They didn’t contract. That’s why the glare from the fluorescents is so painful.
The tie, tickling across my forehead like a feather.
Help me! I scream up at the Baywatch beefcake, who is probably an intern or maybe just a med school brat. Help me, please!
My lips don’t even quiver.
The face moves back, the tie stops tickling, and all that white light streams through my helpless-to-look-away eyes and into my brain. It’s a hellish feeling, a kind of rape. I’ll go blind if I have to stare into it for long, I think, and blindness will be a relief.
WHOCK! The sound of the driver hitting the ball, but a little flat this time, and the feeling in the hands is bad. The ball’s up … but veering … veering off … veering toward …
Shit.
I’m in the rough.
Now another face bends into my field of vision. A white tunic instead of a green one below it, a great untidy mop of orange
hair above it. Distress-sale IQ is my first impression. It can only be Rusty. He’s wearing a big dumb grin that I think of as a high-school grin, the grin of a kid who should have a tattoo reading “Born to Snap Bra Straps” on one wasted bicep.
“Michael!” Rusty exclaims. “Jeez, ya lookin’ gooood! This’z an honor! Sing for us, big boy! Sing your deadassoff!”
From somewhere behind me comes the doc’s voice, cool, no longer even pretending to be amused by these antics. “Quit it, Rusty.” Then, in a slightly new direction: “What’s the story, Mike?’
Mike’s voice is the first voice-Rusty’s partner. He sounds slightly embarrassed to be working with a guy who wants to be
Bobcat Goldthwait when he grows up. “Found him on the fourteenth hole at Derry Muni. Off the course, actually, in the
rough. If he hadn’t just played through the foursome behind him, and if they hadn’t seen one of his legs stickin’ out of the puckerbrush, he’d be an ant farm by now.”
I hear that sound in my head again- WHOM-only this time it is followed by another, far less pleasant sound: the rustle of
underbrush as I sweep it with the head of my driver. It would have to be fourteen, where there is reputedly poison ivy. Poison ivy and …
Rusty is still peering down at me, stupid and avid. It’s not death that interests him; it’s my resemblance to Michael Bolton. Oh yes, I know about it, have not been above using it with certain female clients. Otherwise, it gets old in a hurry. And in these circumstances … God.
“Attending physician?’ the lady doc; asks. “Was it Kazalian?”
“NO,” Mike says, and for just a moment he looks down at me. Older than Rusty by at least ten years. Black hair with flecks of gray in it. Spectacles. How come none of these ~ can see that I am not dead? “There was a doc in the foursome that found
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him, actually. That’s his signature on page one … see?”
Riffle: of paper, then: “Christ, Jennings. I know him. He gave Noah his physical after the ark grounded on Mount Ararat.”
Rusty doesn’t look as if he gets the joke, but he brays laughter into my face anyway. I can smell onions on his breath, a little leftover lunchstink, and if I can smell onions, I must be breathing. I must be, right? If only-Before I can finish this thought, Rusty leans even closer and I feel a blast of hope. He’s seen something! He’s seen something and means to give me mouth-to-mouth. God bless you, Rusty! God bless you and your onion breath!
But the stupid grin doesn’t change, and instead of putting his mouth on mine, his hand slips around my jaw.- Now he’s
grasping one side with his thumb and the other side with his fingers.
“He’s alive! – Rusty cries. “He’s alive, and he’s gonna sing for the Room Four Michael Bolton Fan Club!”
His fingers pinch tighter-it hurts in a distant comingout-of-the-novocaine way-and begins to move my jaw up and down,
clicking my teeth together. “If she’s ba-aaad, he can’t see it,” Rusty sings in a hideous, atonal voice that would probably make Percy Sledge’s head explode. “She can do no wrrr-ongggg… My teeth open and close at the rough urging of his hand; my