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Medicine
The Man From ’Stanbul
I am the “man from ’Stanbul.” Yes, I cannot pee. Oh, I can squeeze out a few drops here and there. I can dribble; I can even trickle. Occasionally what passes for a stream arcs into the commode. But it’s no McDonald’s golden arch, let me tell you, not the yellow rainbow of satisfaction I once knew so well, the Victoria Falls of my not-so-distant youth.
June 2007
In The Near Dark
At first there’s darkness, and then darkness becoming less dark, then vaguely dark, then just shadows and the glow of sunlight pushing on closed blinds. There’s Melanie’s tangled black hair falling on the pillow inches from my face, a sniffle and the ruffle of sheets as her leg moves. There’s a siren howling closer and closer and then fading. The phone rings, then rings again.
June 2007
Giving Weight
One winter evening, when I was twenty-six years old and recovering from a long illness, I decided to go out dancing. I could have chosen another form of entertainment, I suppose — a movie or a meal out — but I chose contradancing because it would involve my body more than my mind, and my mind was what had gotten me into trouble.
May 2007
Cry In The Wilderness
Unless I tell people about the voices, they don’t know. I’m not sure how this can be: that they don’t hear them, too. It’s suspicious, in fact. I want to crawl inside their heads and listen, see for myself where their thoughts come from.
July 2006
Diagnostic Tools
They breathe deeply and put their hot hands on me. I lie on their padded massage table, on their soft sheets. Light slants across the room and into the kitchen, illuminating the place where my seventeen-year-old dog lies on his bed, unable to move without human hands to hoist his hind end up, a human voice to encourage him on his journey into the leaf-covered yard.
June 2006
Still Here
My wife China, my son Ben, and I left for the hospital at five in the morning, crossing the bay on the Golden Gate Bridge. The streets of San Francisco were still gray and quiet when we parked, but the hospital halls were alive with activity. An admittance clerk questioned me about insurance, then fitted me with an ID bracelet and ushered us into a partitioned area where a gurney waited.
December 2005
Trying
Recently samples of baby products — diapers, formula, wipes — have begun showing up in my mail. Packets of coupons with smiling infants on them arrive in envelopes that say, “Congratulations!” in big red letters.
October 2005
Surviving The Body
A thick canopy of smells — car exhaust, rotting vegetables, melting tar — hung in the sweltering midafternoon air. As I stepped onto a narrow side street to escape the noise and crowds, my left leg buckled beneath me, and I fell down in a puddle of motor oil in front of a sidewalk stand.
April 2005
The Shed Skin
I ask if I have cancer. Somehow this still isn’t clear to me. When the doctor confirms that I do, it is an odd relief. I don’t want to have to explain to people that the “architectural pattern of my breast lesion features an intraductal papillomatous tumor.” Saying I have cancer will be easier, except when I tell my mother.
February 2005
