I Am Not Spartacus
by Josh Davis
Audrey lay on her side wondering whether or not she should scratch her swollen stomach. It itches. It burns. She can almost hear John Madden’s raspy voice blubbering on about tubes of miracle cream. She almost wishes she actually did. Anything would be better than this. Babies crawling upside-down on the ceiling with spinning plastic heads would be better than this.
Her head aches. Not aches, really, though it’s certainly in the ballpark. She wonders where all these sports metaphors are coming from.
More than an ache, she feels like her head might become an omelet at any given moment. She pictures her skull splintering at the mere flick of a wrist, spilling out and reshaping itself in a skillet and marrying three different kinds of cheese. She thinks of this and gags a little.
There’s a trashcan at the bedside. She looks into it. She leans quizzically forward, then retches into its black empty stomach. Her eyes fill up with something and the lights turn off.
Pablo sits on a white chair in a white room with white curtains watching his future ex-wife gain and lose light. His head doesn’t hurt and his stomach is already empty. If he could talk, Pablo would tell you than he can’t actually feel a thing, save for the sharp tingling of his right foot, crossed in his lap, slowly falling asleep. He is staring at the girl he did this too, who he made into a potential omelet, who has all the bright lucidity of a waxless wick.
Doctors come and go, taking the girl’s pulse, making notes, then wandering off as if on a loop. They don’t look at Pablo. They know he can’t talk—that he can’t feel or be reasoned with. Once, he remembers, a young nurse thought about scowling at him for the smallest possible measurement of time currently allowed by Stephen Hawking, but eventually thought better. He secretly wishes they would though. He even thinks of writing a note on the palm of his hand to show them. “Tell me to fucking die!” it would say.
Pablo met Audrey in a pet store in Philadelphia that resembled the shop from Gremlins. He was buying a cat, waking with the desperate urge to bring something alive into his small downtown apartment. She was looking at dead fish. He remembers being frozen by her, opening his mouth as if he’d forgotten his ailment, then pointing to his throat. She looked at him, ironically, like a kitten with her head tilted sideways. He wrote something on her arm. “I’m Pablo. I can’t talk.”
“Aud-rey,” she wrote on his.
By the end of the night they were both covered in smeared black ink.
A year later they are in the complete polar opposite setting; sterile, lifeless, still, final.
A small t-shirt with a bright yellow Velvet Underground banana lay on Pablo’s lap. Audrey made it, nearly five months ago, in a silkscreen class in college. It sat, since its conception, on their dresser in his apartment waiting for a new body to be born for its very purpose. Pablo remembers stuffing it in his pocket on the way out the door the minute Audrey collapsed. “It’s just contractions,” he thought. “Everything is everything is everything is fine is fine is fine fine.” He grabbed a pen and rushed her out the door, hailing a lucky cab, and nearly carrying her into the very room where he now sits.
Of course everything went wrong. Of course it did.
Pablo swallows, soundless.
The girl stirs, her eyelashes beating like broken wings, diaphanous. She rolls over, groans, and makes a tiny sound that could be construed as the echo of a snore. Pablo leaps forward, then slinks back.
“All that blood,” he thinks. The phrase is written 17 times on his left arm in six different fonts. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with her—only that the girl’s vitals are becoming increasingly weak.
“What’s happening?” he wrote on the palm of his left hand.
“The baby won’t come. She can’t last like this. We have to make a decision soon…”
“I’m Pablo. I can’t talk,” he writes.
“The child or the mother?” the doctor says. “YOU—HAVE—TO—CHOOSE. Do you understand?”
Pablo raised his left hand.
“We’re losing her,” says a woman in white. An
arcade of beeps and blips fill the room. Pablo thinks of going to
the boardwalk when he was a boy. He wonders if he can still navigate
through all the meteors.
“NOW GODDAMNIT!” the doctor screams.
Pablo closes his eyes and shakes his head no. The nurse grabs his shoulder and shakes him awake.
Pablo makes an imaginary incision across his stomach.
Copyright © 2009 Josh Davis. Published on Monday, 20 July 2009. The permanent link for this story is http://angler.donavanhall.net/03/?n=4.
Josh Davis has published two novels, What Rough Peace (ROR, 2000) and The Muse and the Mechanism (2004 Pretend Genius Press). He has also published a short stories and poetry in the anthologies Fish Drink Like Us (2006 Pretend Genius Press) and Last Night's Dream Corrected. He currently lives in Salisbury, Maryland.
