Ostrich: A Novel Read online

  I start thinking about all the items on my current To Google list. All of the names I’ve heard for things I’ve never got round to looking up. All of the doors I’ve never opened: Walter Cronkite, Cassius Clay, Capsicum, Sir Vantess, Tess of The D’Urbervilles, John Cougar Mellencamp, The Dow Jones Index, The Duckworth-Lewis Method, The Rhythm Method, The Footsie 500, The Daytona 500, The Birmingham 6, The Aurora Borealis, The Cuban Missile Crisis, Christian Guru Murphy, The Bay of Pigs, Pig Latin, Jerry Mander, Mandy Patinkin, Monica Seles, Mnemonics, New Radicals, Free Radicals, Flea Markets, Fixed-Rate Mortgages, Double Penetration, The Corridor of Uncertainty, Squeaky Bum Time, Tennis Elbow, The Ottoman Empire, The Six-Day War, The Hundred Years’ War, Hamid Karzai, Prince Naseem Hamed, Prince Albert, Albert Pierrepoint, Pierre van Hooijdonk, Donkey Oaty, Titus Oates. (It’s like browsing the index to a book I haven’t read.) And that’s when it hits me.

  What if something goes wrong?

  What if this is the last conversation I ever have?

  For the first time, I feel myself starting to panic.

  “Where’s the other one?”

  “What other one?”

  “The other one. The anesthetic practitioner. What happened to the other one?”

  “Oh, honey, he’s not a doctor. Don’t worry, there’s nothing to be afraid about.”

  “Why does everyone keep saying that?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “If it’s true, they wouldn’t keep saying it,” I hear myself say.

  I try to breathe normally, but my heart is beating in my throat. I feel like I could cough it up right into her lap. The nurse flicks a dewdrop off the end of a syringe. “Look, this really doesn’t hurt, I promise, just so long as you can keep calm. Will you do that for me?”

  I think of things to reassure myself:

  1) It takes sixteen years to qualify as a neurosurgeon, which means that Mr. Fitzpatrick has been studying how to do this sort of operation since before my parents met. (Before we left for the hospital, I googled the 100 biggest hits of 1988, and I’d only heard of seven of the artists in the list.) Mr. Fitzpatrick is so well qualified that people don’t even call him doctor anymore. You get to be called Mister only after you’ve qualified on top of qualifying to be a doctor. (It’s a bit like sports day. If you run the 100 meters, then you end up 100 meters away from where you started, but if you run the 400 meters you end up in exactly the same place.)

  2) Trepanning is a word, which I know about from another 18 I saw. It’s when you drill a hole in someone’s skull to cure them of headaches or madness (or, in the film, demonic possession), and apparently it’s the oldest surgical procedure that they’ve ever found evidence for, dating back at least as far as the prehistoric era. Even though no one knows how widespread it was, the fact that it has a name means they must have done it at least twice. Which means it must have worked.

  3) Pour trouver le bureau des objets trouvés continuez tout droit.

  The nurse is rubbing cream into the back of my left hand and talking about nerve endings. The veins run blue like motorways on a roadmap. They are the quickest possible way to my heart. (We are not interested in taking the scenic route.) I look away and think of all the must-see films I’ve never seen.

  She taps on the skin to bring up the vein. My blood is hiding from the syringe, running scared. It’s in the last place she would think to look.

  “All you’ll feel is a tinsy prick, like a wasp sting.”

  People use analogies when they’re trying to explain something you don’t understand.

  “I’m allergic to wasps.”

  “Then a small electric shock.”

  I’ve never been electrocuted. We have plastic socket covers.

  I am totally unprepared for this. I have a Personal Best stiffy.

  “Now, remember what I said about counting to ten …”

  I refuse to give her the satisfaction. If this is to be my last act, let it be one of defiance.

  I decide to do a Fibonacci sequence.

  Ice shoots up my arm.

  “1 … 1 … 2 … 3 … 5 …”

  And then I die.

  Chapter Five

  (Question: Bungee Jump is to Suicide as General Anesthetic is to ________?

  Answer: Lethal injection.

  (You know the difference only on the way back up.

  (Which is why right now I think I’m dead.)))

  Death is a bit like being in screensaver mode, except the mouse is unplugged.

  That your life flashes in front of your eyes before you die is such a cliché (and Miss Farthingdale says that in Composition you should avoid clichés like the plague. (Dad says clichés are clichés because they’re true, but this is also a cliché.)). I never thought my death would be so mosaic, which is a better word for dull.

  I always imagined a blooper reel.

  I am walking hand in hand with my father along unfamiliar streets. There are no signs or numbers on the doors, and the houses and the driveways feel unimagined somehow, unrealized, like the outskirts of a computer game level (as though no one ever expected us to venture this far). We stop outside one such house. The gravel under our feet makes no sound. The door is without detail. I don’t believe there is a thing behind it, but Dad presses the buzzer anyway. It makes the noise of a circular saw. After a moment or quadrillion a gigantic man answers. Beneath a tangerine beard, his face is slate. Hair licks his forehead like fire. A lock darts down his face and bursts into flame in his fierce blue eyes. (They are the hottest part. (As he looks down at me, I think I might melt.)) Dad talks to him in an adult language I don’t understand. It’s a series of clicks and fellas and laughs and curses, and before long they are old friends and we’re expected. Dad squats down weightlifter-style, and for a minute I think (hope (pray)) he’s going to hoist me up, carry me away from here. But instead he tells me he’ll be back to collect me after his lessons and I’m to behave for Mr. Driscoll.

  Mr. Driscoll shuts the door with me on the other side of it, and the room starts to load around me. For the first time in my life I realize that we are well off. Sunlight from a broken shade bushwhacks through the murk and slices a cross section of the living area. The air is heavy with dust. Breathing is like the last half-bowl from a packet of Rice Krispies. (The world record for holding your breath is nineteen minutes and two seconds. (Dad’s lessons are an hour each, and Saturday is his busy day. (He spends all day Saturday “on road” or “in car.” (His weekends are so busy he doesn’t have time for determiners.))))

  David is on the sofa in front of a small-screen TV, an N64 controller at his feet. A mushroom cloud of dead cells rises around him, so I know he has sat down recently, but he is pretending to be asleep. His snoring is stagy. I sit down next to him on a newspaper front page (Illegal immigrants have been lashing themselves to the underside of freight trains. (Something must be done.)). Even in the near dark I can see that his skin is angry, his face pockmarked and raw.

  Which is when I remember why I’m here.

  David is the second-to-last one in our year to get chickenpox.

  I am the last one.

  I am here to contract his.

  (Life is flashing very slowly. It’s all happening at half-speed but also kind of at once. Looking around the room smears. Time has lost its shape, like a rubber band stretched beyond its elastic limit, and now that they’re no longer tethered by tense, every action is a present participle. Moreover, even the nouns are starting to behave as verbs. It’s hard to explain, but it’s kind of like Antarctica, which most people think of as a continent but is really just sea. (Everything is an -ing word.))

  Outside, through the missing slat, a neighbor is washing a Ford Escort with a garden hose. The spray off the bonnet makes a bastard rainbow.

  And then I remember why I’m back here.

  Today is the day that it rained.

  I know what Mr. Driscoll is going to say before he says it. I hear it in my head before it’s out of his mouth, so
it’s like he’s being badly dubbed.

  “Money’s on the fridge like. Acting the maggot I’ll hear about.”

  The door opens. Light yawns in, like air into a lung, and just as quickly it’s gone. I watch Mr. Driscoll climb into a van. There’s time enough to read the slogan on its side before it shivers awake and pulls out of view: An office without plants is like the Amazon without a rainforest. Love plants. We do. (The sickle of the question mark has peeled away. (Now it is an imperative. (Love plants!)))

  On the TV, Mario starts snoring.

  David stops.

  “There’s only one control,” he says, riding the sofa cushion down onto the floor without looking at me. Mario backflips up a wall and eats a coin. “If you want, you can watch,” he adds, after what could be a minute or a decade. And then: “If you tell anyone you were here, I’ll kill your pets.”

  (I never did tell anyone. I have taken it to my grave, David Driscoll. When you returned to school, your black eye a septic yellow, and told whoever asked that you fell down the stairs (which you must have learned from a thousand bad TV shows in which someone convinces no one that they haven’t been punched), I did not tell them that you live in a bungalow.)

  For lunch we order pizza and eat on the floor from paper plates, which reminds me of birthdays. David eats first. When the grease has stained his lips orange and the light from the ceiling has seeped through his plate and into the carpet, he turns the box round to me. As I open the box its jaws split like a snake’s, and for a second I forget who’s eating who. A cheese-and-tomato tongue beckons me closer, and as I reach shakily through fangs of corrugated cardboard the smell is science experiments and swimming lessons. I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that at any moment this box could swallow me whole (that I would disappear completely), but before it has the chance, David swivels it back round and takes the last slice. I want to tell him that he’s saved my life, but he’s on his feet before I can shape the words.

  The room gulps another breath as the front door opens and I remember the stray dog tied to the lamppost. David frisbees the empty pizza box into the Ford Escort owner’s front garden and sets the slice down where the flea market can catch its scent. He galumphs greedily toward it, his eyes wide with thanks, but when the meal is a half-foot from his mouth (when he can taste it in his nose), the tether snaps back his neck, and David laughs. As he wheezes and strains against his leash I can see the first tears of rain making Venn diagrams of the hosepipe puddle. (The first drop is Butterflies (hairless, diurnal, chrysalis), the second is Moths (furry, nocturnal, cocoon). They hit the surface in a photo finish and burst and sprawl and intersect (antennae, six legs, Pterygota (which is a subclass for insects who are winged hexapods)). The third drop is Bees (hairy legs, feeds on pollen), the fourth is Wasps (smooth legs, feeds on parasites). They meet in the middle (stings, yellow, Hymenoptera (which is the biggest order of insects)) and then become indistinct. In seconds there is an ecosystem falling from the sky (set by set), and by now it’s impossible to spot the differences. (Everything intersects. (One thing becomes another.)))

  Wet gel lacquers David’s brow.

  His hair will dry in stalactites, which are the ones that point down.

  He pushes past me and slams shut the door.

  “Help me get the washing in!”

  I don’t move. I know what’s coming, but right now I’m mesmerized by the dog. He’s trying furiously to catch the rain, which I don’t remember noticing on my first time round.

  (“Oi! Gaybot! Washing!”)

  He is good at it, but success brings him no satisfaction. Whenever he plucks a drop from midair it turns to water on his tongue, which is not what he wanted at all. He wanted to take them alive.

  “What the …”

  Now it’s David’s turn to be spellbound. When I turn round he’s stiller than a bowl of fruit (or a violin). The rest of the sentence has frozen on his lips. He’s standing in front of the open slide door, staring out at a washing line that sags across the back patio like a maths problem.

  The sun is shining.

  There’s not a cloud in the sky.

  David speaks with double question marks. Wonder slackens his jaw.

  “What the fuck …”

  Above our heads, the downpour plays arpeggios on the bungalow’s roof, and in front of our eyes the drought falls in sheets from an open sky. It takes a moment for us to realize what should not even need realizing (what is too obvious to even say). It is raining in the front garden and not in the back garden.

  The carpet feels like sand between my toes. When I look down I am in only my Y-fronts. But this isn’t an anxiety dream, because no one else is in school uniform. David is stripped to the waist. The sores on his back spell out a constellation. He is singing.

  It’s raining, it’s pouring.

  The old man is snoring!

  (This carpet will bear witness to what happens here today. With bare feet we will trample in mud from the front garden and dirt from the back like we’re signing a treaty between two separate planets. (For one day only, David Driscoll’s house is a portal between worlds, and as we run shuttles from slide door to porch we are in both simultaneously. (This is Greenwich to the power of infinity. (We are at the center of the Universe. (Today we can win any argument because the Earth does revolve around us.)))))

  He went to bed and bumped his head

  And he couldn’t get up in the morning!

  A duckbilled platypus lays eggs and has a beak, but it is a mammal and not a bird. I do not know where Bolognese stops and Ragú begins. Once I was riding up an escalator when it stopped working, and then I was walking up a staircase. (Mood swings are one of the symptoms of my illness. Last year when Mum refused to write me an Off Games note I told her that I wished she was dead and I didn’t get into trouble. “It’s not you saying it,” she told me. Which scared me, because I don’t always know what is me and what is the illness. (I really do think I wanted her dead.))

  There are so many things I don’t understand.

  But me and David Driscoll know where the rain starts. And for now, at least, that means we understand everything.

  For the first time in my life I know I will remember something until the day I die.

  (Which I have.)

  Part Two

  Taking an Interest

  Chapter Six

  It’s funny how time works in hospital. When you come in the front door they put you in the waiting room, where time goes backward, but the farther in you get, the more of a rush everyone seems to be in. I’m as far in as you can go and still come back. They call it the ICU. In here I’m hooked up to an ICP (through a hole in my skull), an EKG, and two IVs (which makes eight in Roman Numerals). Everything in the ICU has an abbreviation, which proves how much of a hurry everyone’s in (except me). (If the ICU were a person, it would be the sort who walks up escalators, which would make it a walking tautology.)

  In the other wards I’ve been in, the nurses do things ASAP, but here in the ICU they do them asap. The fact that asap is two syllables shorter than ASAP means that it conveys a deeper shade of urgency. (The extra two syllables it would take the nurses to say ASAP would eat unacceptably into time that could be better spent starting to do whatever it is that needs doing.) While the nurses and doctors buzz around like flies I have a lot of time to think (which hurts less than I thought it would). One of the things I’ve been wondering about a lot is the first time someone used the abbreviation ASAP.

  Although we probably won’t ever know the exact circumstances that this happened in, I have decided that it’s reasonable to assume two things:

  1) That the person who first coined the term was in a rush. It is reasonable to assume this because the one thing we do know about him for certain is that he needed something done as soon as possible.

  2) That the person who first heard the term didn’t understand what it meant. It is reasonable to assume this because no one had ever said it before.

  Therefo
re, it is also reasonable to assume that the conversation probably went something like this:

  MAN 1: I need you to do something ASAP.

  MAN 2: What does that mean?

  MAN 1: It means that I need you to do something as soon as possible.

  MAN 2: Well, why didn’t you say that, then?

  MAN 1: I did say that.

  MAN 2: No, you didn’t. You said you needed me to do something ASAP.

  MAN 1: ASAP is short for As Soon As Possible.

  MAN 2: Since when?

  MAN 1: Since now.

  MAN 2: Says who?

  MAN 1: Says me. Think about it. People only ever say “As Soon As Possible” when there isn’t a second to spare, right?

  MAN 2: So?

  MAN 1: So if there isn’t a second to spare, then surely it makes sense to have an alternative phrase that takes a third less time to say. Which is where ASAP comes in.

  MAN 2: Well, that’s all well and good. But how the eff did you expect me to understand that “I need you to do something ASAP” meant that you needed me to do something as soon as possible?

  MAN 1: I didn’t. But sometimes you have to speculate to accumulate. Moreover, I hope now you can see that, if anything, my decision to risk confusing you by using an unfamiliar abbreviation was, in itself, testament to the exigency of the circumstances that we currently find ourselves in.

  If you think about it (which I have (a lot)), this represents a net loss of 264 syllables, when all Man 1 was trying to do was save himself two in the first place. In conclusion, this means that in this situation saying ASAP was exactly 44 times less efficient than it would have been to say As Soon As Possible.

  (All this is really unlucky for Man 1 and Man 2 (because by the time Man 1 was through explaining, their house would most probably have burned down), but for me, it’s great news. I don’t know how many hours it took me to figure this out because I fell asleep and had to start again quite a few times, but the fact that I can still do mental arithmetic means I don’t have major brain damage.)