American Spirit: A Novel (32 page)

Lonely from twenty-three hours of flights, and the preceding thirty-five years, Matthew goes about Googling diseases you can get in Indonesia, stopping only to refocus the eyes by peeking out the window blinds for a moment. The eyes relax into a long focal length to stare at a luxurious white sand beach littered with vacationers from America and the south coast of Australia. They lie in the late afternoon sun, enjoying drinks brought to them by waiters who stand by attentively in tuxedos abbreviated in the leg and length to accommodate the hot weather. It’s easy to get the impression that Googling diseases and quietly draining the minibar alone in hopes of killing pain is not how one is supposed to spend their time in Bali, so before the haze turns to sleep, a call is made to the desk, and a shuttle ride is scheduled for tomorrow’s ride to BIMC Hospital, Nusa Dua. There, now; that’s more like it.

Things start slowly. Dogs sniff all over outside the van, men with mirrors on sticks sweep them down and under the van and look for anything they need to look for. Brain does the math of dogs and mirrors and recalls the blackened and splintered bombed-out disco was still there on the drive in yesterday. This world, fucking mad, or whatever the name of that film. It’s hard to want the van to leave the chain resort where one is swarmed by women carrying booze; it’s harder because, of course, the pain isn’t here today. That’s the way
it goes with these things, get within a block of a hospital three thousand miles across the Pacific, the pain is gone. Get across the threshold, fall out of love, then right back in love with them the minute they’re walking out. But it’s there, it’s there, it’s there. The stupid films from the disc were sent, this was ages ago, after the dreaded price discussion, the one in which the urologist, the fan of Rove-as-author, took Matthew from the torture chamber and into the dark-paneled office to talk scheduling and financing the fancy USA top-dollar lithotripsy and stone removal. A conversation that went something like this:

“That Karl Rove book! I have to say, the guy’s got a knack for…”

“Here’s the thing, I don’t have insurance at this point, so how much would something like this be in cash? Could I do it for ten or fifteen grand if I took it out of savings?”

“Hard to say. Could be twenty grand, could be thirty, could be more if it takes more than once, it’s just hard to say.”

“Okay, I’m going to do some checking around.”

The subtext of the exchange was something like:

“I’m one of those millions of people you read about in America.”

“No insurance?”

“Exactly. But I could swing ten grand in cash.”

“That’s weird, I can’t hear you for some reason. I see your mouth moving, but no sound is coming out.”

“Never mind, I’ll just go to India or something.”

The van is on its way. The paradise of tiny bottles, room
service, and window blinds fades into the rearview, and the road becomes less enchanted as the palms on the property end and the main drag of Nusa Dua begins. Painted plywood billboards cracked by beautiful days and the occasional hurricane blur past and advertise half-assed roadside bars made of cinder block and lumber and offering the chance to drink something strong from a bottle with a cobra in it. Or you can do a shot and eat the egg of a cobra, or you can get drunk then wander the warm roads and dirt paths at night until a cobra bites you and you die with a swollen black leg. The DVD shops show up in clusters like komodos to a kill. One offers a dozen Hollywood hits on DVD for $12.99, the next offers a dozen for $10.99, the next two offer a dozen for $9.99, and the very last one on the end offers a dozen for $12.99—the same price as the first one, but they have more flashing lights than the first shop, plus there are pretty girls out front waving as you go past. Souvenir shacks blur past, too, but the souvenirs can barely be seen from way out here in the traffic pattern’s snarl of vans and taxis. Motorbikes scream a steady chorus of
nen-nen-nen-neen-neen,
engulfing the shuttle van like a storm of red, white, and black locusts ready to strip crops of tourist green. The impression of the gift shacks’ inventories at this speed is: small skulls of wood, cobra head key chains and paperweights, cobras in bottles of something, big lizards made of wood, small lizards made of wood, more big lizards made of wood, and certainly somewhere a cobra head glued to a lizard made of wood if one had the time to slow down and look for it. There are massage joints and spas,
too, many offering something called the Bali Mystical Warm Stone Treatment, certainly a euphemism for something, the brain surmises. At any rate, strange the way the eyes key in on a sign that offers something so close to what the body needs at the moment. The body needs the Bali Not-So-Mystical Stone Removal Treatment and the hospital on the horizon has just that.

There’s this thing the cab drivers here do, this moment where they know they’re about to swing a hard right turn, and they slow a bit, almost close their eyes a little, as if to make peace with the fact that when the right is swung, the motorbike swarm may or may not part and that is up to something bigger than all of us. The choreography of it goes off without a hitch, a right turn that works like Stravinsky and the van is off the main drag and down toward BIMC Hospital, looking, so far, exactly as it does on the brochure; a building that was intended to be a low-slung, concrete resort hotel until something went sideways and a shipment of medical equipment arrived a few months before the grand opening. One checks in without the pageantry of area resort hotels, that’s the first difference one notices. Outside, medium-cute girls, roughed up by the hours, smoke Djarums and steady themselves for the shift ahead; long drags and glances up at the cloudless vivid blue; the bedpan-and-gauze beat is better than dancing in front of a DVD hut or selling fake Cartier on the beach to tourists.

In the waiting room, a little window of glass frosted at the
bottom slides half open and a woman, clearly no fan of ceremony, shoves a clipboard up onto the smooth, cool counter and more signatures are in order. Between clearing customs, crowds of short con men rushing up, being swarmed by women with drinks seeking signatures, and fast shuttle vans navigating throngs to arrive at the hands of bored administrative types waiting to usher you along discreet corridors, the head wanders to what it must have been like to be a Beatle in Japan circa 1967. Even more so since the pain isn’t present in the nuts or back this morning. Clipboard one signed, all five pages, clipboard two signed, all three places, a locker key issued, a seat offered up in wait, dented and dog-eared gossip magazines of stars you’ve never seen. Soon enough the body is gowned and ushered along a purgatory of hallways and into the room, and then Matthew falls madly in love with a man.

This man is maybe fifty years of age, admittedly plain-looking at first glance, with an unremarkably benign bedside manner, but in full control of a little cart and rack that administers something that’s been attached to the needle left in the left arm. The body lies staring at a ceiling and the brain wonders what daydreams are real, and the man smiles kindly at something; at everything for some reason, Jesus, enough smiling. The table has more brains than the body lying on top of it at the moment. The table has told the technician where the stupid black dot has moved to and Matthew is pushed a bit over to the left, asked to scoot down just
a touch, bumped an inch or so back to the right, and then bull’s-eye: The table’s X-ray eyes tell the technician on Matthew’s right that the little gel-filled electronic tit under the lower back is aimed at the money spot. The man/love interest on Matthew’s left takes another look at his screens and flow, thinking about whatever it is anesthesiologists/lovers think of at times like this. The two men then look at each other and the table looks up at the two of them and nods, indicating that its screens, levers, and currents are ready to be cocked for nine thousand or so fast little weird ticks; tiny kicks that should cause subsonic demolition in the ureter.
Ureter. Ureter. Ureter. Ur. You’re. Your.

“Can you feel the machine, the ticking? Can you feel any discomfort there?” Matthew’s future husband asks.

Inside the head, a refrain,
Say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes, say…

“Yes.”

“Okay, let me increase. You let me know when you’re comfortable; we want to be sure you’re not feeling pain.”

Don’t leave me. Ever.

The only thing that the head is trying to figure or explain is who the woman is who just walked right into the room and sat down to eat a plum and watch, like she had wandered from a kitchen into a living room. The lips tried to form the words. The head asked in silence a thousand times,
Who is that?,
but the mouth wouldn’t have any part in getting the
words to come. The beep on the monitor slowed, the warm flood hugged the veins, blood became love, and everything was fine for the very first time since before turning nine and getting the news that the parents weren’t coming home from that second honeymoon, and hoping somehow that it meant the second honeymoon was going to last forever in heaven. The stuff in the blood is really working wonders on the past now, any rough spots in the road up to this point softened into mud; enemies melted into people who had only ever tried to love you and just messed up. Somehow the idea comes on strong that every day is sunny, even when it rains, if you just go high enough up, there will always be sun.

The woman sitting there smiling and eating a plum—she might be the source of all of this well-being and resignation, as far as the head can tell. The table ticks and punches at the rock in the guts, the machine to the left beeps steady measures of a heart still marching on in perfect meter, the woman looks up and her eyes squint a beautiful smile and her cheeks suck in a little at what must have been a tart spot in the plum. The lips are the ones; the nose is the one; the eyes are the ones; the breasts are the ones. People or machines could kick at Matthew forever, so long as this love smiled on him the way it is right now, almost vibrating like this. The heart speaks up plainly:
I’m ready; I’m done here now. It’s been so hard since you’ve been gone and I’ve never said so. I’ve tried my best since the day they gave me away. I want to come home to you now.
The heart races at a weird full-speed arrhythmia
while the two men flanking Matthew can be heard in some kind of panic about the new jazz-time signature on the machine,
beep, beepbeep, beepbe—bap, bee, p.
The heart races happy, sky swelling into the room from a giant glorious crack in the roof.

Matthew musters everything he has, cons synapses in hopes of gaming the system; to con the man in control of the morphine flow from the cart and rack. Matthew fakes a pain with a push left; arches up like it can’t stand the feeling of the process even though it is numb and almost gone. The head tries harder than it ever has; pushes a grunt to feign discomfort; tries to make the men flanking the body think that there’s not enough heaven in the room and that pain is still being felt, and that this is the truth. The light gets brighter, the music gets louder; earth is going to be gone for Matthew if this grift works; if this grunt and squirm tricks them, it’s the end of this dull and sad dimension. Even the head had to admit that this is starting to feel like magic; somehow a nine-year-old is looking down at the longer, bigger, older thing it had become. The boy wishes and begs, in a sad fit of temper, to be done dragging this body through earthly days, to be through with spending the rest of his time disguised as this man on the table below him.

But it doesn’t matter how hard you hope to never come to, they all rush to get oxygen on you, they call others in to slide the man from the table, to a gurney, to a bed, and before the head knows what hit it, they’ve moved the body and
the brain and the heart into this other room to recoup. The nose breathes big, pure, silvery white clean hits of oxygen, the heart feels a world of warm yellow and orange turn all matter-of-fact and blue again, and the head tries to explain away whatever it recalls of the situation in the other room.

The Buffet Is Having Problems. So Is the Business Center

M
ATTHEW HAS TWO SAVVY TRAVEL
tips he can dole out to the first-time visitor to Bali. The first is that one shouldn’t attempt to navigate the seafood buffet in the golden afterglow of minor kidney trauma, jet lag, near death, morphine, and Tylenol 4 with codeine. The head narrates the scene with the hysteria of a small-town neighbor talking about a house fire, but it might be justified here in the Club Level dining situation, the culinary equivalent of the VIP section, really. A stunning lattice of concrete pads that seem to float on ponds. Each square connected by teak bridges, the emerald waters beneath lush with flora of the region and bright orange-and-white koi, their colors dulled just a bit until they rise to the surface, for a silent chorus
of hello kisses in this brilliant mirage of travel and leisure. The ears swore they heard a voice that was not Matthew’s—a voice saying that life has been trying to show him places like this for ages now but that he seemed tied to routine and determined to resist.