A Version of a Version

Gurney wheels squeak. Rolling into a shiny, white room, glinting scopes and hardware, knobs, levers, and wires. Flipping on my back, IV’ed, masked up, the anesthetist turns a red faucet knob. He asks me about pizza. I tell him about the sausage and the ham and the liquidy stuff I had on the blank fellow where they went to the trees and the beach we had a good time there and we made the harvest patch in the fervent matter of glee and they gha dto kick us o….

On the floor, flat on my belly, cheek down on the open top of a pizza box. It was a good pizza. Best damned pizza I’ve ever had. The TV is on. It is blurry, and the actors speak lapsed languages with long, large tongues. Spittle and slobber, a naked starlet sings her song while sinking into a tub full of bloody bubbles, all on the television, of course. That’s make-believe. That’s where I’d rather be instead of dying here on the floor in an empty house tucked into the sandy woods of the Florida panhandle, all palmettos and cockroaches, farting pick-up trucks and pine trees. But, yes, I’m dying. It’s the only way to put it. Soon enough, I’ll be half eaten by cats and other feral beings because I left the back door open for a little fresh air. It was hot. It’s always hot. And humid, putting that sticky, underwater feel on everything all around. The carpet seems drenched with it, moist and slushy with the black-booted, flat feet coming and going. They’re taking my stuff, either junkies looting for pawn shop requisitions or repo men pulling the scales back to even once again. One and the same, they are, sometimes, most times. In the room the men come and go [smelling of smoke and Michelob]. I’ve been nudged and kicked, enough to their satisfaction, enough to let them know I’m still breathing, still hanging on to that little spiky ball of light inside my skull, the life-force, the spirit lantern, the ghost light, the last long tether between two lost worlds ever-trumpeting outward, brass cones into nothingness.

I remember a time when we talked, she and I, alone in the car, in the dark, but together, pulled into an empty parking lot beside the high school football field house. I talked and she listened, uncomfortable obviously; she looked cornered, taken aback, ready to go and get back on the road, on with this, back to things where we didn’t constantly have to be looking over our shoulders. A cop pulled up and whooped his whistle. I rolled down the window and explained we’re having a private conversation, sorting things out. I showed him my face and her face with the light of my phone to let him know we were serious adults having a serious conversation, not jerk-off kids up to no good, boiling drugs in soda can bottoms. He recommended we wrap it up soon and move along. This was no place to get stuck after midnight on a Friday. Thumbs up, I smiled, showing teeth, hospitable grin, forced, yet indicating compliance. My window rolled up on his taillights leaving the parking lot. I turned back to her.

She said, first time she had spoken in almost an hour, “I do have feelings too, you know.” She reached for her seatbelt, slid it across her chest. “I feel the things you say. And I don’t show it. I hide it.” She motioned to the keys in the steering column, swirled her fingers in a clockwise twist. “And just because you can’t see my feelings, it doesn’t mean they can’t be hurt.”

I cranked the car, hypnotized by her subtle maneuver. I put it in reverse to back out of a parking spot in a parking lot where nobody else was parked, where nobody else even existed. I could’ve just moved forward.

“You say a lot of things,” she said. “Some of it, some of the words, I don’t even understand. But some of it, I do. And this talking you do, the way you go about it, fishing for feelings, trying to learn one way or another what’s going on in my head and whether it has anything at all to do with you and with where all this is gonna go, it’s pointless. If I could answer. I would. So stop.”

I opened my mouth. No words.

“Just stop,” she said. “I have feelings. I do. And you’re hurting them.”

I remember another time, us together, not quite alone. We hunched in the dark of the bedroom hoping it would go away, stop banging on the exterior doors with its thick, dusty fists—like shaking hands with a sack of bonemeal or flour, it was, not that I would ever shake hands with it, after all, I was fucking its wife.

I was looking at her, across the room backed up to one of the nightstands. She hugged her knees with one hand and dialed the phone with the other. She was looking at me, in the dark, two guilty, shamed shapes. The monster’s shadow crept across the long curtains, outside, skulking through the crunchy, dead grass in the yard. Curved horns on its head, like a ram, thick-boned and short-haired. I imagined ears twitching left, right hearing the sweat squeaking through my tight-clenched pores. I imagined polygonal pupils scanning the eaves and shrubs for a secret soft spot, a short-cut to entry and to reclaiming what was rightfully his, by law, and by God, and by the time-stained paper stamped and signed in blood, sweat, and semen.

Into the phone she said, “Yes. I need some help, please. Send police. My estranged husband is trespassing on my boyfriend’s property.”

The men, the Michelob men, take the last of the furniture and then the TV, leaving me passed out in the dusk of an oil-slicked sunset, light beaming through the open door at an ever-flattening angle. It’s not the first time I’ve gone catatonic on the floor of this house. I won’t lie. I make bad decisions. I try different things. I put things in my body, watch and wait, enjoy the ride, then wave like a momma watching her kid go off to college, when the things finally pass. But this, this thing, whatever it is, won’t pass. It’s curled tight and gnarly, like a knot of soaked driftwood, in the back of my chest. And it keeled me once before in the weeks spent alone in this rented, rotting, piece-of-shit house. The weeks since she left. She went back to him.

I remember my phone chirped, and I thought it was her. I always thought it was her, every ring, every beep. It never was. But a blind panic brought me fast off the couch, scrambling in the dark, trying to answer, to find the message, to maybe get a chance to talk it out some more—I had come up with so many more things to say since I watched her walk out even though I knew she had stopped listening long, long before.

The doc called it a “vasovagal” reaction, fancy talk for got-up-too-fast-and-passed-the-fuck-out, but I knew better. Even then the thing, the knotty, sap-soaked thing, had rooted in tightly, squeezing the breath from each individual cell in my body, a suffocation of a completely different order. And I succumbed in a heap on the rug in the bathroom. A carpet burn on my cheek (my other cheek, not the one I’m on now) pinked my skin like a young strawberry.

I remember lying there wondering if I was hurt or concussed or dying. Yeah dying. What if I was dying? This thought didn’t scare me nearly as much as the realization that I really didn’t care either way. So die. Don’t care. Don’t give a fuck. I got up, took a crap, flushed and fell asleep on the toilet.

And I’m thinking it now, once more. So what if I die? Right here, flat out on the cardboard of my last delicious meal. Right here on the blood-soaked carpet where I tried to open my own chest, digging in under the sternum with a BBQ fork, to exorcise this parasite dry humping the back of my rib cage.

“Oh, man, you are screwed,” it says, the monster has come back again to rub in the victory. Pachyderm feet planted wide in the doorway, thick bull chest heaving raspy breaths under a red and black shirt, the horns so wide they scrape curlicues in the paint of the doorframe, it, he, grunts out something between a laugh and disgust.

I fully expect him to leave me for dead here in my own filth, spit, and shame. Or maybe even heave me from the floor, up by my belt loops—because he’s that damned strong—and haul me into the woods where the fire ants and centipedes will clean me down to dry, sun-bleached bone within the space of four months.

He doesn’t.

He calls an ambulance and farts away in his mud-dusted truck before they arrive.

Son. Of. A. Bitch.

I remember driving far, fast and alone at night under unexplored stars and spring-drawn moonlight. Get far. Get perspective. Right before she had left, it was a last-ditch effort to show a poker face to the brush-toothed specter of impending solitude. I spent the last night before turning around at an off-season ski resort in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Four in the morning I startled awake to the sound of my hotel room doorknob clattering to the tiles on the floor. Dark shapes moved swiftly, surrounded me, held me down. They knew I was holding. They had me marked in the lobby as soon as the sliding glass doors parted in front of me with my sweat stained duffel bag, my gas-mart sunglasses on a cloudy day, and my tentative walk, like stepping across an ice-scabbed driveway.

I had way less than they thought I had. And some of the stuff they didn’t even recognize. But they took it all. They called it “mead” half serious and half joke. They turned me and laid into my back, butt, and calves with steel-studded belts. They shouted ethnic slurs, not because I was ethnic, but because they were the meanest words they could muster to satisfy the rage of not being able to walk away with a wheelbarrow full of illicit drugs as they had fully intended to do. They all partook of what little loot they had found, a quick one for the road. Then they melted away like caramel. I lay there coagulating until the sun came up.

I’m starting to understand how it feels to be a victim. A true victim. Not just a kid on a couch whining about how the wi-fi won’t work. I’m thinking of bad things I’ve done with more clarity now. And I know, given half a chance, I’d probably wind up doing them all over again. But this time I’d know whose side I was on. I’d know what I was doing and the effect it would bring. And I’d slurp up every last droplet, sweet nectar of suffering, because this, perhaps, would give me power to fight back. A win is a win. A sin is a sin.

The monster. Her husband. He called 911. Saved my life. What am I supposed to do with that? I slept for six months with a nail-spiked baseball bat waiting like a scared rabbit for him to come blasting through my front window in a blind-rage howling death shriek, spinning hatchets or machetes, like a killer from a teenager titty-freak horror movie. He had her back now, sitting silently, complacently at the side of his throne. What more did he want from me? Apparently, nothing. Or apparently, as they like to say in bad Westerns, death was too good for me. Satan points his black tipped finger from a canyon-wide crevasse, accusingly, provocatively, and only tickles my tummy like the little white dough boy.

Snapping fingers in my face. A doctor? An orderly? A nurse? The person grins down through a face shield happy to see me return in one piece from that bleach-white emergency room. The anesthetist breezes by insinuating a large bill. I tell him that will buy a lot of pizza. The doctor whisks in, white coat open, shoving a pen in his lapel pocket. He looks at the clipboard and tells me it was touch and go. But in the end, they got it all out. Most of it. Enough to make a difference. And for the first time in quite a while I don’t feel it there, the lump, the parasite, the whatever type of thing it was, doing pull-ups on my collar bones all day and all night, pissing blood all over my breadbox, eating away at my will to live. It is gone. And I’m happy with that. It’s a start. Not a great one, but okay.

Besides, even though it was no longer in me. I knew, for a fact, it was still in her. Grin.

I think about her, once more, trying to remember those times, those key scenes in our history that made it work and yet not work. And it’s already fuzzed in a light drift of white noise. And I realize, this was never, never ever, about what actually happened. Not at all. The details smooth and fade, as with everything. We never remember what actually happened. We only remember how it felt. Our version of a version. Our pain filtered through the threadbare fish nets of time, pulled forward without fish once again by callused hands. We fish on.

©2022 J. Brian Reed

Published by The Rumen in May of 2023

https://www.therumen.com/publications/Version%20of%20a%20Version