The type of animal that I saw in the mirror every morning in the hospital was close to the chimpanzee but something more bipedal. The last one in a long line of chimps but first from the right on the chart of evolution. God’s favorite. The human being.
If God has a long white beard I’m not a believer because the beard I was trying to pull before being admitted to the ICU was thick, brown and totally round. I wanted to pull on the orderly’s beard to see if it was real. I was also biting at his hands in slow motion as he mirrored the panicked swirling of my hands. “Insanity?” he asked. We must’ve looked like we were grappling while on ketamine, palm to palm, in an old fashioned pro wrestling metaverse because one of us wasn’t real.
His eyes were looking directly into mine so much so that our pupils were dead locked, swirling together so intensely I could see myself and the background behind me. I swear I could hear springs popping off and gears turning inside his head. I didn’t turn away for fear of losing a spring myself. I was trying to win this fight but it was impossible because I didn’t know the right thing to answer as he calmly asked “insanity? insanity?”over and over again, progressively getting louder. It’s not like I could’ve said “yeah, you’re right” and call it a truce. Sticks and stones.
As much as I wanted to get off that gurney right then, if this was how thrilling the ride into the ICU was going to be, I thought maybe I’d see where this was going to take me. Maybe the doctors had longer beards, and the patients maybe had one eye or something and didn’t know the answers to insanity, so I could possibly win a fight or two.
At that moment I knew it was better to be seen than to be heard. I had only one decision to make inside the ICU and it would turn out to be the right one.
Francis Erich McElroy 