Peaceable Kingdom by Jack Ketchum
Inside the ambulance he began to bleed heavily and the attendant sitting inside across from him couldn’t seem to find any tissues nor anything for him to bleed into. Eventually he came up with a long plastic bag that looked like a heavier grade of Zip-loc which he had to hold open with one hand while dealing with his leaking nose with the other. A small box of tissues was located and placed in his lap. When one wad of tissues filled with blood he would hurriedly shove it into the bag and pull more from the box, his nose held low into the bag to prevent him from bleeding all over his khaki shorts. The attendant did nothing further to help him after finding him the bag and tissues. This was not the way it happened on ER or Chicago Hope.
The emergency room was reassuringly clean and, at five in the morning, nearly deserted but for him and a skeleton staff. They did not insist he sign in. Instead a chubby nurse’s aide stood in front of him with a clipboard taking down the pertinent information, leaving him to deal with his nose, replacing the half-full Zip-loc bag with a succession of pink plastic kidney-shaped vomit bowls but otherwise treating him as though it were ninety-nine percent certain he had AIDS.
He didn’t mind. As long as the pink plastic bowls kept coming and the tissues were handy.
He was beginning to feel light-headed. He supposed it was loss of blood. He couldn’t remember Annie’s address though he’d written her from his New York apartment countless times in the past four years since she’d moved away and knew her address—quite literally—by heart. He couldn’t remember his social security number either. The nurse’s aide had to dig into his back pocket to get his wallet. The card was in there along with his insurance card. He couldn’t do it for her because his hands, now covered with brown dried blood, were occupied trying to stop fresh red blood from flowing.
The ER doctor was also half his age, oriental, handsome and built like a swimmer with wide shoulders and a narrow waist, like the rest of the staff quite friendly and cheerful at this ungodly hour but unlike them seemingly unafraid to touch him even after, having swallowed so much of his own blood, he vomited much of it back into one of the pink plastic bowls. He asked Alan if he was taking any drugs. And that was when he learned about the blood-thinning properties of aspirin. He thought that at least he was probably not going to have a heart attack. He supposed it was something.
The doctor used a kind of suction device to suck blood from each of his nostrils into a tube trying to clear them but that didn’t work which Alan could have told him, there was far too much to replace it with, so he packed him with what he called pledgets, which looked like a pair of tampons mounted on sticks, shoved them high and deep into the nasal cavities and told him to wait and see if they managed to stop the bleeding.
Miraculously, they did.
Half an hour later they released him. He phoned Annie and she drove him back to the condo and he washed his hands and face and changed his clothes and they each went back to bed.
He woke needing to use the toilet and found that both his shit and piss had turned black. A tiny black droplet clung to his penis. He shook it off. He supposed he’d learned something—a vampire’s shit and urine would always be black. He wondered if Anne Rice could find a way to make this glamourous.
The second time he woke he was bleeding again. He squeezed at the pledgets as he’d been told to do should this occur but the bleeding wouldn’t stop. He roused Ann and this time she insisted on driving him to the hospital herself, handing him her own newly opened box of Puffs to place in his lap. Upstairs David continued to sleep his heavy adolescent sleep. It was just as well. The boy was only fond of blood in horror movies.
The chubby nurse’s aide was gone when he arrived but the pink plastic bowls were there and he used them, sat in the same room he’d left only hours before while his doctor, the swimmer, summoned an Ear Nose and Throat man who arrived shortly after he’d sent Annie back home.
By now he felt weak as a newborn colt, rubber-legged and woozy. It seemed he needed to grow a new pair of hands to juggle his kidney-shaped pan, eyeglasses, tissues and tissue boxes, all the while holding his nose and spitting, vomiting, dripping and swallowing blood at intervals.
He felt vaguely ridiculous, amused. A bloody nose for chrissake.
What he felt next was pain that lasted quite a while as the ENT man—another healthy Florida specimen, a young Irishman who arrived in pleated shorts and polo shirt—withdrew the pledgets and peered into his nose with a long thin tubular lighted microsope, determined that it was only from the right nostril that he was actually bleeding, and then repacked it with so much stuff that by the time it was finished he felt like a small dog had crawled up and died in there.
A half-inch square accordion-type gauze ribbon coated in Vaseline, four feet of it folded back-to-back compacted tight into itself and pushed in deep. In front of that another tampon-like pledget, this one removable by means of a string. In front of that something called a Foley catheter which inflated like a balloon. Another four feet of folded ribbon. Another pledget.
He had no idea there was so much room inside his face.
The man was hearty but not gentle.
He was given drugs against the pain and possible infection and put into a wheelchair and wheeled into an elevator and settled into a hospital bed for forty-eight hours’ observation. Once again a nurse had to find and read his insurance and social security cards. The drugs had kicked in by then and so had the loss of blood. He didn’t even know where his wallet was though he suspected it was in its usual place, his back pocket.
The bed next to him was empty. The ward, quiet.
He slept.
He awoke sneezing, coughing blood, a bright stunning spray across the sheets—it could not get out his nose so instead it was sliding down his throat again, his very heartbeat betraying him, pulsing thin curtains, washes of blood over his pharynx, larynx, down into his trachea. He gagged and reached for bowl at the table by the bed and vomited violently, blood and bile, something thick in the back of his throat remaining gagging him, something thick and solid like a heavy ball of mucus making him want to puke again so he reached into his mouth to clear it, reached in with thumb and forefinger and grasped it, slippery and sodden, and pulled.
And at first he couldn’t understand what it was but it was long, taut, and would not part company with his throat so he pulled again until it was out of his mouth and he could see the thing, and then he couldn’t believe what he’d done, that it was even possible to do this thing but he had it between his fingers, he was staring at it covered with slime and blood, nearly a foot and a half of the accordion ribbon packed inside his nose. He’d sneezed it out or caughed it out through his pharynx and now he was holding it like a tiny extra-long tongue and it continued to gag him so he reached for the call-button and pushed and fought the urge to vomit, waiting.
“What in the world have you done?”
It was the pretty nurse, a strong young blonde with a wedding ring, the one who’d admitted him and got him into bed. She looked as though she didn’t know whether to be shocked or angry or amused with him.
“Damned if I know,” he said around the ribbon. Aaand ithh eye-o.
He vomited again. There was a lot of it this time.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “I’m going to call your doctor. He may have to cauterize whatever’s bleeding up in there. I’ll get some scissors meantime, snip that back for you, okay?”
He nodded and then sat there holding the thing. He shook his head. A goddamn bloody nose.
It occured to him much later that an operation followed by a hospital stay under heavy medication combined with heavy loss of blood was a lot like drifting through a thick fetal sea from which you occasionally surfaced to glimpse fuzzy snatches of sky. In his younger days he’d dropped acid while floating in the warm Aegean and there were similarities. He awoke to orderlies serving food and nurses taking his blood pressure and handing him paper cups of medication. None of it grounded him for long. Mostly he slept and dreamed.
There was something ultimately lonely, he thought, about the process of healing. Nobody could really help you. All they could do was be reasonably attentive to your needs. He began to look forward to his momentary visits from the pretty blonde nurse because of all the hospital staff she seemed the wittiest and most cheerful and he liked her Southern accent, but ultimately he was completely alone in this. He’d told Annie not to call for a while after her first phone call woke him, he was fine but he was not up to conversation yet. And that felt lonely too.
When the black man with the haunted eyes appeared in the bed beside him by the window he was not really surprised. He assumed a lot went on in his room that he wasn’t aware of. He’d looked over at the window to see if it was day or night because as usual he had no idea, no concept of time whatsoever, and there he was lying flat on his back and covered to the chin, hooked up to some sort of monitor and an elaborate IV device of tubes and wires much different from his own, his face thin to emaciation, drawn and grey in the moonlight, eyes open wide and focused in his direction but, Alan thought, not seeing him, or seeing through him—and this he proved with a smile and a nod into the man’s wide unblinking gaze.
Possibly some sort of brain damage, he thought, poor guy, knowing somehow that this man’s loneliness far exceeded his own, and moments later forgot him and returned to sleep.
Imagine the seats on a slowly moving ferris wheel, only the seats are perfectly stable, they don’t rock back in forth as the seats on a ferris wheel do, they remain perfectly steady, and then imagine that they are not seats at all but a set of flat gleaming slabs of thick heavy highly polished glass or metal or even wood, dark, so that it is impossible to tell which—and now imagine that there is no wheel—nothing whatever holding them together but the slow steady measured glide itself and that each is the size and shape of a closet door laid flat, and that there are not only one set but countless sets, intricately moving in and out and past each other, almost but never quite touching, so that you can step up or down or to the side on any of them without ever once losing your footing.
It is like dancing. It gets you nowhere. But it’s pleasurable.
That was what he dreamed.
He was alone in the dream for quite a while, until Annie appeared, a younger Annie, looking much the same as she did the day he met her sitting across from him on the plane from L.A. with her two-year-old son beside her over a dozen years ago. Her hair was short as it was then as was her skirt and she was stepping toward him in a roundabout way, one step forward and one to the side, drifting over and under him and he wasn’t even sure she was aware of his presence, it was as though he were invisible, because she never looked directly at him until she turned and said, you left us nowhere, you know that? which was not an accusation but merely a statement of fact and he nodded and began to cry because of course it was true, aside from these infrequent visits and the phone calls and letters he had come unstuck from them somehow, let them fend for themselves alone.
He woke and saw the black man standing in the doorway, peering out into the corridor, turning his head slowly as though searching for someone with those wide empty eyes and he thought for a moment that the man should not be out of bed, not with all those wires and tubes still attached to him reaching all the way across the room past the foot of his own bed but then heard movement to the other side of the darkened room and turned to see the form of a small squat woman who appeared to be adjusting the instruments, doing something to the instruments, a nurse or a nurse’s aide he supposed so he guessed it was all right for the man to be there. He looked back at him in the doorway and closed his eyes, trying but failing to find his way back into the dream, wanting to explain to Annie the inexplicable.
It was almost dawn when the arm woke him.
He had all but forgotten about the arm, the inflamed swollen tendon that had started him on aspirin and landed him here in the first place. The drugs had masked that pain too. Now the arm jerked him suddenly concious, jerked hard twice down along his side as though some sort of electric shock had animated it, something beyond his will or perhaps inside his dream, needles of pain from the elbow rising above the constant throbbing wound inside his face.
He guessed more drugs were in order.
He was hurting himself here.
He pressed the call button and waited for the voice on the intercom.
“Yes? What can I do for you?”
“I need a shot or a pill or something.”
“Pain?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll tell your nurse.”
They were fast, he gave them that. The pretty blond nurse was beside him almost instantly, or perhaps despite his pain he’d drifted, he didn’t know. She offered him a paper cup with two bright blue pills inside.
“You hurt yourself awake, did you?”
“I guess. Yeah, my arm.”
“Your arm?”
“Tennis elbow. Didn’t even get to play tennis. Did it in a gym over a month ago.”
She shook her head, smiling, while he took the pill and a sip of water. “You’re not having a real good holiday, are you?”
“Not really, no.”
She patted his shoulder. “You’ll sleep for a while now.”
When she was gone he lay there waiting for the pain to recede, trying to relax so that he could sleep again. He turned and saw the black man staring at him as before, and saw that the man now nestled in a thicket of tubes and wires, connected to each of his arms, running under the bedcovers to his legs, another perhaps a catheter, two more patched to his collarbones, one running to his nose and the thickest of them into his half-open mouth. Behind him lights on a tall wide panel glowed red and blue in the dark.
By morning it was gone. All of it. Alan was lying on his side so that the empty bed and the empty space behind it and the light spilling in from the window were the first things he noticed.
The next thing was the smell of eggs and bacon. He did his best by the food set in front of him though it was tasteless and none too warm and the toast was hard and dry. He drank his juice and tea. When the nurse came in with his pills—a new nurse, middle-aged, black and heavy-waisted, one he’d never seen—he asked her about the man in the bed beside him.
“Nobody beside you,” she said.
“What?”
“You been all alone here. I just came on but first thing I did was check the charts. Always do. Procedure. You’re lucky it’s summer-time, with all the snowbirds gone, or we’d be up to our ears here. You got the place all to yourself.”
“That’s impossible. I saw this guy three times, twice in the bed and once standing right there in the doorway. He looked terrible. He was hooked up to all kinds of tubes, instruments.”
“ ’Fraid you were dreaming. You take a little pain-killer, you take a little imagination, mix and stir. Happens all the time.”
“I’m an appellate lawyer. I don’t have an imagination.”
She smiled. “You were all alone, sir, all night long. I swear.”
Some sort of mix-up with the charts, he thought. The man had been there. He wasn’t delusional. He knew the difference between dreams and reality. For now the dreams were the more vivid of the two. It was still one way to tell them apart.
Wait till the shift changes, he thought. Ask the other nurse, the blonde. She’d given him a pill last night. The black man had been there. And he was on her watch.
He dreamed and drifted all day long. Sometime during the afternoon Annie and David came by to visit and he told David about coughing up the accordion ribbon and what he’d learned about the color of a vampire’s shit
“Sure,” she said. “I remember. You hurt yourself awake.”
“You remember the guy in the bed beside me?”
“Who?”
“The black man. I don’t know what was wrong with him but he looked pretty bad.”
“You know what your doctor’s giving you for pain?”