NaNoWriMo And The Tempo Of Doom...

I'm still not sure I am going to do NaNoWriMo this year but if I were, I'm still on schedule... First pages are one post back. This is the second set of pages...


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“It looks worse than it is,” she says. “We’ve been poking at you for quite a long time now.”

“Did you think I was going to die?” I ask her.

“No.” She smiles one of those kindly nurses smiles. “We were worried that you were going to live.”

She scrunches up my hair like a sister would and her face scrunches up as I watch her. Her hand falls gently to my chest like a falling sock and she leans on my chest just enough for me to feel her substance through the layers of blankets. I smile at her and try not to make this matriarchal and childish. If I were a child and you were my mother, I think without saying, I would not want to fuck you like I do.

“I’ll be back, sport,” she says. “Glad to get to know you.”

-5-
The lights come on. I’ve been sleeping, apparently. The day is now dark and the halls outside are void of giggles.

I remember watching them through my night vision goggles. They were three in a cluster, slinking across the roof top across the street from my janitor job. In the greenness and the blackness, they looked like cartoon characters. There were three of them because there were six flailing arms. They all wore different kinds of hats and I laughed at them as I watched their mass move down onto a fire escape and break a window.

What seemed funny to me became suddenly serious. I knew that window and I knew that girl. She lived alone and she danced in T-shirts in her underwear. I opened my window across the alleyway, and I shouted

“I have night vision goggles! And I know who you are!”

The three men stopped and turned. My goggle was my mask. They could not know me, and I could not know them. But the bluff was working. I threw a can of furniture polish at them, and they clambered back up onto the roof. They went from cartoon characters to villainous louts to cartoon characters again, all in green and black. The last thing I remember seeing was one of them tripping and falling, knocking one of the other two down.

I had a belly laugh. You really should have seen it.

My room is empty except for me. The walls are half white and half cream with a strip of wallpaper like a ribbon in the middle. From what I can see, the ribbon goes all the way around. There is another bed in here, but there is nobody in it just laying there like I am. There are machines that I don’t recognize lined against the wall between my bed and the empty one. A few of them are on with tubes and wires leading from them into me. Boy Oh Boy. They must have really, really stomped me good.

They told me I can’t move much because I have atrophied. They told me I had sixteen broken bones. They told me I have a metal plate inside my head, and the doctor said its bulletproof, just in case.

“Just in case what?” I think I asked him.

“You do more hero work,” he told me, and squeezed my hand.

When I was a child, I used to lay in my bed and stare at my ceiling. We had sparkles in the texture and they would become stars in a white sky. I connected the dots and drew dinosaurs, and my dinosaurs fought. Mom and Daddy would be working, and I would be home alone. My lights were on, back then, and I thought many things. I thought about the moon and the stars and I thought about God. I thought about my sister and I thought about life. Your lights are on. Your lights are off. I thought about that crimson circle that I never saw. How could you bleed to death, when the blood stayed inside you? When I was a kid, I never knew that I would never know it all.

Daddy worked in a building that made light bulbs. Mom worked in a building that made cans of chili. I never knew what they actually did, because they never liked to talk about what they actually did- at least around me. I know my Daddy worked and my Mom worked, and I went to school and had friends sometimes and that we lived in a small apartment on the third floor and that sometimes I played inside, and sometimes I played outside. When I was still only seven, I played with my dead sister on the floor in the tiny living room and she played with me.

“You be the dinosaur!” she would yell at me. I would always be the dinosaur.

“Knock knock!”

It’s Caroline. The pink carnation.

“Time for your pain meds.”

“But I don’t feel pain.”

“I know. We’ve got you on a drip. You’re not supposed to feel pain, silly.”

“What if I don’t have any pain?”

“No pain? That would be sensational!”

“I feel weak, but I don’t feel pain.”

“Do you feel this?”

She pokes my foot with something sharp.

“Ow! I feel pain.”
“You really started screaming after you woke, so we put you on morphine.”

“I was screaming?”

“Mmhmm.”

“I don’t remember.”

“We put you on morphine, and you’ve been quiet ever since. Let us know how it’s working and we’ll keep you comfy, Okay?”

It’s working fine. I feel like I am floating in a bath of warm water, only its not wet. I feel like I am of a mind and my body is not so much of me. Far, far away from where I‘m thinking, I am laying there in a pile on a hospital bed, though right here next to me, there I am. If I look down, I can recognize my feet and make them move. If I pay close attention, I can feel me moving one of my legs about though I‘m not sure which leg it really is. I forget I’m not talking and I can feel myself smile.

Caroline’s face lights up. And she really sparkles.

“That’s good stuff, isn’t it?”

She puts a hand on my forehead and I close my eyes.

-6-

They’re kicking me and stomping me. That’s all I see are beards and boots and legs and angry hairy bellies hanging over dirty belts and blue jeans. Sometimes there is a shaking sky and sometimes there are boots and legs and beards and angry, hairy bellies. Parts of me jerk around and are being jerked around and kicked around and bounced around and rolled around and there is shouting and the thwack thwack thwack of stomping boots and sharply focused pain in places I never felt much in my lifetime. My chest is on fire with this pain and my head is a bomb of pain and my feet are screaming with pain and I am bouncing around on the ground and all I want is sleep. Kick me harder in the head. Kick me harder in the head. Kick me harder in the head. The lights go out.

-7-

The lights go on. My stomach really hurts and I ache all over. There is a bustle about and several people fussing, looking down at me through fishbowl faces and I don’t mean to moan but I just do. They roll me on my side and it hurts me and I moan. They roll me over. They are wiping my ass and my legs and my feet. I feel the odd-cold slippery texture of someone’s odd-cold slippery hand between my legs. They tell me there are sores on my back that need attending to and that it just may sting a little.

It stings a lot. They work methodically, changing the sheets beneath me while they talk to each other and pretend I’m not embarrassed. They roll me on my side. They roll me over. When I blink my eyes and try to look at them, they scurry from the room.

I jumped on the back of a large man, once, and rode him like an ostrich. He spun me around and around and around and around but I held on. He shouldered over an old gray lady and took her purse. I stood atop a park bench, and leapt from there. As I landed on his back and loaded him down, he slowed and leaned and spun. He was trying to hit me with the old woman’s purse, but I kept ducking my head around. We traveled like this for several minutes. The big man had more energy than I wished to think about. I held him at his neck and tried my best to choke him, but his neck was big around and my arms sure weren‘t. He dropped the purse and the old lady cursed and was right there right on top of it. She picked it up and dusted it off and thanked me very much.

“You’re welcome, ma’am!” I said to her, as she tottered off.

But I wasn’t through. I rode this big man for fifteen minutes, choking him and kicking him while he swatted and grabbed at me. He was out to get a hold of my head and I bit his hand. He tried to pull on one of my legs and I cinched them around him. I never was a big man but I always had the keenness. You had to be a clever man, if you were not as big as much as you needed yourself to be.

Like a worn-out tranquilized bull the man finally dropped. I got down and walked back where I came from. He was a criminal to be sure, and he needed his comeuppance. I just figured I had punished him enough.


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My Mom liked to stitch and sew. She liked to knit and crochet and macramé and make things for our household. She liked to cover things with different colored knitted covers as if everything was cold. Cold salt and pepper shakers. Cold toasters. Cold televisions and the backs of our couch and chairs. Our building had a furnace in the basement and radiators in our rooms, but Mom was unconvinced. Everything needed to be covered by some stitch or knot or fabric, to keep them warm.