Throughout the U.S. Armies wide
Stand formations side by side
Their contempt they’ll never hide
for Calisthenics!
Here’s Flight Lieutenant Garthwaite, RAF administrative officer, in his monthly bulletin “Over to London”: “To those at home we send our sincerest hopes for the future. Although not on the field of battle ourselves, we do but gird ourselves for the great and final overthrow of Naziism. Let us hope and trust the coming year will see this war through . . . and . . . not a little by the fruits of our learning over here.”
Yes, here they learned their recitations: maximum speeds and service ceilings; flight ranges, fuel capacities, and armaments carried by the Arvo Lancasters, Armstrong Whitleys, and Bristol Beau-fighters they’d be flying over the skies at home, soon, soon.
I knew in this vacancy something asserted. Something strange—that is, real—and insistent was here. The land didn’t mean to be torn and tar-covered, wasn’t meant to sprout stock farmers, farm women, and ranchers. The land asked to be considered, and seriously. The land wanted to speak—past the bunkers of rolled insulation, past the earth-eating backhoes and yellow concoction my farmer (okay, working stiff, bare hands in the poison, then wiping his nose) force-fed the grass. Here, the land must have been green by the runways. Some of the big trees still here must have seen it. Yes, it must’ve been lush once, before hotels started turf wars along Marriott/Hilton lines, and thick vines choked the trees, and the tractors came and the hot blacktop poured, so the SKUs of Big K—hundreds of thousands—might take root and flourish.
I was returned—but not to an Eden, for there were airstrips and the screams of takeoffs, supply roads were laid down for fuel and equipment, the contrails of jets streaked the air, burned, scented, inscribed the quiet so the feel of the whole experience—the desire to serve, the fear of serving—would return whenever humidity, fuel, barbecue combined rightly for the novices.
I was returned, but more in this way: someone dreamed of getting the word, high over Berlin, to top-speed it east toward the Polish border, the Führer, he’s there!, it’s the hamlet of Gierloz, fix your sights, son, load, steady, and—. Someone considered the glory, the fame, posing for photos with requisite wounds. Family pride, shining future. The world’s gratitude. Because the boys must have thought it, because I had the thought, it must have been lingering. The thoughts must have held on, hovering, jittery, wanting some rest. Such thoughts were preserved, but nowhere on the land. Nothing cadet was marked here, not poems or pudding, jaunty caps, homesickness. Instead, here were lots, grids, boxes, all manner of automata—doors that opened without human touch allowing the body to float right on in and get down to the business of buying.
Here’s where the splintered, close barracks were raised—and then razed, plowed under into a new kind of cloverleaf: blacktopped, clovery only from air.
When the land would not speak and my characters failed, when the land was muffled and my characters stock, this piece was born.
Here is my seed. Here is my search, trail, map of convergences.
Here is the thing I made in place of—what, exactly?
What did I find myself wanting? Something simple and telling—say a shop revealing the “character of the people upon whom the town depended for its existence.” Even better (and this from Thomas Hardy’s England), “a class of objects displayed in a shop window . . . scythes, reap-hooks, sheep-shears, bell-hooks, spades, mattocks and hoes at the ironmongers; beehives, butter firkins, churns, milking stools and pails, hay rakes, field flagons and seed lips at the cooper’s, cart ropes and plough harnesses at the saddler’s; carts, wheelbarrows, and mill gear at the wheelwrights and machinist’s; horse embrocations at the chemist’s; at the glover’s and leathercutter’s, hedging gloves, thatcher’s kneecaps, ploughman’s leggings, villager’s patterns and clogs . . .” Oh, boots to lace up against scalding and scraping! Commerce boiled, reconstituted—oh, made rhythmic with breath, heavy with being—even objects transparent as the jewel-colored jars of preserves in the pantries of farmhouses I’ve known—apricot suns, the flushed hot-dawn tomatoes, deep dusk-purple plums put up, sealed, stored away, would shine with this presence.
I wanted a footpath, a field edge—a sidewalk. People at ease with neighbors and chatting. A simple plaque at the site of—whatever: Here the cadets of 42E sat to eat their first grits. Scrap of wing or propeller on the Hilton’s faux mantel. Fins and Flippers next to every Gideon’s Bible.
What did I find? Some Februaries that matched—one then and one now; some novices each with their good fights and good words, their gratitudes, civilities, and homey soft puddings.
I wanted to know what happened here, on land like this.
Now I know.
People learn to fly through it. And then they go home.
Patient
Rachel Riederer
FROM The Missouri Review
1
THE BUS WILL HAVE TO MOVE. I’m under its rear tires on the passenger side, and with the crowd, the driver can’t see me in the mirror. “Can you please tell him to move?” I say to someone leaning over me. It is easy to be calm because I cannot really have been run over by a bus.
I look for my friend Simone. She is short and curvaceous, with warm brown Caribbean skin and long black hair. We have been out together, dancing in a sweaty blue-neon nightclub with pulsing music and dancers with seductive silhouettes gyrating on pillars. Earlier, she had helped me pick out the pink-and-red shoes that are now squished under the tires. She would make the driver move the bus, but I can’t see her.
In an emergency, you cannot just say, “Somebody call 911,” because everyone will assume that someone else will do it, and no one will call. This is called “the Problem of Collective Action.” I pull my cell phone and driver’s license out of my jacket pocket and hand them to a stranger and tell the stranger to call an ambulance.
It’s about two in the morning, a weekend in late November; there can’t be a bus on my leg. I am a junior in college, and tomorrow I am going to a big tailgate where I will drink beer and hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps, laugh with my friends in the cold. A few minutes ago I was standing on a corner in downtown Boston, in a crowd of about two hundred students waiting to be taken back to campus. The tall charter bus, with gleaming white sides and purple lettering, its tinted windows well above eye level if you are beside it, came around the corner. We were standing on the street, and it pulled up fast, right by the crowd. And then those of us standing furthest out in the street were up against it—the hot, smooth flank of the bus on one side, the pressing crowd on the other. Someone beside me fell, and then I fell. While I was still lying on the cold asphalt, the bus moved forward a little, and its tires rolled onto my leg. It stopped there, breathing its exhaust and the smell of hot rubber on me. Do all buses have four tires in one cluster like this, two across and two deep? Two of the tires are sitting on my left leg, and my right leg is wedged into the little crevice between the pairs.
But this isn’t a real event; it is a saying: “I feel like I got hit by a bus.” You say this when you have gone for a long run without stretching and wake up the next morning with soreness in long-forgotten muscles. It does not happen in real life, certainly not to me.
The bus moves forward, off my left leg, over my right leg, and then off me altogether. The weight must have been deadening my nerves; the sensation that was uncomfortable a moment ago has exploded, the pain in my leg taking up all the room in my brain. Someone picks me up and moves me to the sidewalk. I feel small. The cold cement feels good. There’s an ambulance, and now Simone is here. She will go to the hospital with me, but she has to ride in the front. I lie in the cargo hold and beg the EMTs for drugs. They cannot give me any and ask what hospital. I shouldn’t have to make this decision; I don’t even know the names of any Boston hospitals, and what good are EMTs who are powerless to choose a hospital or relieve pain?
At the hospital, everything is moving
; my stretcher is being thrust into wide, swinging doors. White coats and bright-colored scrubs flash against the bright white walls. There is forceful talking and the beeping of machinery. People surround me. They put an IV in my arm, and a beady-eyed nurse says that she put morphine into the IV bag, but she is a liar and a sadist, I can tell from her pinched face, which cannot even approximate a look of compassion. I know from the feeling in my left leg that there is not a single drop of morphine in the ridiculous plastic bag.
My left leg is purple and scarlet and mustard yellow. It would be grotesquely beautiful, but the tire mark and gravel embedded in the flesh ruin this effect. The sadistic nurse touches my ankle and says it is broken. They will do an x-ray to confirm and send me home in an air cast, with crutches. She is wrong. If broken ankles felt like this, people would not have them so often.
I demand anesthesia. I cannot leave the hospital. I have to be unconscious. Now. She laughs. I try begging. “Please,” I say, and my eyes tear for the first time. I repeat myself, screaming, so she will know I am not kidding. She is sorry, she claims, but she has given me the maximum dosage. That’s not my fucking problem, and I tell her so.
She wants to cut the shoe off my left foot; I cannot let her. I love these shoes! They are Mary Janes, but they are soft and have soles like sneakers, and they are pink with red checkers. My swollen ham foot is bursting out of the left shoe, but I can still unhook the small silver buckle. I sit up, and while I am unstrapping the cute, salvageable, only slightly torn shoe from the ruined foot, another nurse, clearly Beady Eyes’s nemesis, comes in. “Here, I thought we should have given you this in the first place.” She plunges a needle into one of the connector sockets on the IV tube. The throbbing leg goes numb. The panic subsides. I love her. I have to know what she gave me.
“How do you spell it?” I ask, and as the room blurs and quiets, I hear: “D-I-L-A-U-D-I-D.”
Semiconscious and calm, I am full of solutions. Emergency rooms need to be bright and well-lit, but someone should have remembered that all the sick and injured people are lying on their backs, scared and disoriented, and staring into rows of fluorescent lights doesn’t help. I will mention it to someone.
It has only been a few minutes since the angel nurse gave me the medicine. Now a tall, handsome black doctor is standing at my feet, looking at my leg in a way that worries me. He is touching parts of my enormous Technicolor calf and ankle—my leg is now a column, the same size below the knee as above—and asking can I feel it. Sometimes I can. He touches my toes and asks if I can move them. I wiggle them. At least, I order them to wiggle. They refuse. The nurse and doctor exchange words about nerve damage and crush syndrome. I try again, try asking the toes to wiggle. Try cajoling, sweet-talking them. I revise: they don’t even have to wiggle, just bend a little. They are unmoved.
My toes would have bent. My feet are pretty and obedient. They are slender with high arches. Yes, they are callused on the bottom, but they are nothing like this fat red blob that has had all the foot shape squashed out of it. “We are going to operate right away,” the doctor tells me. “We are going to do everything we can to save your leg.”
I have seen enough medical dramas to know that when doctors try to save a limb, it gets amputated. When I go to hospitals, I get stitches or an air cast, not an amputation. If my leg is amputated, I will never fall in love and get married. I will either be a bitter, one-legged old maid or else I will have to troll around on the Internet and join some sort of online group for fetishists of lopsidedness and half limbs. Maybe I will get a discount on pedicures—but no, actually, how could I even bring myself to paint the toenails on my remaining foot? Does a cyclops wear mascara?
This can’t be real. Maybe I never went to the steamy, pulsing blue club outside which buses mangle legs and thrust people into metallic-smelling fluorescent hospitals. I have read about lucid dreaming; if you want to be lucid in a dream, there are a few techniques. Try to flip on and off a light-switch—it will not work. Or try to read text or numbers—you will not be able to. Your dream self has only to remember that if you cannot read and use light switches, you are dreaming. With practice, good lucid dreamers can control their dreams. I have done this only once. I dreamed I was in the ocean, about to drown in a huge oncoming tsunami. I panicked but then realized that I am never in the middle of tropical oceans in real life, so this could not possibly be a tsunami situation and I must be dreaming. I calmly flew into the air and hovered while the wave rolled past beneath me.
2
Please remove any jewelry before surgery. I hand the nurse a fistful of tongue ring, nose ring, and earrings. The handsome doctor is an “orthopedic traumatologist,” and he introduces me to a plastic surgeon who will help in the surgery. I gesture to my nose and say, “Oh, no, I’m not here for this. It’s actually my leg that’s the problem.” He doesn’t get it and begins explaining that plastic surgeons do more than cosmetic surgery; they work on all kinds of soft tissue. I already knew that, but I don’t bother explaining because they have given me a little something to calm me down, and I sink into sleep.
I wake up in a dim beige room with soft light peeking in from the window where the blinds are drawn. My leg hurts. A lot. My leg hurts—it must still be there if it hurts this much, and I should be excited that it is still attached to me, but the ripping pain makes that impossible. My mom has come all the way from Kansas City, so it must be at least the next day. Mom, with her strong pianist’s fingers and her brown eyes and brown hair, straight and fine like mine, only shorter—a familiar fixture in this strange room. She is stroking my hair and saying soothing things to me, which is nice, but medicine would be better, and I ask her to get the nurse. The ICU nurse, Joey, is a tall, muscular man in his forties with a trim, dark beard and mustache. I tell him my leg hurts, and he starts to talk about morphine and maximum dosages. This time I do not swear; I say simply that morphine does not work on me and I need something called “Dilaudid: D-I-L-A-U-D-I-D.” He smiles and disappears into the bright white hallway, closing the door behind him and reinstating the dimness.
There is a faded baby-blue blanket over my legs, and tubes run from beside the bed up under the blanket. “Will they have to—” I cannot finish the question, but my mom knows what I mean—she must be wondering too—and she says that the doctors do not think they will have to amputate my leg. They have cut some slits into the tissue and left them open to relieve the pressure.
When Joey returns, he plunges a needle into the IV socket, and a familiar warmth rolls gently into my brain, flushing out panic and muffling the pain. Joey says I have strong legs, and we talk about kickboxing, which I take at my gym and which he teaches at the Y. He has a high voice for a man so muscular and dark, and when he speaks, it is slow and friendly, with lots of inflection, not like the rushed, flat-affect speech of the ER nurses. He says I will kickbox again someday because I am strong; he can tell. “Yeah,” I say, trying to mimic his cheerful tone, but as I say it I start to cry.
A few days have passed. I have been moved from the ICU to the “Med/Surg” floor, where my off-white wallpapered room has a large window that looks out at pale late-autumn sky and the gray of other hospital buildings. I still have the light blue blanket. Two plastics residents come and debride my leg every day. The muscle of my shin was torn off the bone. It has no blood supply, but the doctors decided not to remove it—they hope that if it sits there long enough, blood vessels will grow in and reattach the muscle to the rest of my body. Meanwhile, it dies a little every day, the muscle that used to move my foot up and down. In the first surgery, the doctors cut four long slits into my leg and left them open—now there is no skin on the front of my shin. It is wrapped in gauze and then a layer of plastic wrap to keep it sterile. When the doctors change the gauze, which they do daily, it tears off small chunks of dead tissue. This is supposed to stimulate cell regrowth, but it doesn’t feel regenerative. The first few times they did it they put me under general anesthesia, but they can’t do that anym
ore.
General anesthesia shuts down your digestive tract. The nurses told me this to explain why I need laxatives and suppositories. Using a bedpan is embarrassing, but when it is difficult, it’s worse. And so it is good to have less anesthesia. I try to remember this when the two residents come and change the dressing while I squeeze my mom’s hand.
3
My mom has moved into the hotel down the street from the hospital, and she is in my room almost all the time. She’s an excellent patient advocate, making sure the doctors check on me frequently and demanding that the nurses up my pain meds whenever their maximum dosages are not enough. We talk about getting extra Valium for debridings, how to wash my hair, how to insert suppositories—not walking.
She has gone down the hall to talk to a nurse, or maybe to call my dad, when a new nurse comes in. He is my age, tall and slender and tan, with dark eyes, heavy eyebrows, and thick brown hair. I am feeling alert and more normal than I have in days, and we chat about ordinary things. He is in the nursing program at Northeastern; he knows someone I know, and I ask if he likes his program, and he asks me what I study. For a few minutes, while smiling and talking and feeling a little awkward and shy, I am like myself. Then he says he is going to give me a sponge bath, and I am again a crippled patient talking to one of her many health-care providers. I stink. I have been sweating into the once-crisp white sheets, and they are soft and damp. One of the medications makes my sweat smell tangy and chemical, and my hair is greasy, but though I badly need a bath, I am mortified at the prospect of this glossy-haired young man soaping and rinsing me limb by limb, and I ask him if we can do it later.
The Best American Essays 2011 Page 21
