Unkiss Me (9 page)

Mesa Samaritan was set up in pods.
Four pods: A, B, C, and D on each of the twelve patient floors. Each floor had its own theme, not unlike Disneyland: ICU, Post-Op, Cardio-Vascular, Peds, Ortho, Rehab, Neuro-Intensive Care (not to be confused with Neo-Natal Intensive Care—both claiming NICU as an acronym), Renal, Cancer, OBGYN, and Rich. Rich was the floor reserved for wealthy and/or famous patients. Nixon had been here once, it was rumored, as had Goldwater, Reagan, Johnny Carson, and even, God love her, Vanna. The gossip with Vanna: she suffered from menopausal bloatation. Her chart read: hormonal imbalance, but there was much ruling out during her stay. Tumors, for instance, and various viruses.

Rachel worked Rich during Vanna’s stay, before she’d proved too good at her job and was subsequently promoted to the dietetic challenges, renal and cancer.
Vanna’s hospitalization had coincided with Rachel’s step aerobic/anorexic phase, before all this business with speed and Doctor Rudy. Vanna had been NPO, however: no food, no menus, nothing from the kitchen, and Rachel’s contact with the icon had been nonexistent. Abraham got a nice peek though. An orderly had taken ten bucks from each of the Soiled Process crew for wheeling Vanna downstairs for her scope via laundry, waste and autoclave. Abraham had a front row seat, and, he’d let his wife know, the gowned goddess had a bit of a protruding tummy. In fact, with her highlighted hair hidden under a plastic cap, her face free of make-up, she resembled, pretty much, any other menopausal matron.

Rachel now worked the floors where a misplaced banana or a microbe-laden lettuce leaf could result in the word EXPIRED, hospital euphemism for DIED, to be stamped on the front of a patient’s chart.
Rachel could handle a twenty-gram protein, two-gram sodium, two-gram potassium tray with her eyes closed. No chocolate, no salt packet, no bananas, no orange juice, no potatoes, no tomatoes, no ham. Lo-pro bread, strawberries, one ounce baked turkey, a lettuce salad with lo-salt dressing, cranberry juice and a dozen sugar-free suckers. The standard meal for someone dying of kidney disease.

And up on cancer, pushing calories.
Ice cream and Ensure and milkshakes. Cake and fried chicken, and gravy, gravy, gravy and nothing fresh. Everything laden with preservatives and antibiotics and germicide. A war on life. Abraham pictured his wife sitting in her caster-bottomed chair, correcting menus, her packet of crank safely tucked into the top drawer of her desk. Hope, actually, was what Rachel specialized in. Her job was rife with hope. His own job though, his job was chock full of reality. The sticks and stones of the business.

Abraham began his day by sopping up a spill in radiology.

His wrinkled tunic now smeared with human detritus, Abraham stood waiting for Rachel by the clay statue of the Mesa Samaritan and the Cripple. The Mesa Samaritan, bulging biceps and Aryan features, towered over a figure that looked only part human: a droopy soul bent over a crutch, draped in rags. All around the statue were hibiscus shrubs; their startlingly sexual flowers, vibrant and red, reminded Abraham of feminine protection advertisements. He took in a lungful of Camel cigarette as his enthusiastic wife sauntered up to him.

“Hey,” Abraham said, out of the corner of his mouth.

“Jesus, Abe,” Rachel said, brushing her delicate fingers against his cheek as she yanked the fag from his lips. “We’re not smoking these things anymore, remember?”

She took a long drag, a bong-like inhale, holding the smoke in her chest—which now puffed out like that of a proud bird—and then dashed the Camel to the cracked cement beneath the benevolent Samaritan.

The walk home was, this time of year, thirty to forty degrees warmer than the walk to work. Mid-afternoon desert sun blanked out pieces of the landscape like a cataract. The dust from Rachel and Abraham’s footprints hovered around their feet in one, long smoky cloud. There was no shade on their pedestrian commute, not one single palm frond of shade between Mesa Sam and the grouping of cacti that embellished the front gate of their condominium complex. Abraham watched the back of his wife grow further from him as they neared the condo, her long stride kicking in; a thoroughbred at the home stretch.

The condominium complex overlooked the parking lot of an Arby’s.
On rare, smogless days Abraham could just barely make out the Superstition Mountains above the large cowboy hat sign when he peeled back the metal mini blinds. Rachel liked keeping the thermostat set at 65 degrees whether they were home or not. The icebox feel of it, she’d told Abraham, reminded her of working at Howard Johnson’s and sneaking into the walk-in freezer to pick almonds out of five-gallon cartons of fudge nut ice cream. This memory made her hot, she’d told Abraham, as did all stealth these days. Goosebumps raised immediately on Rachel’s bare arms as they crossed the threshold from desert to cave. Abraham’s eye’s felt vacuumed from their sockets. Sweaty patches of forehead contracted, his pores sealing like a Zip-loc baggie. It felt like a slap, actually. An assault. He watched his wife spread her arms out, dropping her purse with a thud on the Berber carpet.

Abraham pushed down the lever of the PureMountain cooler in their tiny galley kitchen, and filled two tall glasses with water.
Rachel extracted the shrink-wrapped bag of methamphetamine from her purse and slapped it on the tile bar that separated kitchen from living room.

“Speed kills is the answer,” she said.
“What’s the question?”

“Why did the chicken screw in the light bulb?” he asked.

“No.”

“Orange you glad I didn’t say root beer?”

“No.”

“How many blondes does it
take to walk across the road?”
“Close,” Rachel said.

Abraham loved his wife.
Loved her wit, her mania; he loved her convincing stabs at optimism. He’d been hooked from the day they met in one of Mesa Sam’s freight elevators—he was on a break, the Republic tucked under his arm, a pack of Camels in his breast pocket—and she remarked on the flecks of gold in his brown eyes.

“That’s a sign of good fortune, you know,” she’d said to him.
“You’ll be rich some day.”

“Cheers,” Abraham said now, now that he had realized this “good fortune” in the form of Rachel-as-Wife.
He handed Rachel the glass of water, and with that, they began their weekend, which soon included cabernet, goat cheese, Ritz crackers and crank.

Rachel set the paraphernalia up on the coffee table between the three-piece sectional and “Wheel of Fortune” on the wide-screen.
Rachel’s cheeks were flushed—her eyebrows in permanent raise, half-hidden by wispy bangs. Her tapered fingers slowly played against the edge of the shrink-wrapped package. She was whistling along with Bob Barker, who had just remarked on the magnitude of a speed boat display. The woman who’d replaced Vanna White tilted over the cumbersome motor in a lateral yoga posture.

Always during these anticipatory moments, Abraham revisited a childhood birthday party where a clown was supposed to show up and do tricks after the cake and ice cream.
The pin-the-tail game, musical chairs, even opening the presents prove a blank in Abraham’s memory, eclipsed by the wait for the clown, and then when the clown did arrive: the knock at the door, his mother whooshing off to answer it, there stood a plain man with a duffel bag. He’d come from his son’s t-ball game, the plain man said, and was there a place he could change into his stuff? The whole time the clown performed for his guests Abraham saw only a regular man, someone’s dad, acting like a weirdo. This memory was what Abraham meditated on before any potentially exciting event. The point was to diminish expectation. The point was to set yourself up for less than.

Rachel clearly had never had a bad clown experience.
Rachel’s strategy was to delay gratification just a little, increase the tension, guzzle a liter or two of water—because you always forget about dehydration when you’re getting off—and approach the starting box knowing you’re going to win the race. Abraham stroked his wife’s staticky hair; a few strands sucked themselves against his palm. Rachel leaned forward and yelled, “Buy a vowel!” at an obese man in a jogging outfit.

Rachel chopped the lines on top of her dead grandparents.
A sepia-toned studio formal taken when the German couple first married. Abraham snorted from a button-up boot to the top of a velvet-backed settee. Rachel’s line sliced her Opa in half vertically, the way her doting grandfather had once taught her to quarter a hen. To gut a fish. These childhood anecdotes were jewels. Rachel’s rare gifts to Abraham. “The way you can tell if a pineapple’s ripe,” she once whispered to her husband, “pull the center frond. It should yank out effortlessly.”

The experience began with a tingle felt just beneath the scalp.
For Abraham, the tingle was in the middle of his bald spot. For Rachel it was more toward the frontal lobe. Wheel of Fortune had become a baseball game. The television began to thrum. Rachel put on some music. Talking Heads. Simple Minds. Abraham chuckled at the cerebral theme, but when he tried to share the joke with Rachel, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the distance between thought and speech.

Rachel’s magazines—Elle, Vogue, W—were scattered about the coffee table next to the drug-fest: European models wearing scant, expensive outfits.
Rachel grabbed the lot of them, stood up, and paced the living room flipping through the glossy spreads. She held up a double page featuring an exotic one-name model whose thighs ran the length of Rachel’s index finger. “Who’s sexier?” she asked her husband. “Me or her?”

Despite Abraham’s guarded expectation, his dick began to stiffen.
Rachel’s intoxicated identification with leggy models had proven, over the years, to be a prelude to passionate, tormented sex. Even the clown scenario couldn’t negotiate away Abraham’s Pavlovian libido. The problem was though, try as he might to engage the animal in himself: the cock, the balls, the desire to beat his chest, Abraham could not stifle that brain of his. The need to analyze, compartmentalize and suffer while he fucked his wife on their three-piece-no-interest-for-four-more-months sectional.

As he entered her, his dick slicing along the crack of her ass, his hands slipped under her tunic, cupping her large areolas, her stubby nipples, his left cheek riding the sharp bones of her shoulder, he thought about Doctor Rudy.
He thought about the fact that Rachel was, undoubtedly, thinking about Doctor Rudy. It was as if Doctor Rudy was there on the sofa with them—his annoying ponytail and Birkenstocks, his smarmy self-assurance. As Abraham came, he shouted, “Fuck you!” into the frigid air.

Rachel collapsed underneath him.
His heartbeat, her heartbeat. All of it much too quick. Rachel squirmed out from under him, yanking her uniform tunic down over her bony ass, brushing couch lint off her shoulder. This was Rachel becoming Rachel again. Clown performance over, back into the dad outfit. Soon she would pick up her panties and cart them off to the white-clothes hamper and spend the rest of the night cleaning a closet or alphabetizing the compact discs or, God forbid, steam cleaning the carpet with her Bissell cleaner, her Germanic upbringing swung—with the meth—into high gear.

Meanwhile, Abraham would zip up his fly and channel surf away the rest of the speed, scratching his scalp and crotch.
Pacing occasionally. Morning would hammer down, and Abraham would clatter the mini-blinds open. Maybe he would see the Superstitions and the Kool-Aid sunrise, or maybe he wouldn’t, maybe he’d just look over the Arby’s dumpster, the amoebic garbage bags heaped one on top the other. Soiled process. His life’s work.

~

The cafeteria at Mesa Sam was a warm, nourishing place. Orange plastic chairs paired with purple laminate tables were plopped down in clusters. A large cartoon broccoli loomed from the opposite wall. A quart of milk with arms and legs jogged alongside it. In the far corner, a cheeseburger licked its own bun.

It was Monday, lunchtime, and Abraham positioned himself at a table behind the salad bar.
The clock nailed to the center of a painted moon declared quarter past noon. He watched his wife glide by, scanning the room while balancing her tray of lettuce and diet coke on her fingertips. He watched her as she locked her eyes on Doctor Rudy, who sat near a window, half of his face illuminated by the god-awful desert sun and the other half in the shadow of cafeteria fluorescence. There was paperwork in front of the doctor. Mounds of it.

Rachel had lost weight and it was most apparent in her limbs.
She looked spindly, haggard. Abraham watched his wife go tables out of her way to avoid contact with the patient visitors who spilled out the edges of their orange chairs. The telltale catatonic stirring of their Styrofoam cups of coffee as they stared out at dead air.

Abraham’s wife approached Doctor Rudy’s pony-tailed head.
The good doctor remained bent over his papers, the small bundle at the nape of his neck like a feeding slug. Rachel stood in front of him. Doctor Rudy did not pick up his head. He was blowing her off. Abraham smiled, initially, until he watched his wife’s hungry face. Watched her rattle the items on her tray the way a dog might nose an empty food dish.

He would need to love her tonight, hold her as she shuddered with ineffable disappointment.
He wished he could stop himself from the sudden elevation of spirit that threatened to make him hopeful. No doubt, there would be another Doctor Rudy, and it was this thought he carried with him into the hose room, where he ended his shifts.