Writing Exercise 3 - Kyle

Walt. Walt on the toilet. Walt with his forearms on his knees. His head hanging down. Examine your stool. Your stool should be of medium dark color. It should be long and thin, in the shape of your lower intestine. The doctor said. The doctor with the beard that looked like it had been colored. Missed patches at the sideburns where it touched his ears. Gray and thinning. Your stool should be long and skinny like your lower intestine. There should be no blood in your stool. That goes without saying. If there’s blood in your stool then we have a problem. There’s something going on there that we’ll have to look at. Do you understand? He asked. The doctor asked. But there’s blood in that coiled mess down there. And it’s not long and thin. It looks nothing like his lower intestine, or what he imagines a lower intestine to look like. By lower intestine he guesses the doctor means small intestine. That is the one that meets up with the colon. The urethra. Does he have that backwards? Is it the large intestine? And how the hell does an intestine meet up with both? Or does it? Of course Walt knows next to nothing about biology, about the body’s basic functions. He accepts as working what does not make itself known to him. There are times, however, when he’s faced with his body’s fitfulness. Like the infrequent breaking of bones – toes, fingers – and the even less frequent occurrence of blood – glass on the railroad tracks opening up his side, a metal stair breaking skin above the eyebrow. Infrequent but there. And with them the avoidance of doctors. Dentists even. Normally. Because they were doctors too. Normally but not always. Sometimes there was nothing you could do. The little Asian guy leaning over his face and coming down with a light. Some sort of headlight. But he might be remembering it wrong. That might have been taken from a television show, a movie. The little Asian guy clamping his back teeth and tugging. His mouth injected sixteen times with Novocain. Lifeless and thick and drool spilling down his chin. The assistant wiping his chin and saying, You should try to keep your head still. Don’t move your head so much. You have to hold your head still if he’s going to get that tooth. Look straight ahead. Do you understand? And then, later, wiping blood from the swollen fat lips while trying to get some liquid in him. Water, only water. The way it spilled out his mouth and down onto the front of his shirt, a smear of pink on his white shirt. His whole face numb. People were looking at him on the subway. For there he was, jaw slack and drooling, leaking blood all down the front of him. The tongue’s lost, the feeling. Walt chews on the side of his tongue. Because three days later when the swelling finally came down there was nothing there, not on the left side of his tongue. There was no feeling. Or there was something, something there. Like the feeling when flesh resumes its tingle, the rush of blood and sense after coming down. The numbing agent wearing off. He still wonders if feeling will come back. Probably not. Unlikely. Because there was research done on the topic, facts and statistics looked up. Peoples’ comments to sift through. Parasthesia. That’s what it’s called, this residual numbness. A small portion of people who have their wisdom teeth removed suffer from permanent nerve damage called parasthesia. They will never recover feeling. The oral surgeon – the little Asian guy – the dentist – the doctor motioning to the assistant with his eyes. Take a look at that. And the assistant. What’s that? Is it infected? Looking down into the hole in the back of his mouth and he there in the chair helpless, his body turned on its back and elevated and nowhere to go. Down there in the hole a tangle of nerves, ugly and wet like a bolus of serpents exposed, teeming. The stitches going in. Tied and snipped. And then no more feeling on that side of the tongue. Walt balls up a wad of toilet paper and wipes. He puts it up in front of his face, looking at the ill smear. Mud-brown and the paper stippled with red. Almost pink. Was it fatal? There was that little kid in elementary school – Danny Lin – that was found on the floor of the boy’s room. Pants around his ankles and blood everywhere. They’d wheeled him out on a gurney with towels wrapped around his middle like a diaper. The kid unconscious. The word hemorrhage. But he hadn’t died. He’d only switched schools. There was no way to come back after something like that. And of course Walt understands the impulse. He understands it oh so clearly. He chews his tongue and looks at that mess on the paper and he even brings it up close and sniffs it. A godawful stench, something primal and bacterial. Something to clear the room. And so it does.