The Anesthesia Game Page 3

  The first time Syd played the game, it was spontaneous—no planning. The whole idea just exploded like pop rocks out of her head. “Wait!” she’d said to whatever anesthesiologist. “Ask me something, anything. Quick!”

  “What?” said the doctor, frowning. “Why?”

  Syd doesn’t remember which doctor it was, because he wasn’t crush-worthy. He was one of the old ones who all look more or less alike when you’re lying on a surgical table with your eyes half-closed. She remembers the young ones, or the ones with the goofy personalities like Dr. Sawyers. This was no Dr. Sawyers.

  “Just ask?” she’d begged. “Any question at all. About a place, though. A place worth visiting.”

  “Okay then…” he’d said. “Where were you born?”

  Not very creative, but whatever. “Hartford,” Syd said, then squeezed her eyes shut preparing to lock the answer away but not so far away that she couldn’t remember the question. “Okay I’m ready.” She tugged the nurse, Nicole’s, sleeve and said, “Ask me for the answer as soon as I wake up. Without the question,” Syd emphasized. “Don’t give me any clues. Just ask me for the answer. It’s important.”

  Nicole just said, “Fine,” without even asking why. That’s why Syd loves nurses. Nurses know.

  That time—the first time 18 months ago, she didn’t remember the question or the answer when she woke up. She’d been confused, headachy, nauseous, disoriented, and horribly disappointed in herself. She’d lost control, and she was not about to let that happen again. But in the 15 procedures since, she’s improved the odds. She’s learned to take the thread with her when she goes under and not let go. She’s learned to build a story.

  All in all, she’s beaten the game ten times, the last six consecutively, but who’s counting? She is! So she’s gaining. She’s taking the light back from The Taker, which is the point. When you consistently take back your light, nothing can kill you, because you’re strong enough to tell your own story, to keep your own light. Light is what keeps you alive. When you can keep your light, you win. She’s surprised more people don’t know that.

  Syd’s decided that when she’s all done and completely cured, she’ll write a book about how to beat the odds. About how to keep living no matter what. How to turn on the master switch that someone or something felt entitled to switch off on your behalf, but without your awareness. Who wouldn’t buy a book like that? An idiot, maybe. Or people who like to give up when the going gets tough. But most people are not idiots. If her book is a best seller maybe she can even open a clinic of her own.

  There’s activity in the hall just now that distracts Syd from her thoughts. She turns to see her favorite nurse, Rozlyn, stroll casually into the procedure room. Roz is chill and at the same time, hot. Chill because she is super cool, and hot because, well, anybody can see that. You don’t have to be a twenty-year-old male. Just watch the heads turn when she floats like a hovercraft down any corridor. She’s a Hollywood Barbie with black hair, sky blue eyes and crazy long legs. Roz would beat ordinary old blonde Barbie in a beauty contest any day. Plus blonde Barbie never looked all that smart. Roz is a genius, and her tortoiseshell glasses aren’t the only clue.

  Roz adjusts the overhead lights from dim to bright, and Syd squints. “Ugh,” she says, covering her eyes.

  “Gotta see what I’m doing,” Rozlyn says smiling. She goes about her business, efficiently assembling the usual assortment of needles, tubes and bags of fluids like she’s arranging the candy display at a convenience store. Totally chill. She takes Syd’s hand and rubs the vein on her inner arm with a pad of antiseptic and grabs her weapon. “A little pinch,” she says as she inserts the IV.

  Syd flinches. Rozlyn’s good at this, but Syd’s veins have flattened from overuse and are not always so accessible. Sometimes it takes awhile.

  “Done!” Rozlyn declares triumphantly. “First attempt!”

  She does a little victory shuffle, all Gangnam style, which cracks Syd up. She wishes she could get up and do it with Roz. Syd can’t help grinning, not just at Rozlyn’s exuberance, but also because small victories matter in a war this big. Syd wants to win them all, every battle. She wants to show up The Taker in an embarrassing win, battle after battle, until he concedes. Until he is crushed. The asshole! Oh my God, what an asshole.

  “That one went well, but you might wish you had that port back one of these days,” says Roz. “No more pinches.”

  “No way,” says Syd. “That thing was constantly clogged.”

  The port-a-cath was a little rubber thingy inserted in Syd’s chest when she was first diagnosed 18 months ago. She won’t say what she was diagnosed with, not ever, because just the word alone gives The Taker too much power. In Syd’s mind, it’s a temporary issue anyway; a temporary issue that’s all but fixed. So fuck The Taker. He can take his disease and shove it up his corroded “arse” as the Irish nurse, Deirdre, loves to say. Syd loves Deirdre’s musical accent, not to mention the crazy orange hair and personality to match. So many people Syd would rather be right now than herself.

  Syd’s vocabulary has admittedly gotten a lot worse since she’s been going to the clinic, not because of the clinic—it’s pediatric after all, but just the freedom of no one daring to correct her. The look of horror on her mother’s face alone is worth it, and hard not to keep pushing right over the edge. Plunk!

  “That’s vulgar,” her mother said to Syd once early on for some minor infraction.

  “You know what’s vulgar?” Syd said. “This bag of radioactive shit going into my blood. That’s vulgar.” And it was.

  Syd’s goal is to degenerate her mother’s language as much as she has her own. Wear her mother down with vulgarity. Hear her mother actually say, “Fuck!” Just force it out of her. What a goal. At some point maybe she’ll rethink this challenge, but for now it meets all the requirements of achieving the impossible. And surviving. Surviving!

  Anyway, the port was connected directly to a vein in Syd’s chest, and the purpose was to give doctors easier access for blood draws and meds. It worked for a while. Not that Syd likes needles, but she wasn’t sad to see the port go. It was freakish. And anyway, by her calculation she doesn’t have too many more of these procedures. Maybe eight tops. She can deal with it.

  Rozlyn’s shiny black hair is long and straight today, falling past her shoulders in wisps. It looks like silk against her ivory skin. Syd wouldn’t mind looking like Roz when she gets to that age—28 or 30 probably. Old enough to know what to do, but younger than most of the nurses at the clinic. A good age to freeze yourself at, if that were possible. Roz understands things the others don’t, like the fact that Syd doesn’t want her mother present at every procedure. Not that her mother doesn’t mean well, but just…whatever. It bugs her. Her mother bugs her. Just the over-importance she puts on everything to do with this condition. As if it’s permanent. As if it has anything to do with Syd at all.

  Syd reaches out and touches Rozlyn’s hair. “You have so much,” she says, mesmerized. “It’s like wild black silk or something.”

  “Yours will grow back,” Rozlyn says, shrugging. “You’ll see.”

  The doctors tap on the door and enter. There’s tiny Dr. Lee, who does her spinals, and also Dr. Anton, the anesthesiologist, with his cool gray eyes—grinning insanely like a mad scientist with his vial of alien goop. “How’s my girl?” he says, winking.

  The drama at the clinic among the doctors and nurses is a great distraction for Syd. She sometimes fantasizes about being a doctor herself some day, walking around with a starched white coat and a stethoscope telling people what diseases they have and curing them. But not children—she never fantasizes about treating children. Children shouldn’t have to come to a clinic like this in the first place. But then again, why should anybody? It’s a bad plan in general if you ask Syd, but God hasn’t exactly included her in the grand design.

  Dr. Anton checks the IV. “Mom’s not around?” he says.

  “She’s in the infusion
room,” Syd says. “I want to do this myself.”

  He looks meaningfully at Dr. Lee, who nods. “Papers signed,” she says. “Mom’s aware.”

  “Okay then,” says Dr. Anton. “Ready to go to dreamland, Syd?”

  “Sure,” she says, squirming to straighten herself on the table. “No, wait!” She grips Roz’s hand. “Ask me now. Hurry!”

  Dr. Anton’s gray eyes crinkle at the edges. He frowns and poofs out his lips. “Oh, right, the game,” he says. “Go ahead. I can wait a second for something this important.”

  “Okay then,” says Rozlyn. “Yikes—such pressure! Okay…got it. What’s the capitol of Thailand?”

  Syd grimaces. “That’s too hard. I’ll never remember. Ask me the capitol of New Jersey.”

  “You want to change your own rules?” Roz says. “You’ve answered harder questions than that.”

  “Fine. But I don’t know the answer. What’s the capitol of Thailand?”

  “Bangkok,” says Dr. Lee.

  Syd says, “Bangkok, oh yeah! Okay, Bangkok.” She nods at Dr. Anton.

  “Ready?” he says.

  “Ready,” Syd says. “Bangkok, Bangkok, Bangkok, Bangkok…” she mumbles until her eyes close and she’s a bright light adrift in the darkness. On a plane. A vibrating streak of bright light on a plane with no sides. She’s greedy with her light; won’t let it leak. Holds it in. Her plane departs for Bangkok where she is instantly greeted by smiling people in pointy straw hats who escort her on a long boat in a black river into a city where she is on guard for The Taker. Where are you? I know you’re here!

  There is music in this dream, shrill and foreign with plenty of sharp notes that echo like rubber bands pinging and twanging. She rises up from the river boat into the gray sky and flies high over marshes and rice paddies into a city that pulses with deep vibrating color and rapid movement. She flies down, hovering low over a web of street vendors hawking gutted fish, bowls of spicy food, and rolls of vibrant silk fabric. Moving on, she flies over temples, giant marble Buddhas, and gilded palaces made of gold and porcelain with spires that reach high into the sky, now silver with moonlight. This is her Thailand—her Bangkok—all hers. It is pure magic; there’s no way she can forget this place. “Bangkok,” she says. “Bangkok. Bangkok. Bangkok.”

  Hovering just above the city, she feels a jolt in her spine and stiffens. Ouch! But she forgets just as quickly, because she’s learned not to dwell on any distraction. She can’t afford to. If she does, she’ll lose her way. Fall right back into the clinic and forget where she was. It’s happened.

  In a second, the sky transforms into a lake of black ink studded with sparkly crystal jewels. Just as quickly, the moon begins its descent, and the sky brightens slowly from below. Syd races the approaching dawn at the scarlet horizon to fill herself with first light. To drink the dawn’s first light until she is drunk with it. Gorged. She’s almost there, somewhere between the moon and the rising sun, when she sees The Taker’s beady purple eyes staring down, spotting her, recognizing her. She curses him then quickly looks away. Best not to give him any attention at all. None. Zero. And anyway, she already drank the light. It’s hers—all hers—and he can’t take that away from her unless she forgets the answer.

  She feels a tug on her big toe and tumbles back across the barrier into the material world, opening her eyes in the dim light of the recovery room.

  “Hey there, hon.”

  Syd can’t see clearly, but knows it’s her mom—a suffocating presence. Darth Vader. As much as her mother pretends to be light and airy, she’s not. She’s weighed down with bitterness, disappointment, and grief that she covers up with a fake smile like drugstore perfume. But Syd knows what’s what. She smells it. It stinks.

  “All done,” says her mom.

  Syd’s head throbs from the spinal. This was not a great one, she can already tell. Sometimes they’re not. Sometimes a little fluid drips out, causing havoc. “Where’s Roz,” says Syd weakly.

  “What’s that?” says her mom, a blur in her usual gray sweatshirt, gray hair cut severely short in solidarity with Syd’s bald head, not that Syd asked her to or wanted her to. She didn’t. Grow your hair!

  “Get Roz?” Syd whispers. Her mouth is a desert.

  Her mom says, “Drink some water first. It’ll help the headache.” She sticks a straw in Syd’s mouth. Syd drinks.

  Roz taps on the door and enters. Just her energy alone changes everything. “Got another customer,” she says softly, and wheels in one of the little kids conked out on another cot. “How you feeling?” she whispers to Syd.

  Syd smiles triumphantly. “Bangkok,” she whispers. “So…fine.”

  Roz performs an abbreviated version of her victory shuffle and gently high-fives Syd.

  “Bangkok?” says her mother.

  “It’s the answer,” says Syd. “Never mind.”

  She can see that her mother is hurt from this dismissal, and Syd doesn’t want to deal with the long face, so she says, “Bangkok is the capitol of Thailand.”

  “The game?” says Roz kindly. “We ask her a question…”

  Mom smiles. “Oh, right. The game. Well good then, you’ve won.”

  Syd vows not to be so hard on her mother, but it’s hard not to. And anyway, she’s a teenager, so what does she expect of herself exactly? A teenager in a clinic, for God’s sake. Taxi!

  Hours later when Syd and her mom pull up the long, snowy driveway in their Volvo wagon, Syd says, “Dad’s home!”

  The black Land Rover truck sits in its place in front of the third bay of the garage. A flash of warmth runs through Syd. As crazy as everything is, she feels less crazy when her father is around. Unfortunately, because of his traveling, it isn’t often enough.

  “Hmmm,” says Mom. “He’s early.” She parks the car and walks around to Syd’s door to help her.

  “I’m fine, Mom,” she says. “Seriously, I can walk.”

  Her mother holds onto her though, and Syd lets her, whatever. It’s slippery. Maybe her mother’s the one who needs the help. As they’re treading carefully up the icy slate path to the front step, her mother stops suddenly, issues a slight gasp, and throws her hand to her chest.

  “What?” says Syd. “What’s wrong?”

  Her mother inhales deeply. “Nothing,” she says tentatively. “I don’t know. A little charley horse in my leg I think.”

  Whether she’s fine or not, Syd wouldn’t know, but pardon her if she has a hard time sympathizing with a leg cramp. And besides, when doesn’t her mother have something going on? Never. As long as Syd can remember, her mother has complained of one physical symptom or another. There were the migraines and the arthritis and all the crap that preceded the hysterectomy and the infections after. Not to mention the supposed appendicitis and the kidney stones that never panned out. Syd grew up practically expecting to be sick, although when she was actually diagnosed, it blew her mind. But unlike her mother, she won’t let it beat her down. She won’t. She won’t just survive, she’ll thrive. She won’t let The Taker win.

  They get to the top step without another cramp incident. Through the front door, past the hall, Syd sails gingerly into the arms of her dad who says, “Hey sweetness. How’s my sugar?” He hugs her mightily as she inhales the crisp yet wooly smell of him.

  “I’m okay,” she whispers.

  “Swear?” he says.

  “Swear,” she grins, scratching her hairless head under the itchy wool cap. She slinks out of her jacket and throws it on the chair. Another in the endless string of infractions she gets away with when her dad’s around.

  Her dad has some kind of marching band music turned up uncharacteristically loud on the TV, and her mom marches to the beat straight across the room and turns it down. “Sydney’s got a headache,” she says curtly. “She just had a spinal for God’s sake.”

  Dad ignores this and smiles impishly at Syd. “I have a surprise for you,” he says. “I need you to shake out that headache and hold steady. Can
you do that?”

  “A surprise?” Syd says. “You do?”

  “You do?” repeats her mother as she shrugs her puffy parka loose. Her short gray hair stands at attention from the static. “What is it, Aaron?” She leans in. “What surprise exactly?”

  Now Syd is really excited, because this surprise is all hers. Her mother didn’t even know about it, which means it’s uncompromisingly Dad—100% guaranteed grand slam. “What is it?!” she says, clapping.

  “Well, I hope it meets the expectation,” says her mom drearily. “I haven’t seen her smile in a week.”

  This pisses Syd off, because what exactly does she have to smile about?

  “Oh, it will,” says Dad. He beckons with his right hand. “Follow me.”

  Syd follows him down the long center hall through the great room and into the kitchen. Around the corner, a round ball of cocoa fur charges at her, skidding and tripping, squealing.

  “Oh my God!” says Syd. “Oh my God, it’s mine? He’s mine?”

  Dad nods while Mom stands there all Plaster of Paris in her gray sweat suit, hands over her open mouth.

  “Can I keep him, Dad?” Syd squeals. “I can keep him, right?”

  “Aaron,” says her mom sternly.

  “Aaron, nothing,” he says. “It’s a gift from me to my daughter. I should be able to give her a goddamn gift.” He folds his arms and turns to Syd. “Yes, you can keep her,” he says, winking. “It’s a she.”

  “A girl?” beams Syd. This is the best surprise ever. The goddamn part of her dad’s language doesn’t really surprise her since her parents have been a little stressed lately. Lots of tense, quiet conversations behind doors like the low hum of a deadly buzz saw. But Syd knows when her dad is tough like this he’s going to fight for her. He’s going to make sure she can keep the dog.

  She pulls the puppy’s tail and says, “Who are you, little girl?” as she tries to contain the creature’s frenetic movement. Her splitting headache feels better already, just watching all this life. “Ha ha she’s everywhere!” says Syd. “Where did you find her? I looove her!!!”