Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Sailing the Moon”
Albert Feinstein lay on the bed, feet on the pillow end, ignoring the man praying for death and watching the hospital’s florescent lights.
The lights hummed and pulsated, irritants that no doubt had led many long-term hospital patients to pray for the Grim Reaper’s release. Albert stared at the long light shaft above him. In years past Albert’s eyes had been too sensitive to light to allow such a lengthy stare, but now his eyes didn’t bother him as he stared, unblinking, into the brightness.
Albert had noticed the unpleasant color before, of course, although now he found that he could not put his finger on exactly which unpleasant color it was. Looked at once he was sure the glow had a greenish tinge, and so it would remain as long as he concentrated on it. But eventually his thoughts would drift, and when he next paid attention to the color it seemed the same faded purple as a vein running down his mother’s calf. Right now the glow looked more blue, the color of some sort of pale watery mold. But Albert never managed to be looking at the color while it changed; the change remained frustrating and mysterious, like Big Bird’s bizarre elephant-creature friend.
That was an odd thought, thought Albert. He had hated that character as a child, hated the stupid ears dangling and swaying like his father’s scrotum, and the useless trunk that never seemed to be used to manipulate objects or even to drink water (what was the point of the trunk? he would demand of his mother. Was it just a long nose?). Most of all, of course, he had hated the way that the elephant-creature would always find a reason to disappear whenever Big Bird fetched his other friends, so that Big Bird would appear to be insane.
He had started by loathing the elephant-creature, but the hatred had spread from there. He found himself hating Big Bird for being fooled this way, not once or twice but dozens of times. Was Big Bird totally mindless? Didn’t he see that a certain pattern had developed? How Albert had longed to be Big Bird, just for a few minutes, just long enough to grab the elephant-thing firmly by its stupid useless trunk and drag it step by step to where it would be definitely, once and for all, seen. Not to mention Big Bird’s so-called “friends,” those cheerful traitorous morons who couldn’t even bring themselves to believe that Big Bird might have a friend they’d never met. Assholes!
Albert ran a hand over his face and grimaced. Even now, he still felt it…that stupid elephant creature! (What was it called? Albert wondered, and did not remember, and was momentarily annoyed that there was no one he could ask). Once, when he was eight, his mother had taken him to a parade, and in the parade (after several marching bands, a floral float, a contingent of marching firemen and a rolling display of what appeared to be gargantuan replicas of dairy products) was a Sesame Street display, with Big Bird and Oscar and Grover and Bert and Ernie on a float. Those muppets represented the royalty of Sesame Street and so were raised above; but walking behind the float was a collection of puppet peasants, the minor Sesame Street monsters, the Cookie Monster and the Count and that creature who looked like Grover with a pink dye-job and others. On TV they mostly seemed child-sized, but here in the street they were oversized, larger than even a large adult.
And there, among the minor monsters, had been the elephant-thing. Later, Albert didn’t remember twisting out of his mother’s grasp or running into the street. He didn’t remember leaping on to the elephant-thing, grabbing and clinging to the long fur with all of his might. He didn’t even remember biting and punching at the thing, over and over, and butting his head into the soft space under the dangling trunk.
What Albert remembered was an overwhelming sensation of triumph as he screamed “Here he is! Here! Look! Loooooook!” at the top of his eight-year-old-lungs, over and over. They pulled him off, two unshaven men he had never seen before and the strangely oversized Cookie Monster and his mother, who kept saying “please Albert please,” but he managed to grab the swinging trunk and hang on with legs and arms and teeth until the trunk itself suddenly ripped off and they had all tumbled down, and right until Albert’s head hit the pavement he had gone on screaming “Look! Look! Look!” After that they took him to a strange clean place with doctors and nurses and humming florescent lights, and that had been the only time Albert had been in a hospital. In his life, anyway.
Albert came back to himself with a start, the sounds of the old man’s murmuring and the muttering of the florescent bulb coming to him sudden and loud. Please, lord, please, the man begged. “Fuck off, dipshit,” Albert told him in a pleasant tone. “You should’ve offed yourself while you still had the mobility the Lord blessed you with. Now you’ve wasted his blessing, and it’s too late.”
Looking straight up, Albert noticed that the light had at some point changed color, and now had a slight yellow flavor, toilet water after only a moment’s urination. Albert sighed and stared at the bulb.
The florescent light bulb had a dark core that he had never noticed, a dim line running straight down the center of the bulb, the marrow in a cross-section of white bone. It was this that pulsated, narrowing to an invisible thread and then growing to a chopstick’s width, narrowing, growing. The movement seemed alive and muscular to Albert, a worm’s undulation as it pushes itself forward through yellowish-white glowing mud.
But worms were silent, whereas this made noise. There was the florescent buzz, of course, but Albert could hear under it a throbbing noise, luuub-lub, luuub-lub. It reminded him of a sound from Star Wars, the noise made at the heart of the Imperial Death Star as Ben Kenobi did something-or-other to some controls that were improbably located on a narrow catwalk above a seemingly bottomless pit (Albert imagined that the Empire had lost several of its clumsier tractor beam technicians in that particular pit). After a moment, he tried to make the noise with his mouth. “Lluuub-lub,” Albert sang loudly, “lluuub-lub!” He continued singing for several minutes, and it occurred to him that what he was seeing and hearing was the heart of the hospital building itself, pumping piss-yellow blood from room to room through glowing florescent veins.
Then again, it might be only his own heartbeat, vibrating in his ears and eyes and creating an optical illusion. He tried concentrating on his eyes, increasing the muscular tension around his eye sockets, and he found that he was able to slow down the light’s throbbing in this way. Lllluuubb...luuub. Lllluuubb...luuub. Lllluuubb...luuub. He tensed his eye muscles more, screwing up his whole face, and got the throbbing to slow down so much that it was more like a slow tide’s movement in and out on a placid day, or a dog breathing so slowly and quietly that you can barely tell it’s breathing at all.
Sssslllluuuuuuuuuubbbb.
Sssslluuuuubb.
Albert felt queerly relaxed and calm. The light had changed to being a milky orange color at some point when he hadn’t been paying attention, and he didn’t even mind.
Sssslllluuuuuuuuuubbbb.
Sssslluuuuubb.
And if Big Bird could never prove the existence of the elephant-thing to his friends, so what? It was frustrating, true, but it was important that children learn about frustration. So many things in life were like the elephant-thing; you tell your friends that you’ve seen them, but they won’t really know if you’re really seen them or not, and all they can do is smile and nod. God. Religion. Happiness. Orgasms. They don’t know, they’ll never really know. (Assholes!) The elephant-thing, it now seemed to Albert, taught children an important lesson, that they will travel through their lives entirely in their skulls, and that they can pound and pound on the white bone curving around them but they will never really get out, never really be able to touch anyone on the outside directly, and their friends will never be able to see what they see.
It’s important that children understand that, thought Albert, with a sudden rush of fellow-feeling for confused children everywhere. They have to know. (This feeling must be what drives Mr. Rogers on, some corner of Albert’s mind thought.)
Sssslllluuuuuuuuuubbbb.
Or, better yet, everyone is like the dark core at the center of a florescent bulb, glowing on everyone but not being able to anything do more than that. Albert mimed pounding his fists frantically against a glowing glass tube, screaming “let me out!” as loud as he could, screaming and pounding until he stopped in a fit of giggles. (This must be what being stoned feels like, the same corner of Albert’s mind reported.)
Sssslluuuuubb.
Still giggling, Albert pushed himself up and sat on the edge of the bed, head swimming a bit with the sudden motion, one hand sinking through the praying man’s abdomen. Albert felt gripped by an impulse he couldn’t quite describe… something stuck in him, something which had to get out. Experimentally, Albert opened his mouth as wide as it would go and let out an inarticulate noise, halfway between humming and screaming. He stood up, stretching his arms wide and shoving out his chest, extending the noise more and more.
No, Albert thought. That felt great, but it’s not what I’m supposed to do.
What am I supposed to do?
I must…
I must…
Sssslllluuuuuuuuuubbbb.
“I must forgive the elephant-thing!” Albert said aloud. “Elephant-thing!” he shouted, and began spinning in place—noticing, mid-spin, a nurse coming in the door, but paying her no attention—he spun faster, eyes on the ceiling, watching the long glowing rod of the florescent light whirling above him like a helicopter blade—or like his girlfriend, for that matter—“Elephant-thing!” he shouted again. “I set you free!”
Albert stopped spinning, dizzily swaying a bit, facing the window. On the grounds below him he could see a road, some trees, an institutional-looking (rectangular, brick) building. “Go from me!” Albert yelled. “I will not be bitter towards you from now on! Wander where you will, do what you want, but you won’t be part of me any longer!”
Sssslluuuuubb.
That felt really good, Albert thought. In his mind’s eye he could see the elephant-thing shamble from him, much older now than when Albert had attacked him in the parade, wrinkled, motley, furred only in patches, enormous bulbous eyes sagging liquidly, slumped shoulders brushing the ceiling. It paused, looking sideways at Albert, then walked heavily through a wall. Albert didn’t turn from the window until he was certain the elephant-thing had departed; perhaps, he thought, it simply prefers to go unseen.
Albert noticed a spider, sitting perfectly still on the window. “That felt really good,” he told the spider in a prim tone. “Like taking a really enormous shit or something, you see. You don’t realize how weighed down you had been until you notice how much lighter you feel afterward.” Remarkable, really, that people still had to shit. If they could put a man on the moon, you’d think they’d be able to put a stop to all that bowel movement nonsense.
Albert leaned forward to peer at the spider, which was brownish black, with splayed hairy legs meeting a reflection of themselves in the window glass, a tiny spider standing leg to leg atop another tiny spider. Albert blew on the spider, to no effect. Flicked his finger through both spiders, but neither one had the grace to skitter in fear or even to drop dead, as some insects did at Albert’s touch. Filthy thing, really. Albert turned around, intending to walk out of the room.
The nurse he had seen entering the room was still in the doorway, stepping into the room, frozen in place like a mannequin.
She was overweight, with dark hair speckled with gray, a hook nose, a double chin and lines around her mouth. People called them smile lines or frown lines, but without animation they just seemed like wrinkles. Her sensible-shoed foot hovered two inches above the floor, not moving or trembling. This nurse apparently had a long stride, because her other foot was well behind her, only the front of the foot touching the floor, standing still in a feat of middle-aged balance that the world’s great swamis and gymnasts could never touch. The tray in her hand, supporting several pills on a square blue napkin and a small paper cup of water, cut shock-still through the air; the water in the cup was a still-life of liquid sloshing to one side. Her brown eyes, liquidity and placid, did not move or blink; the long white bar of the florescent light, reflected once in each eyeball, did not tremble.
“Hoo-hah,” said Albert. Then, “yeek.” Neither vocalization sounded quite right under the circumstances, and after a moment’s contemplation, he asked the nurse, “Are you okay? Ma’am?” Albert shook his head hard, as if to dislodge stupid thoughts that had become stuck there—what did it matter what he said? No one would hear, no one ever heard.
He stepped though the nurse into a gleaming hallway full of still-lifes. An elderly man in white hospital gown held a walker an inch above the ground, his stillness and his glossy black skin making him look like a statue, while a middle-aged black man in a UPS uniform (the elderly man’s son?) kept a hand protectively on one aged elbow. A mother walked down the hall, pulling two children by their hands, one child with a long shiny dangling snot pulling improbably from one nostril, frozen suspended in the form of a chain. The mother had leaned toward that child to tell it something (hopefully to wipe its disgusting nose). The other child, a boy, stared wide-eyed at several men in National Guard ensembles talking self-importantly to themselves. Albert could see a saliva-slick filling gleaming in one guardsman’s open mouth. That guardsman was craning his neck to look down the blouse of a teenage girl who was dozing, leaning against a closed door, an unlikely plethora of earrings hanging from her visible ear. Except for not breathing, she looked just as she would have in a non-frozen world.
Are hospitals usually this crowded? Albert wondered. He peered through the window in the door, but could see only reflections—a twin of the girl leaning against the girl, and behind the twin a guardsman caught embarrassingly in frozen leer. No Albert, of course.
He wandered through the halls, examining the frozen people. Soldiers, soldiers everywhere, always in groups. These groups generally could be found rudely taking up the center of whatever hallway they were in, while others moved (or, more accurately, froze in still-life mimes of movement) around them, pressed against walls; the guardsmen brought their own world with them wherever they went, it seemed to Albert, and other people could only dodge around them. In their faces, the soldiers looked to Albert like weedy college students, but their gear made them look bulkier, more consequential.
Albert wandered by what he thought of as his room but didn’t go in, out of fear that That Awful Teck Woman might have returned. When he had walked out on Teck, she had been sitting in a self-satisfied manner with her plastic shield around her, counting Mississippi’s to herself (Albert, having been, felt that even one Mississippi was too many).
Then again, Albert thought, that was yesterday, wasn’t it? Albert stopped and thought. He had watched the Awful Punk Girl who lived in Albert’s hall being cut open (Albert could lose himself for hours watching surgery; he had knelt with most of his head submerged in Evelyn, so that he could watch the surgery at entrail level, embedding himself in the alien landscape of meat and blood) after leaving Teck’s counting behind, hadn’t he? Yes. That had been nice.
Then what?
Albert had read a comic book over someone’s shoulder. When was that? He couldn’t remember. If he could have had some blood splattered on him by his close view of Evelyn’s surgery, he would have had a means of telling time. But nothing clung to him, and he had no punk blood on him when he read the comic book but that meant nothing, it could have been before or after. No blood, no time.
But still, it had been night when he had read the comic, hadn’t it? Yes, it had been the middle of the night; Albert remembered wondering what the person had been doing reading a Batman comic at 3 a.m., sitting calmly in the middle of a hospital waiting room. And Albert remembered noticing the pun of the title, reading The Dark Knight on a dark night. So the comic book had been at night, Albert was certain, and he also knew that Evelyn’s surgery had been in the afternoon.. If so, then since night follows afternoon the comic book must have been after Evelyn’s surgery; if so, then since it was now night a new day must have begun; and if so, it must now be the day after the surgery; and since he had gone to surgery after Teck it must now be day after Teck. That Awful Teck Woman was surely gone by now, Albert told himself, and turned around to walk back to his room.
What if I actually read the comic book the night before the Awful Punk Girl’s surgery?
Albert stopped. That was a real possibility, and that meant That Awful Teck Woman might still be in his room. He tipped his head back and clucked his tongue, frozen in indecision. The tiles above him were pitted in seemingly random patterns that reminded Albert of a moonscape, a little planetoid which was capable of supporting no life other than the microbes that cause the planet’s face to become scarred with acne, pits and depressions marring the surface everywhere. But the moon surface was flat, flat, no curvature visible at all. In eighteen hundred and forty two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue to prove the Earth was round and look at what he found, but no one thought to sail around the moon, and now it turns out the moon is flat, they should have checked, now they’re going to reach the edge and fall over.
Should have checked….
Albert shook his head, unsure of what he had been thinking or how long he had stood still like that, absorbed in industrial ceiling tile. He unthinkingly ducked his head through the door to his room to look at the clock, but then remembered that clocks could no longer tell Albert anything. Of course, I’ve moved to the land beyond time, Albert thought. Stuck forever in this split-second while the rest of the world had, presumably, moved on beyond him…. Which, to be fair, it had already done after some unknown person had shot him.
Why do they always say that the dead have moved on? Albert wondered. It is so clearly the other way around. Stupid assholes, the living, really.
That Awful Teck Woman hadn’t been in his room when he checked the time, so Albert walked through the door. Jill was lying above and through her body, half-in, half-out; no more rpm Jill, apparently. At least Teck hadn’t been given the satisfaction of seeing Jill wake up. At the head of the bed, the gay nurse washed Jill’s hair, his fingers creeping across her sudsy head.
Creeping visibly. Movement. Very slowly moving, almost too slow to be seen, slow as… Albert couldn’t find the right simile. Slow as molasses, he supposed, except that he had no idea what molasses were or why they moved so slowly (lack of predators in their natural state, perhaps?). Still, movement was movement.
Albert turned and stared at the secondhand on the wall clock, which stood stiffly pointed at “2,” unmoving. Albert counted, one Mississippi two Mississippi three…
When Albert reached fourteen Mississippi, the thin stick moved slowly down a quarter-inch, to the one-notch-below-two position.
Back in the world, Albert thought.
Then: well, no, not really.
After a while watching Jill, Albert returned to wandering the halls and rooms, watching the slow motion world of the living. In one room, he watched a woman depress her call button, a process that took about a minute. In another, he stopped for an hour or two (five minutes?), watching a woman beat up a man who looked elegant until he vomited. She used a nightstick wrapped in thick cloth, and when she was done with that she held a pillow over the man’s face while his hands scrabbled unpleasantly in the air, two old crabs unable to get purchase on shore. Albert thought he was witnessing a murder; but then she removed the pillow and the man vomited. The dead don’t upchuck, Albert thought, disappointed, therefore no murder. Still, Albert had never before seen anyone beat up, outside of TV and movies, and that was something. The slow-motion vomit coming out of the man’s mouth reminded Albert of films he had seen of lava flow, chunky with yet-unmelted rocks.
It must be nice to just hit people, Albert thought. When you talk, people are listening or they’re not, but when you punch someone they have to notice, don’t they? No wondering if the message was heard, if they know you’re there at all; just WHACK! and then they know, and you know they know.
But then the woman started talking, and the sound of slow-motion speech was not only annoying but impossible to understand (“Aaaaayyyyyyyygggggcchhhhhhhoollllth yyyyuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu nneeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhbbbuuuuuuuuuu cccccchhhhheeeeww…”), so Albert walked through a wall into the next room, where a middle-aged woman in a pale blue uniform was mopping the floor so slowly that time appeared to have stopped again.
Albert moved on, impatiently, with no idea that he was being called. Past room after room of patients, most either sleeping or watching TV, and the only way to tell the difference was to check their eyes. Through a glum cafeteria, where people sat glumly staring at glum food, all of it the product of a long row of vending machines. One machine offered hot paper-wrapped hamburgers and hot dogs which were a cheerful reddish color in the illustration on the front of the machine, but which looked disturbingly green in front of those few patrons who had purchased them. “Pah-PAH!” Albert sang as he passed quickly through this room, “pah-PAH!”
Down a long hall, and now Albert was actually running, although he didn’t question this (it seemed no odder than anything else he did, nowadays). “Zooooom!” he yelled, “zoooom!,” spreading his arms like jet wings. Through a set of double doors and he was in a reception room, bleak and bare, with plastic chairs to sit on and a cadaverous nurse behind a receiving counter, her face sunk into one hand like melting wax, while the other hand wrote slow-motion notes on yellow pad. Albert moved on, hesitant, down another hallway filled with doors with small windows and locks on the outside. Five, six, through a nurse, seven doors Albert counted, and then stepped through the eighth.
The room was almost featureless: a narrow bed, a desk even smaller than the desks provided by dormitories, blue industrial carpet and light gray paint. Both the small window and the florescent ceiling light were protected behind wire mesh screens. A skinny man in a patient’s gown stood looking out the window, his thin pale bare ass facing Albert. The room was cold, and smelled unpleasantly of cigarettes and sweat and a strange goatish odor.
Albert looked around, confused. The man turned around quite suddenly and said: “He is here.”
Albert glanced at the window of the door, where the nurse was still walking in slow motion—quite a bit faster than the nurse washing Jill’s hair had moved, actually, but still unnaturally slow. Albert turned back to the skinny man, who was staring at him, or possibly past him. The man’s eyes were pale and diseased, a milky white skin over light brown eyeballs.
“How can you be—you’re moving at—“
Albert had been planning to say more, but the man raised a finger to his lips and Albert fell silent.
“Yes, I’m talking to him now. A sprit, as we thought. Yes, exactly.” Albert looked around, confused again. There was no one else in the room.
“Effusing, I’d say. I agree. It is done, blessed be. Spirit, we seek the Benandanti. The Good Walkers.”
“What? I don’t know them. Who?”
“We are not empowered to deal with human things, like locks and wards and Homeboy. Yet we cannot seek the Benandanti trapped. We require your assistance.”
“Are you talking to me? Can you hear me?”
“We seek the Benandanti. You will help us.”
“I don’t think you can hear me at all,” said Albert, and then gasped and clawed at the hand on his throat. Albert had never seen the man move.
“Hear, see, touch. We are not empowered to deal with human things, but neither are we completely without recourse. We require your assistance.”
“How?” Albert managed to gasp.
“It is a small thing we ask. Hardly anything at all. And we have already given you a gift far greater than what you will offer us. But we think nothing of it.”
“What?” said Albert, his voice sounding small and pathetic.
“Destroy the locks so we may leave this place.” The man abruptly released his grip on Albert’s neck, and Albert fell back, gasping. “A small thing.”
“I can’t touch anything, you fucking moron!”
“We are not without impatience. We seek the Benandanti. Open the doors.”
“I can’t—“
“You can. We are empowered to have given you a gift.” He paused and pointed straight at Albert, like Uncle Sam in a recruitment poster. What a fucking drama queen, Albert thought, and was oddly proud of himself for being able to think that under the circumstances. “Open the doors, Poltergeist!”
•
Albert opened his eyes woozily and looked around. Jill was there, comatose both body and spirit, a few strands of her silky-fine hair blowing slightly in the ventilated air. The various machines that interested parties had connected to Jill’s body wheezed, blinked and hummed, in response to unknowable internal drives. A nurse—not the hairwasher—walked in, made self-satisfied clicking noises with her tongue as she examined a machine, and then walked out humming.
A thought passed through Albert’s mind, and he closed his eyes, trying to capture it. Something… splintering wood. A soldier frozen in place, fillings gleaming in his open mouth. Eyes the color of milk spilled on Formica. Doors and lamps spinning like Frisbees.
Albert shrugged, and pushed the meaningless images out of his conscious mind. Fragments would disturb his thoughts throughout the night, but it would be days before Albert remembered completely.
•