7   

It’s good that I already know where the losers go. Paul has a table at every bar I get kicked out of and he's always watching me getting dragged out into the street by bouncers from it. All by himself. But pretending he doesn’t see. 

At first, didn’t think that was any place for me. I wasn't a loser. Even while getting kicked in the head for all the pint glasses I smashed. Or the framed pictures I pulled off the wall and tried to stuff down my pants. Or the toilet paper I set on fire. When you’re a winner, you can always find a seat, even after being thrown out of everywhere.   

A mailbox we pushed over. A hotdog vendor we murdered for hotdogs who we eat hotdogs on top of. 

More kissing.  

Paula was such a catch.  

But now she is gone and there is only Paul. Saving me a seat. Covered in shadows. Pale and twitching under the influence of a batch of acid he made himself.  

“Is good, is good”, he tells me, “Not rat poison”  

I ask him if he’s got anymore and he starts searching his pockets. It’s very dark back here and hard to tell if it’s drugs or an old gum wrapper that I put under my tongue. 

awww (; _ ;)

8: EPILOGUE  

Sometimes you aren’t actually in love. Sometimes you’re just frightened. They did an experiment on a bridge and now the scientists know all about how easy it is for the human brain to confuse the two. My professor seeming to suggest that maybe my heart hadn’t been broken last year after all. I’d only been scared for my life. Which could have been true since Paula was terrifying. Frightening enough to love for at least another ten of my lifetimes.  

So I stopped going to that class, and no longer listened to that professor, but made sure my new girl would be different. Nothing at all to be scared of with her. Always little more than half asleep on my floor mattress. And if not there, out on the carpet, eating mashed potatoes straight from the pot with a wooden spoon. Sometimes pointing in the direction of Jim Morrison’s ghost and asking if I saw him too. How he was raising a glass to us. How he approved of me, and he never approved of anyone.  

Not what I wanted, but not too frightening.  

Every day thinking she might be about to go home, then started peeling more potatoes.  

Wasn't even sure how she got inside my house in the first place. Pretty sure it had been another girl I’d invited back here, but somehow this was who I got. Was the one who climbed into the cab behind me. Who still hadn’t gone home, weeks later, not even for a change of clothes. Just laying there no matter how many times I told her I was in love with someone else. Not even bothering to open her eyes when I raged in the middle of the night about how I was never going to get a job, and I would hide in the forest and restart civilization if that’s what it called for. Not even bothering to read all the things I had written on my bedroom wall with her mascara.  

Just laying there.   

Starting to smell.   

Eating all of my potatoes.  

Might as well ask her to get married and if she wanted to say no, that was okay.

At least I wasn’t scared. 

SANDRA AS A DEAD BABY  

Sandra thinks she still looks like a bulldog. Even though there are no childhood photographs of her to remind her what she actually looked like back then. Even though it’s been a long time since the doctors broke and reset her jaw, that’s who she still is.  

In her mind it still sticks out. Shows off all her bottom teeth. Looking dull even in all this sunlight they jut out into. Neighbourhood kids petting her head. Telling her bulldogs look like this because they’re inbred.  

It wasn’t just Sandra. Her mother didn’t think to take pictures of any of her kids. Twelve childhoods with no evidence of ever happening. Too busy with her Pepsi Cola. Staying upstairs in the empty room that had the television. No time for cameras. Of lining all those kids up and trying to get them to stay still for the flash.   

Not that they were ever all in the house at the same time, anyways. Sometimes some of them put elsewhere. In different houses. Maybe with families who did take pictures of them. Standing off to the side of brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers they smiled along with, even if they didn’t know them.  

Maybe you could see Sandra’s bulldog jaw at the bottom of some drawer, in some house she had briefly lived in a long time ago. Maybe the Portuguese family that forced her to eat octopus. That tied her to a tree outside when she refused. Tied her there with her sister Sharon, who’d been out there since lunch because her diaper was wet.  

But maybe there was still one picture, tucked away. Not sure, but maybe. Her son finding it on the floor one night as Sandra sits cutting the boy’s father out of old photographs. Because he’s a son of a bitch and getting her best friend Margaret to cut up pictures of her son of a bitch boyfriend too.  

Her son holds up the old photograph he’s found on the carpet. A baby who looks strange. Only just born and looking away from the camera. Looking like a disembodied head. Faded like a ghost but can still tell there is something wrong with it.  

“Who’s this”, her son asks.  

“No one”, she says, “That baby died”   

When he asks what killed it, she tells him it was because it was ugly. Then gets angry and tells him to put it back where he found it.   

But he can’t let go. Keeps looking at it. Puts it in his pocket, as he likes to do with everything that frightens him. Then continues to sit there, watching bits of his father get cut up with scissors and thrown to the floor.  

BOW TO ME. I AM THE KEEPER OF THE FLOORS. COLLECTOR OF HUMAN HAIR  

I’m the king up here.  Not down there with a lowly mop like all you peasants in your scrubs and spongey soled shoes. Ya, that used to be me too, only with less comfortable footwear. But now I've got myself way up on this mechanical beast where I can rule over all of you, spewing my soap. Scrubbing away all the coffee and blood and human hair that would rise up to the ankles on these hospital floors if it wasn’t for me.   

Walking is for chumps and up here I’m a star. Even as I cast them miserable looks because they are always in the way, all the old ladies learning to walk again look delighted as I drive around them in the hallway. Trying their best to veer into my path of destruction with their walkers, as if they think it a blessing for me to run them over. Maybe wanting me to make them clean and young again with my bristles.   

“I could use one of those to get around”, some of them will say and I pretend to laugh. Then make a face that says to get out of my fucking way.  

Oh, how appreciated I finally feel. Everyone knows me, even strangers. Even the bedridden showing how they are full of love, waving to me as I pass their open doorways. Hooked up to their IV’s and most of them so skinny. But lifting their arms in anticipation of my arrival which they’ve been expecting since I began making a great whirring ruckus all the way down the hall. And I hardly blame them. I’m something exciting for them to watch as their mouths drop open in astonishment. Or maybe just left that way after a stroke. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference as I drive quickly past, usually waving back, but sometimes pretending I don’t see them if I’m getting behind in my routine.  

No doubt, I am a role model and great citizen. Children looking up to me when I can bother to see them down there. Not just driving over them and chewing them up as chum for my dirty water tank. Telling me how watching me go around and around and around has made it so they are finally unafraid to grow up and one day die if it means getting a job just like the one I’ve got. It looks like so much fun, they say. They want to be an important person too. And so all I can do is Iaugh and tell them to stay in school like I did. That's what gets you the keys to the autoscrubber. Maybe they won't’ be nobodies after all.  

No guarantees though.   

Maybe they’ll grow up and get put on bathroom patrol. Brain full of rocket science and scrubbing a toilet until they die. You never can tell in this crazy life.  

3  

Everyone thinks the hospital is too big even though I know it isn’t. I let them keep complaining about their tired feet and don’t bother telling them how quick I can drive down every one of its hallways. First down one side, then turning back to clean the other. Seeing every dying face in here at least twice a day. All of them impossible to tell apart, like the hallways. But always knowing when their eyes lock on mine that they recognize me from earlier.   

Grey heads sunken in pillows. Their yellow eyes looking out at me.  

If anything, I wish it was bigger here. Big enough so I’d never have to see anyone twice ever again. 

5  

I think I’m next. Death is looking for anyone in these hallways and my autoscrubber moves slow. Can’t help but notice how everyone is faster than me. The elderly and the legless spilling past. Even those dying have got wheels on their bed. Pushed through clean corridors by teams of nurses and porters. Oxygen masks held to their shrunken little faces as I pull over to let them pass. Leaving me in the dust, as I wait on my cumbersome orange machine for their black angels to catch up to me. To realize how much easier I am to follow. Quickly tangling above my head into a knot. A black cloud forming as I realize my autoscrubber won’t restart.  

The smell of something burning rising into the air.   

“You left the parking brake on, idiot. Turn it off, turn it off”  

Doomed and stuck in the doorway to the ER. Getting in the way of all the patients trying to get in, and getting dirty looks from all the doctors. But also keeping death out of there. Being a hero, in my own small, slow, stupid way. Not asking for any credit. Just for someone to help me push. 

7  

Sometimes it’s just a good time, the places where my dark spirits send me. Their spooky voices rise in unison, still trying to get the hospital to kill me because I’ve got it much too easy here.  

“Send him to.....mental heaallllllth”  

Get the call from my supervisors to jump off my autoscrubber and get myself to the fourth floor. Up where they have to buzz you in through the doors. Where you have to make sure to never leave your mop unattended. Spend the day having scientific discoveries you’ve never heard of before explained to you in the kind of detail where everything becomes revealed as an insect. Step around the ones laying on the floor. The ones banging their head against the walls. There’s always at least one.  

Knock on their doors and clean their rooms. Wipe down the railings on their medical beds while they lay there looking at you, telling you to watch out for all the broken glass they’re sleeping in. Then after you finish, they just send you to clean another one.   

I think this is supposed to be some kind of punishment for the easy life I’ve now got for myself, but I have no fear. They send me into all the bad rooms and that’s okay. Want me to approach the Dick Grabber with nothing but a damp cloth in my hand and so I do. A pair of eyes peering out from beneath a bundle of blankets like a squat, sleeping ogre under a bridge, and I keep moving towards it anyways. Wondering what is about to happen. More curious than frightened.  

Only yesterday they said her room was too dangerous to clean. Told me she has grown immune to sedation, but that they’ve upped her dosage, so shouldn’t be able to grab anything today. Certainly won’t be able to hold on to it. So in I go, assured she is asleep but in a flash her blankets hit the ceiling, and she’s on her horrible feet, and her lank hair is hanging in her face as she chases me around her bed, pulling her pants down.   

Maybe I’m smiling as security comes running in to tackle her to the floor. Tie her to her bed. Then I go into her washroom to clean her toilet and think, yes, this is the life for me. Can hear her in the other room, thrashing. Trying to free herself and rip off another cock with her bare hands.  

Try not to make it obvious how much fun I’m having. Hope they never stop sending me here. Continue to think this is somehow going to kill me.

Last edited by crumbsroom (11/07/2023 2:44 pm)

9   

It seems they’ve finally found my weakness. I don’t know who told them. He’s standing there when I sign into work that morning. Watching me with a bent broom in his hand.  

“Today you’ll be working in the cafeteria with Nick”, my black spirits tell me, now all combined together into one shadowy mass. It’s wearing black leggings and fake eyelashes as I smile dumbly back at it. “Nick isn’t independent, so you will need to stay with him. You take your breaks at the same time, okay”  

I introduce myself to Nick, and his hands shrivel up into his armpits. He doesn’t say hello but starts following me towards the cafeteria, answering all of my questions with a simple, slow “Yah”. One yah after another until I run out of things to say and ask if he is hoping to get a job in the hospital one day. I have a feeling he doesn’t say no very much, but when he does he always says it real quick, like he does to my stupid question.  

“No”, he says and starts to walk faster, as if he’s trying to get away from me.

We continue the rest of the way to our supply closet in silence. Not knowing what to say to this kid slowly eating me alive. Can feel myself decomposing as I busy myself with work, folding one microfiber cloth after another and wondering if I’m supposed to be teaching him something. He’s just standing there and watching. Doesn’t even laugh when I spill water all over my pants. Draining me of life with every silent second I can feel his eyes on me.  

I'm sure he doesn’t mean it, but I will almost certainly be dead by the end of the day. I don’t stand a chance of survival.  

What am I supposed to say? How long is he going to stare?  

You’ve won, hospital. I surrender.  

10  

He still mostly just said yah all day, but I survived. We both did. And when I told him it was the end of the day and he could go home now, he shuffled off without saying goodbye. Like today didn’t even happen.  

I hadn’t died. And he didn’t wander off and disappear like I worried he might. Didn’t need to file a code yellow and have everyone in the hospital know I lost him. Kept him constantly in my sight. Only let the elevator doors close on him once. A terrible clatter and then both of us pretending it didn’t happen.  

When I get home, my girlfriend asks all about how my day was and when I tell her what they did to me. But she thinks it was a wonderful thing I spent the day with someone like Nick. Maybe just happy my complaints are different for a change.  

“It was hard”, I tell her, “I thought I might die”  

“Well, I hope you were kind”   

“Of course, I was kind”  

After dinner she wants to know all about him. If he likes music. Or if he has a cat. And I make sure she knows he wasn’t too talkative. That he barely communicated at all and that he only smiled once. Saw it shortly after noticing how he always chose the same big garbage bin that had the wheels that squeaked. Catching him grinning ear to ear when he realized my face kept scrunching up from the pain of this sound he clearly liked.  

“He was communicating with you”, Sarah cries out, nearly clapping, “I think he liked you”  

I let her continue thinking that’s what it meant. That it wasn’t maybe something I should be concerned about. Simply relieved I was still here to tell the tale and that, if it all happened again tomorrow, I at least stood a chance of returning home. That being kind and patient for another afternoon wouldn’t necessarily be the end of me.  

EPILOGUE  

I lay in bed, or sometimes the bath, and think about all of the people in the hospital. All of the poopers and all the grey, shrunken, dying faces on pillows. All the ogres grabbing at dicks and benefactors who stand in hallways full of clozapine. But most of all, I think of Nick and whatever happened to him when he was younger, maybe even before he was born. Whatever it was that was going to make everything so hard for him, even tying knots in garbage bags. How unfair it was he got stuck laughing at squeaky wheels and being trained for life outside of the hospital by the likes of me.  

I think about everyone that isn’t me. Then about reincarnation. Starting to fret that maybe we might have to keep coming back. Over and over until we’ve been everyone. Everyone that was or ever will be. Wonder if maybe that’s the only way out of this predicament. That one day I will be Nick, and Nick will be me, and he will be the one worried I will never come back from my bathroom break. That we will both be burned at the stake. That we will both be beheaded in the French Revolution.  

I lay in my bed, or sit in my bath, and start getting tired just thinking of all these lives. So many of them. Coming back here over and over again. Can’t help but grow cold thinking about all the people I never want to be. Worry over all the terrible lives that still lay ahead of me.   

Sometimes I consider never getting out of bed. Or drowning in my bathtub. Until I realize that maybe this is no way out at all. That this will never stop, no matter what I do. That when we die, we only have to do it all again. That we don’t even know how many times we’ve already died before. Couldn’t even imagine how long we will keep having to do it.  

Eventually, I fall asleep ,or dry myself off with a towel, never telling anyone how terrified I am. And poor Sarah wondering why I’m so quiet as she drives me to another day of work.  

“What's going on?”, she asks. “Are you okay?”  

“Yah”, I say, and stare off into the distance.  

2  

Cathy liked musicals, and if her brother ever tried to change the channel, she’d dig her fingernails into his arm. Leave him crying and bleeding and listening to Ethel Merman warbling away as he collapsed onto the carpet.  

But when she got older she claimed to remember a Bruce no one else seemed able to.   

“Remember Baby Bruce and how he used to be a chubby little chunker?” she would ask the whole family as they gathered for dinner. “Remember how he used to loooove his big sister. How he would just lay in the middle of the carpet laughing and laughing and laughing at nothing at all. Giddy, like Shirley Temple in a brand-new pair of tap shoes?”  

But no one remembered this. They only remembered this gaunt Bruce who barely spoke and brought his dinner back to his bedroom. Still living with his parents as his moustache got grey and the hair on the top of his head started to fall out. Not at all interested in these memories of his sister. Calling her a liar as he filled his plate with piles of meat and left the dining room. Leaving just as everyone at the table began to do their best impression of the grumbling he would do all the way back to his bedroom.  

Grumbling about how he always hated his sister.  

Grumbling about how he didn’t eat vegetables and how he didn’t know why his mother kept cooking them.  

Grumbling about being back in this house and about how everyone who had been able to escape it kept coming back to visit. Kept reminding him it was possible to leave.  

All the way up the stairs, one long grumble until he was safely back in his room, laying in front of a television that was safely all his and that he knew Cathy would never get to change the channel on. Even if she dared to follow him up here.   

At least growing up had some benefits.  

“But he wasn’t always this morbid thing. He really wasn’t. In the beginning he was a very happy boy”, Cathy continued, downstairs, even though no one at the table was really listening. Maybe only being listened to by Bruce through the floorboards. “And believe me when I say he loved his big sister. Loooooved her”  

And as they continued with their holiday feast, somewhere in the distance, the sound of a foot began pounding on the floor repeatedly. Then a long and sad howling that sounded like someone telling the whole universe to shut the fuck up.  

Or at least just Cathy.