Goodnight Nurse

My nurse explains my stories. Sometimes better than I can. My nurse visits me from time to time and time. And time seems to freeze when she’s here. She always has plenty to say and she makes lots of sparkling remarks that graze me like an errant bullet. She’s a stone cold knockout and clairvoyant up to a point just shy of uncanny.

She’s a marvel of medical science and healthy in a way that went out of style in the 1940s. She’s the kind of girl you want to throw a medicine ball to. Heave-ho.   

She doesn’t approve of medical marijuana in my particular case because it exacerbates my anxiety. “Well,” I tell her, “So do you.” Her visits provoke me in unsavory ways. 

My nurse’s name is Hilda Boursinberry. I almost said, “You’re kidding,” when she told me, but didn’t. I hope. I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings. It causes my empathy to backfire and stall. I always want to hurt them again. I am unscrupulous in a gentle way.

I told her that she had a good name for a W.C. Fields movie and she had no idea what I was talking about. But I think she took the comment as a compliment, which wasn’t my intent but whatever. Take the compliment, honey. It’s all yours. Gratis.

At 6’2” my nurse is taller than me. Statuesque, I guess. Her hair is blacker than any smoggy night I’ve ever coughed through. So black it shines like a pool of crude oil in the moonlight. But that’s just me being pointlessly romantic. I get poetic when I’m in pain. 

She could take me in a fight, hands down. So, I have to fight her in other, more subtle ways. I am as selfish as a drum solo.

Since she disapproves of marijuana, I make a point of smoking a thick blunt of Fumigator-12 just before she arrives. It’s a fanned hybrid and potent as hell. I pollute the surrounding atmosphere with a good, smoky, pungent haze. A burnt peanut butter smell. My dastardly plan is to give her a secondhand high. Then we’ll see.

The smell and the smoke get a rise out of her every time she walks through my door. She shakes her finger at me. “So, I guess you aren’t going to be able to communicate with me now.” She has a slight accent I can’t identify. Cartoon Romanian. 

“Probably not.” I clam-up when I get stoned. The THC in weed gives me first-day-of-school feelings. I tighten with shyness. I become morbidly introspective and so self-conscious I am unable to follow conversations and I overthink even brief, innocuous replies until they die in my mind and then I get rigid with stagefright and can’t think of anything to say and it makes the other person get annoyed because they have to start all over again and I panic because IT’S IMPERATIVE that I pay attention this time and oh hell,  there I go overthinking again and “What did you say,” I say.

“I can see your thought-processes. Or I should say, your not-processes. You’re nervous. And becoming paranoid again.”

“What did you say?” I say, I think.

“I didn’t say anything.” She’s rummaging through her black satchel and comes up with a blood pressure cuff. While she’s pumping it up, she says, “Under your tongue,” and slips a thermometer in there. I sit. We wait. “You’re a little high,” she says, meaning the blood pressure. The tearing Velcro sound shoots through me like a portal to an enclosed habitat. Like those plastic tubular mazes they make for hamsters. Or did I just dream that invention? Maybe I should register a patent with the government. The government?! No. Bad idea. I need to steer clear of insidious bureaucracies. Besides, the hamster thing is called a Habitrail and it already exists. Thank god I remembered that and didn’t file a patent. That would’ve been embarrassing. And the government would have been on to me.

She looks at the thermometer. “But you’re cool.”

“So are you.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” I want to talk to her but I can’t. I’m muzzled by army brass. I don’t even know what I mean anymore.  

So we leave it there. Or I leave it there. Until now.

She picks up a kitchen chair and places it before me. We’re now facing each other and I swallow what feels like a fetus in my throat. No more Happy High Guy. I’m being interrogated for a felony homicide.  

“And how are we feeling today?”

I try to nod and feel my neck creak like a rusted hinge. I imagine my head breaking off and toppling to the floor, guillotine style. Rolling eyes. Silently muttering mouth. Garish and cruel. The whole damn world.

And then I remember where I am. “What?”

“I asked you how you are feeling.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Well?”

“What?”

“You are feeling well?”

“Um, no. I feel okay.”

“What’s the difference?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s the difference between `okay’ and `well’?”

“Oh. Well, `well’ is better than `okay’ because `okay’ is just okay.”

God, it’s so hard for people to understand each other. Language is as crude as stone tools. It’s Paleolithic.

“Pardon me?” she asks and I feel dread creeping into my soul.

“What?”

“What’s Paleolithic?”

Oh no. Did I actually say that when I only meant to think it? Or am I broadcasting my thoughts? Or is she probing my mind again with her ESP?

“I don’t have ESP,” she says with a wink and I start to scream until she shoots me with Midazolam and relaxation rushes over me like a river of warm little fish.  

And that’s all I was after. Midazolam induces amnesia and for that I am glad.