Everything's Eventual

Riding the Bullet.

Luckey Quarter.

*

Autopsy Room Four

It's so dark that for awhile just how long I don't know I think I'm still unconscious. Then, slowly, it comes to me that unconscious people don't have a sensation of movement through the dark, accompanied by a faint, rhythmic sound that can only be a squeaky wheel. And I can feel contact, from the top of my head to the balls of my heels. I can smell something that might be rubber or vinyl. This is not unconsciousness, and there is something too too what? Too rational about these sensations for it to be a dream.

Then what is it?

Who am I?

And what's happening to me?

The squeaky wheel quits its stupid rhythm and I stop moving. There is a crackle around me from the rubber-smelling stuff.

A voice: Which one did they say?

A pause.

Second voice: Four, I think. Yeah, four.

We start to move again, but more slowly. I can hear the faint scuff of feet now, probably in soft-soled shoes, maybe sneakers. The owners of the voices are the owners of the shoes. They stop me again. There's a thump followed by a faint whoosh. It is, I think, the sound of a door with a pneumatic hinge being opened.

What's going on here?I yell, but the yell is only in my head. My lips don't move. I can feel them and my tongue, lying on the floor of my mouth like a stunned mole but I can't move them.

The thing I'm on starts rolling again. A moving bed? Yes. A gurney, in other words. I've had some experience with them, a long time ago, in Lyndon Johnson's shitty little Asian adventure. It comes to me that I'm in a hospital, that something bad has happened to me, something like the explosion that almost neutered me twenty-three years before, and that I'm going to be operated on. There are a lot of answers in that idea, sensible ones, for the most part, but I don't hurt anywhere. Except for the minor matter of being scared out of my wits, I feel fine. And if these are orderlies wheeling me into an operating room, why can't I see? Why can't Italk?

A third voice: Over here, boys.

My rolling bed is pushed in a new direction, and the question drumming in my head isWhat kind of a mess have I gotten myself into?

Doesn't that depend on who you are?I ask myself, but that's one thing, at least, I find Ido know. I'm Howard Cottrell. I'm a stock broker known to some of my colleagues as Howard the Conqueror.

Second voice (from just above my head): You're looking very pretty today, doc.

Fourth voice (female, and cool): It's always nice to be validated by you, Rusty. Could you hurry up a little? The babysitter expects me back by seven. She's committed to dinner with her parents.

Back by seven, back by seven. It's still the afternoon, maybe, or early evening, but black in here, black as your hat, black as a woodchuck's asshole, black as midnight in Persia, andwhat's going on? Where have I been? What have I been doing? Why haven't I been manning the phones?

Because it's Saturday, a voice from far down murmurs. You were were

A sound:WHOCK! A sound I love. A sound I more or less live for. The sound of what? The head of a golf-club, of course. Hitting a ball off the tee. I stand, watching it fly off into the blue

I'm grabbed, shoulders and calves, and lifted. It startles me terribly, and I try to scream. No sound comes out or perhaps one does, a tiny squeak, much tinier than the one produced by the wheel below me. Probably not even that. Probably it's just my imagination.

I'm swung through the air in an envelope of blackness Hey, don't drop me, I've got a bad back! I try to say, and again there's no movement of the lips or teeth; my tongue goes on lying on the floor of my mouth, the mole maybe not just stunned but dead, and now I have a terrible thought, one which spikes fright a degree closer to panic: what if they put me down the wrong way and my tongue slides backward and blocks my windpipe? I won't be able to breathe! That's what people mean when they say someone swallowed his tongue, isn't it?

Second voice (Rusty): You'll like this one, doc, he looks like Michael Bolton.

Female doc: Who's that?

Third voice sounds like a young man, not much more than a teenager: He's this white lounge-singer who wants to be black. I don't think this is him.

There's laughter at that, the female voice joining in (a little doubtfully), and as I am set down on what feels like a padded table, Rusty starts some new crack he's got a whole standup routine, it seems. I lose this bit of hilarity in a burst of sudden horror. I won't be able to breathe if my tongue blocks my windpipe, that's the thought which has just gone through my mind, but what if I'm not breathing now?

What if I'm dead? What if this is what death is like?

It fits. It fits everything with a horrid prophylactic snugness. The dark. The rubbery smell. Nowadays I am Howard the Conqueror, stock brokerextraordinaire, terror of Derry Municipal Country Club, frequenthabituT of what is known at golf courses all over the world as The Nineteenth Hole, but in'71 I was part of a Medical Assistance Team in the Mekong Delta, a scared kid who sometimes woke up wet-eyed from dreams of the family dog, and all at once I know this feel, this smell.

Dear God, I'm in a bodybag.

First voice: Want to sign this, doc? Remember to bear down hard it's three copies.

Sound of a pen, scraping away on paper. I imagine the owner of the first voice holding out a clipboard to the woman doctor.

Oh dear Jesus let me not be dead! I try to scream, and nothing comes out.

I'm breathing though aren't I? I mean, I can't feel myself doing it, butmy lungs seem okay, they're not throbbing or yelling for air the way they do when you've swum too far underwater, so I must be okay, right?

Except if you're dead, the deep voice murmurs, they wouldn'tbe crying out for air, would they? No because dead lungs don't need to breathe. Dead lungs can just kind of take it easy.

Rusty: What are you doing next Saturday night, doc?

But if I'm dead, how can Ifeel?How can I smell the bag I'm in? How can I hear these voices, the doc now saying that next Saturday night she's going to be shampooing her dog which is named Rusty, what a coincidence, and all of them laughing? If I'm dead, why aren't I either gone or in the white light they're always talking about on Oprah?

There's a harsh ripping sound and all at once Iam in white light; it is blinding, like the sun breaking through a scrim of clouds on a winter day. I try to squint my eyes shut against it, but nothing happens. My eyelids are like blinds on broken rollers.

A face bends over me, blocking off part of the glare, which comes not from some dazzling astral plane but from a bank of overhead fluorescents. The face belongs to a young, conventionally handsome man of about twenty-five; he looks like one of those beach beefcakes onBaywatch orMelrose Place. Marginally smarter, though. He's got a lot of dark black hair under a carelessly worn surgical-greens cap. He's wearing the tunic, too. His eyes are cobalt blue, the sort of eyes girls reputedly die for. There are dusty arcs of freckles high up on his cheekbones.

Hey, gosh, he says. It's the third voice. This guydoes look like Michael Bolton! A little long in the old tootharoo; maybe He leans closer. One of the flat tie-ribbons at the neck of his greens tunic tickles against my forehead. but yeah. I see it. Hey, Michael, sing something.

Help me! is what I'mtrying to sing, but I can only look up into his dark blue eyes with my frozen dead man's stare; I can only wonder if Iam a dead man, if this is how it happens, if this is whateveryone goes through after the pump quits. If I'm still alive, how come he hasn't seen my pupils contract when the light hit them? But I know the answer to that or I think I do. Theydidn't contract. That's why the glare from the fluorescents is so painful.

The tie, tickling across my forehead like a feather.

Help me! I scream up at theBaywatch beefcake, who is probably an intern or maybe just a med-school brat. Help me, please!

My lips don't even quiver.

The face moves back, the tie stops tickling, and all that white light streams through my helpless-to-look-away eyes and into my brain. It's a hellish feeling, a kind of rape. I'll go blind if I have to stare into it for long, I think, and blindness will be a relief.

WHOCK! The sound of the driver hitting the ball, but a little flat this time, and the feeling in the hands is bad. The ball's up but veering veering off veering toward

Shit.

I'm in the rough.

Now another face bends into my field of vision. A white tunic instead of a green one below it, a great untidy mop of orange hair above it. Distress-sale IQ is my first impression. It can only be Rusty. He's wearing a big dumb grin that I think of as a high-school grin, the grin of a kid who should have a tattoo reading BORN TO SNAP BRA-STRAPS on one wasted bicep.

Michael! Rusty exclaims. Jeez, ya lookin gooood! This'z an honor! Sing for us, big boy! Sing your dead ass off!

From somewhere behind me comes the doc's voice, cool, no longer even pretending to be amused by these antics. Quit it, Rusty. Then, in a slightly new direction: What's the story, Mike?

Mike's voice is the first voice Rusty's partner. He sounds slightly embarrassed to be working with a guy who wants to be Andrew Dice Clay when he grows up. Found him on the fourteenth hole at Derry Muni. Off the course, actually, in the rough. If he hadn't just played through the foursome behind him, and if they hadn't seen one of his legs stickin out of the pucker brush, he'd be an ant-farm by now.

I hear that sound in my head again WHOCK! only this time it is followed by another, far less pleasant sound: the rustle of underbrush as I sweep it with the head of my driver. Itwould have to be fourteen, where there is reputedly poison ivy. Poison ivy and

Rusty is still peering down at me, stupid and avid. It's not death that interests him; it's my resemblance to Michael Bolton. Oh yes, I know about it, have not been above using it with certain female clients. Otherwise, it gets old in a hurry. And in these circumstances

God.

Attending physician? the lady doc asks. Was it Kazalian?

No, Mike says, and for just a moment he looks down at me. Older than Rusty by at least ten years. Black hair with flecks of gray in it. Spectacles. How come none of these people can see that I am not dead? There was a doc in the foursome that found him, actually. That's his signature on page one see?

Riffle of paper, then: Christ, Jennings. I know him. He gave Noah his physical after the ark grounded on Mount Ararat.

Rusty doesn't look as if he gets the joke, but he brays laughter into my face anyway. I can smell onions on his breath, a little leftover lunchstink, and if I can smell onions, I must be breathing. Imust be, right? If only

Before I can finish this thought, Rusty leans even closer and I feel a blast of hope. He's seen something! He's seen something and means to give me mouth-to-mouth. God bless you, Rusty! God bless you and your onion breath!

But the stupid grin doesn't change, and instead of putting his mouth on mine, his hand slips around my jaw. Now he's grasping one side with his thumb and the other side with his fingers.

He'salive! Rusty cries. He'salive, and he's gonna sing for the Room Four Michael Bolton Fan Club!

His fingers pinch tighter it hurts in a distant coming-out-of the Novocain way and begin to move my jaw up and down, clicking my teeth together. If she's ba-aaad, he can't see it, Rusty sings in a hideous, atonal voice that would probably make Percy Sledge's head explode. She can do no rrr-ongggg My teeth open and close at the rough urging of his hand; my tongue rises and falls like a dead dog riding the surface of an uneasy waterbed.