ASCLEPEION

by Sam Cooper

C₁₇H₁₇CL₂N

The hospital lights are bright but not unpleasant, not like real hospital lights are. I am in a glass room at the center of a nest of corridors, and these corridors are lined with doors, which are all closed. The room I am in is for family and friends. No one else is there with me. The walls are glass and so is the door and the door closes with a swish when I enter it (this all starts with me entering the room), and then the room is still and airtight and mostly soundless.

My friend is dead. I can feel it in my body.

She died a few minutes ago and there was nothing the doctors could do. I do not know what she died of. I do not know if someone told me or if I intuited it—some change bodily or atmospheric? I don’t know. All I know is that now I can feel it, her death. Other people I know are in the hospital but not in the room with me and I think I can hear them crying and screaming. I myself start to cry. More like sob. The sound I make is sob sob sob, choking on my own tongue and vomiting up grief. My eyes squeeze shut and I can no longer stand. I fall to the floor and sob. There is a chair next to me, part of a grouping of furniture made of steel tubing and thin upholstered foam, and I try to support myself on it and pull myself up a little bit, but I end up sliding back down to my knees and then onto my side, and I feel my ribs press against the linoleum of the floor and hurt every time I inhale. I inhale hugely, masochistically. After a while the pain is too great and has replaced sorrow as fuel for my tears. I feel I am suffocating. Although I am shaking, and can’t feel my knees or any other joints for that matter, I somehow manage to rise. My eyes are still blurred with crying, but I look around. The swishing glass door has disappeared from, melted into the glass walls. I wonder why I am not worried. In a glass corner a coffee machine I did not see before switches on. Beyond the glass walls there are people walking, mostly in vague shadow. I wish they could not see me. I wish someone would see me. Maybe the glass is tinted. I know this to be untrue. My tears stop and suddenly my cheeks are dry and eyes clear. My throat burns as it gulps the coffee-scented air into my swollen lungs.

There is a chair in another one of the glass corners. On this chair is my dead friend’s backpack, colorless and shapeless. I cross to it, my chest the only part of me I can feel, hurting. I reach out a mechanical hand and touch it. The canvas is warm. I pinch the tab of the zipper and pull it up and over the tracked peak of the pack, and wrench the sides apart. The pack gapes. Inside are binders, folders, envelopes. In a moment that goes faster than one clock second, I rifle through one binder and take a sheaf of papers. Her hand stains all of them. If I could recognize or remember her scent, I’m sure I would find it perfuming the bleached fibers. I fold the papers once and again. They go in my pocket. I think they will not be missed—their absence will not be noted; no one else knows exactly the contents of her backpack. No one living. If I am wrong, I will gladly return anything wanted. But there is no time to sort through them now, no time to worry; time has run out. I must carry them with me, incubated near my flesh, folded and safe next to my skin, because now there is need for haste. Although the door has not reappeared in the glass walls, and no passing shadows look in on me, I am suddenly in a great hurry.

C₁₈H₂₁NO₄

I fell from a great height onto a flat plane of broken glass the size of Wyoming. The shards were big, most of them easily the size of my leg (I saw as I fell closer), and triangular and wickedly pointed, and none of them fit together. They lay in a rough single layer, in some places overlapping and piled on each other like pressed leaves made of formed sugar. From a great height the ground looked like the ocean at sunset, for an unseen light like the sun shot oblique fiery rays across the shards like the they were tiny peaks of a calm sea. As I fell, slow and haltingly like a goose feather, I felt fear, yes, but also no fear. My clothes were linen and loose and pastel pill blue. I was falling facedown, arms crossed in front of my chest like a golden pharaoh, so that the air I cut through rushed into my hair and pushed it up, sculpting it jagged like a war headdress. In the far sparkling distance, something like a river ran glowing and hot through the plane of shards. I smelled mint and motor oil.

Eventually, sleepily, I drifted closer to the ground, and saw that at my own projected ground zero, the shards of glass were fogging up like a giant’s breath was blowing under them. My lazy descent turned into a straight drop. I put my arms up in front of my eyes and make a sound like a chandelier crashing when I hit the ground.

My eyes, squeezed shut at the moment of impact, fluttered open. The light around me was no longer carrot-orange and slanted, but now was dull and cool like slate, and diffused from above or below or maybe all around, I didn’t know. The glass under me, at least that directly in front of my eyes, was no longer fogged, but sharp and clear and shining and cold. I moved and felt a queer tugging, like my skin was too tight around my flesh. As I got to my knees, I felt heavier than I ever remembered being. I did not look down at myself, or at the glass surrounding me. Would not. Sounds like windchimes rippled away from me, maybe echoes of my impact. I looked up at the sky as I got up and found it close and silvery, and completely neutral—indifferent. I was standing. I looked down at myself.

Out of my arms and chest and legs stuck many shards of glass, each at least eight inches long, glittering and refracting the hazy light around its edges and reflecting my own face (curiously blank and ashen and taking some seconds for me to recognize as my own), and emitting a high wet-finger-on-wineglass tone. There was no pain. None at all. Only the tugging, the tightness, my skin stretched over alien angles. There was no blood. On the ground, which I now saw to be less like ground and more like membrane (…the feeling of something on the other side…and was that translucency I sensed?...), was a bare patch, a space completely devoid of glass, the exact dimensions of my person.

Without feeling, without thought, without opinion, I pulled at one of the shards in my right arm. It did not come out without a struggle. My skin stretched along with it, elastic and pale and distended and translucent (like the ground/membrane maybe was) where it clung to glass. When the shard finally drew out of my arm, he note it sung was silenced, and its point was covered not in blood, but in honey. There was no pain.

I started on the next one.

C₂H₆O

In space that’s empty

And blank like inside eggshells,

I stand motionless.

I take a few steps…

And no change in perspective…

All is as before.

My footsounds echo

Off unseen walls and hard floor

And return ringing,

And my breath is slow

And quiet, and the air crisp

And citrus clean.

There’s no horizon,

But my focus is drawn to

Where it might have been.

A dot like black dust,

Shimmering in the bright void

Like through waves of heat

(Though the air is cool),

Seems to be approaching fast,

Growing into shape.

Fear rises inside

My intestines, dread of the

Thing nearing, showing

Neat outline now and

Depth as well—I can see it’s

Not human but beast—

Revealing itself

And its terrible hairy

Carnivore nature.

Four legs and black coat,

Eyes gone or too dark too see,

And surely sharp teeth.

I turn to retreat

(Retreat to where I don’t know),

But feet won’t obey.

And the thing draws near.

I cannot look; its gait seems

Familiar to me,

Its trotting rhythm

Known already to my ears,

And I can only

Think that it is my

Own animal shadow come

To wreak some revenge

For an unknown sin.

On me and my trembling form

It now closes in.

Determined but stuck,

And brave now, I uncover my eyes

To face my demise…

And I find that this

Terrible, deadly creature

Is my own pet dog.

I call out her name,

The joy and relief a high

Crackle in my voice.

But she canters past,

As if she does not hear me,

Tongue flapping behind,

And she continues

Off and away until she

Disappears from sight,

A black dot where the

Opposite horizon would

Be if there was one.

How strange, I think, and remain standing motionless for some time.

C₂₁H₃₀O₂

Vowing to hold on to this feeling, we interwove hands and tried to wake up, closing our eyes tight and wishing hard.

When that didn’t work, we tried opening our eyes as far as possible, holding each other’s wide and watering with gentle fingers and apologizing all the while.

Still unsuccessful, we sought the solution with our heads, devising ways to test the difference between sleep and everything else.

We decided there was no way to tell.

When we kissed, we realized that we were already awake, because neither of us ever had any dreams this good.

And then woke up.

C₁₇H₁₇CL₂N

Fade in.

I lie in a narrow hospital bed, naked under a paper gown, goosebumped, a bad taste in my mouth, badly having to pee. I have liver cancer. I have found this out, although I cannot remember how. It is night and I am waiting for some news or maybe a test result or maybe something else. The TV that hangs in its heavyduty cradle near the ceiling is on, but displays only infomercials. I am alone. I feel fine.

A doctor comes in, patent leather shoes shrieking, and he sits earnestly on the edge of my tiny hospital bed and says he is a no-bullshit guy and is going to be onehundredpercent straight with me. He wears frameless glasses so that his eyes can communicate the lack of bullshit better. He is, as promised, straight:

The liver cancer cells somehow traversed the tunnels of my veins and have landed and metastasized in my left arm—a pink-beige tumor like expectorated bubblegum the size of a strawberry, nestled and comfortable between my radius and ulna, fleshy moorings wrapped around the bones and stretching with their movement, nudging muscle aside. It will kill me if untreated. It will grow and infect the cells around it and then eventually he rest of the cells in my body until I am wholly corrupted and beyond help and I die. But—!

It can be removed. I can ostensibly be cured of the tumor and liver cancer of the arm. But only through radical action.

The plan is outlined: surgical amputation just below the elbow, careful incisions and prying and pulling and eventual and hopefully neat removal of the malignancy, reattachment, future wellness on my part. There’s one catch—no general anesthetic for some reason (But, he promises, no bullshit, the Best Local that modern science can provide. I won’t feel a thing.)—but I don’t care; I’m weeping with perfect religious joy and nodding compulsively and signing any forms I can get within my grasp. And to think!—I felt fine.

Dissolve.

To me, the operating room is only a pair of bright halogen lamps (one aimed at my left arm, and the other, for some reason, pointed directly at my eyes, an oilslick rainbow halo around its bulb) and the fuzzy darkness beyond them. The surgical team arrives. Voices talk at me and I talk back. There is a sting in my arm and I look in time to see a needle withdraw from skin. Numb. It happens so fast. Too fast. No one asks if I am ready. I can only watch.

Arm strapped down. Head strapped down. Told to relax. Bonesaw started somewhere out of my sight, whining and whirring, then brought into the light and its blade is no blade but the blurred impression of one, and it descends and cuts through my arm like the limb is beeswax. The sound is indescribable. Sand glass rusty nails. The vibrations travel to and rest in my teeth. My forearm is severed. There is blood, but not much, and inside the arm seems hollow and dry. There it is, the ugly glistening fruit. Doctors huddle around and attack with scalpels and forceps and emerge victorious—the enemy held aloft in the solid grip of surgical weaponry. The arm is repositioned. My teeth still ring like bells. The divorced forearm is drawn by some magnetism to its parent flesh, and snaps in place. The joint steams and bubbles and meshes and mends, and the only evidence of the saw trauma is a dull brown ring. I faint while doctors pat each other on the back and grin through their seafoam masks.

Quick cut.

I am in a field—an empty field, once planted with corn. Now all that’s left is the stubble of stalks cut and harvested. There is mist on the ground, shroudlike and unmoving, indifferent to the movements of our feet—movie mist. I am with people I know to be my friends, but their faces are blurred and they are dressed in gray. The ring near my elbow remains and aches, how I imagine a hairline fracture would feel some days after injury, although I have never broken a bone. It swings and flexes like it always had before; mobility seems unlimited. But there is the ache again, and I know without thought that the ache will never fade, just like the faint ring will never fade. I am wearing a long heavy coat, which has no color. I wander, feet crunching down mummified cornstubs. Birds that are like and unlike crows wing in spirals above me in the tan sky, and their cries are long and sad and come to rest and reverberate under my eyelids.

~~~~~~

2009