That Dammed Beaver, page 20
Personally, I think he’s still nuts about her and anyway his pride is hurt. Trouble is she’s flaunting it – the new man’s quite well off, set her up in some sort of mansion, her picture gets in magazines and people asking about her opinions, it’s enough to make you sick. So there she is, all diddied up in her new pearl necklace and smiling away as sweet as pie and saying how happy she is in her new life, and how every woman should follow her heart. Says it wasn’t easy when she was growing up, being half-divine and all, but now she’s come to terms with it and she’s looking at a career in the movies. Says she was too young to get married that first time but now she knows how fulfilling love can be, and the chief wasn’t, well, he just wasn’t. Of course everyone thinks she’s saying he was a nothing in the sack department, so there’s been some snickering up the sleeves, though not openly because he’s still got a lot of clout in this town.
The long and the short of it is, pardon my pun, nobody likes to be laughed at. The chief’s from a big family, a brother and a lot of cousins, all of them with muscles and tempers. My bet is things will get serious. It’s worth watching.
CONSPIRACY
PRISCILA UPPAL
They give you these little red see-through gel capsules and act like the whole thing is a damn mystery.
Let us know when you’re able to go.
I’ve just had a lung transplant.
My roommate has had a tumour resected from her brain.
Now they want us to take a shit but apparently they haven’t solved the problem of how to move our bowels.
If you don’t go for five days, you need to let us know.
Five days?
I’m supposed to leave here in four.
My roommate in three.
It seems the body can recover more easily from intrusions into the frontal cortex or pulmonary cavity. They want me to keep blowing into this tube so my lung capacity continues to expand. My roommate has finger exercises to reconnect her neural pathways.
We get pills for pain – lots of pills for pain – pills for nausea, pills for sleep, pills for muscle atrophy, and surprisingly painful injections to thin our blood.
But only these little red see-through gel capsules to move our bowels. That are quite obviously useless to all involved. No one has taken a shit here since pre-op. No one.
It’s a fucking conspiracy, I’m telling you.
Laugh if you want, but it’s true. It’s a fucking conspiracy.
The little red see-through gel capsules are no more effective than placebos. It’s a medical sleight of hand designed to manufacture hope.
Everyone is constipated here.
Everyone. On every floor.
In every room.
You want another word for constipation? Replace it with conspiracy.
And they practically pin a medal on you when you fart.
Farting is also part of the plan. Farting is a loss-leader. A taste of success before you’re taken for all you’re worth.
Let me tell you, it’s the same in hospital as it is anywhere. Don’t let the red crosses or the ladies with the cookie and juice carts fool you.
Nobody, nobody wants to deal with your shit.
When you get your discharge papers, that’s when they give you the real pills, the ones that will actually move your bowels and move them so fast you’ll think a volcano is erupting. Just before you hit the five-day limit.
Because the real mess happens when you go home.
THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
DARREN GLUCKMAN
Manfred was eating a grapefruit at breakfast when he felt a crushing blow across his back. His torso was thrust forward, so that his head almost hit the table. He turned around but there was no one there, nothing that could have been the source of the blow that had come and now, apparently, gone, but he was left with the sensation that something enormous was resting upon him. He put down his grapefruit spoon – a teaspoon with a serrated edge – and looked across at his wife, Gretchen, who was drinking coffee and reading the paper and evidently hadn’t seen what hit him, or even that he’d been hit. He said to her, “My God, it’s like…it’s like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders.”
Gretchen looked up at him and said, “Perhaps you have too many meetings scheduled, perhaps you should cancel some. One or two meetings can be sacrificed if you’re feeling the weight of the world.” And she got up, grabbed her briefcase and shouted for the children – who came running with their schoolbooks and lunch bags – then waved goodbye to Manfred and was out the door.
An hour later, at the office, Manfred was between meetings when he felt it again. It buckled his knees and he fell to the ground. He called his secretary, who saw him lying prone and trying but unable to raise himself up. She called 911. In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, the pain became too much. A medic plunged a syringe into a vein.
Gretchen was at his side when he opened his eyes in an antiseptic room. The children were fighting over a toy in the corner. Gretchen had turned to them and was instructing the girl to leave it alone, that it belonged to the boy, that she had her own toy to play with. Manfred thought, If they only knew, they would forget about the toy, they would forget about toys altogether! No, it’s better that they don’t know. That no one knows. Gretchen turned back to Manfred and saw that his eyes were open. “They said you had a breakdown,” she said. She didn’t seem terribly concerned. But then, he reminded himself, what difference did it make whether she was concerned or not? Who was she, really, in the grand scheme, in light of what he now understood?
“I didn’t have a breakdown,” he said, his mouth extremely dry. He tried licking his lips but there was nothing. Gretchen passed him a paper cup with water. He took a sip.
“I didn’t have a breakdown,” he repeated. “It started pressing down on me.”
“What did?”
“The weight of the world. It’s descended upon me.”
“I’m trying to understand you, Manfred, but when you talk like that I must admit that you do sound a bit crazy.”
He turned away from her. Her voice was becoming faint. When he turned back – and this he did only because his neck was starting to cramp – he saw that she had taken the children and gone. Doubtless, she would be back at some point, but if she never returned, if he never saw his children again, he’d have enough anxieties and pressures – shifting the weight of the world from shoulder to shoulder, striving constantly to balance it, never quite managing, knowing that one wrong movement and the whole thing would come tumbling down, the earth would collapse from his back to the floor and shatter into a thousand pieces and he’d be known in myth and legend as the failed Atlas –that he wouldn’t miss them. Not just that he wouldn’t, but couldn’t! It wasn’t that he was without emotion, incapable of love. Far from it! No, it was the weight of the world that had stretched his soul to such capacity that there was no longer any room for love. Under the weight of the world, Manfred saw, love was the first thing to go.
A young doctor came in and looked at his chart. He said, “Things look good but we’ll keep you for a few days, for observation.” He said if Manfred hadn’t had the kind of comprehensive health insurance provided for under his employee health plan, he would never have been admitted. But under the circumstances, they didn’t mind keeping him a few days, for observation. Manfred looked at the doctor. He was barely thirty. His training was in medicine. What could he possibly understand about the weight of the world?
“It’s the weight of the world,” he said. “If you want a diagnosis, that’s it, the weight of the work. It’s pressing down on me.”
The doctor nodded. And nodded again. Then he shoved his hands in the pockets of his white coat and said, “We’ll take some X-rays.” And he left.
X-rays? Thought Manfred. What good are X-rays? I haven’t broken anything, there isn’t a bullet lodged in my body; what good are X-rays? But he decided to be a good patient. If they wanted X-rays they could have X-rays. He wasn’t going to tell them how to go about their business. The phone rang beside his bed. He picked it up. It was Gretchen. She wanted to know how he was doing, whether there was anything she should bring from home, she was planning on coming by this evening. He told her not to bother, that there was nothing for her to bring, that the crises were too numerous to even contemplate and yet he felt he had to contemplate them all. What could she possibly bring from home?
She said she wasn’t going to bring the children, the way he was acting. He said fine and they hung up. She called back almost immediately. “I want you to know I still love you, if that means anything to you.” He said of course it did, but he knew about love, about love being the first thing to go.
A nurse came and said it was time for X-rays. She led him down the hallway, to the elevator, down to the first floor, down another hallway, to a room. She told him to wait. Presently, a technician summoned him and made him sit at various angles while a large camera on a huge swinging arm took photographs. Sometimes Manfred smiled when the pictures were taken. The technician saw this and said, “You don’t have to smile, they’re not that kind of pictures.” Manfred knew they weren’t that kind of pictures, he wasn’t an idiot. He’d had X-rays before. He told the technician, “If it’s all the same to you I’d just as soon smile.”
The next day he was sitting in his bed, three fat pillows propping him up. Gretchen was telling him about the children, about how they wanted to know what was wrong with Daddy, about how she didn’t know what to tell them because frankly she didn’t know herself. She was going on in this manner when the young doctor burst in into the room, trailed by a team of doctor-looking types, all of them frowning terribly. Gretchen put her hand to her mouth.
The young doctor held the developed X-ray pictures. He looked at Manfred for a long moment before finally saying, “You’re right. I thought you were mad, or at least wildly off-balance, but you’re right. These X-rays confirm it.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Gretchen.
The doctor held the X-rays up to the light. “You see?” he said. “You see this spherical shape right here? That’s not part of the human anatomy. That shouldn’t be there. It shouldn’t be there, but it is.”
“What is it?” asked Gretchen, a catch in her voice.
“Well it’s…” And here the young doctor looked around at the faces of his colleagues before turning back to Manfred and Gretchen. “It’s the world.”
“What?”
“It’s the world. We don’t know how else to explain it. It’s the world. The planet Earth. If you look closely you can see the shapes of parts of continents. Look, here, Africa, there is the Horn, and here is the Cape of Good Hope.”
Gretchen blanched. She looked like she was going to be sick.
The doctor continued: “And if we look at this X-ray we can see Florida, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. It’s quite remarkable, really. We don’t know how to explain it. Except…”
“Except?”
“Except as your husband has suggested.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s bearing the weight of the world.”
“Thank God,” said Manfred, who turned away from this commotion and looked out the window.
The doctors conducted a series of tests. The young doctor was replaced by an older one who was said to be a specialist in the field. When Manfred asked which field exactly, this new doctor muttered something about universal biology and refused to be pinned down any further. Manfred was analyzed from every direction – his pores and orifices were probed, his blood taken, his hair split, his stool and urine examined, his DNA code isolated, his molecular structure broken down – but aside from a slightly elevated blood pressure, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Until, of course, one consulted the X-rays or the ultrasounds or the various radiological scans which all revealed what the naked eye could not see – the world pressing down upon his back.
A television news crew conducted an interview:
“How does it feel to bear the weight of the world?”
“It does not feel good.”
“Is it a heavy as one might expect?”
“Heavier.”
“How is this affecting your sex life?”
“It presents a challenge.”
“Do you have any advice for the children who might be watching?”
“Work hard at school. Be good to your parents.”
Priests and theologians visited to determine if he was the Messiah, or the New Messiah. But they were unimpressed with his pronouncements – which were generally complaints about the pain and the inadequacy of his meds – and felt that while he may be shouldering the burdens of the world, he ought not be bowed down to. They instructed their pupils to continue worshipping, or not worshipping, as before.
Gretchen continued to make regular visits, though without the children, as she’d warned. And she advised him that she was now represented by a lawyer. There was a book deal pending. He didn’t care and told her so. She nodded and quoted him verbatim in her journal, which she was keeping for the forthcoming book: “He told me he no longer cared.”
Within days, bruises began to appear across his back. The imprint of Australia was unmistakable.
His blood pressure was rising. His breathing was becoming strained. There was talk of hooking him up to a respirator. Therapists told him not to worry, not to take it all so personally. Naturopaths prescribed a steady diet of herbal tonics. Incense was lit. But the plight of the human race was having an adverse effect on his health. And not worrying about it just wasn’t in the cards. When the doctor – the specialist – next came round, Manfred told him he wanted to be cured. He wanted to be relieved of this burden. It was becoming too much to bear. It had long ago become too much to bear. Now he was at the breaking point.
But the specialist said, “Maybe the problem is that you’re not strong enough. You need to strengthen your leg and back muscles. That will make the burden easier to shoulder.” And the specialist supervised as Manfred lifted weights and pulled levers and added protein to his diet. But it seemed that every ounce of strength he gained was offset by the weight of a thousand new problems added to the already unwieldy mass – from Delhi to La Paz, Moscow to Hiroshima, from a mudslide to a bankruptcy, an adultery discovered to a bike stolen, a political assassination, a dog lost, a child struck sick, a bus over a cliff, a plea denied, a failure of justice, a worker fired, an insult, a slap, a wound – it was too much. Hairline fractures began to appear along the bones in Manfred’s back. His spine was compressing.
“I want someone else to bear the burden,” he said. “I’ve done my bit. Someone else can do theirs.”
The doctors agreed that it was a reasonable request. Advertisements were place in newspapers around the world. Most of the responses wanted to know how much the position paid. No one, it seemed, was willing to do this for free. And why should they? The trouble was, no one was willing to foot the bill, certainly not while Manfred was doing the job for nothing. In desperation, Manfred turned to the doctors. “One of you,” he pleaded. “One of you must take this on.”
But they begged off, citing their commitment to science, to their other patients, and to golf. His back now bore a deep concave impression, Asia featuring prominently, the bruise of India like a giant mole above his kidneys. And his kidneys: all his organs were being pushed down and towards the front of his body as the weight of the world grew heavier. Ribs were cracking. Hemorrhaging was imminent. Gretchen brought the children round to say goodbye to Daddy. The nurses who’d been caring for him could no longer enter his room with dry eyes. But no one – no one! – was prepared to take on the weight of the world. They’d sooner bear witness to his decline, mourn his passing, than relieve him of his burden. And who could blame them, he thought – even as thought itself was becoming difficult, with the pressure mounting along the base of his skull. Who could blame them, and they didn’t even know the half of it!
He asked for more tranquilizers and his request was granted.
At four in the morning, the night nurses heard a violent crashing sound. They ran to Manfred’s room, as the sound had come from there. But when the lights were turned on, they saw that Manfred was no longer there. Neither, for that matter was his bed. A large round hole had appeared in that section of the floor that had previously supported Manfred and his bed. As the nurses leaned over the perforated tiling, they saw that the hole continued on the floor below and on the floor below that. And when the emergency staff and scientists and military personnel arrived on the scene and cordoned off the area, they saw that the hole continued through the basement of the hospital. And when the mining company officials arrived with their machinery, they announced that the hole continued further into the earth than any of their equipment could go. No one knew what had become of Manfred, or his bed. Or the weight of the world.
That morning, in a small village on the Malabar Coast, Sunil was mending a hole in his fishing net when he felt a crushing blow across his back.
I AM A SPECIAL BOOBY
GAIL PRUSSKY
THREE STIKES AND YOU’RE OUT
LINDA ROGERS
I like baseball. Three strikes and you’re out. How clear is that – rules, cut and dried, a perfect covenant, à la grisette, Jonathon Swift’s poeticized/satirized ho, a piece of jerky in her little grey dress?
And, thy beauty thus dispatch’d
Let me praise thy wit unmatched
Set of phrases, cut and dry
Evermore thy tongue supply.
My mind travels fast, faster than fastballs and agile tongues – from grisette to ball(s), ball to diamond, a song Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, and so on.
The first strike came through the bay window, beveled glass blasted to kingdom come, at least as far as the dining room and, as luck would have it, the kitchen, because the pantry door was open. It was a sunny afternoon. Light leaked in the window and the hole in the window and, of course, it refracted in the lethal bits that penetrated the Martha Stewart wallpaper and slipcovers and the oil painting of his mother, turning his living room into a veritable disco ball.
