Falling apart

© 2004 Eric Stark
All rights reserved.

My wife picks me up at the hospital. The doctors have done a nice job, she tells me, one medical miracle after another. And then she tries on a smile. Still gooey and unfocused from the gas, I study my hands while she drives. I reach for the radio and her arm jerks back and then regroups—the corners of her eyes say, "you startled me." But she's been afraid to touch me ever since I snapped off inside her while we were making love, since we packed the piece in ice and rushed to the emergency room. That was weeks ago. Now we pass a hardware store and I make a glib remark about stopping for superglue and dowels and she starts to cry. I think she's taken a lover.

Who is that whole man, I want to ask, but my teeth feel loose in their sockets, my jaw slack, my tongue heavy and detached. Her eyes are dripping down her cheeks and I turn away, imagining a sloughing of retinas. Outside the car, life continues silently. Is he out there, I wonder, picking up flowers and condoms, planning simple dinners and sweet desserts? What is thirteen years of barren marriage to him?

We pull into our driveway and the engine quiets. She stares out the windshield for words and, finding none, leaves me in the car to study my hands. Jesus, they itch, my hands. Stitches circle the knuckles and when I flex it's a stretching of thread rather than muscle. I wonder if there's anything left inside the skin, under the shell. Am I Frankenstein or the Scarecrow? I can hear myself laughing.

Right before they gas me I see the flash of surgical steel and a crowd of masked faces. I lie there like a science experiment while they huddle behind o.r. scrubs and jargon, their only line of defense against hopelessness and ignorance, those indecipherables with Latin roots they spit with the satisfaction of spelling-bee champs. Then the gas comes and I go. Then nothing. That surgery almost killed me; the specialist said I hemorrhaged, that I was lucky to be alive, but that was a lie. Doctors can't stand fate, I replied, and he smiled at me like God.

"He can help you," my wife had said. "He's the best."

When I saw the specialist for the first time he offered me a reclining chair and gum. He asked me a bunch of questions that seemed irrelevant. Is there a history of this in my family? Well, my uncle Ron got an exotic infection while on a trip down the Amazon and they had to remove everything south of his right knee. Is that what I have, doctor, an exotic infection? Aren't there exotic lizards that drop their tails when startled by a predator? But the tails always grow back. Why can't you do that, grow me new parts?"

"You're not a lizard, Frank."

So he prescribed something with a scientific name, something you can't pronounce or you might ask for a second opinion, something you can't spell or you might look it up on the internet, something scribbled so it can't be read. He told me to keep in touch. He wrote his home number, equally cryptic, on a crisp slice of paper.

I took the pills—big, fat, stamped ones. They stopped the itching, made everything two-dimensional, and allowed me sleep. Perhaps I was getting better. But then my right arm fell off in the shower one morning, so I knew they weren't working. I sat, dripping, on the toilet and held the bloodless limb with my good arm. Have to call that specialist, I thought.

"Honey," I shout. "Can you bring me the phone?"

But she's left me. All her stuff is gone. She's moved in with her whole man, her tender lover. I found a pair of her panties between the washer and the wall, dusted off the cobwebs, and pressed them to my cheek. They smelled and felt just like her. I used them to collect the teeth that tumbled from my mouth. She calls me sometimes and I can hear her voice faltering, her sniffling, but she never knows what to say. I'm better, I tell her and she says, "oh" and asks if I'm taking my pills. I tell her that I had to sweep my toes out of our old bed and put them in glass jars. Evidence. I chuckle and she wails until I hang up the phone.

Today I flushed all those pretty pills down the toilet. They're placebos. Nothing but sugar with a plastic coating. Doctors tell of the miraculous healing power of the mind; if you think you're supposed to get better, you will. Even without the drugs. But what if you think you're getting the placebo but are actually taking the medicine? That's what they call double blind. Flush.

My legs came off at the hip and I had to crawl for the phone to dial 911. When the ambulance wailed up to the house, the paramedics refused to touch me. It might be contagious, I told them. A hazmat team arrived, men in spacesuits, and they lifted me onto a stretcher, strapped me down tight. The phone was ringing. As they bounced me out the door I felt my head loosening on my shoulders and I prayed for them not to drop me. Behind us came a man with thick black gloves, a leg in each. I heard the phone ringing and I cried out: "If that's my wife, tell her that her husband is falling apart and can't get to the phone." No one laughed but me.

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