Click, click, click.
She’s New Orleans–sized—that is, stout, unkempt in a casual, easy, comforting way.
“He’s alive,” I say, a little more pert than I intended, than I feel.
“Thank you, Jesus,” she says, with that familiar hint of Cajun French still slick on her tongue. She looks from one machine to the next, makes a note. She looks from Dad’s wrist to his face, makes a note. She looks from the clock to her clipboard, makes a note. She looks at me, raises her eyebrows. “Any questions?”
I consider for a second. “Are you … having a good day?”
“Any questions about the patient?” she clarifies.
“Oh, uhh—”
Click, click, click.
She smiles. “Actually, I’m having a fine day. Thanks for asking. You?”
Some machine beeps. Some patient across the hall coughs. Some spell is cast upon me and I can’t even manage a lie.
“Did I interrupt a little chat?” she asks.
“Maybe,” I say, embarrassed.
“Don’t worry. I interrupt little chats all the time, up and down these halls and left and right. The way I see it, some people are hard to talk to. Some people go through their whole lives unconscious, unaware of other people around them. Sometimes talking to someone when they’re asleep is no different than talking to them when they’re awake. So I always say, ‘Have at ’em when you can.’”
Click, click, click. She tucks her pen in her jacket, nods, smiles, and slips out without another word, marching down halls full of other one-sided conversations, leaving me feeling less alone for the first time in years. I pull Mom’s locket from my jeans and hold it in my hand. In the hospital light it looks so trashy, so grimy and bereft, like it belongs back in that basement with her other decaying possessions, forgotten and molding. But its empty encasement holds history. I can still see it dangling from her keys as she drove me to school, can see it twisting around her other keys when she unlocked the front door, her big smile when my childhood hands gave it to her all those Christmases ago. I’m holding this old locket like a rosary, like a magical bean.
I look up at a local newscast on the hospital TV strapped to the wall. It’s hard to watch news because I know all the tricks. I know all the ins and outs of what’s going on behind the scenes. I think about the hell of my job waiting for me back in Los Angeles—my newsroom, with clocks all over, the incessant tick, tick, tick. We, grunts of the news business, live and die by the second hand, twirling in its orbit and dictating our fate: how much time until we’re on the air, how each second is accounted for, how each second is assigned to this story or that, how each second is allocated during commercials—for those seconds, the seconds of commercials, are the most important, for those seconds pay our bills. My livelihood depends on commercials for dentures, life insurance, erection medications.
It has been 691,200 … 691,201 … 691,202 seconds since I left Kathi Kannon’s home.
Dad stirs a little in his bed. I consider trying to coax him awake, but I decide against it.
I’m uninterested in my usual time-wasters, but I turn to them anyway:
Facebook: I scroll through the list of my so-called friends, people I barely see because of my work schedule. I’m free while they’re at work; I’m asleep when they’re free. I resent them. It’s less my friends list and more a cemetery of acquaintances. Bruce, ugh.
OkCupid: I stalk but never date. My OkCupid name is MardiGrasGuy, a stupid reference to being from New Orleans, which no doubt makes people think I’ll show them my dick for trinkets—not totally inaccurate, I suppose, given my irresponsible sexual history. My dating profile isn’t even finished. I have yet to fill in all the lame questions, take the stupid surveys. I just like to look around and see what I’m missing, or not. I’m not available for a relationship, anyway. My life revolves around sleeping. Some guy wants to take me out on a dinner date during the week—it will have to be at three P.M. No one wants that. I don’t even want that. It was always much easier to go out on a Saturday night and meet some random guy at a bar and begin my so-called passive suicidal ritual: risky sex, wake up the next morning in a panic that I have HIV, rush to a doctor to get an emergency test. I’m thinking all of this seems way easier than a relationship. But I’ve never been in one. Not really. What’s the point? I know what love looks like, and it’s shit, it’s lifeless, it’s a cold urn in a basement in fucking Perris.
* * *
My father is slowly waking from surgery, and I know he’s heavily medicated, because he smiles at me. I squeeze out a smile back. ALWAYS BE POLITE! I hear him yelling in my head, the father who lives inside me, the villain of my inner world, and often my outer, despite my best efforts to unburden myself of his worldview.
“You just missed the nurse,” I say as his eyes start to open.
“Of course I did,” he says, surprisingly calm, present. “Healthcare in this country is shit. Democrats, you know?”
I keep my mouth shut.
“Did they get all the cancer? Did they take out my kidney?”
“They think they got all the cancer,” I tell him. “And they didn’t have to remove the whole kidney. You’re expected to make a full recovery.”
Dad’s lips quiver. Not even all the manliness in the world can hide some emotions, especially when it comes to himself.
Some people go through their whole lives unconscious.
Even in these comically early stages of his healing, I’m plotting my escape again. It’s a record on repeat. I’m once again dying to get out of this hospital and Louisiana, dying to get far away from my father. Sentimentality only travels so far.
776,214 … 776,215 … 776,216 seconds since Kathi Kannon.
Hey, Siri, maybe I’d prefer to kill myself back in Los Angeles after all.
I rub Mom’s locket, feeling the engraving, feeling the scratches, rubbing it like it’s Aladdin’s lamp, carefully making just one wish.
4
The text message wakes me from my morning’s after-work nap. I’m groggy and disoriented. The room is dark from my blackout shades, noisy from my whooshing sound machine.
Ding!
My life’s biggest and best moments all start as annoying interruptions to my sleep.
What time is it? Where am I? I grab my phone.
UNKNOWN NUMBER: Cockring?
I’m instantly blushing at maximum redness, my body reacting with heat and a rush of blood to all parts far and wide. My eyes open. My spine straightens. I stare at my phone. I’m not sure how to respond. Is it her, is it her agent or manager? Is it a wrong number with just the right message I need in this very instant? It has been eleven days—950,176 seconds—since I met her. Hey, Siri, I’ve been clinging to life, hoping for this moment, desperate for a do-over, for another opportunity to impress, to be perfect. I was giving her twelve days—1,036,800 seconds—before I ended it, my desire to work for her, to improve my life, to continue my life. And now this?
It’s a friendly universe.
Maybe Therapista is right.
I text back.
ME: Who is this?
UNKNOWN NUMBER: Do a lot of people call you Cockring?