David Nutt
Gunderson's appendix was sick. He had seen the specialists, and the specialists agreed. Twenty of them, all named Jim.
"The Jims," Gunderson noted, "look nothing alike."
Gunderson raised his shirt and stared at the abdomen, pale and harmless, now infirm. He must have contained multitudes.
"Baffling," Gunderson whispered.
"Can I ask you something?" Hollis was on the foldout sofa with a spatula half down his trousers, tooling around for an itch.
"Sure."
"What the fuck are you doing in my apartment?"
"This is my apartment," Gunderson replied.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Hollis muttered. "They all say that."
Hollis yawned into the hairy rut of his elbow.
"The real issue," he continued, "is this strange sleep disorder of mine. I go to bed every night and disappear for six to eight hours. When I wake up, the world is a completely hostile place. My bones are older, and my brain is slower. All my loved ones are either contagious or dead or living in Florida, which is sorta the same thing."
"I smell tuna. Do you smell tuna?"
"You think that odor is mine? See this spatula? This is my homemade appendectomy spatula. I'll shave you bald, skin you alive, gut your gimp parts, and ransack that secret snack shelf you keep at the back of the pantry. Don't think I haven't noticed it."
Gunderson slowly lowered the shirt, careful not to upset his multitudes.
"I'm turning thirty-three next week," Hollis said, retracting the spatula from his pants. He sniffed it. "Birthday boy wants a new machete."
Hollis was a thin-lipped miscreant with a lackluster credit ranking and serious germ phobia, but Gunderson had chosen him as an apartment mate over the pill junky, the needle junky, the dust junky, the junk junky. Sometimes, when Hollis was enjoying one of his malt liquor siestas on the sofa, Gunderson would sneak into the ex-con's bedroom and survey his things. Military cot, skunk-striped rug, a crate of unscented candles, stashed toiletries, girly soaps. Hollis showered compulsively throughout the day—six, seven times—and a pile of moldering towels was neatly squared on the floor. Gunderson eyed the girly soaps a little too covetously. The Jims had recently scribbled his abdomen with red magic marker, circling the bunk organ's location, x'ing it out, circling a new spot, x'ing that one, too, again and again, until Gunderson's chest resembled a lopsided tic-tac-toe board. Nothing washed off.
The gentle throb continued to float around his middle, mysterious, unmoored.
He had a Jim for every major organ, every symptom and neurosis, every damaged gland. All the Jims insisted the appendix was serious business.
"It's a gateway organ," Gallbladder Jim told him. "I'm not even the appendix guy, and I know that."
Gunderson was spread flat on the stone table, his limbs and bare swatches of flesh burdened by an assortment of clamps, straps, basins, suction machines. The Jims stood around him in a cabalistic circle. They had donned their anonymous surgical smocks, each a slight variant of red. The blank ceiling, the blank walls: all of it red, red, red, red. The Jims were preparing to pare him like wet fruit.
"Maybe it's not so bad," Gunderson said. "It's only an appendix. It doesn't really hurt."
"Let us be the judge of that," the Jims replied.
Afterwards, the painkillers had slurred Gunderson's sense of geography, but he was fairly confident the surgeons told him the sick organ had been shaped like the potato state.
"Is that Iowa?" Gunderson asked, a slick glaze upon him. "Indiana? One of those has a spud shape."
"The shape isn't the problem."
"Problem?" Gunderson repeated. "What problem?"
"Not just one," Intern Jim replied.
"Multitudes," the Jims said in chorus.
They washed their toothy blades and ladles in the stainless-steel sink, then laid the tools in artful arrangement on the Gundersonless operating table. Gunderson was across the room, stitched and dressed and buckled into his wheelchair, ready for discharge.
"What did you do with it?" he asked. "My appendix?"
An ancillary Jim in a maroon jumpsuit, stuffing gore-spattered rags down the trash chute with a spatula, paused the labor and glanced over at the row of grim-faced colleagues fussing their scrubs.
"That's the weird part," Custodial Jim said. "The messy thing we ladled out of you? It wasn't an appendix at all."
Hollis sulked on the front stoop. His proud hair, usually slicked high into a misfit wedge, was still damp from his most recent shower spree, his skin rashy, eyebrows tweezed raw. He was glaring at the pink wicks of his sandblasted fingernails.
"The whole apartment is under siege."
"Okay."
"My whole life."
"What's that reek? Is there a seafood truck nearby?"
Gunderson sniffed him.
"I was eating tuna fish on your bed," Hollis replied. "The tin leaked. Now the whole place stinks like goddamn SeaWorld."
Gunderson tilted around the sidewalk with his middle mummified in gauze, braced on his crutch. He wasn't sure how much of his surgery had been a success, or a failure. He had no idea how stringently his multitudes could be measured while balled up inside him, gossiping amongst themselves, twitchingly alive. This seemed to Gunderson a deficiency of science, perhaps a flare-up of his own deficient character. He had no idea how to calculate that, either. All the body's daft, eclectic metrics. Now his tonsils were troubling him, too.
Hollis was still gazing at the ground. He blindly raised a hand and pointed at the lanky, limbless sugar maple that loomed half-dead in the courtyard. "You seeing this shit?"
Gunderson stabbed his crutch tips into the dimpled sidewalk and pivoted stiffly, like a drafting compass. He saw it. The squirrel was squatting on the tree's exposed root system that had ruptured up from the dirt, the animal's cheeks bulged with bottle caps, snubbed cigarettes, hoarded things.
"That bitch has mange," Hollis said. He grumbled up the stairs. "I need to take another motherfucking shower."
Gunderson had an urge to sit on the unoccupied stoop and entertain a few flitting ideas of his own—appendixes, potatoes, dead trees, the infinite mange—but all the feverish meat and bacteria migrating inside him was too great. He crutched his way upstairs and into the apartment, where he found the TV.
"We have a TV?" he asked.
After his penultimate shower of the evening, Hollis admitted to ransacking several neighboring apartments earlier in the day and uprooting thousands of dollars' worth of stereo equipment, which he lugged downtown and pawned for cash. Then he took the cash to a skeezy discount electronics boutique and purchased the secondhand TV now mounted on the living room wall.
"Why didn't you just steal a TV?" Gunderson asked.
Hollis was sprawled on the hall floor, damp and immobilized. The seasons of moral turpitude had finally caught up with him.
"No idea what you mean."
"Never mind," Gunderson sighed.
"All this fucking pollen in the atmosphere," Hollis mumbled, trying to dry his face on the floorboards. "I have this germ thing, this chemical sensitivity thing. Sometimes it feels like I need a kickstand for my headache. That rancid deodorant of yours is poisoning me, too. Show a little consideration."
Gunderson sat on the couch and realized there was no remote control for the TV. He raised his crutch, leaned forward, and tapped the power button. The TV awakened. Somewhere in his reorganized innards, he detected a brief, optimistic pang. The giant cracked halves of the world, erratically sized, ever uncooperative, had temporarily aligned. All was whole.
Then he glanced around at the rest of the living room.
"Where's my stereo?" Gunderson asked.
During their bi-weekly prod and poke session, the Jims showed Gunderson the jar in which the runty wadded prune thing was afloat. Gunderson raised a meek finger and tapped the glass. The prune performed a full rotation, a shimmy and twist.
"So what is it?" Gunderson asked.
"We were hoping you could tell us," the lead Jim replied. "Maybe something you ate? Something you dreamed up or lied about? Something you stashed away and forgot?"
"I thought you were the specialists," Gunderson said.
"Even specialists need a little mystery in their lives." The Jim picked up the prune jar and regarded it with grudging admiration, then stuffed it on a shelf crowded with other murky, clandestine jars in the depths of their office pantry, just off the kitchen.
"Don't forget to pay the receptionists on your way out," the Jims said.
At home, he found Hollis stationed in the kitchen, too, but nowhere near the pantry. He had a patchwork blanket hugged around him. He was staring at the gallery of faded postcards affixed to the fridge. There must have been dozens, all layered atop each other, a nostalgic collage, which Gunderson had mailed to himself over the years. Melancholic vistas, sun-crumbled monuments, national scenery. Gunderson had never traveled or breached the state line. He purchased the postcards at the local supermarket and sent them to his own address from a deserted post office across town. Each postcard began with a cheerful salutation: Ahoy Gunderson! The rest was blank.
"Tell me," Hollis said, squinting from postcard to postcard, peeking at the blank backsides. "Which one contains the suicide note?"
"The Jims say I'm not a threat to myself."
"I bet there's a hell of a scar," Hollis said.
He put a finger on a computer-enhanced snapshot of the Grand Canyon, that wide abyss of tan rock and stark darkness. He unloosed a long, tuna-flavored sigh.
"The world looks better in Garamond," he said quietly.
Gunderson limped over. "I agree."
"That's no goddamn excuse."
Gunderson cleared his throat, undid the drawstring of his sweatpants, and peeled back the mummy bandage. Hollis hugged his blanket cape tighter. He knelt down on the linoleum and ogled the ugly jag across Gunderson's belly.
"That is a righteous mess," he said.
It was true. The stitches were not the tidy seams found in pigskin but rather overlarge, puffy, blue not black. And underneath the careless threadwork, Gunderson could feel the bruised tissue and broken hose unable to heal itself. A treasonous organ now gone.
"The recovery hurts more than the actual sick item," Gunderson said. "Whatever it was. Something prune-like. Maybe a gooey raisin. Is a prune a raisin? Are they sorta the same thing?"
Hollis stood and hiked up his shirt to reveal a pale scar, roughly avocado size, just below the lowest rung of his ribcage. "I lost a kidney once. Some garbage dick stole it while I was indisposed. Shit happens."
Before Gunderson could scrutinize it, Hollis lowered his shirt. The scar vanished. He nodded at Gunderson's dropped trousers. "What a goddamn freak show."
"Consider it a belated birthday present," Gunderson said, resealing the bandage, raising his pants.
Hollis's expression immediately withered. The squint was now rueful, an aching grimace.
"I was hoping my folks would visit," he said. "You know, say hi, maybe spend the weekend, treat me to dinner. Mexican. My favorite. They could stay in my room, I could stay in your room, you could stay on the couch. A real family reunion."
"They flaked on you."
"They died," Hollis said. "Almost twenty years ago. The ultimate flake job. Sometimes I forget."
Gunderson idly tapped his crutch on the linoleum, trawling for some solacing words, but he must've been in the wrong kitchen for that. "Is there something else you want for your birthday?"
"A trip to the glue factory."
"That could either be a dead horse joke or a dead roommate joke." Gunderson pondered it. "Maybe it's both."
"I think it's both," Hollis agreed.
The TV was not such a prurient addition to their living quarters at first. It diverted Hollis's attention from his ever-expanding portfolio of invisible ailments and kept him docile, his slack body melded to the sofa's lumpy contours, dozens of tissues crumpled like snotty tulips across his chest. Then the soap operas concluded in a sentimental orgy of mangled cars and smeared mascara. The evening news wasn't any cheerier. Gunderson could only join the agony for so long. Now the family sitcoms were starting. Gunderson was horrified.
He reached over and plucked a nacho from the plate on Hollis's stomach. So far not a single crumb or glob had marred the miscreant’s immaculate white t-shirt or pants. Gunderson's own clothes were specked with nacho shrapnel.
"I'll give you this, Gunderson," Hollis said between crunches. "You make an above-par nacho."
"I had to use your salsa."
"That wasn't my salsa."
"It was someone's salsa."
"Just keep telling yourself that." Hollis held his hands over the carpet and clapped them clean while side-eying Gunderson suspiciously. "What's with the racquet?"
"This?" Gunderson unslung the padded case from his shoulder. "The Jims invited me for racquetball. They lent me court shoes, too."
He raised a handsomely sneakered foot.
"They sound like pretty stellar boyfriends," Hollis said.
Gunderson shrugged. He reached into his new gym bag and extracted the jarred prune thing, a rainbow ribbon knotted around its lid, and set it on the sofa ledge.
"Happy birthday," Gunderson said.
"Get that fucking thing away from me!" Hollis shrieked. In his drastic recoil, he dribbled some salsa on his arm and began obsessively rubbing it.
"Clean, clean, clean, clean," he whispered, a rapid, hyperventilated mantra.
"Actually," Gunderson said, tucking the jar back into his bag, "the prune is a loaner, too."
After Hollis showered, dried and dressed and undressed himself, returning to his private sanctuary in front of the blinkless screen in a pair of fascistically pristine boxers, he rummaged under the sofa and unsheathed the new birthday machete he had poached from a sporting goods emporium that afternoon.
He clasped the long, flat blade to his chest.
"My soul is a schooner ship," he monotoned, eyes squeezed tight. "My anxieties are the sail."
Later that night, Gunderson found the machete imbedded in the bathroom wall, a perfect hypotenuse jutting from the plaster. For now, he nodded as if he understood.
He took his handful of cold nachos down the street and ate them, shard by shard, in the darkening park.
"But is it dead?" Gunderson asked.
"Everything is dead, Gunderson."
"It looked like it was, I dunno, dancing? In its jar? It looked so happy to no longer be inside me."
"What are you really asking us?"
"It's not sentient. It doesn't have feelings."
"You think you have to be alive to have feelings? You think the dead don't know anything anymore?"
"Well, I don't—"
"The funny part," the Jims said, standing around in their red shirts and red shorts and red sneakers, "is that puny prune thing was probably the healthiest part of you."
"Why is that funny?" Gunderson asked.
The Jims snickered while cinching their goggle straps, adjusting their velcro gloves.
"Everything may be dead, but a few things are probably revivable, right?" Gunderson said. "Not a lot. But a few. Certainly a few."
"Just keep telling yourself that," the Jims replied and went back to mopping and squeegeeing the bloodstains off the racquetball court floor.
Hollis was out in the courtyard with a bandana around his red-puffy face, hacking away at the tangled jungle greenery the landlord refused to maintain. Gunderson could see him from the window, the skinny arm raised high with machete, the wild swings and strokes. Gunderson waited in the calm dark of the apartment, gray static crackling in his gray head. The TV was gone. Hollis had chopped it apart, dumped the pieces in the bathtub, and drowned the evidence. Gunderson couldn't understand. Why didn't Hollis murder the TV somewhere outdoors or abandon it on the sidewalk like any other loveless appliance? Why wouldn't the TV die, even after it was dismembered?
Hollis traipsed back into the apartment and perched on the edge of the sofa, sipping an orange energy drink, staring at the emptiness on the wall.
"This just ain't baby-living weather," he said sagely.
"You're not showering yet?" Gunderson asked.
"Just five more minutes," Hollis replied, his jaws uncomfortably clamped, neck veins in violent throb.
"I'm impressed."
"I ain't doing this shit for you."
"Listen, about the bathroom—"
"I'm tired of you leaving your shit everywhere."
"Me?" Gunderson asked, incredulous.
"I found this in the jungle." Hollis showed Gunderson the postcard, old and dingy. It had a picture of Hell's Canyon, Gunderson's handwriting, Gunderson's address, an Idaho postmark.
"I've never been to Idaho," Gunderson said.
"The potato state," Hollis nodded.
Gunderson gave him the postcard back. "I guess we can save it along with the others."
"Good idea," Hollis said and tossed it in the trash.
"I meant the fridge."
"I'm sure you did."
Hollis resumed his sofa sulk, a lonely huddle of one. Gunderson pointed at the red sweatbands on Hollis's wrists, the red bandana around his neck, his red drenched shirt and shorts.
Hollis shrugged. "I guess you were right. The Jims are solid dudes. They even gave me a nickname. Holistic Hollis. They're helping me sort out some personal shit. You know, germ shit. Phobia shit."
"Hollis shit," Gunderson nodded.
"That's right," Hollis said. "Hollis shit."
Gunderson lightly touched the healed incision on his abdomen. It was like a small screaming mouth that now refused to speak at all.
Gunderson picked up the phone.
"Calling in the airstrike?" Hollis asked. "Make sure you ask for extra napalm and pepperoni."
This time it took all day to prep him. They shaved his sternum and pelvis, the pits of his arms, the crown of his head, his shoulders and his shanks. They shaved him until he was hairless, totally hairless. Then they vacuumed up his shorn pieces, spiked him with an IV and colorful fluids, and suddenly here he was again, another calmly befuddled Gunderson on a platter of cold gunmetal, staring up into the angled lamps. All the attention crowded Gunderson into the neutral, familiar fact of his body.
He just didn't know what any of these facts meant, how they congealed, if they metastasized, if they would die on him, or if they would butcher him, too.
The Jims rallied around the table, scratching their heads in muffled consultation.
"What will it be? Liver? Kidney? Intestines? The flabby, god-sick soul? Anybody got a roulette wheel we can spin?"
Gunderson waited patiently, viewing the ceiling, the constellation of smoldering lamps illuminating every isolated part of him. He raised himself on an elbow and looked around. Beyond the cart of sinister instruments and the row of distracted Jims, he saw the pantry shelf across the room. It was empty. All the murky jars were gone.
"Where did they go?" Gunderson asked. "The organs?"
The Jims swiveled in unison, not at the pantry, but at Gunderson, regarding him quizzically.
"My prune thing," Gunderson repeated. "It went somewhere, right? Did you run out of room? Throw them out? Recycle them?"
"Everything usually ends up in an Idaho," Guatemalan Jim shrugged. "It's just not always the same Idaho."
Gunderson tried to act surprised.
"Thank you," he said.
The Jims went back to their hushed consultation. Someone was writing out a long list of options on a forsaken scrap of brown paper bag. Gunderson stared up into the lamps. Even the light fixtures seemed casually distracted about the procedure. Slowly, Gunderson unplugged his tubes and cords and rolled off the table. The anesthetic was still snailing up his arteries. He staggered out of the medical theater, naked and hairless, half-numb, only mildly disappointed that no one tried to stop him.
Hollis was waiting on the sofa at home in a blood-red suit and sculpted hairdo. On the tabletop, he had arranged the spatula, the spoon, the ladle, the meat cleaver, the machete.
"It's not that life is too short," he said. "It's just so goddamn skinny sometimes."
Gunderson sat on the sofa. He wasn't sure how much of Hollis he agreed with, or which parts of him, or if any of the nagging components should be separated anymore. Gunderson was okay with this. He inspected the multitude of tools and selected the silver meat cleaver, which he handed to Hollis.
"Good choice," Hollis said.
"Shut up and slice," Gunderson replied.