THE HOSPITAL ROOM

Snarls and yelps of pain from the next room over slowly filtered into Richard's cognizance. What kind of fucking hospital is this? he thought to himself, opening his eyes. Jesus, they're killing themselves over there. He lay there in the uncomfortable bed, his arms and legs bound by plaster at odd angles (the better to heal, he'd been told) and he listened to, what was now, silence. His nose itched. Shit. There was a sudden flurry of scrabbling nails and snarls and then a final piercing yelp of pain and then there was silence once again. He wondered what was better: animalistic fury or this dead pregnant silence. Noise, fury, he decided, was better. At least, that way, he knew he was still alive and not suspended in some kind of Purgatory in which he could not move his arms or his legs--or even his head, for that matter--a Purgatory in which he couldn't even scratch his nose when it itched.

God, his nose itched. From his prostrate vantage point, he couldn't see the clock (he assumed it was on the wall behind his head) but he figured it had to be around the time that the smoking hot nurse usually came in and checked his morphine drip and drained his weasel if it needed draining. At first, Richard had been horrifically embarrassed to have such an attractive woman handle his cock in such a detached clinical nonsexual way but, over the last week or so (time had pretty much lost relevance; he didn't know if he'd been in hospital for a week or four or more) he'd left the embarrassment and the somewhat-shame somewhere along the Convalescence Highway and had come to actually look forward to her arrivals. Not only was she a stunning blonde, with the body of Venus, but her visits also broke up the monotony of the day.

God, his nose itched. "Come on, lady," he muttered. "Come and scratch my itch, bitch; I got it for ya right he-ah." Don't be a dick, Rick, his father spoke suddenly in his mind. Her name is Lydia, by the way, and she is more than just an attractive cut of meat, boy. Be nice. Don't take your anger about your situation out on her. His father had been dead for about two years, but, lately, he had been speaking up more frequently in Richard's mind, and daily since he had been in the accident that had landed him in this surreal hospital--the accident that, incidentally, try as he might, Richard could not remember.

"Sure, Dad," he said. "Sorry. And that 'dick, Rick' joke? That stopped being funny about ten years ago, man." His father chuckled somewhere in the back of Richard's mind, and then faded away.

Richard was left alone, by humans and by ghosts, to lie on his back and study the cracks on the ceiling. The cracks over which putty had been smeared over the years, but were still slightly discernable and so Richard had taken to studying them, making pictures come alive in his mind's eye--there is an elephant and there is a woman crying and over there is a baboon--anything to help pass the time as his bones mended and his ostensible bruises faded.

God, his nose itched.

"Anyone there?" he called. Immediately, as if his voice had been a cue, the snarls and yelps from the next-door room began anew. They sounded like-- What the hell are dogs doing in a hospital? Why am I healing in a place that has fucking dogs in it? That doesn't sound too sterile, godammit. What the fuck?!

"Hey?!" he shouted with as much force as he could muster, which was, admittedly, not a whole hell of a lot. "Is anybody there? Is there anybody...out there? Now I'm Pink Floyd and I'm in The Wall and this is fucking crazy and I'm going crazy and now I'm talking to myself and there's a goddamn baboon on the ceiling and he's making the woman cry and the elephant just doesn't give a flying fuck and what the hell is going on?!"

From the next room, Richard heard the scrabble of the claws against the floor, two maybe three animals running around, snapping at each other, causing yelps of pain, perhaps maybe even tearing flesh from bones, leaving stinking hot pools of blood all over the once-pristine hospital floor, slamming into the walls--boom!--crashing into the mobile IV units--tinkle of breaking glass--leaving it all out on the playing field, as it were. And then, just as quickly as it had started, there was, again, silence. In his mind--his imagination had always been sharp, top-notch, sometimes scary--Richard could picture the combatants, sitting quietly, facing the wall that divided their room from his: heaving panting sides, foaming muzzles, glints of extended canine teeth, bloody ragged flesh.... He could picture them--two? three? five? who knew?--studying the wall like the RCA dog, heads cocked, determining if, in fact, there was some easy meat in the room over. They smelled him, he was sure. They'd heard him; he knew that. "Nice doggies," he muttered. "Now just stay the fuck over there, okay?" It didn't matter to him, now, that there were dogs in a hospital. The incongruity of the situation had ceased to flummox him. He just wanted them there, not here. In this case, segregation was just fine and dandy and A-okay and just what the motherfucking doctor ordered. Speaking of which....

"Hey! Where the hell is everyone?!" Richard had become aware that, though the door to his hospital room had been open the whole time he'd been conscious--his internal clock told him that it'd had to have been at least ten minutes, he'd not seen one person pass by his room. Not a one. No nurses, no doctors, not even a janitor. "This is like that damned Twilight Zone episode," he said to himself. "You know the one. The one where that dude is walking down Main Street and there's no one there, nobody, anywhere, but him. This is just too fucking freaky, man." From the next room, Richard heard a low throaty growl. The dog sounded big. Saint Bernard? Rotty? A Pitty? Irish Wolfhound? Mastiff?

His nose didn't itch anymore. "Hey!" he shouted, "my nose itches! Could someone please come and scratch it for me? It driving me friggin' nuts, here!"

No answer. In fact, though he knew this absolutely couldn't be the case, Richard didn't feel the presence of even one human being outside his door, down the hall, in the nurses station, in the cafeteria, anywhere.... He felt his Fear animal clawing at his gut, much like he heard the animals in the next room clawing at the closed (God willing) door of their prison.

"My! Nose! Itches!" he shouted. It had become a sort of mantra to him. It'd become a kind of talismanic umbilical cord that kept him secured to this, the physical world, because he knew--or least he assumed--that if he passed out from fright or quite simply gave up to his fate, he was as good as dead. The beasts from the next room would surely eventually get free and they'd scrabble over to his room, their hindquarters skidding on the polished hospital hallway, led by their noses and their sense of Easy Meat, and they would tear him to pieces and eat him alive; unable to kick or scream or beat at them, it'd be like taking doggy candy from a baby.

Howls erupted from the next room and the scrabble of claws at the door intensified. "My God, there're fucking wolves over there," he said. He moaned and tried to wiggle his fingers and wiggle his toes. They wiggled, a bit, but the rest of his appendages--both arms and both legs--were tightly secured by both the plaster casts and the seemingly-antiquated pulley systems that had been rigged to keep them in place. "This is impossible," he said. "Why am I here? And where the fuck is everybody?!" he shouted. "What kind of a hospital is this?!"

***