Suicide Notes - Oyster After Dark

The last time I saw or touched a real living person - the kind with thumbprints, hairdo, and breath curling in and out of their snoot - was seventy-five million years ago, give or take a handful.  I was sick at the time, as I was almost always in those days, could barely stand up.  It was the doctor, wearing a white scarf around his head and mouth.  He put his hand out and grabbed mine, pulled me over into the old dentist chair.

"Do you trust me, Oyster?"  At the time I had laughed.  The doc's eyes twinkled like a dying star.  He had a grim sense of humor, too, gallows humor they used to call it.  Our laughs sounded like they were spit through a noose.

"Just give me the shot, doc."  I went to pull my sleeve up but remembered I wasn't wearing a shirt.  My arm was red and scabbed over.  He didn't even look at it.  He put a finger to my neck and traced it down my side.  He tugged on my sweatpants and pulled them down to my ankles, staring at the veins on my leg.

I used to care about this, about my body.  I tried to imagine sitting in stained underwear in an old dentist chair when I was younger.  I imagined my fat, full body.  I looked down at the stretchmarks on my stomach, the rolls of flab, now puckered and empty.  I would have been so uncomfortable, writhing in myself, bursting at the seams.  I would have been thinking, over and over, "It's so easy to get wet, so hard to get dry."

I was still so wet I was dripping then, but I had long lost the will to care.  Life was not a dry enterprise.  Life was juicy, moist, soggy, sodden.

"Aha," the doctor said, pushing the electric tip of a needle into my calf.  "I'll do two in here, and the main line through there."  He pinched a spot on the side of my other ankle.

The two needle-pricks set my jaw hard.  I remembered a wasp near that very spot, stinger dug in and just pumping, pumping.  Standing on the stairs of my childhood house.  There is that breathless moment when skin is pierced.  Time stops and there is but one problem to solve in the universe.  The solution then was a deft napkin plucking the wasp away, peace, a hug from mommy.  What I got now was so much better.

"Think happy thoughts," the doctor said, and I would have laughed if I had time to before the drugs started coming on.  He lowered a headset around my temples and pushed a button on the side.

There was but one problem to solve in the universe.