You smell different today, Gin. Different from Arrid. Different from your summer garden. This is the smell of death. I remember it from twenty years ago when Mother passed and I'd sat with her for a week in this same hospital. You held my hand through so much of that gruesome spell. I calculate this odor is an harmonic combination of the expulsion of urine and perspiration. I'm making this up of course. At first it is somewhat repugnant. Enigmatic. Not something one has ever experienced elsewhere. Combined with the complexity of the experience of a loved one leaving the body behind, it becomes an epiphany of sorts. And sweet. Memorable. As in: When Mother died... Add in: surrounding hospital sights and sounds. Like: The sappy things the nuns say. Or the prick across the hall. His wife has been in a coma for seventeen weeks. She stopped babbling ten weeks ago—just lies there. He brings his office to her room. (Doesn't anyone respect the dying for chrissake?) He's on his cell right now blasting his broker. Believes Disney's going to be the next corporate giant to go belly-up. Believes all the great American icons are finished. I wish he'd close his door. You're my icon, Gin. Probably lots of folks on the eleventh floor are watching a deeply personal icon go down. You'll probably be ash tomorrow, my love. Damn! That hurts. Maybe I should close your door. To tell the truth I'm afraid to be totally alone with you. I want to be totally alone with you but I'm afraid to be totally alone with you. I want to be alone with you. I can't be totally alone with you. Mon Dieu! And now from outer space a punky looking kid with rings attached to every possible orifice and some kind of black stuff smeared around her eyes appears at the door. I guess she's a she. She's on some terrestrial substance. I suspect she might be a displaced dead spirit. She stares at you, Gin. Says, "Death is so way cool, Dude." She wears earphones. I can barely hear Patsy Cline coming from them singing her classic, crazy for trying, crazy for crying song. Christ! Where does a twenty-first century kid come up with Patsy Cline? Must have listened to her in a previous life. So here's this dead looking punky waif on the death floor encompassed in the smell of death tripping on Patsy Cline. Whoa! I think I've totally lost it. And where's nurse Daisy with her Saltines? The eleventh floor is weirder than anything in that cuckoo-ass freakbar scene in Star Wars
"...and I'm crazy for loving you."
I forget I'm in a hospital. I light up a smoke. I grind it out in the palm of my hand. Jesus! I light up another. Grind it out again. Jesus! I'm spattered on the walls of this fucking sterile cell. I think the smoke alarm just went off. My mouth tastes like mayonnaise left out in hot sun. Daisy shows up with four lousy packets of Saltines and a cup of hot joe. She says, "Such devotion, Dr. Bruckner. You've stayed so long. Miss Anderson your kin or what?" "No." "Wife?" "Common law." I lie. Daisy jiggles her hips. "Oooo la la," she says and winks—as if she's learned I just got lucky. "May—December. They's a lotta that these days. Specially movie womens. You looks juss like Harrison Fort." She tweaks my cheek. Says, "Brighten up, Dr. Bruckner. It's almost over."
Are you listening, Gin? Maybe it's time I tell you about this thing in '58—just something I've always wanted to get off my chest because I was such a sleaze bag when... I told Tom Watkins how you gardened right next to Mom's bedroom window and how I promised him I would phone him next time you wore your spaghetti strap sundress and how you usually dropped the straps when you deadheaded your zinnias and faced our house and stooped way over and exposed your way-down-below cleavage. Tom said he'd give me five bucks if he could watch you from mom's room and jack off. Said he hoped you'd get real sweaty. What little shits we were. So anyway you got real sweaty and we jerked off together and rubbed it on each other's faces and we started laughing so loud and obnoxious and we slapped each other on the back and I'd've sworn you heard us. Pretty fucking stupid. It's just bugged me all these years. Did you hear us, Gin? Can you hear me now, Gin? I guess I'm just babbling and you're babbling and we're a crazed duet.
I step into Gin's toilet to take a leak—a funhouse of spotless though slightly distorted reflective surfaces in which I stare at my cock. From one direction it looks teensy. Another it looks twisted—like a pig's dick. Another it looks rippled—like the trunk of an elephant. I think my penis doesn't belong to me anymore. Except for pissing, this pitiful piece of meat is of no apparent use. Hospital toilets are fucking cold and distant. I don't even want to take a spit bath here. Nonetheless it's difficult to believe how intimate I am able to feel about Gin in this environment—and so sad that Gin can't enjoy the intimacy. I run my fingers through her hair. I hope she senses my touch of every strand. Over my lifetime I've watched it turn from glistening black to glistening white. Always glistening. (I've never known another brunette Swede.) Now it is the color of snowflakes falling in direct sunlight. Nothing I can imagine could feel more like pure silk. I am in ecstasy. I haven't always been good at intimacy. During med school, my first marriage (to Shirley) tanked. She worked nights to help finance me. Lasted eighteen months. She got a raw deal. I was a cad. She just wasn't Gin.
Now I'm trying to block Gin's babbling and the relentless groaning of patients. I no longer can tolerate the noises of nurses incessantly scrambling up and down the hall. A quelle heure ca finit? When? Will there be another day? Pain beyond tolerance. My own. Mon amour, mon amour. Got to trip away to anywhere but here. Back to where: ...I'm thirty-five again. Gainfully employed. Quickly begin raking in big bucks in tits and illegal prescription drugs (on the side). Genuinely believe I will marry Gin. Take her to an intimate posh French restaurant. "Pantoufle." We pig out on escargot. Get thoroughly soused. She's absolutely ravishing at sixty-three—would make Sophia Loren look like the ugly stepsister. When she returns from a bathroom break, her wrists smell like violets and she tells me in French that I resemble her 'missing in action' Sonny Lawson. She says she is forever grateful to have such a friend as me. Just once she calls me Sam instead of Sammy. We laugh a lot and for the first time I begin comfortably calling her Gin instead of Auntie. To my way of thinking, we're equals. Unfortunately she still speaks to me as if I were the kid next door. I try to remember all the words to Piaf's Hymn to Love. All I can think of is, If one day we had to say goodbye… I fall all over myself. I get a knot in my throat and can't say what I really need to say.
Gin groans (as if she is lucid and aware of pain?) and attempts to raise her legs at the knees. They are puffy and hideous. Maybe I can communicate? Gin? Gin? Pinch my thumb. I dampen a washcloth and fold it into a tidy rectangle. Place it delicately on her brow and press my fingers against her temples where I barely sense a pulse. I lightly kiss each temple. I caress her hands. Her skin brings to mind a lambskin purse I brought her from Paris. It is thin. Pale white like a slightly fogged mirror. I imagine I can see my own reflection through it on her finger bones. I reside inside her. I am comfortable. She's never had ugly brown blotches on her arms like most folks her age. I trip out on rubbing her knuckles till I drowse… she wears a white cotton blouse tied in a knot at the waist. She dances in graceful circles with her arms wrapped tightly around her breasts (as if they might escape her). She sings, "my little man, my little man." I awake facedown and smothering between her left arm and left breast. I do not bite her. She smells like rubbing alcohol. I smell like tobacco. I am sweating. So is she. Dawn sun shines brightly through her IV bag. I think the drip is stagnant. The room is dead silent.
I know Gin and I were meant for each other. I dream of penetrating her—no blood. At the same time biting her tits. Like puppies bite each other at play. We endlessly role in the grass and she bites me back. She chews my flaccid cock without her teeth. She has no intentions of hurting me. Just raucous lovemaking. Fuck the Auntie thing. I'm a big boy now.
Temperature: one-hundred-and-nine-degrees. Pulse: three-beats-per-minute. I ask Daisy to roll Gin's right palm against an inkpad to create a handprint keepsake (indicating the mark of the ring on her right hand). I cut a substantial ringlet of hair from near her right temple and tremble like a frail old man as I stuff it in my wallet and am helpless to my recall of the event…when I gave Gin a forty-thousand dollar diamond and sapphire ring. She had said, Oh you shouldn't have, but I know she understood the meaning—that above all others on earth she was the woman of my lifetime. It was not about money. I swear. It just had to be big and spectacular to match her. The same knot appeared in my throat as the night at the French restaurant. She, incidentally, said she had a knot in her throat and could I please get her a glass of tepid water.
And again, I slip into the toilet. I have a passionate urge to blow something unknown out of my nose but it's bone dry—like parchment. I shove my little finger deep into my left sinus passage. Something snaps. I snort a couple of lines. My head is on the ceiling. I strut cocksure and certain of purpose toward Gin's bed—fall facedown against her forehead. Our cheeks meld like liquid glue. I will complete my long awaited mission. I deftly untie the bow of her gown to reveal her cleavage, then stick my upper denture in my shirt pocket. God, I stink. Suddenly my head mysteriously and violently jerks backward. The face of the Mary doll turns crimson. The doll crashes to the floor. The annoying scritch scritch scritch of Daisy's uniform appears and fills the room—bounces off the fucking walls. Goddammit! Daisy stands at the foot of the bed holding Gin's ankles up like trophies. A pallid undernourished nun I've never seen before scratches something on a clipboard…
"St. Josephina's Hospital."
I foam at the mouth like a rabid skunk. My jaw locks rigid. My lower denture bites my upper gum. My nose runs freely. I think my left nostril bleeds. I desperately yank Gin's angel white hair downward toward her pillow. I feel no resistance. I wretch something that looks and tastes like thrice spent buttermilk…
"Miss Mary…"
at the speed of light, a fat wormlike substance shoots through my cock…
"Virginia Anderson. Time of…"
a hummingbird's heart possesses mine…
"death."
I feel nothing…
"9:37 a.m. 6/27/02"
Where Gin is, I am.
spiel says, "at the ripened age of 64, i've finally adjusted to being referred to as 'crusty' and a 'curmudgeon'. my father used to tell a story about the first time he ever changed my diapers -- he claimed i looked up at him with defiance.
"at the heart of my work is the issue of conflict. i hold myself to no rigid rule as to how i will write (poetry is my specialty). yet i write nearly every day. and the bulk of it is about the darkness of the condition of man. it is the one predictability of my work: what editors and fellow poets have come to expect of me and what most naturally flows from me."