Craig's Friday Presentation

Harry’s Time

The nurse enters the room. “Are you awake? Harry, wake up.”

Harry woke up from his anesthetic haze.

“MY FUCKING CHEST HURTS MORE THAN BEFORE and I have to take a piss.”

He had to lay flat. Doctor’s orders. The nurse hands him a plastic piss jug and says she will be right back.

Harry positions the jug between his legs and tries to relax. A little piss drips onto the sheet.

Harry responds, “I hope they change these sheets soon.”

The nurse returns after a while with a hypo filled with relief. She injects the clear fluid into the IV port in his sore hand. A calm floods Harry after a couple moments. Morphine he thinks. It reminds him of the times he stuck needles into his own arm. That was another time.

Harry rubs his face, then reaches for a small mirror on the cart beside his bed. There are now some lines he can trace along his face. Traces of time.

Ooh, time. Time past, still time, our time, future time. Harry wondered if times were getting better or getting worse. He always had a difficult time putting his finger on the present.

Harry speculated whether time was long as in a line or wide like the plain his grandmother is buried in. In this immobilized body he now can move across the dim line.

Harry relaxes and contends, “Ah, this long thin line, and if I should loose my balance I will fall and crush to death all my lovers.”

Harry mused about the idea of punctuation for that sentence. “Actually, periods are not that useful. Thoughts don’t end, they collide like streams flowing into a river. There should be tiny stop watches at the end of sentences that tell you how long it took to write that that one thought. After all, sentences are keeping track of my time.”

Lately, Harry was wondering who he is. At least at this time. His assorted lives slipping by in an endless stream. Harry didn’t mind the shifting changes of life. He was fluid. He could move with the ebbing and flowing of the environments he found himself in. He wondered who made all this shit, but he didn’t like thinking of God. God left him long ago. If he had to think of God he would like to stare into His angry face and tell Him how to run this sideshow.

As the morphine kept time with the rhythm of his heartbeat Harry nodded off to sleep thinking about Aegean blue and lounging on a rooftop in Santorini, reading Beckett, sipping wine and smoking opium with his constant friend and sometimes lover Carrie. He used to call her Lola.

Harry woke to an unenthused phlebotomist fumbling a needle for blood.

“Fucking rude vampires,” he grumbles under his breath.

He grabbed a small notebook next to his bed and scribbled illegibly across the page, “What happens when the world you live in doesn’t work the way you want to live?”

Harry mutters, “That cunt couldn’t even come to the hospital to see me. She said this was the last time–she couldn’t handle anymore. Some fucking compassion.”

“The bitch is taking my time, my money, my house and my name.”

A scar now covers the tattoo that contained her name on his left breast.

His wife is gone, but he still has time with his kids.

Harry didn’t mind the discord in his life, but a divorce could have been done with a little more finesse. He liked the in-between spaces with a sense of unknowing. He wasn’t sure if he would be lonely or happy in time. He looked into future time like pulling focus of a video camera. Something could materialize, moving in and out of focus, distance, perspective and point of view, but then vanish just the same. The movement through the years, days and moments of his life all diverging in an irreconcilable way.

Harry heard the sound of a car stereo echoing through the hospital window. He thought about the times he became excessively annoyed when listening to music in his car only to have another car pull up bumping some shit out of subwoofers. He always hated that fucking rap. Over time, Harry began enjoying the discord of the combination of two dissimilar genres. The hip hop beat blended well with the Velvet’s “Sister Ray” or John Zorn’s sax. He like the uniqueness, connections, overlaps and chance compositions never to be experienced again.

Now these seemingly disparate rhythms became anthems for his time.

Harry cringes and utters, “This Goddamn pain won’t let up.”

He wondered if the nurse would be stingy with the morphine. He pressed the call button.

She promptly delivered some relief with just a little taste of morphine. Enough to get his ragged body by.

Harry’s body has been letting him down. Turning him inside out. He guessed that it was just the ravages of time on a still living body. It is just change. Inevitable. Change. This architectural framework called a body is weathering. Bad heart, bad cholesterol, headaches, protruding stomach, sagging breasts, a shriveled cock. This change Harry had to carry in his heart. Harry thought about what that sullen faced philosopher Heraclitus purported, “There is nothing permanent except change.”

Harry was in need of a change. There was that Russian woman in New York he had talked to several times. She had liked the paintings he had done. Harry had time for new creations. Although, he would have to at least wait until he could stand up to pee.

He nodded off again listening to the repetitious rhythms of the heart monitor.

Harry woke to the sound of a group of chatty doctors entering the room.

One doctor asks Harry if he still has any pain.

Harry nods his head.

The doctor remarks, “We had to do plenty of cutting and stretching. That is where the pain is from”

Another doctor announces that they are concerned that his enzyme levels had risen and they need to keep him for observation a couple more nights.

Harry thinks, “More time. Fuck, they gave me a heart attack on top of this. That is another reason why the pain is killing me.”

A third doctor says that Harry already had too much morphine and they cannot give him more.

The first doctor replies, “We’ll get you fixed up.” Then they exit the room.

Frustrated, Harry resigned to wasting his time in the hospital bed.

Harry picks up Bukowski’s book “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” and begins reading in the middle of the book.

The nurse came in with two syringes. She flushed the IV with one and said the other contained dilaudid, which the doctor had reluctantly prescribed.

Harry thought, “Fucking crap, need 10 grains to kill a headache with that shit.”

It was just enough of the drug to make Harry’s eyes lidded and change his tension to relaxation. His body slipped away into a dreamless sleep.

It was Harry’s time.