Homemade Surgery

By Arlen Lawson

Pick up that telephone and dial (319)354-9374

 

Lights up.  Fisher is onstage.  Lighting Booth?  Are you there?  Later in the script, I want the lights dimmed ever so slightly.  At a point after that, I want them to come back up.  I will tell you when, but be prepared’s my advice to you.  I will figure out how to move when I’ve got Theater B to work with

 

 Fisher: It was homemade surgery.  Alex needed his appendix out.  The reason he needed his appendix out was his stomach hurt, he said.  He said, “Hey, Fisher, shit, my stomach hurts bad.  I think it’s my appendix.”  And so I rustled through the silverware drawer in the kitchen, pulled out the only knife I could find, which was a steak knife.  When I came back, Alex was spread out on the futon with his shirt pulled up under his arms and I could see his appendectomy scar from when he had it taken out as a kid, and I said, “Hey, Alex, you’re appendix was already taken out” and he says, “Yeah, I know.  Fucker must have slipped back in when I wasn’t lookin’ or something.” And I said that didn’t make any sense and he said, “Just fuckin do it!”

   And at least he had his scar there so I knew where to cut him.

   Now, my brother Kyle’s a doctor, and so was my dad, so I figure, since I talk to my brother just about every week, and since I must have inherited something in the way of the doctor gene from Dear Old Dad, I’d be a natural at this.  That’s probably what Alex figured, too, seeing as how I’d told him all about my family of doctors.

   What I do is I put sandwiches together for a living.  Down at the subway.  So I’m good at it.  You know.  It ain’t much to brag about, but I know how to make a sandwich’s what I’m saying, and when I make a sandwich at home, I put all the trimmings on, including the oil and the vinegar.  And that’s what I’d done a little earlier, made some sandwiches for Alex and myself, and I guess I spilled some oil on my hands.  That’s why my hands were greasy and that’s why the knife slipped out of my hand when I was swinging it and stuck straight up out of two inches above Alex’s knee, and not because I had butterfingers, which was what Alex said.  “Missing something, Dr. Fisher?” he said, then started looking around for the knife, cause he couldn’t tell that it was sticking straight up out of two inches above his knee, right.

   I mean, luckily I saw it first and took it out, or he never would have trusted me to take out his appendix and he woulda been setting there all night with a sore appendix.  Oh, a thing that happened when I took the knife out was a stream of blood shot up from out of his leg, so I leaned in and put my hand over it, you know, like I was just trying to get a closer look at the appendix scar, then I flashed the knife around a bit, half to show him I’d found it and half to distract him from all the rivers of blood pouring out between my hand and his leg, ya know, spreading and rippling.

   For the cut, I tried my best to split the scar tissue evenly down the middle, dividing it into two equal strips, but I’m afraid that, with the tools at my disposal, this was an impossible task.  And Alex laughed whenever the tearing red line strayed off the scar and came back across.  “Fuck you, man,” I said, “This is harder that it looks.

   Oh, by the way, Hi!  My name’s Fisher.  Vernon Fisher, really, but people just call me Fisher, seeing as how Vernon and Vern and V-man all sound retarded and seeing as how I spent a year or two in college working at a fish market, so obviously people would notice how appropriate my last name was.  Nicknames stick with you, you know, especially if they happen to be your surname, like Fisher was mine, and especially if you insist on being referred to by said Nickname, like I did, and most especially if you made sure your name tag at the subway said Fisher on it, like I did.  No, call me Fisher.  I insist.  It’s on the name tag.

   Now, keep in mind that both my hands, the knife, Alex’s stomach and his shorts are all red and flowing at this point.  Keep in mind that all this blood is moving, streaming out Adam’s new openings, gathering in buds and dripping off the knife and my hands, soaking and bubbling in his blue shorts.  And Alex is there with no anesthetic, except of course, for that prescribed to me by my dear brother, Kyle, for the clinical case of boredom from which I suffer, and Alex’s laughing and so am I.  And he says, “Hey, Fisher did you cry during Dumbo?”

   “Only at the end,” I might have said, or at least I might have thought it.

   And that’s when I spread open the wound, pulling it apart with fists like so much bloodied vagina, and I’m laughing still, and Alex is too, but maybe Alex’s laughter changed a little bit.  Maybe somewhere in the back of his brain, in the part of him that knew how to live, some switch or another was muttering over and over, oh shit oh fuck oh shit oh fuck oh shit oh fuck, some switch that we had effectively gagged that night.  But, if any of that happened, I didn’t pick up on it at the time.  And I reached my hand into his side, probed around until I found something that felt like what I was looking for.

   In the distance, Alex said, quietly, and just a touch less merrily, “Fuck.”

   And I tore his appendix out and threw it down on the coffee table, shimmering and folding, a slimy snake of a thing.  And Alex wasn’t moving or breathing.  And I laughed a little.  (long pause) And then, slowly, it became that neither was I moving or breathing.  And the two of us remained there for a little while.

   I called my brother, Kyle, told him he should come over, quick(LIGHTS DIM), then I wandered outside into the snow, into the dark sky, muscles tightening in the cold, sending a jet of silver breath onto my hands, covered in death-and-life fluids and the paste and slimy bits of inner flesh.  I sat down with a crunch in the snow and I thought that, if Alex were dead, his last word had been “Fuck.”  And I thought that was terrible and I wondered how the criteria for last words were judged.  Were your last words the last sentence you spoke, the last complete thought?  What if somebody had gone on for hours on their deathbed without coming around to the point.  Maybe last words start the moment you realize you’re about to die and end while you’re trying to explain why you became you, to explain yourself, end most often in fragments of sentences, pieces of thoughts, fragments of run-ons and of paragraphs  and pages and manuscripts.

   I’m here and I’m cold and I’m frozen.

   A reindeer walks directly in front of me and I stumble back a little, scraping the snow and startled.  The thing is magic and it doesn’t belong here, but it is here, alive, breathing and twitching, and maybe it’s all in my brain, but, if it is, my brain is beautiful.  Except, and this comes to me slowly, it’s not a reindeer at all.  It’s a moose – that’s why its so fuckin big – it’s massive antlers, for all the world like the jaws of a meat-eating flytrap and on its left front leg there’s a gray-black jagged scar in the shape of a swastika.  And it moves its eyes until they’re facing mine and I see and it’s at that moment that I know Alex is dead and that his last word was “Fuck.”

   The reindeer-moose runs when my brothers headlights find it.(LIGHTS UP to full)

   Inside, my brother freaking out, and he a doctor, talking about the terror of it all, the end of a normal life, and he’d lose his license and go to jail just for writing one or two prescriptions for me, and I tell him it’s not as bad as he thinks, really, because, and this maybe I should have told you earlier, Alex was a prostitute, and there was no other relationship between us and suddenly Kyle’s eyes light up, like suddenly there’s a way out of this if he can just think long and hard enough, just think of what to do with a body and I sobering a little and looking at the terrible sandwich I’d made, thinking, “Well, there’s his appendix problem right there,” and, while Kyle leaves the room, muttering something about an axe, maybe, I’m thinking about how important last words are and, if I can just erase his last syllable, his last crude revelation, then his final words would be,

    “Hey, Fisher, did you cry during Dumbo?”

 

And that could be beautiful.

 

Lights Down