First voice: 'Want to sign this, Doc? Remember to bear down hard-it's three copies.'
Sound of a pen, scraping away on paper. I imagine the owner of the first voice holding out a clipboard to the woman doctor.
Oh dear Jesus let me not be dead! I try to scream, and nothing comes out.
I'm breathing, though ... aren't I? I mean, I can't feel myself doing it, but my lungs seem okay, they're not throbbing or yelling for air the way they do when you've swum too far underwater, so I must be okay, right?
Except if you're dead, the deep voice murmurs, they wouldn't be crying out for air, would they? No-because dead lungs don't need to breathe. Dead lungs can just kind of... take it easy.
Rusty: 'What are you doing next Saturday night, Doc?'
But if I'm dead, how can I feel? How can I smell the bag I'm in? How can I hear these voices, the Doc now saying that next Saturday night she's going to be shampooing her dog, which is named Rusty, what a coincidence, and all of them laughing? If I'm dead, why aren't I either gone or in the white light they're always -talking about on Oprah?
There's a harsh ripping sound and all at once I am in white light; it is blinding, like the sun breaking through a scrim of clouds on a winter day. I try to squint my eyes shut against it, but nothing happens. My eyelids are like blinds on broken rollers.
A face bends over me, blocking off part of the glare, which comes not from some dazzling astral plane but from a bank of overhead fluorescents. The face belongs to a young, conventionally handsome man of about twenty-five; he looks like one of those beach beefcakes on Baywatch or Melrose Place. Marginally smarter, though. He's got a lot of black hair under a carelessly worn surgical greens cap. He's wearing the tunic, too. His eyes are cobalt blue, the sort of eyes girls reputedly die for. There are dusty arcs of freckles high up on his cheekbones.
'Hey, gosh,' he says. It's the third voice. 'This guy does look like Michael Bolton! A little long in the old tootharoo, maybe . . .' He leans closer. One of the flat tie-ribbons at the neck of his green tunic tickles against my forehead. 'But yeah. I see it. Hey, Michael, sing something.'
Help me! is what I'm trying to sing, but I can only look up into his dark blue eyes with my frozen dead man's stare; I can only wonder if I am a dead man, if this is how it happens, if this is what everyone goes through after the pump quits. If I'm still alive, how come he hasn't seen my pupils contract when the light hit them? But I know the answer to that ... or I think I do. 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 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.-
