Chapter One.
The doctor’s habit is to hold his hand in front of his face
when he’s delivering bad news. He looks like he’s about to
cough but he’s about to tell you that he saw a shadow in your
lungs. “That’s a great metaphor,” you don’t say. You don’t say,
“Wow, and then what happened?” He’s not that kind of doctor.
You probably need a new doctor, one with a literary sensibility,
the hell with how he did in med school. You take notes in your
private shorthand while wondering what part of town they keep
those doctors in.
and out of nowhere it dawns on you that blossoms are fruit
Chapter Two.
The Man Who’s Sometimes There asks you if you need anything.
This is a signal he’s about to not be there for a while. He needs
something to bring back with him when he returns. “Something to read,”
you tell him. The Man looks worried. He doesn’t understand what
you like to read. You can’t blame him, you don’t really understand
either. Now that you think of it, you don’t even want anything to read.
Reading makes you feel like throwing up. You tell him to bring pudding,
because he loves pudding. Then you lie on the couch for six hours not
reading. It’s the only thing you can think of to do.
all summer all the voices on the radio
Chapter Three.
Each Thursday from two to five, while tethered to the most insidiously
comfortable chair in the world, you spend way too long wondering
things: whether the cactus in the waiting room is real, whether your
brain will survive being poisoned, whether the nurse with the blue
fingernails would ever be your friend. Is there some kind of
professional taboo against that? What does the nurse with the blue
fingernails do with her friends? You suspect it’s something lighthearted
and wonder whether you could ever hack that. You go to sleep and
wonder things in your dreams, things too vague and terrifying and
beautiful to put into words, and when you wake up the nurse with the
blue fingernails is laughing at you. Or no, wait, she’s just laughing at
something the other nurse said, but it’s too late, you kind of hate
the blue-fingernailed nurse now. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
a sharp distinction between apples and alone
Chapter Four.
The new doctor, who by now is the old doctor, asks you if you saw
that new Haruki Murakami book that’s more pictures than words.
The new doctor’s got you wrapped around his little finger. That’s a
great metaphor, you don’t tell yourself. You only ever read anymore
to have something to talk about with the new doctor. You say
something about Haruki Murakami that only makes sense to somebody
with a poisoned brain and the new doctor nods the way he nods
when you’re being crazy. I’m not sure, he says, that it was a very
successful experiment. He looks at the computer where he stores
everything he knows about you and sighs, and frowns, and opens his
mouth to speak again. Opens his mouth and says some words, but
words are just words to you now. What’s real out in the waiting room?
What will someone bring you next?
listening very closely to frostbite
Red Dragonfly 