erection. Why this was code-red crucial, I have no idea, but it felt like everything totally depended on it.

  I woke to a nurse feeding a tube into my right arm. She was so white she appeared to be lit from within. Her arms were flabby and her hands smelled like lotion and her mouth was so small it seemed sewn shut. I prayed she wouldn’t speak.

  She was sliding the needle under my skin. My arm seemed dead. It looked like meat from the butcher’s.

  The IV needle was cold, and I couldn’t see out of my right eye. This biological fact registered much later than it should have. Things to the right just weren’t making their way into my field of vision. My left eye told me that there was a TV, an empty bed beside mine, and this totally monstrous rubberized plant that looked so highly advanced I feared it would hop down off the windowsill and ambush me.

  There were two vertical slats set up on either side of my neck, positioned at the ears, apparently to keep my head from moving.

  A pain materialized. It was that kind of pain that makes it hard to breathe. I located it above my neck, then in my head, then, more specifically, in my right eye. Everything on the right side of my body sort of throbbed, and I was afraid to move.

  I felt my right hand rising toward my face.

  “Don’t touch now,” the nurse said.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “You’re in the intensive care unit of the ophthalmology ward at Medical Associates.”

  I said, “What happened?”

  My voice sounded like it had been taken out and put back in.

  “Well, from what I hear, you put your own thumb through your right eye. You have a shield over it. The doctor will be able to give you details.”

  It felt like there was half of a football helmet totally welded over the right side of my face.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Not so good.”

  “This’ll help,” she said, fastening a strip of tape over my now-inserted IV needle.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, this is a narcotic that will make you feel better and help you relax.”

  “What kind of narcotic?”

  “Morphine.”

  I said, “Whoa.”

  “It should kick in in a few minutes. The fluid fed into your left hand is a rehydrating electrolyte. You were terribly dehydrated, Steven. Your system was practically poisoned with antihistamines.”

  “How did you know my name?” I asked.

  “We found your school ID in your bag. Your brother and father were here earlier, but you were still out cold. They’ll be back. The doctor will be by later this afternoon to check on you. Try not to move. We need to keep your venous pressure to a minimum.”

  Then I asked her what venous pressure was, because I’d thought she said penis at first, and she explained that it was the pressure in your veins and that the main concern was to keep my optic nerve pumping so things wouldn’t get “shut down,” as she described it.

  “The less you move your head around, the better,” she warned. “Try not to sneeze or laugh or cough. And if you need to move your bowels, just relax and let yourself go. You’ve been fitted with a diaper.”

  “I’m wearing a diaper?” I asked.

  “Don’t be embarrassed.”

  She dabbed a cotton ball full of alcohol over the small hole she had just made in me. It was cold and stayed that way for like ten minutes.

  When she left, this totally weird sadness overwhelmed me.

  Fluorescent lights sort of droned.

  My bed smelled clean and sterile.

  A TV loomed above me, all blank and omnipotent.

  I almost started crying, but I made myself stop because of all that venous pressure business. And then my sadness was replaced by something much, much, much, much, much, much, much, more powerful: morphine.

  I will say this:

  With morphine there is no longing.

  There is no hunger.

  There is no need for sex or clothes or friendship.

  There is only love.

  The pain disappeared so fast I almost missed it.

  I suddenly loved the smell of my bed. The TV was my best friend, the plant a sexless time-traveling monk sent to my room to bless me. Everything was right in the world. Even my thoughts turned suddenly clear and hopeful. I started setting goals. I would go to college! I would scale the holy ivy at some totally tweedish liberal-arts institution in the Northeast! I would wear khakis and penny loafers and freshly laundered underwear! I would learn all there is to know about the history of this beautiful country and how things came to be! I would yearn for knowledge! I would flourish and expand! My body would fill out handsomely, and girls would find me interesting and entertaining! My pubic hair would finally grow in with fantastic, undulating curls! I would graduate with honors and work in a major city and my gabled New England home would have several rooms where my blond-haired, blue-eyed, fourteen-thousand-word-vocabulary children would play chess and read complicated novels! I would move beyond math and solve the mystery of bacteria! I would be awarded and anthologized! Busts of my likeness would be erected on all the great lawns! I would die in my eighties and leave behind a legacy of Nugent geniuses-to-be!

  Then an elderly man was wheeled into my room. He was pretty lifeless-looking, and his head was covered with gauze. The staff attending his gurney huddled around and manipulated his chart and whispered truths and medical poetry. After a moment they pulled a curtain between us and exited. There were things beeping all around him.

  This was not a man, my morphine mind told me. This was a beast of love sent to my room to radiate warmth and a healing holiness.

  I suddenly had to go to the bathroom. This was okay. This was fine. My morphine mind told me that this was bliss, in fact. So I urinated warmly. And I defecated softly. I released my bowels and felt glad. I was highly entertained by this and I smiled throughout.

  In the other bed, the elderly man moaned. It was a pretty intense moan. I imagined both of his eyes missing. Two enormous diamonds fitted into his sockets instead.

  He moaned again and then added, “Nurse! Nurse! Oh, my God! Somebody help me! Nurse!”

  Moments later my nurse entered the room.

  “Yes, Mr. Johnson?” she asked calmly.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “I’m right beside you, Mr. Johnson. I’m right here. Are you in pain?”

  “No, not pain, no. No pain.”

  “What can I do for you?” she asked.

  “I want to know if I’m going to be able to see.”

  “The doctor said it was a successful operation, but we won’t know what the actual outcome will be until we remove the bandages. You
need to heal a bit before we can do that.”

  “I want to know now!”

  “I know you do, Mr. Johnson, but we don’t want any early, unwanted light to damage your eyes, do we?”

  Mr. Johnson didn’t respond. He breathed and sighed. He was really scared.

  “Is that clear, Mr. Johnson?” the nurse asked. “Do you understand me, Mr. Johnson?”

  He finally replied, “I understand you. Go away.”

  The nurse turned to leave and then it dawned on me.

  “Nurse?” I asked.

  “Yes, Steven?”

  I said, “What about me?”

  “What about you, Steven?”

  “My right eye. Am I like blind?”

  “It was a very serious puncture, Steven,” the nurse said. “There’s a strong chance that you’ve lost vision in your right eye.”

  26.

  I woke to the sound of a squealing gurney.

  The morphine had worn off a bit and I came to feeling pretty sad and dislocated. My last conscious memory was talking to the doctor. Dr. Black was his name. He visited in the middle of the night. He was bald but had bushy eyebrows and hairy hands. His breath smelled like Certs and Tater Tots.

  Dr. Black told me that I had this thing called a hyphema, an optical hemorrhage caused by a tear in the pupil. He used terms like “vitreous humor” and “aqueous humor,” words that somehow sounded like they came from the sea.

  In addition to his baldness and Certs-and-Tater-Tots breath, Dr. Black was an unusually tan man. He sort of looked like a professional golfer, now that I think about it.

  He went on to tell me that there was an eighty-percent chance of me losing all sight in my right eye, and then he slowly powered my bed into a V-shape. It felt strange to sit up. The morphine had done something to gravity and other natural laws. I felt like I had been beaten and that things inside me had been removed, rearranged, and put back in.

  “In a moment I’m going to need you to open that eye,” Dr. Black said, suddenly producing this contraption that looked like a thing used to calculate the weight and quality of bat feces. He called it a “slit lamp” and told me that it was a device used to measure the pressure in my eyeball.

  “I don’t want you to be alarmed if you can’t see anything. Your blindness is not necessarily permanent.”

  Necessarily? I thought.

  When I opened my right eye, all that registered was a murderous sea of red. There were no outlines, nothing defining height or depth, only red and redder red. When I opened my good eye, the world bounced back into my brain with a fluorescent vengeance. Then I closed it, opened my bad eye, and everything went red again.

  Dr. Black said it was red because the back of my eye was bleeding into my retina. For some reason I imagined my eye menstruating. Like my eye was having its first period or whatever.

  He fitted my face into the slit lamp. There was a chin strap. There was a very white, very small spotlight. There was a strange little metal nipple that he explained would have to “touch my eyeball” in order to obtain a proper pressure reading. The prospect of something touching my eye was pretty alarming, to say the least — especially something metal and nipple-shaped. Morphine or no morphine, I experienced what I can only describe as a brain scream. Terror and morphine do not mix. The morphine only relaxes the body, so that the terror can sink its monstrous talons deeper into your drug-calmed flesh. I prayed I wouldn’t defecate in my pants while Dr. Black got his “pressure reading.”

  He told me to close my good eye and worked my bad eye open with his fingertips and said relaxing things like “This won’t hurt a bit,” and, “It’ll be over before you know it.” Things that basically make you clench up in anticipation of hypodermic needles or dental drills. The little white spotlight was drawn so close to my eye that I could feel the heat radiating from its tiny bulb. Moments later there was the faintest touch on my eyeball. It could have been a moth wing.

  He repeated this three times. That was it, he said. That was all he needed.

  Dr. Black said that soon he would start to administer what he called “healing drops” twice a day and that if the pressure was kept down, there would be a chance of regaining some of my vision. When asked what these healing drops were, he said they were optical steroids that would help the rupture repair itself. Like the nurse, he warned me not to move and encouraged me to use my diapers.

  Then Dr. Black started to pack up his slit lamp.

  “So how long will I be in here?” I asked. My throat was pretty dry and sore.

  “Well, that all depends on your venous pressure,” he said, redressing my patch. “If the readings increase, we may need to do surgery. If they go down on their own, then there’s a good chance for recovery. This was your first reading and it’s pretty high, so we’ll get a better idea over the next few days.

  “I’ve had hyphema patients who’ve had to stay in the hospital for weeks,” he explained. “Others left after a few days. The eyeball is a mysterious organ. Some people respond better to this condition than others. The key is stillness. How’s the pain?”

  “Not so great.”

  “Well, use the morphine. We can only keep you on it for a few days at a time, so use it liberally.”

  Then he pressed the little button attached to my morphine cartridge and left in sort of a rush.

  The second wave of sleep was beautiful and deep. Like mermaids leading me through warm, breathable water.

  27.

  The next time I woke, my dad was sitting in a chair next to the bed. He had turned on the TV, and its light was making his face look sort of old and bloodless.

  On QVC these two overly caffeinated guys were narrating sales pitches about the most important things ever to be invented by the human race: sports cards.

  One of the guys, whose voice was being transmitted over what sounded like some totally fake phone line (he was probably speaking into a mike through a pair of pantyhose), kept saying that he was “stone cold dead serious.”

  “I am stone cold dead serious, ladies and gentlemen,” he swore to us. “You will not! I repeat not find a Tiger Woods rookie card at a lower price ANYWHERE!!! You’d be a friggin’ idiot not to take advantage . . .”

  The camera would occasionally pan to his partner, who was actually handling the cards in a makeshift home studio. That guy looked like some kind of overly showered hitman posing as a Christian youth organizer. He spoke with such passion and velocity, you would have thought he was powered not by blood and oxygen but by gasoline and other combustible fluids.

  My dad was wearing an old red bowling shirt with his name embroidered on the chest in yellow cursive stitching. He’d finally changed out of that suit, thank God. It was the first time I’d seen him since I’d taken off. He looked pretty horrible. His hair appeared to be somehow fried. His stubble looked sort of rusty. He was really thin, too.

  Those QVC guys were screaming at him to take the Tiger Woods rookie card for two payments of $450.

  “Take the card! Take the card!” they screamed.

  It was like they were punishing him.

  Then my dad turned toward me. I could see him through the crust in my unpatched eye. He watched me with this totally pathetic look on his face, almost like he was starving or something.

  After a moment he rose out of his chair and took a step toward me. I sealed my eye. I had no idea what he was planning to do, but I have to admit that I was sort of hoping that he would maybe put a hand on my shoulder or fluff my hair.

  But what he did was lean over me and pick up the phone that was on the other side of my bed. His breath smelled all weird and soapy, like he had washed his own mouth out. I thought maybe he was shampooing with Crest and brushing his teeth with Irish Spring or something.

  The dial tone sounded so far away it made me feel like I was in another country.

  My dad punched in a number. It took him so long the touch-tones practically echoed. A receptionist’s voice came on the line like a faint bee buzz
ing. She said, “Hello,” or, “Good evening,” or whatever scripted greeting she was forced to recite, and then in a tired, dehydrated tenor my dad told her that he wanted to purchase the Tiger Woods rookie card for two payments of $450. After agreeing with the woman on the other end of the phone a few times, he recited his credit card number from memory.

  All sixteen digits, plus the expiration date.

  Another time I woke and Welton was sitting in the same chair. It was pulled very close to my bed and his forehead was sort of resting on my mattress. I had no idea what time it was.

  After a minute I realized that I had been making a fist with my morphine hand. It felt cold and strange. When I lifted it to feel the crown of Welton’s head, I could see that he had removed my morphine IV and inserted it into the webbing between the index and middle finger of his right hand.

  You hear about how brothers take cross-country road trips or camp in national forests. Well, this was our first Brothers Nugent journey. My hand eventually did find its way through the velveteen perfection of his hair, and when he looked up, we understood something so pure that it defies words, something that perhaps only birds know, birds or like deer or caribou, or other mammals that can leap and at times achieve temporary flight.

  We eventually fell into a kind of half-dreamed sleep, my hand planted on his head, his thumb depressing the little button attached to my morphine toy.

  When security came for him, his body was limp and lifeless. I remember his delirious laughter as he was ushered through the door. It was one of the goofiest laughs I’ve ever heard.

  On the eighth day, they finally let me out of bed. The nurse suggested that I use the wall for balance. At the end of the hall, there was an upright scale. For some reason I felt the need to weigh myself. As I already told you, I’m skinny. There is no way around this biological fact. Sopping wet I’m around 145 pounds. The scale at Medical Associates read 127 pounds. At six three, that basically made me a human pipe cleaner. Granted, since my homelessness I hadn’t been exactly eating three square meals, and in the hospital I had only ingested a few bowls of green Jell-O and whatever rehydrating fluids they had been pumping into me. I could feel my ribs through my pajamas. I felt somehow made of wood. Like some sort of weird totem created by fitness professionals to illustrate the tragedy of adolescence, a life-size puppet to be kept behind the health-class movie projector and only taken out after children had certain permission slips signed by their parents.