The Road Back to Destruction Bay

Trapped then I was, trapped in the hospital, trapped not just by ill health but by poverty, too. I was trapped, and there was no place for me to go. I slept during the day, so that I would not have to talk to anyone, and sat alone in the dark at night, thinking of every place, any place, I had been and would now rather be.

I remembered a rainy morning leaving North Dakota, feeling depressed and very low, despite a giant shimmering cheerful rainbow stretching across the northern horizon. I drove all day west on Highway 2, into Montana, on The High Line, through patches of fog and drizzle, under more rainbows, past the white crosses that marked where people had died along the road. My spirits grew as I headed west. There was a lot of empty space around me—signs of human presence, sure, but everything was very spread out and junky-looking. I liked it. In the afternoon I hit Havre, which seemed a mighty town after the emptiness of the plains. I stopped and had a beer at the Havre Daily Saloon, and years later that made me smile. The Havre Daily Saloon: not much of a bar, but I liked the name of the place—the idea behind it. Thinking about that while I sat in the dark in the hospital made me happy.

The problem was, I was dying—dying not at the normal day-by-day rate we all die at, but much faster than I would have preferred had I given it any thought—and so I had ended up in the emergency room, pierced by a badly-placed IV, listening to a man in the next alcove scream, “Oh God! Ohhhhhh! Ohhhhhh!”

Two youngish doctors—interns, residents, whatever—stood next to me, a man a woman. The man appeared to be from South Asia, the woman from Latin America. They just stared at me. The screaming man beyond the curtain kept screaming. “Ohhhhhhh God! Ahhhhhhhhh!”

Finally the man said, “No one’s done his rectal exam yet.”

The woman said, “No.”

I looked up at the ceiling, wondering if it would be the last thing I saw. Bright lights, florescent. The top of a pale green curtain shutting my gurney off from the screaming man and the rest of the room. I thought, Well, this is it.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh! God! God!”

The male doctor said, “You do it,” and he quickly ducked away beyond the curtain. The woman frowned. I could see that she was pissed off—at me, for some reason, like it was my fault. After a moment she said to me, “Roll to your side.” When I did the badly placed IV jerked out of my arm and swung to the floor. I tried to show my arm to the woman, but she said, “Just lie still,” and then she rammed her finger up my ass. I realized then that while I might be dying a bit faster than normal, I wasn’t yet dead—not yet, not yet.

The next day I was wheeled into a room that looked out over the morgue. “They’re trying to send me a message,” I said to my fiancée. To a nurse I said, “That’s awfully convenient—you all can just toss me out the goddamn window when you have a need to.”

The nurse said, “We’re going to make sure that’s not going to happen.” I was unconvinced, but at the same time I knew that was pretty lucky to be there. I was so miserably poor—I probably made a total of around $7500 that year—that I qualified for the county’s medical assistance plan, and had better medical care than I might even have had with some regular types of health insurance. Without being so poor, I might really have ended up in the morgue rather than looking out at it.

I shared my room at the hospital with a retarded guy who had some sort of heart trouble. He was in his late thirties, maybe, and quiet...