This is how they keep me, how they keep us: behind a curtain, a sparkling curtain. It shifts and sways; you can see the grain in the sparkle if you look. Eyes open or closed, it doesn't matter; just look at the shimmering quality of seeing and you'll know we're behind a curtain. Maybe it's not quite real but we believe it's there because we're weak and they keep us pumped with drugs. The shiny sequins on the curtain are drugs: a jittery glint tweaks right back to some chilly nerve in my head.
Sometimes the curtain collapses; maybe overnight it's buckled and the nurses and guards haven't come. The curtain has fallen; it is lying on the bed, a blanket of sequin-snow covering the trees and the animals. There's movement as the morning arrives, the movement of wolves, of monsters!
That's if you're a kid and you're scaring yourself.
Otherwise it's just a small body waking up under a thin blanket and the monster is pain putting razor-blades in my blood. The night drug is fading and the sequins are dull; the curtain is as fine as those old dresses of see-through stuff, fading like fog. Breathe in the last wisps and be still; any small movement brings pain so sit still 'til they get here.
Pain don't sit. It has a heart beat. It has my heartbeat! Each wake-up day it comes and tells me how it will be. This is Pain talking:
One day we'll wake up and the shimmering curtain will slide off and they won't come! They'll get stuck in the elevator. Or there'll be a strike. Or two of the nurses will be dancing, fooling around. But I won't miss you. The kind doctors have opened you up from your asshole to your wings and I can reach in and play your spine like a Chinese banjo, strings all tangled to the knobby pole. Your blood pumps and hollows out your heart so it's an empty horn. Listen! You are reveille for this zombie ward! Waking everyone! Go ahead! Howl your blood right out to the walls, to the streetlights, to the dawn sky: red on red on red.
'Red sky in the morning, Sailor, take warning!'
The blanket is transparent now; I'm awake. The pillow is a mountain in my arms and each little shift of my body is seismic, measured by pens that waggle somewhere and flood the screens with numbers. I can push the pain around my planet, my body; I can have it hover in the air like lightning bolts. The Thing Most Laughable is I have an erection; it is the only thing that works. I can't stand or sit or walk; I can't even remember the other words: dance, prance, leap, fall, tumble, rumble, boogie, woogie. But, as my spine collapses and my body gets smaller, my erection gets bigger! Soon it'll be bigger than my body!
Every morning I ask my friend the Pillow: "How did we get here?"
Your body was crushed. Crushed itself...collapsed. You lost seven inches of spine overnight. The goo between your vertebrae got squeezed up into your brain and down into your testicles and for nine months you've been lying here sweating and screaming and sleeping and dreaming and generally being the best entertainment this place has had in a long, long, time! Unlike all the other...
Shut up, Pillow! I hear them coming: the squeak of the wheelies on the winch!
"Hi, Maddy! Maddy in the Morning!"
"Sailor."
Already the push back, the blunt go-away; all the attention going to Jabba.
"Maddy! Could you...I know you could...would you give me some?"
Busy nurses pay no attention to that kind of stuff. They make a brisk attempt to pull the curtain around Jabba's bed but I can see. What does Jabba care? We are slabs of meat in the locker! Do we shy away from seeing each other's fine marbled flesh? No! So I watch as they winch Jabba up for his bath.
