Fiction Fix Seventeen

53
Fiction Fix
away than to disgrace myself (and my HMO)
with a fruitless search for a pregnant pause
that turned out to be hysterical in nature and
reported with mocking hilarity in the trades.
Sadly, however, I had not chosen the prudent
path. And now my shame of not wanting
to tell the doctors what I suspected had possibly
put my life in danger. I had learned a
valuable life lesson to speak up—now if only
the doctors could extend my life so that I
would have more days ahead of me to put
that lesson into practice.
Preparing for surgery is nerve-wracking.
But being in surgery is even more
nerve-wracking.
Literally.
I took each of my nerves and put them
on the rack. And then I turned the wheel
and made them squeal until they told the
truth about believing in Mythological Creatures
Who Lived in The Sky and made the
heavens go “Boom!” Then we (my racked
nerves and I) had a good long talk about the
tendency to believe in Supreme Beings when
the possibility of demise is in the air. We discussed
Richard Dawkins and flying spaghetti
monsters, Egyptian gods and Middle Eastern
goddesses, that badass original Goth girl Lilith
(there’s always a first wife no one wants to talk
about), and Pandora of the box fame. Poor
entrepreneurial Pandora. She (sadly) didn’t
go to Harvard Business School so didn’t get
praised for all she let outside of the box.
Ouch! Where was that pain coming from?
Wasn’t I supposed to be under?
By the way, sorry about the stream of consciousness
ramblings; it must be the aesthetic.
I mean the amnesia. I mean the anesthetic.
Is this real life? No, but it’s a gas.
“My mind is racing,” I said out loud. “I can
see the checkered flag.”
The anesthesiologist just looked at me, staring
at me with the dead eyes of a bored shark.
“Just keep counting backwards.”
So I did: 37, 38—whoops—36, 35, 34, 32...
And then...
And then a plank in reason broke, and the
bottom dropped out of Bottom’s dream, and
I slipped into some place that was no place at
all… except that it looked like a steel-framed,