The Walking Man (13 page)

It took The Truth and me the better part of two years to perfect quadriplegic access to the internet. Due to faulty voice activation software and hardware integration problems, it was difficult to get the network to respond to every spoken command. If you asked the network to open your email, it would often suggest a cooking recipe and if two people talked at the same time, mating mammals would appear on their browser…or worse.

Eventually, after continuous hardware upgrades and the installation of voice activation software that possessed artificial intelligence, each computer on our network could detect the voice of its master and execute basic tasks flawlessly. After our network became fundamentally perfect, The Truth launched a website, so anybody at Leicester County Hospital could go online and, by default, I was its web master. The URL of the network was www.lchospital.org and my email address, by my choosing, was [email protected].

Although I was diligent in purchasing the equipment needed to get my people online; there were many I could not help, including a series of post-Arthur Slank roommates. My battle with Arthur caused the hospital to classify me as an incorrigible. This resulted in me being paired with motionless men who lived in a coma because ultra-sensitive equipment detected an occasional brain wave, or somebody loved them too much to pull the plug. Frankly, it was fine with me. I didn't need a talking roommate to get through my days. Although the sounds of a ventilator could be annoying, especially the gurgles, I found mechanical noises far less troubling than spoken words from another desperate human being struggling to survive.

After my sixth roommate flat-lined, the last one, who I nicknamed John Paul, having lived in my presence for nary two days, Juliette Dritch and I had a powwow to discuss the future of Room 302. I'd made a request to convert 302 to a single room. In turn, I promised to build a world-class computer network for the hospital on the spot where Arthur Slank once tried to set himself on fire.

"Is this a negotiation?" I asked Juliette Dritch.

"Yes, it is," she responded. "You make an offer, and then I say no, and then you make another offer."

"In exchange for a single room, I offer to build the hospital the best computer network in the world using the latest and greatest Apple technology. Every three years, I'll provide every patient, and every member of the hospital's staff, with a new Apple iMac and a large screen monitor. I'll pay to have optical fiber connected to every room in the hospital so you can stream digital video from your office. And I'll install a satellite dish on the roof of the hospital to ensure we always have a consistent high-speed connection to the internet… and I'll name the whole mess JDritch.Net and proclaim you as its founder."

"No," Juliette Dritch said. "Not good enough."

"I'll throw in a root beer lollipop," I said, certain she was bluffing.

"Done," Juliette Dritch said with a smile. "You drive a hard bargain."

Juliette Dritch was a stiff, but she did have a sense of humor.

My rapidly expanding wealth enabled me to easily fulfill my commitment without putting a significant dent in my personal fortune. I delivered the hospital a world-class computer system within three months, and on its opening day, I donated two million dollars to hire The Truth to maintain the network in perpetuity.

"Does perpetuity mean I'll have a job forever," The Truth asked me.

"No," I said. "Just until you retire."

"Sorry," The Truth said. "I'm usually more precise."

"I know," I said. "Perhaps it was all the excitement about having a job forever."

"Sloppy talk causes errors," The Truth said. "My apologies."

"You are forgiven, my Padawan."

"Thank you, boss."

"Ehh," I said.

"Thank you, Obi Wan Kenobi."

"You're welcome."

Besides my Ferris wheel ride and every other minute I spent with Maria, my happiest moments at Leicester County occurred when The Truth connected another patient to the internet after outfitting them with the best available handicap accessories. By the time my work was done, every patient in Leicester County hospital had voice-activated access to the internet and the ability to directly communicate with each other via video conferencing. Several old timers were so grateful for my work that they claimed, if they ever became capable of having children, their firstborn would be named after me. Overall, my biggest takeaway from building JDritch.Net was that happiness could be found by helping others. It made me stop saying cynical things like "no good deed ever goes unpunished."

During the build-out of JDritch.Net, Smitty expressed his concern that I was becoming complacent in the pursuit of my ultimate dream. In our weekly meetings, Smitty would lecture me by saying things like: "'Unobtainable' is a word for losers. 'Striving' is the key to a happy life. And 'Always remember; Maria is still out there'."

When in lecture mode, Smitty said a lot by saying little, but when it came to implementing his advice, Smitty was more than a little verbose, always challenging me to maintain my research by assuring me that he was absolutely certain I would, one day, walk again. My problem was, after a decade of learning, I thoroughly understood nerve-muscle connections, but I had no theories on how to cure myself. Until I watched
Buried Alive
one evening on cable TV…

Buried Alive
was a movie about a guy who was injected with a rare fish toxin that paralyzed him sufficiently to be proclaimed dead enough to be interred, for some unknown reason, without being embalmed. He was the victim of a cheating wife, an ultra-hot Jennifer Jason Lee, and her boyfriend doctor, some actor guy. It was a revenge tale starring Tim Matheson: Otter from
Animal House.
It was a made for TV movie that should have debuted in theaters; it was that good.

It was the late 1990s; Google hadn't taken over the world yet, so I used a search engine called Alta Vista to collect information on toxins. I began by examining fish toxins, but soon focused on snakes. I choose snakes because people lived on land, thus there was far more information about snakes biting unsuspecting villagers than scuba divers being pricked by a deadly spine-coated fish.

Inevitably, even in the scientific journals, snakebite stories described progressive paralysis followed by super grim death. The tales made me wonder how God or evolution could produce such a beast.

The first snake I studied was the African Black Mamba, a gunmetal gray, eight-foot long beast called "black" because its eyes and the inside of its mouth are as black and heartless as a lump of coal. The Black Mamba is the longest, fastest, and deadliest snake in Africa; otherwise they'd make a perfect pet.

During my research, I found the Mamba and numerous other snakes—including the Krait, indigenous to India—produced toxins that
irreversibly
bonded to nerve cells. The result was increasing paralysis that inevitably led to a horrific death. However, in rare instances, when a substance called anti-venom was given to a freshly bitten victim, the paralysis process could be halted and the nerve damage reversed. I concluded, if an anti-venom serum could cure paralysis, anti-venom could also cure me. Logically, since my body produced whatever was responsible for my paralysis, I called my potential anti-venom,
Anti-me
.

Convinced that I'd found a potential cure, I began sending Rodrigo and Smitty to college libraries throughout New England to find books on snakes and anti-venom. To check out the documents, Smitty would provide letters of identification from Dr. Bonjour that inevitably led to multiple phone calls as anal-retentive librarians triple-checked the procedure for lending a book to a bed-bound resident of Leicester County Hospital. In stark contrast, Rodrigo deployed what he called "self-checkout" to bring me wagonloads of books without delay.

"The walls of these colleges are all cluttered with books, too many books, too many books. They'll never miss a few, never miss a few," Rodrigo chattered, also claiming he'd bedded two librarians during his book foraging expeditions. "Calm on the outside, wild in bed, wild in bed. Look out when they drop the eyeglasses, drop the eyeglasses, oh yeah, oh yeah."

Within months, I became an expert on snake neurotoxicity. Unfortunately, many of the words in the medical text books were not recognizable by my text-to-speech software, so most of my knowledge was gained via a series of painstaking reading sessions, in which I had to train Smitty to recognize and pronounce words like nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, glyoxysome, ganglioside, and my favorite, lipopolysaccharides, a word that Smitty told me looked like a Chalupa with extra hot sauce.

I had a prior knowledge of antibodies; nonetheless I was shocked to learn how anti-venom was produced. The process involved crazy people capturing snakes and then "milking" their venom by forcing them to bite a rubber-sealed collection jar. Needless to say, on the list of occupations commonly denied life insurance, "snake milker" was always going to be near the top.

Assuming the venom was collected without killing its collector, it was then sent to a special lab where it was injected into a horse or pig to create antibodies. These antibodies were then extracted from the animal so they could be injected into a bite victim in hopes of destroying the snake venom before it caused a funeral.

The beauty of my idea was its relative simplicity. I figured if I could extract the neurotoxin that was blocking my nerve-muscle connections, an anti-venom lab could inject it into a horse to produce a vial of Anti-me. Subsequently, the miraculous serum would be injected into my stationary tookus, ultimately causing me, like Tim Matheson, to rise from the grave.

Shortly after my work began on Anti-me, the first of several nurses who had been with me from my first day either retired or passed on; unfortunately, Nurse Judy fell into the latter category. I don't know the specifics, but I noticed her losing power for a couple months before she took a medical leave, never to return. I'll say what her co-workers would never say, "cancer," of the breast, I think.

Another great nurse, Judith Bisk, replaced Nurse Judy. I called her Nurse Judy II. In many ways, Nurse Judy II was similar to the original. She was a no-nonsense gal with a good sense of humor. She wasn't as strong as Nurse Judy, but she didn't have to be. I only weighed one hundred sixty five pounds.

Nurse Judy II was a big girl, as in rugged big, not Pillsbury Doughboy big. She was a brunette. She had exceptionally white teeth, and eyes that bulged, as if somebody was continually poking her in an unexpected way. Also, ever present around Nurse Judy II's neck was a silver crucifix, for she was a Pentecostal Christian. Her fervent religiosity bothered many of my fellow patients, but not me. I found if I co-praised the Lord with her I could get preferential treatment.

"Praise the Lord! Nurse Judy. I think I've had another bowel movement," I would say.

"Oh my God, you have," she would respond.

"Praise be the Lord in heaven," I'd repeat.

"Praise be the Lord," Nurse Judy II would gasp.

~ ~ ~

It took me several months of Google work to find an anti-venom lab willing to produce Anti-me for me. The problem being, generating injectable "treatments" was a highly regulated process that required years of killing small animals with mega doses of the proposed medicine before a human trial could be considered. Subsequently, the thirty-day turn around I was seeking for the production of Anti-me was a felony in most countries. Fortunately, at Melvin's Anti-venom Lab and Delicatessen, a lab/restaurant located in Botswana, Africa; there was little concern about government oversight, especially when a process involved a substantial influx of American dollars.

The Melvin of Melvin's Anti-venom Lab and Delicatessen was Melvin Pliskin, a Queens-based Jew, who moved to Africa when he learned anti-venom had higher margins than diamonds. Melvin possessed the worst possible combination of traits for a businessman; he was a serial entrepreneur who had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD. This meant Melvin constantly started businesses, but then lacked the focus to turn a profit. After twenty failed companies, Melvin somehow convinced his wife and kids to move to Africa with him by repeatedly saying, "Trust me. After you've been bitten by a snake, you'll pay anything for anti-venom."

Botswana was the founding location of Melvin's lab due to its abundance of snakes and relatively low operating costs, people being willing to work for whatever employers condescended to pay them. Per his modus operandi, Melvin did little planning before starting his business, so he knew nothing about the snake milking process. In fact, having grown-up at the corner of Jamaica Ave and Sutphin Boulevard in New York City, Melvin was fairly certain he'd never seen a snake.

Melvin's Anti-venom Lab and Delicatessen's first months in business found Melvin searching the underbrush of Africa for snakes. Melvin's quest was a source of great amusement to the locals who'd never seen a man dressed in an Izod shirt, Bermuda shorts, and brown penny loafers attempt to catch a snake. Fortunately, while Melvin's efforts failed to produce any income, Eleanor Pliskin, Melvin's inexplicably loyal wife, opened Botswana's first Jewish Delicatessen and it was an instant success, the locals preferring a breakfast of bagels and cream cheese to goat's milk and ground twigs.

When I first contacted Melvin via email, I wasn't aware of the shaky nature of his enterprise. I simply told him I wanted to ship him some tissue samples that had to be injected into a horse to produce antibodies for me. Melvin said he'd do the job. I wired him fifty thousand. In turn, Melvin bought the only horse in his village and the equipment needed to establish his lab. At long last, Melvin was a success, much to the delight of his wife and children, and I had my Anti-me production partner.

Having procured a proper improper anti-venom lab, I next needed to make an awkward request of Smitty.

"Smitty, I need to ask you a favor," I said.

"I'd say 'anything', but I'm too smart," Smitty said with a wry smile.