THE SWIFTNESS OF THE SEA | CHAPTER 1
JUNE 15, 2006 - MAUI, HAWAII
I'm lying on my back on a bed of undulating seaweed, twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea. I'm Mr. Spock flying through the universe, sealed in a capsule, my destination unknown. I'm a vegetating chunk of humanness, a rotting homo-sapient tuber buried in the slimy earth, millions of worms invading me, crawling into every orifice, devouring my living corpse from the inside out. I'm the centenarian Dave Bowman, lying in that enigmatic and mysteriously uber-sterile green and white room in 2001 - A Space Odyssey, growing older, and older, and older, by the second... whole, but not whole, not wholly alive. What is it to be alive? Perhaps I'm dead and alive, but mostly… I'm so alone here.
I'm treated just like another sheet on a bed that gets turned back every day, whether it needs it or not. I'm placed in another bed every morning when my diaper is changed and I'm scrubbed, and I'm cleaned, and I'm smeared with fragrant emollients that overwhelm my remaining sense of smell— treated like a domesticated animal that smells or might smell as the day wears on and turns to night.
My bed is freshly, efficiently made each day by chattering hospital workers who speak Illicano, pidgin Hawaii-English, and Spanish, but many times their voices mesh and sound as if cloaked Klingon warriors arrived to discuss the fate of my seemingly lifeless body. I'm hefted back into my bed as if I were a sack of potatoes, a living lump of lard, a mass of living flesh that once possessed a personality, mastered a talent or two and had an affable friendly smile for almost everyone I encountered—in what I thought was the good life. I was a nice guy before this happened to me....
In a time that may or may not be the morning, a nurse enters the room; inserts what I think are needles of nourishment, medicine or perhaps some evil magic into my arm. I'm washed every other day by a man who whistles off key 1970's disco tunes and seems to pay more attention to my penis than I think is necessary. He is also the brusque purveyor of my occasional enema and my official machete wielding, fingernail, toenail, hangnail cutter, filer and polisher. My once muscled agile fingers, my once perfected guitar nails... all things of the past, never to be again.
I've had four different roommates since my arrival. This is how I get my news. I can't ask my wife Aya, or my son Reuben about what has happened, what is happening or what will happen in my future. My roommates have all been members of big noisy local families: Samoans, Fijians, Marshall Islanders or some other race who climbs and partakes of the coconut tree culture. I smelled the coconut oil on all of them, each and every time they walked into my hospital room, while rambling speaking perplexing Donny-speak or pidgin-gone-Polynesian in loving intonations and liquid-y loquaciousness.
These unknown family members talk to me, ask me what I think about everything under the Hawaiian sun. They tell me things about their lives they wouldn't tell a wife, a priest or a cop in an intimate confession. I've overheard five different versions of what happened to me, why I'm at this place, in this space, and in this time. These simple, happy, un-restless natives, who for the most part place the quandaries of life into the hands of their Jesus. I've spent many days thinking about Jesus and concluded Jesus was a lot like Walter Ozman Junior, the Oz, The Great and Powerful Oz — both young men heaped with heavy responsibilities to live up to — revered images — god like images — only to be betrayed by a Judas and Fritz Mann... for some reason my mind turns itself off, as if suffering traumatic stress disorder. My brain will not allow thinking or mental images associated with Fritz Mann to proceed— too painful Robert, my over-functioning, always-on brain tells me— too painful.
Mick King came to visit me once. He came alone, but I could smell Aya's scent still on him. He told me he was sorry for what happened. He cried. He told me he loved Aya. He said he loved her more than anything in the world. He asked if I would forgive him. Forgive him for what? Forgive him for loving my wife behind by back with a distinct passion.
If I could tell him anything, I would tell him to hold her tight, to love her, to take care of her forever. I may never be able to do so again—Mick, my young and talented friend, you are now her future! I would tell him that and I would tell him I may never be able to leave this prison of my own body to even whisper one last, ‘I love you, Aya'.
Mick asked me not to judge his pal Fritz too harshly. Fritz, he told me, has many problems. Then I remembered who Fritz Mann was. Tears do not flow from my eyes anymore since my tear ducts no long work. I can laugh, but I no longer possess the ability to coordinate my breathing, so my laugh is only a meaningless grunt, if that. Only futile grunts when I try to cry, or laugh, or yell, or rant in my utter despair. My laughter, when it does activate what remains of my vocal cords is off the beat, out of sync, only a nasty gurgling grunt... only crude grunts, accompanied by my constantly drooling spittle, secreted in never-ending streams from my malfunctioning saliva glands… up and over lips more putty than muscle. I appear to be an idiot to people, a motionless heap of sinewy soft muscle, spread over useless old bones and there is absolutely nothing in this lifetime that can be done about it.
If I could strangle Fritz Mann to death with my last ounce of strength before I died I would do it without guilt, without reservations and without a second thought; strangle the man until his eyes bulged out of his head, until he bit off his protruding purple swollen tongue, until he lost control of his bowels, until he begged me to let him live ... and after he was dead; I would strangle him again, and again, and again... until the end of time itself.
My mind turns itself off, some ideas; some mental images are not allowed or permitted at this stage in my recovery.
Often my visitors pose philosophical questions to me. Have I become a guru in a bed, in a sterile room, on the top of a mystical mountaintop the troubled, the world-wary, the dispossessed come to find the answers to their enigmatic and intimate questions? They often ask me to think about things. Think about what I've said, Robert, they tell me, just think about it, they say, confident I'll get back to them in a day or two. Then they leave, and when the hospital quiets down in what must be the late evening, when there are only the sounds of highly caffeinated nurses making the rounds and the persistent squawking hallway voice of a female asking for a doctor to call a number....
The long, long nights, all is now one long night here in my sealed off cave of useless delayed nerve and body pulses, impulses and cellular short circuits… it is then I think about their questions. I think, ponder and ruminate, and then I think, ponder and ruminate some more... it's all I can do in this prison of my mind, in this seemingly endless long journey into night!
I've stopped thinking about peoples' questions in the normal way. I now filter, arrange, categorize, classify and correlate each and every word of the day's discerned discourse, innuendo, random conversations, fragmented parts of dialogues of the fully living, hushed spoken references to me, terminally alive ironies and the sickening despair of those struggling to breath all around me... into quanta of info bits and musical notes for a symphony I'll never write.
Kurtz muttered with his last breath, ‘the horror, the horror", I live a life of, ‘the boredom, the boredom', and can only pray a fellow like Kurtz's rigid and righteous assassin comes in and frees me someday soon... or I come out of this god-damned fucking coma!
Anyway, I slowly, over many days sometimes, derive answers for all the questions I'm asked, but I don't think anyone would believe my solutions; most think they're too busy to listen anyway. Besides, they all think I'm in a coma, nearly dead, a good listener or perhaps an extremely calm person.
My first roommate was a gunshot victim, a teenage boy shot in the gut by a friend. Apparently, an accident, but I wondered. As I've said, I hear things differently now... indeed, I may be a saint, a glorified soul, an angel, a consecrated lump of all that is human, all that a man can be who is suspended in time and space without a vocal option, without a way to communicate with my species, without...
Two detectives, who spoke in deep monotones, came in to question the boy in the bed next to me. They both smelled of freshly laundered clothing, Old Spice and baby powder. They decided it was an accident. The young boy may have felt a loyalty to his friend and that was the reason he lied ... I can tell if people are telling the truth. The boy confided to me, as if I wasn't still comatose one night, saying he was blinded by jealousy, he lost his mind because his best friend made love to his girlfriend. Kids, kids trying to deal with powerful hormones programmed by millions of years of killing and loving to kill, to kill the lesser of the fittest, to reproduce while madmen are beating down the doors to sacred bedrooms in jealous rages, to kill all that stands in their driven quest to reproduce, to kill... to reproduce, to kill to reproduce... my mind skips like an old phonograph record at times... and I want to yell out to them about Fritz Mann, but I know they'd never hear my accusations.
The detectives asked him who I was, who I am. I learned I'm the victim of a road accident. My car went off a cliff. I'm alive only because of a miracle... but no one has ever taken the time to tell me about the miracle.
I've pieced together what I think, people think happened to me. Driving to work around sunset on the Hana Highway, I pulled off the road above Mailko Gulch, to answer a phone call telling me I didn't have to come in to work. I was going to return home, but I shifted my SUV into drive instead of reverse and drove off a two hundred foot cliff. My beautiful Exterrra caught fire. I was ejected into the sea when the car hit the rocks below the cliff.
I've no recollection of this. The last thing I remember vividly was seeing a red haired woman, wearing a pearl white wedding dress, coming towards me with a long stemmed rose of some sort, a beautiful red rose that smelled so wonderful... and then my memory stopped, a darkened theatre called my life, the last performance, the last hurrah… the curtain simply closed.
I think the stem of the rose was inserted into my head and driven through my brain, into my spinal cord, but this may be a hallucination, I can no longer tell. I may be dreaming right now. I can't differentiate reality from imagination. Is this all a fantasy?
Memories ravage me, old memories flooding back in distortion and chaos into my brain: Rubens birth struggle, love making with Becky, the day we met and fell in love, the first sex we enjoyed in front of Casa Pacifica in San Clemente California in 1973, odd flashes of a tricky-dick Nixon on television and the Vietnam War.
Then where was the memory of Aya the night I saw her across the room in The Deep Blue Sea Restaurant. She opened her Christmas present from me, put the ruby necklace around her beautiful neck, inserted the earring hooks into her delicate ear lobes … the one special moment when she looked up at me...
I can't seem to control my wide-awake memories that appear to be dreams, or are they sleeping dreams, masquerading as wide-awake memories? My mental movie starts out fine each and every day when I awake, and segues into the infinities of never ending fractal imagery, the byzantine, the bizarre, the grotesque, the ludicrous, and the fantastic. Memories drift into amalgamations of moments in my past life I know are moments of my true reality, yet they soon become disjointed flashing wallops of harrowing madness, the never ending acid trips from a places I've begun to call the world of my abandoned soul.
In this horrid place that I must endure, this living liquid hallucination of constant jerking, and twitching, and shooting, and punching and stinging tortuous pain throughout my body, as if a cruel sadistic taskmaster resided within me, constantly poking out from below my skin's elastic surface with the sharp shining metal instruments of sadistic torture, from my nervous system's operating room, from my heart of darkness where the vestiges of the abandonment of my souls dwells, from a nether world of....
"Robert, Aya is here, wakey, wakey— time to wake up. Wake up, your beautiful wife is here Robert. Dr. Thompson is making his rounds soon, Aya. He will check on Robert within the hour. Are you happy to hear that, Robert?"
Nurse Victoria asks, and then I'm freed from the hell of my mind with the first utterance of another human being addressing me directly. It is a validation I'm indeed alive! I laugh in the face of the despotic over-lord of my despair, and at the same time cry in happiness. I'm so overjoyed I've been asked a question by another human being—I've been freed— another human being! I'm not totally alone in here!
Nurse Victoria has a melodic voice, strong hands and smells of earthy soap, a soap that reminds me of the smell of a beautiful doorway flung open to an outside world of fragrant jasmine floating on a languid summer breeze. I laugh out like a drunken sailor, laugh in utter joy at her rescuing presence, now freed from myself, now freed from my mind, from whatever crunching fear-generated hell that is now my restless yet totally immobile existence.
Three seconds later... an eternity when perceived from this level of limbo, a limbo where time no longer has meaning, or is it three minutes later... I then perceive my laugh has come out as a grunt. My once beautiful laugh, now a dog-like wheezing grunt, a mongrel dog coughing up tough pieces of gristle-old-bone remnants.
"Any change in condition?" Aya asks.
It is so good to hear Aya's voice! Trumpets blare out from my imagined heaven to announce to my brain the overwhelming emotion of love I've for my wife. Her love smells like freshly picked rosemary after being pulled apart, rubbed on my hands ... her love is a liquid rhomboid, an elastically endowed semi-solid, yet an ephemeral and sometimes malleable entity I imagine I can sense and touch and hold and breathe and clasp that fuses into the very soul of my being.
Then my primordial sense of smells begins to play nasty little games with the thing I use to call my mind. Disinfectants, old food, women wanton-wicked and dosed with perfumes, musky men-y smells of crotch-y locker room fungi, the smells of rancid coffee oil in the air, the decaying smell of flatulence stealthily passed by Victoria, the dental-plaquesque aroma remaining from Dr. Kuolema's bad breath, and a smell from Aya's body I recognize—a smell I recognize, a smell that nearly stops my heart cold!
Smell is a picture album, a scrapbook of perception objects that strike me with overwhelming power, as my mind turns page after page of smell memory snapshots of my life. Some are truly nightmares that overwhelm me to the point of retching, but I can no longer vomit up my emotions as my memories begin to build into nauseous anomalies in a stomach I can't feel, nor control. Something is not right!
"I'm about ready to change out his nutrients bag and suction hose. Little choking now, Robert. Don't you worry about things Robert. Aya, you'll learn how to aspirate Robert esophagus and trachea so he doesn't choke or suffer acid reflux. Robert, today for lunch: Beef Roulades with Blue Cheese and Walnuts ground up and strained into your feeding tube."
I hear Nurse Victoria joke, then laugh in her innocent Irish-y guarded nurse's chuckle as she reams my red-raw throat with a sucking plastic hose clearing my throat of my bile and liquid emotions, but also sucks away all my life-giving breath.
"My husband took me to the Kai Makai Restaurant for dinner last night. Loved it. My husband Johnny's a musician too, but said he was nowhere near Robert's caliber of playing. Robert was a genius everyone tells me. Wouldn't it be something if Robert understood what I'm saying?"
I do understand, I do understand. I yell like an insanely desperate sailor marooned on a forlorn and desolate Pacific coral isle seeing a boat steaming by on the far horizon— for the millionth time I yell to them I'm here, I'm alive. I yell to Victoria, I do understand ... and then seconds later my yell comes out as moronic grunt, strands of drool gurgling, bubbling and flowing uselessly over my lips and onto my chin.
"Makes him hungry if you talk about food, he's drooling like he's hungry. Robert ate at the Kai Makai many times. He worked there for many years... You hungry Robert? Did you ever hear Robert play the guitar?
Aya asks Nurse Victoria, her voice a radiant song.
"Oh yes. Practically every one on Maui knows of Robert Rubio, master guitarist, genius... His old music partner, that Rex character... He was in last night after visiting hours." Nurse Victoria tells Aya.
And putting the make on one of the night nurses as usual, good ol' Rex. The horny old bastard always pushing the envelope of infidelity, as usual and getting away with it What I wouldn't give to be able to give him a sock in the kisser for hurting Susan.
"I think the neurosurgeon has good news for you Aya. Robert is doing much better. Dr. Thompson he knows his stuff. Robert may be going home sooner than expected. He's making a remarkable recovery."
From the tone in her husky voice, I knew she was telling the truth. She'd transcended from careful, caring, nurturing Nightingale, to pitying, punctual and perfect nurse after our first two weeks together, after she accepted the diagnosis of my remaining life as the head beaten and burned coma guy in bed 309B.
A coma of the first order was the thing Dr. Thompson explained to others and me in the room one day, yelling it in the second person future perfect tense. Perhaps he thought speaking in a loud voice could penetrate this heavy fog I'm immersed within. I imagined him now as Adolph Hitler; with the funny haircut and the even funnier little mustache, holding a extremely sharp surgical scalpel, standing over me ready and willingly make the cut deep—yes, please operate you fiend, cut, cut away on this fucked-up brain and make it work! I'll give you my soul for one minute to say one word to Aya, the woman I love—Love.
His fascist-like bedside manner always quieted everyone in the room. His voice, a harsh drill sergeant on a cold rainy winter day at San Onofre barking orders at me... ”Robert your reactions will be inconsistent and unpredictable. You will respond without purpose or understanding to stimuli. You will respond to things in a non-specific manner if you respond to them at all. You may experience eye blinking and movement after the bandages come off, you will experience changes in your breathing rate and experience gross body movement you can't control, you will drool almost constantly and you will vocalize with grunts that are in no way connected to cognate thinking. We will be checking closely for eye movement when the bandages come off.
In other words, he thinks I'm a vegetable. Am I? NO! I'M ALIVE! I'M ALIVE? THIS IS MY LIFE?
I've heard many conversations from the hallways and from the rooms close to mine on this floor of the terminally ill and dying. I'm starting to detect when doctors and nurses lie to patients. Mostly it is little lies about control, but sometimes it's plain downright malicious. Sometimes I think it is all from some well know medical profession sanctioned, Machiavellian playbook that is adjusted to the life expectancy or death expectancy of a patient, live - die... a flip of the coin of fate.
And then there is the smell of death ......... So far, only one person has died on this floor since I arrived. Most of the most terminally terminal, in the terminal state of being really terminally inclined are wheeled away in the night, never to return....
That one unexpected death event on my floor invaded my olfactory sense in the same way 9/11 assaulted and commandeered my color vision on that infamous day. I'm certain the heightened sixth sense wraiths and goblins the terminally ill experience near the end, those slippery permutations in the imagined realm of existentialism that dress up as the ghosts of despair, angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom were dancing up and down the hospital hallways, on that dying day, after freeing that one death-bound soul, in pure demonic joy.
"Do you hear that Robert? Oh, by the way sweetheart, Lucky slept in our bed, he slept with me last night... he was so lonely for you."
I imagine her smiling and laughing. I imagine my Weimaraner, Lucky, his always morose and sadly staring golden eyes, usually a reassuring image to me, but now an image that evoked utter desolation from within. Something was not right. Aya was holding something back from me. Something was not right!
I knew what her voice told me. I hear between the lines of her love for me. I hear the little grace note of guilt and I detected higher and more fragile lisps of deception in her beautiful voice. What she wanted to say —Mick slept in our marriage bed for the first time last night.
I knew in my heart Lucky was only there to protect the last vestiges of my conjugal authority. The smell I detected on Aya—betrayal; the smell of guilt ridden sublimated desires of a married woman. The remnants of the hormones of forbidden love are not so easily washed away and discarded.
Life moves on and in my despair I configured the way it must be and decide Aya just asked me if loving Mick King was all right.
Yes, Aya, you've my permission. I'll allow Mick into our marriage bed. Although, you'll have your work cut out for you to convince Lucky I no longer claim you. I laughed at this thought. I was happy. I wanted her to be happy. I loved her so much I would willingly free her up to pursue her happiness. Once again, my laugh—heard as only a delayed drooling, grunting event to her and the outside world.
My mood swung down hard, tore a black swath into my brain with a vengeance as I thought about Lucky, this coma and being the loser of love forever. Oh these the drugs must be causing the mood swings, or I've gone completely crazy— love for my dog made me cry and experience the full extent of the loneliness driving me deeper and deeper into the shit-pit of my immobile existence.
If only I could respond to her with the love I hold for her. We always looked each other in the eyes when we spoke. I loved the shiny reflections of the world around us in her beautiful brown eyes. I often saw myself reflected back as I looked into her deep dark eyes. Her eyes always seemed to be smiling from heavens above as we lived our lives together.
I know I can see. I know I can move my eyes— Take off these dammed bandages! I must see her love for me in her beautiful face! Betrayal— and the sting of it hits me—I realize I can't claim my love for her ever again.
"Robert, I received a check for seventeen thousand from the insurance company for the Exterrra. I bought a dark blue VW Jetta for eleven thousand. Mick asked a friend to sell it to me, a bargain. Robert, property taxes raised. You made over too much money last years, we will be hit with a tax in Maui for the wealthy."
Aya says with a sigh that breaks my heart.
"I brought some new music for you. Luigi Legnani plays his thirty-six caprices. I hope you like; I remembered you often played them."
Aya says, inserting the CD into a small bedside player.
"Mick told me to bring some old Jeff Beck and John McLaughlin for you. I know you like these; I start with classical guitar for you. I wish I knew what you wanted to hear... or even if you can hear me."
She is lying and I knew it was time to wake up and smell the music. She told me long ago she hated Legnani and I told her I hated his music too, pure pedagogy, only exercise pieces for my students. I remembered telling her Legnani etudes were strictly something I made all my students listen to, only one small step to classical guitar mastery.
This was the second lie I detected from her since we were married.
You don't need to lie to me about Mick or anything else sweetheart, I said, but I knew I would never be heard. I knew there would be many more lies from her as I became more and more like that treasured old piece of antique furniture, stuck away in a little used room, in a musty old condemned house... until I was carted away to the last landfill of my life.