Stories From a Darkened Hallway

Have I told you lately how much I love my desk? I love it because it’s in my office, which is in a building on a nondescript plot of land in Daphne, Alabama. I’m aware that working in an office has graduated to clichéd middle class horror story status. If the media is to be believed, I’ll kill all of you any day now. Until then, I’ll tell you a story from my home health nursing days, where my office was my car, my desk, my freakin’ dash board. Android tablet in one hand, cell phone in the other, hurtling up and down bloody Hwy 98 like a black hearse full of, ironically, normal saline, sterile gauze and catheter tubing. I've done and seen some amazing things. Roy Batty’s quote from Blade Runner comes to mind.

 "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..."

In truth, amazing experiences in life aren't always beautiful and some moments deserve to get lost like tears in rain. I've catherized a retracted penis while roaches crawled all over my shoes. The retracted penis was the real deal breaker in that scenario. It’s like trying to threat a big, soft meat needle On the plus side, I did a passable job of willing the roaches to get off me with my mind. I've put my entire fist into a sacral pressure wound at gunpoint. I've been attacked by wasps and chased by donkeys. I've eaten gas station food!  I've reveled in awe and disgust. If you reserve your sense of wonder in life for only the beautiful and the palatable, you will eventually find yourself in an existence devoid of polarity, where beauty has lost it's value in the absence of horror. This is a place that is at first seemingly idyllic, then merely dull, until the true nature of our universe asserts itself  and demands checks and balances in the form of cruelty and brutality. Nursing forces one to acknowledge this duality and home health nursing was truly fascinating, until I got burned out. The patients were all lovely (or bizarre or terrifying), in their way, but the burn out was inevitable. If you throw an object around at high velocity long enough, there will be damage. It's just a matter of time.

But enough of my trials. Here's the story.

 The lawn was more red clay than grass, leading up toward the front of the house in muddy red gashes. All over the yard were scattered several abandoned vehicles in various states of decomposition. Behind the house was a rusty, older model trailer, wrapped in a flimsy looking barbed wire fence. On the roof of the house, an orange tabby cat slept, stretched across the shingles sunning itself like a tiny tiger. My eyes were drawn to the cat immediately. He seemed like a totem from a parallel dimension, where dainty, elegant gargoyles guarded hideous, monstrous houses. A plywood wheelchair ramp led to the front door. Inside, the plywood continued underfoot into the front room, unpainted and unadorned except by dirt and scuff marks. On this plywood floor lay two mattresses. Lying on these mattresses in their pajamas at approximately 2:00 in the afternoon was the patient’s family. It appeared to be at least three generations with ages ranging from toddlers to school age kids to teens to twenty somethings and on to young, middle aged and older adults. They presented with a selection of various physical features one associates with, to put it delicately, a shallow gene pool. Sloped jaws gaped open and crossed eyes scrutinized me with embarrassingly naked curiosity as the family lounged on the grimy duvet covers spread over each mattress. The patient himself, who ironically was the only person present besides me that wasn't clad in rumpled sleepwear, greeted me from his motorized mobility chair. He was an older gentleman and possibly the father/grandfather/great-grandfather to the rest. He was extremely cordial, as were the rest of the family. I gingerly put my bag on the plywood floor, donned my invisible anthropologist's hat, gathered my wits and started the patient's physical assessment. As I worked, my eyes roamed the room compulsively. There was so much to take in. Random objects were stacked against the bare dingy walls, forming towers of miscellaneous crap that lead like rickety towers up to filthy, cobwebbed corners. There was no actual furniture to speak of, except for the mattresses. A dark hallway on my right cast me in deep shadows as I squatted down to take my patient's blood pressure. A rhythmic and frantic banging emanated periodically from the end of the hall.. My head snapped around with each fresh round of thumps but the hallway remained dark, inscrutable and empty. The legend of the Sawney Beane clan sprang to mind and lingered. A child smiled up at me and licked her lips. I then heard the shrill chirrup of birds close by. I smiled.

Yes! I thought. I’ll use looking at the birds as an excuse to check out the kitchen! It's bound to be, um, well, weird! 

Welcome to how my mind works. You see, going into people's homes to perform health care was, more often than not, a banquet of the strange, the appalling, the unfamiliar and the unexpected. And as a person with an appetite for the unorthodox, I did indeed feast. Oh, yes. Anyway, when I walked over to the birdcage, which sat on a shelf in what was intended to be a dining room. I was stunned. Inside, two small parrots perched in the neatest, cleanest birdcage I’d ever perused They were chubby little things with a fluffy rainbow of cotton candy colored feathers. Underneath the birds, fresh newspaper covered the bottom of the cage, littered only with the daintiest sprinkling of birdseed. From the kitchen, an older lady with long, stringy grey hair looked into my eyes through the bars of the cage and smiled toothlessly. “Aren't they beautiful?” she asked me softly. I agreed that they were as I watched a teenage boy bring bags of dog food into the kitchen. Again, that parallel universe intruded through the ether. How could people keep a birdcage so clean yet allow themselves to live in such utter squalor? Maybe they loved those birds more than they loved themselves. It's a mystery I've never solved. Nothing I've encountered in life before or afterwards offers any insight. Now, it's forever gone to the other side of the ether, visible but just out of reach.

Sanity is relative. I’m sure someone has already said that. Someone smarter and (possibly) better looking than me.

I come from a long line of “troubled souls,” to employ a euphemism that is in turns poignant and patronizing. I am the recipient of these doomed genes and have often been referred to as “wild” by kinder people and “crazy” by the not so kind (and often the envious). But only I can call myself crazy. I mean, you could but the way that will play out is I'll see your "crazy" and raise you a "hater." In the end, you'll just look like a sore loser. But  seriously, calling myself crazy is my tribal right. It’s also the truth. I wont bother defining my crazy for you because: 

1. its tedious. 

2. it creates expectation and will colour your perception of me, for better or worse. 

3. explaining things doesn't always clarify them. 

You will come to notice that I like things in sets of three. I’m very fond of prime numbers and odd numbers. Even numbers strike me as sneaky little poseurs that are probably up to no good, but that’s a discussion for another day. Today, let’s stick to my relative sanity. I am aware that, to the casual observer, I present a pretty good representation of a sane, responsible and successful adult. Good. That’s how I want it. You see, I guard the parameters of my apparent, functional sanity with vigilance, part soldier, part nurse, part priest. I've seen too many people in my family fall over the cliffs of ruin due to our genetic predisposition for instability. I've shaken the magic eight ball and seen the possible futures. I don’t want it to be me. I feel like I can see back through history, far back to my ancestors all along this timeline that twists and winds like a strand of dna, and I see ruin, failure, misery, regret. I don’t want that to be me. I feel that somehow, I've been chosen by my ancestors to break the cycle. I don’t hear them but I see them in my minds eye like a series of tableau vivants that appear, dissolve and reassemble themselves anew with every heart beat. A great grandfather imploring me with outstretched hands from a single chair in a darkened room, a cold, naked light bulb hanging over his head like an omen. A distant aunt who stares at me with the glazed eyes of the opioid addict as she sheds a single opalescent tear. A cousin frantically swatting at bugs that only she can see, her skin red and diaphoretic as the throes of alcohol withdrawal induced psychosis wash over her like dark and frothy ocean waves. This is the only way they have left to communicate but they try so hard so I scrutinize these scenes for hints and clues like a good critical thinker. Like a scientist or a detective.

But just so we're clear, although I do feel called to break this cycle, by no means do I feel in any way special or grandiose. If anything, I feel cursed. Doomed. And tired. You have no idea how tiring acquiring and maintaining the accouterments of normality is. I run a marathon every day and at the finish line, there’s only me. I douse myself in Gatorade and stumble home. Because, in all truthfulness, I actually do feel special and grandiose. It’s an illusion that I often lasso and ride like a wild horse. Why? Because I can. Because it gets me somewhere better than wherever I was before. Because it gets me to the end of the day. Because it gives me a reason to get up in the morning on those days when my first tastes of consciousness are soured by vague suicide plans and the nihilistic urge to see all of it, all of it in ashes. Because it keeps me hanging on to the idea that it all somehow means something. Because I can.

If you ever see me at the finish line, stop and say "hello." I won't bite. Probably. 

Warren Inn at Twilight

Their front door was open wide, staring out into the violet sky. Not at me or at anything in particular. Just looking out instead of in. Turning away from the day to anticipate the night. I drove past a bunch of kids playing beside a dumpster. Two black boys, one tall, one small boned and short. Obviously much younger. A preteen girl with rainbow beaded cornrows and another little one, a boy in a navy blue sweater at least two sizes too big for him with a sleek blonde bowl haircut that rippled like sandy water as he turned his head to shout back to the others. None of the children payed me any attention but the man and woman standing in front of the open door did. Both of them looked to be in their mid twenties, him dark against his crisp white wife beater, her blonde and petite. Bright faces like two iridescent smudges in the shadows. Alert yet friendly eyes. Were they parents to any of the children nearby? I don't know. I suppose. Or their casual vigilance could have just been a coincidence. But then I was well past them, coming up to the weird little pointless breezeway at the end of the duplex, near the rental office. Ahead of me, a black and white cat walked across the parking lot with a slight limp. It wasn't in any kind of hurry. I guess it felt safe. I cracked the car window and called to it. 

"Here, kitty, kitty, kitty..." 

It's ragged ears didn't so much as twitch. Feet padded one after the other and carried it away from me. Black. White. Black. White. I kept on driving, the Saturn bucking as it rolled over a speed bump and climbed the pavement towards the exit then shot out among Airport Boulevard's swerving heavenly bodies. The cars rocketed past dragging the Saturn away with their irresistible motion, west and back into the night.