All Gone (22 page)

Another pillorying room. Semiprivate. Patient beside me with a football helmet clamped to his head. Dots and dashes. Blots of flashes. Lights, camera, action. I'm strapped on my back to an analyzer. Scanner. Transponder. Spectrometer. Tape recorders. Television sets. Doctor, Doctor, I want to confess. I jumped. Lost the faith. Depression. Born out of rejection. Objection. Sustained. Next witness. Take the stand. No thanks, I'll take it when I leave. Order in the court. My dentist. Dentist will be identified. There's the chiseler. Took me to the cleaners. So I took him to small claims. Said Malfeasance and practice. That when I walked downstairs from his office my new fillings popped out. That's what the dentist my poppa said his patients never said. Later my mother said they did. Pass me the V.E. Good prosthodontics your dentist but couldn't diagnose or heal. So it was my father who uprooted me from the plat. Said Join us, you ole rumbum. Order in the snort. No. My sis said Join me, come, come. That was my lover. Sunday palmist. Once a week divining my hand. No life, short feeling, she found. No, it was I. Wild pram on the loose. Baby cawing and kicking inside when it was saved. Crowd gathered. Camera men came. They're shooting pictures of me below. First thing out of my groin's my foot. A transsexual breakthrough. Balls, the king said, if I had them I'd be queen. No. She said. We did. As kids. You're still a kid. That's what Vitamin D said. Had a bellyful of my changes. But this isn't her flat. No sunlight. No yellowing fern or smell of mint tea. I'm where? They're scissoring. Shearing. Shaving. Sweating. Swearing. Hemming. Mending. Hacking. Yakking. Everything. All the ings. The bings. The dings. The drops. I was dropped to the tracks. Train coming. Conductor screaming. His first fall? I was called to the tracks, I said to him as I fell. He said No or Oh but Stop. Boy and girl at front-car window standing watch. No, I flew onto the tracks. My fly flew. That was it. I had a strange calling. I wanted to unzip. Your fly can be better zippered when you stand than sit, my father used to say. When you sit and try and zip you are just about sitting on your zipper, he said. Yes, Dad, I said, when the zipper tag flew off and I lost my footing and fell on the tracks.

Ether, ether, I yell from the hospital bed. This table. Wherever I'm being worked over on. The pain.

“He spoke,” the doctor, doctoress, sorceress says.

“More anesthetic,” someone says. Milligrams. Microgams. Look at those gams. Some pair. “Mm's,” the anesthesiologist says.

“More ether,” I say. “The pain.”

But I've seen the movie too.

In the end the patient dies.

We couldn't save him, the doctor says.

His heart, someone else says.

A sheet is thrown over my face.

Not thrown. Laid.

Not laid. Lain on my face.

Not lain. Placed. A sheet is placed on my face. I'm covered. A sheet was placed on my face and now covers my face.

Though I've never seen the movie from here.

Next.

Stories in this collection appeared in slightly different form in the following periodicals, to which the author and the publisher extend their thanks: “The Student” in
Mundus Artium;
“All Gone” in
Kansas Quarterly;
“On the Beach” in
Threepenny Review;
“The True Story” in
Confrontation;
“Capital Labor” in
Pendragon;
“Jackie” in
Periodical Lunch;
“The Batterer” in
Cream City Review
and
Ohio Journal;
“A Lack of Space” in
Ohio Journal;
“The Former World's Greatest Raw Green Pea Eater” in
Cake;
“Wrong Words” in
Appearances
and
Asylum;
“The Doctor” in
Confrontation;
“Heads” in
Florida Review;
“The Onlooker” in
City Paper
and
South Carolina Review;
“Try Again” in
Ambit
and
Chouteau Review;
“Bo” in
Asylum;
“Joe” in
Denver Quarterly;
and “Next” in
Remington Review
.

Join the Dzanc Books eBook Club today to receive a new, DRM-free eBook on the 1
^st
of every month, with selections being made from Dzanc Books and its imprints,
Other Voices Books
,
Black Lawrence Press
,
Keyhole
, and
Starcherone
. For more information, including how to join today, please visit
http://www.dzancbooks.org/ebook-club/
.