Body Language
pieces from The Patient Body: A Personal Narrative in Pieces
The patient body had two selves. One wanted to know how the other lived; the other in the dark about the one. How could this discrepancy be? It took 100-mile-an-hour force to knock the arm off that broken record. It took another 100,000 hours to return to center. All of it worth it. All of it just fine. At best: the one and the other had chosen this body, this single life, in which to take up residence. Though it sucks to be tethered to a husk sloughed off eons ago; to be known by its visage, its sordid wardrobe. There he goes, they say. The bastard. The patient body not that guy anymore, really, though the more the explanation the further the fall in estimation. Better go along with the charade, a spy inside enemy lines. Wait long enough and neither will be recognizable—two old men lost inside mirrors. In this endless undercover Op, expect little to nothing of acquaintances. The patient body knows which friends are true and treats them as the royalty they are.
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The mistake is to take a seat at the horseshoe’s grip, open tables surrounding in a fan. An hour to kill and a beer calling for the back of the throat. A wolf howls nearby and a woman the next seat over fishes out her phone. Uh oh, the patient body whispers. Don’t let this one in. If she starts talking, you’re stuck. The patient body needs time to think. Or not to think. He meant to say drink. The check arrives as a man stinking of booze sinks down on his left—Wiley E. Coyote coming to stop on ‘X’ marking the spot on an outcrop of rock, broken-off tip suspended in midair like an anvil, waiting for the actor to hit his mark before it drops.
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Let’s talk, now that the patient body is freed from this giant tube, about all the ways torture can be articulated and all permutations one goes through to keep one’s cool. And goes through should be endures. And by cool what is meant is not losing it. Where did the idea this will take fifteen minutes come from? Turns out it it’s more like 45. Or so says the young woman who pushes the button and the body starts sliding in. And what was said to be a series of loud bangs and alarm bells in reality are a clockwork-orangian array of techno-jack-hammer rhythms pulsed into the brain at maximum volume—one series switched out for another between brief, sadistically calming periods of sound wash (as if held up lightly by clouds) and precipitated by curious animal-in-the-wall knocks. Add to this the tight squeeze, the headgear locking in the body as the warm blanket slowly transforms into a hair suit. The patient body wasn’t ready for the gestalt of it, the pure sensory overload. Nor the inability to drown out the cacophony, nor the panic rising within the body. All stratagems ditched—memorizing poems, tournament seedings, the names of old girlfriends—and in their place breaths get slowly counted. Though that leads to breathing too deep which walks the body to the precipice edge of hyper-ventilation. Nothing to do but start counting minutes: 1 to 60…5-minute blocks. Which brings it up to the 30-minute mark where the body is conveyor-belted back into the light for an IV hook up. 15 minutes to go, chirps the technician before disappearing from view. Back inside. Back to counting. There is one interval where the cosmic pulse matches the counting and the body rides its wave for a while before it subsumes the body, encompassing breaths, obscuring numbers, sending the mind down a rabbit hole of boundless panic, cartoon script floating…47…48…49… Reaching up, grabbing hold hand over fist to 60, resting on its wobbly platform then jumping back into the counting, riding on home, where morning light rises over the horizon and the moon rotates out of view. The body once again stuck behind the wheel of a crashed car, once again released from its hold.
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The patient body remembers the tremor of the head-on collision’s impact shimmer-shocking into its breaking frame—from cracked-open feet to split ribcage. Rattling a while then expiring into resonant silence. Breath over breath over breath then release. How many lifetimes ago? How many selves sloughed off? Most days, the event’s terrible truth slips by unrecognized, and the patient body lives free of its grasping ghost. On others, triggered by this or that, the patient body replays the accident, lost in the blurry home movie. Over time a voice arises, unbidden, and calls the patient body back to the Now. Reminds the body to step over the ever-widening circles of aftershock. The voice whispers: Each day out, you must not forget, an excursion. Whispers: At each tripping wave, awake.
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The night nurse knows to talk to the patient body. To ask the body to take slow, deep breaths, calm its mind if it can. And the patient body, in its way, knows to respond. And so it goes, late into the night, the nurse calming the body. The patient body looking up, mute, expectant. At some point, the night nurse, sensing its distress, starts talking to the body. The patient body thinks it may have conjured the night nurse. How else does it know to address the nurse in the second person so that when the body does speak it can speak in the first? What the nurse says to the body is simple. Stay calm. Mind your breaths. Sometimes the nurse can sense the patient body is lost in a tangle of visions and so answers its wild searchlight eyes with Let’s not go there now. The nurse places a damp towel to its forehead, sings a song from childhood, as the patient body climbs its ladder breath up toward sleep.
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The patient body sits in the center of an empty table, elbows akimbo, back to open garage door, slumped a little like a Hopper nighthawk. Head down, the patient body ink-drops thoughts onto a slowly-filling page. Not waiting for an old friend, or a long-ago lover whose gait is recognizable in the footsteps rounding the corner. Not flirting with the young woman at the counter but taking the pint and finding a seat. The patient body has learned to stay quiet and watch the world spin on its merry-go-round axis. There’s a paperback to read or the latest Mountain Xpress left folded on a neighboring chair, half a crossword to fill in. No longer trying to interpret old signs for hidden meaning nor add graffiti to the bathroom stall. Instead, draining the beer and walking out into the day—re-set and blank as the sun, brainpan empty—aching feet walking the body, step by step, in the direction of the car.
~~
The construction workers across the way blast Ranchera songs. The patient body can hear them chatting between songs, though the mid-summer canopy hides them from view. A light mist of rain. A gulley runs between, bound on both sides by potholed roads. The music, the voices, the mist, the morning cars carrying their passengers home from work, from school. All of it seeps together into a single soundtrack. A crow calls in the distance. Judging by the light roar down the hill, a truck passes by on River Road. Now another. One of the workers drops a stack of wood. Two squirrels bicker in the overstory. The patient body knows the rain has started to pick up by the brush-snare that gets stirred on the drumhead leaves. Someone turns up the music across the way, then someone (the foreman?) snaps it off.