Local Anesthesia

02Jan11

It was now summer, and Keith woke up several hours earlier than he thought was healthy for a recent college graduate with no job or social obligations.  He was allowed only a “light breakfast,” as no one was really sure if the doctor would want him eating more than a bagel and some coffee.  Even so, he felt fully prepared for a surgery that he had neither the need nor desire to have performed, but the performance of which was one that he would not deny those family members who insisted that it was “for the best.”  As soon as his grandfather–the primary member of Keith’s family doing the insisting–arrived at the bottom of the stairs, they left for the hospital.  Keith’s grandfather had worked at the university’s hospital for several decades that Keith hadn’t even lived though, and had racked up a few favors along the way, one of which he was now cashing in to have Keith’s surgery “out-of-the-way” before he went abroad in the fall.

In the waiting room of the outpatient center, Keith’s grandfather received greetings from half a dozen or so nurses and orderlies that recognized him, while Keith signed documents and filled out various forms.  He was still scrambling to sign and date an armful of papers when the nurse called him in with his grandfather in tow.  Keith was led to a bed that the nurse gestured to silently.  Not knowing whether to sit or lie down, Keith attempted to do both by awkwardly adjusting his position on the bed to a nearly forty-five degree angle.  Suspended uncomfortably in this state of limbo, he decided to sit up, and proceeded to lie down just as Dr. Magden walked in.  Keith sat up as his grandfather shook Dr. Magden’s hand, and introduced Keith to his “good friend” Dr. Magden.  As he finished scribbling on the forms he was given in the waiting room–plus a few more that the doctor’s assistant added to the pile–his grandfather discussed tennis with Dr. Magden.  Keith finally signed the last one, and the nurse prepped his left cheek for the surgery and told him to lie down.   Dr. Magden mumbled something to the nurse about a skinhook, and they got started on what he was told was a “short and simple procedure.”

As the knife separated Keith’s left cheek into two distinct sections he found his muscles tensing without his immediate approval.  As Dr. Magden started to pull these two sections of Keith’s face apart, Keith realized that he had no idea where these tensed muscles were, or when they had become inducted into the community of various organs that comprised Keith’s body.  Upon reflection it occurred to him that, perhaps, they were not a part of that community at all, but merely passing through.  They seemed to be stopping in to greet distant relatives who hadn’t been enthusiastic about receiving these new guests.  During this reunion, Keith’s attention veered sharply from the increasingly distressing interactions between the unfamiliar sensations of his facial tissue and Dr. Magden’s skinhook to the nearly inaudible “easy listening” station coming from a radio somewhere in the general vicinity.  It occurred to him that, as horribly uninteresting as he knew the notes were, his inability to identify them made it nearly impossible to remove them from his brain cells.  This double penetration of skinhook and the ever so aptly titled “hook” of the distant chorus gave Keith a feeling of helplessness like never before.  The dual inability to exercise his will over either his mental or physical condition made him slightly more “in touch” with those numerous accounts of out-of-body-experiences that he had heard often depicted on the operating table.

Once they were back at the house, Keith’s grandmother was asleep in same chair that she had been in when they left that morning.  The same chair, in fact, that she had spent most of the days sleeping in since returning from the hospital herself two weeks ago.  Keith decided that instead of quietly puttering about while trying to avoid hushed conversations with his grandfather, he would walk down to the nearby beach where he spent most of his childhood summers with his mother and older sister.  The wooden fence along the path to the beach was rotting and in pieces.  The steps were overgrown and decrepit.  The beach was exactly as he remembered it.  When he turned right to walk along the beach, the wind brushed along his anesthetized cheek with just the right amount of absence to allow Keith to go along on a trajectory of his own just like he had while “under the knife.”  As Keith reached a promontory and hid his body from the wind behind a large rock he either stopped to think, or thought to stop.  Whatever resulted in the intermittent time that passed in that spot, Keith neither knew nor cared to know and even started to wonder whether there was something there that he could know; almost as though looking upon his body as no different then the rock it was placed next to.  He decided to turn around to head back to the house and continued walking in the direction he had came.  It wasn’t as though some disembodied ego went on in the direction of Keith, while watching Keith’s body do whatever it happened to do.  Instead, the meanderings of his body and thoughts were together in more than a parallelism, but less than a unity.  Their distinct substances were fused into something else entirely.  Something more than human.

Upon his return to the house, which reeked of the inevitable continuation of both the most cosmic and minute rotations, he felt the need to vomit.  Whether this was caused by the wearing off of the anesthesia, the collision of his soul with an impasse of metaphysical rivers too deep to cross, or the realization that his grandmother had not been alive since before he had headed off to the hospital, Keith did not know.

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