The Full Ridiculous Read online

  MARK LAMPRELL

  THE FULL

  RIDICULOUS

  Copyright © 2013 by Mark Lamprell

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  First published in 2013 by The Text Publishing Company

  This edition published in 2014 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

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  www.houseofanansi.com

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Lamprell, Mark, author The full ridiculous / Mark Lamprell. Originally published: Melbourne, Victoria : The Text Publishing Company, 2013. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN: 978-1-77089-454-9 (pbk.). ISBN: 978-1-77089-455-6 (html). I. Title. PR9619.4.L34F84 2014 823’.92 C2013-907012-5 C2013-907013-3

  Cover design by WH Chong

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  for Klay

  a love song of sorts, my darling girl.

  1

  Halfway through a ten-kilometre run, you have yet another premonition that you’re hit by a car while jogging so you decide to outwit the fates by changing course, heading down Hastings Road instead of up it. Rather than risk the usual dash across the intersection, you wait at the pedestrian crossing for a sleek green four-wheel drive to pass on your right. Summer is toppling into autumn but it’s still hot and you wipe the sweat from your forehead with the back of your hand. Looking left, you see an old blue sedan approaching and make eye contact with the driver who is lit by a flash of early-morning sun. You stride confidently onto the crossing and almost reach the other side of the road when, out of the corner of your left eye, you see something blue.

  The blue sedan.

  It’s less than a body length away, and it’s not stopping.

  Time slows, just like in the movies, which is ironic because you work in the movies. Well, not in the movies, around the movies; you write about movies, ‘clever’ features poking fun at filmmakers who may not be creative geniuses but at least they’ve had a go which is more than you can say for some joggers

  which is why you have this self-loathing thing going

  which is why you overeat

  which makes you overweight

  which gives you borderline high blood pressure

  which is why you’re jogging.

  Milliseconds pass.

  The blue car moves closer.

  You recall a conversation with a stuntman during the making of the latest Mad Max movie. He’s talking about a sequence where he gets run down by one of those reptilian-looking, post-apocalyptic vehicles but you’re not really listening because you can hear an actor in the wardrobe tent complaining about his costume. He’s not exactly complaining, just fussing about how heavy it is, but in your piece for Cinema Australasia you say he’s complaining because it adds tension.

  This stuntie says the important thing is to go over the car when it hits. You go under, most likely you get stuck on some sticky-outy bit of the engine, dragged along and de-skinned, then kidney-squishingly, eye-poppingly, brain-squeezingly run over by one or more wheels. You go over, at least you’ve got a chance if you land right.

  You don’t know how you remember all this in a millisecond but you do. You even remember the stuntie sensing he doesn’t have your full attention so he gives a demonstration, lifting himself off the ground. A little jump just before the vehicle hits.

  On the crossing, you are not afraid. You feel not one moment of fear. There is no time for metamorphosis so you perform an act of instantaneous transcendence. You are no longer a person. You have become a living thing with a singular objective: to remain what you are: alive.

  You start to turn to face the blue car but you can’t turn far in a millisecond. You can think a lot but you can’t do a lot. You do, however, manage to raise yourself off the road a little before the car drives into your left thigh, still in slow motion.

  You feel no pain.

  And that’s all you remember.

  Inside the blue sedan, Frannie Prager is running late for work. A traffic jam on the highway has prompted her to take a shortcut and it’s the first time she’s driven this way by herself although she’s done it before with her husband behind the wheel. She’s enjoying the leafy road lined with old-money mansions and is mid-fantasy, playing the mistress of one particular Spanish Mission pile, when a break in the trees slashes a stripe of early morning sunlight across her face, blinding her.

  Frannie dips her head, fumbles for the sun visor and lowers it.

  She feels a thump, like she’s hit something.

  Her windscreen cracks and shatters.

  She screams and hits the brakes as glass showers into her lap.

  Through the cobweb hole in the windscreen, she sees a big blond man in a dark T-shirt and joggers flying through the air, away from her. He lands with a thud face down, half in the gutter, half on the small strip of unmown grass at the side of the road.

  There is no blood.

  He’s not moving.

  The first thing you feel is a lack of symmetry: one hand on the cold concrete gutter, one hand in the dewy grass. You’ve landed well—pretty much in a push-up position—and it flashes through your head that your stuntie would be proud of you.

  You turn your head out of the grass to take a breath. A man with a mobile phone in his hand is running towards you, shouting. He’s telling you to lie still, lie still, I’ve called an ambulance, an ambulance is coming.

  You realise you can’t move. You can’t move anything except your head. And then you feel this thing you haven’t felt as clearly or simply since you were a child. You feel really sorry for you.

  You start to cry. You cry like a little boy who’s been beaten for something he didn’t do. And you’re sad. Deeply, purely sad. No adult inner voice insists that you contextualise what you are feeling. Children are starving in Africa. People are exploding in Iraq. Millions are far worse off than you at this moment but none of this enters the orbit of your consciousness. You are utterly occupied with yourself. You are a mewling, puking newborn who has not yet learned that anyone or anything other than itself exists.

  Shoes gather around you. That’s all you can see because you can’t move, you can’t fucking move, and you can’t turn your fucking fuck fuck fuck head. Black-stockinged calves lower into your view. There is a small ladder, just below the right knee. A woman’s hand grasps your right wrist. She tells you she’s a doctor and she’s taking your pulse. You ask her name. She tells you she is Elizabeth Marks. Doctor Elizabeth Marks. Her voice is kind and smart. You do not ask her whether you will be okay because you are afraid of the answer. She asks your name. ‘Michael,’ you say. ‘Michael O’Dell.’

  You continue to cry. You haven’t cried for a long time and it’s like all the times you should have cried and didn’t have been saved up for this single purge. You hear Doctor Elizabeth Marks tell someone there is a child in her car and could they please move the car and keep an eye on the child. Another woman is patting your back. She’s saying, ‘Poor fel
la, poor fella,’ and you think, ‘Indeed.’ Doctor Elizabeth Marks says, ‘Gently,’ to the woman so she stops patting and starts rubbing.

  A pair of men’s business shoes asks if they can call anyone. You say, ‘My wife,’ but then you think how frightened she will be so you say, ‘Can I call her?’ and try to turn to take the phone. Doctor Elizabeth Marks tells you to stay still. You call out your wife’s work number in a weepy voice that you have never heard before and someone puts the ringing phone to your ear.

  Lovely Lucy the receptionist answers and you know you must wipe all the panic and tears from your voice when you speak. You can do this because you are a good actor. At university, your best friend wrote a one-man play about an aborted foetus who lives out his whole potential life in the moment of his abortion. You played the foetus and it was a big hit. You might have made a living as an actor if not for the fact that you vomit before you go on stage which is no way to make a living.

  Lucy is in a perky mood and raring for a banter. She tells you your wife isn’t in yet, it’s probably the traffic. Or maybe she’s having an affair. You make a reasonable approximation of a laugh and add in your best oh-by-the-way voice that you’re okay and not to worry but you’ve just been run over by a car and you’re waiting for the ambulance and could she let your wife know when she sees her. Something in your voice tells Lucy that you’re not joking because she is suddenly very serious and tells you she’ll track Wendy down immediately.

  Wendy Weinstein. That’s her name. She hates it, or rather she hates the combination of Wendy with Weinstein. She doesn’t mind them separately and she doesn’t mind the alliteration. It’s the desperation, she says, of the white-bread, Anglo-Protestant Wendy working so hard to apologise for the unequivocally Jewish Weinstein. She could have changed her surname to O’Dell when you got married but she’s a feminist and refused to sell either the sisterhood or Judaism short. You weren’t going to argue because she’s cleverer than you and whenever you argue you lose.

  Something pops into your head. The driver. Is the driver of the blue car okay?

  ‘Where’s the driver?’ you ask Doctor Elizabeth Marks.

  ‘I’m here,’ answers a small female voice as a pair of tired brown pumps enters the peripheral vision of your right eye.

  You recall the old blue sedan, hear the trace of an accent, mid-European, and construct a picture of your assailant working herself to exhaustion in a tedious, underpaid job she’s nonetheless grateful to have and now terrified she’ll lose if she arrives late.

  ‘Are you okay?’ you ask and then assure her you’re going to be okay too.

  How do you know this? How do you fucking know this?

  You hear sirens approaching. They appear to be coming from all directions and that’s because they are. The police arrive to redirect traffic just as two ambulances pull up. You don’t see any of this—it’s purely soundscape with a running commentary by Doctor Elizabeth Marks.

  An Ambo leans down to talk to you and it’s the first face you’ve seen in what seems like ages. Pale brown hair is plastered to his forehead with a combination of sweat and grease. Deep lines that once were dimples are etched either side of his mouth. He asks you questions with stale-smoke breath.

  What is your name? What day is it? Do you know what happened?

  He tells you he’s going to turn you over onto a board and secure you. A brace will be on your neck and it may feel very uncomfortable and he’s sorry.

  You hear the count…

  on three…

  one,

  two,

  three…

  and you’re flipping over. Knees, thighs, torsos appear. Then faces, all looking down at you. You can see the sky. A woman pushes towards you, someone tries to hold her back but she says, ‘I’m his wife.’

  And there she is, looming over you. This face you know better than your own. You read every twitch and flicker, the slight clouding of her bright blue eyes. She is shocked, shocked to see you prone; then frightened, fighting the faint quiver in her bottom lip. Her thick brown-black hair hangs in a curtain, dangling down at you. She sweeps it behind her ears and makes a huge effort to look calm, to be calm, and now she looks blurry because there’s water in your eyes and it stings and you realise that once again you’re crying salty tears.

  They lift you up and a woman from the house across the road tries to rescue her blanket, which is covering you. The blanket sticks to the stretcher and she tugs at it (but not hard, for fear of disturbing you) and says in a self-conscious way, ‘Doesn’t matter,’ and you know she’s feeling foolish for fussing when there are bigger things at stake. Wendy releases the blanket from the stretcher and returns it to her and you hear her thanking the woman as they carry you away. And you carry the kindness of these strangers with you and are moved by them.

  2

  You are in an ambulance. The brace on your neck is crushing and claustrophobic but you dare not complain. Your view is restricted to the roof of the vehicle as you race along, siren wailing. You know the route to the hospital and you try to imagine exactly where you are, a Global Tracking Patient.

  Wendy follows in her car. You suddenly regret this because you want her with you in case you die. You can’t see the Ambo unless he peers directly overhead which only happens once as he checks your vital signs and asks more questions.

  What is your name? What day is it? How fast was she going?

  How fast was she going? You have no idea so you say, ‘No idea,’ and he suggests, ‘About forty?’ and you think, ‘Forty! Whose side are you on?’ You can hear, close to your ear, a pen scratching on paper and you realise he’s logging all this information and you want to say, ‘A lot fucking faster than forty!’ But then a huge, horrifying wave of pain emanates from your left thigh.

  The Ambo reads your situation and says you can have some morphine when you get to the hospital. This is the first time you are conscious of any pain and instantly you are overwhelmed by it. Unbearable waves ebb and flow over your body.

  The ambulance stops and things slam and slide open.

  You glide fast down a long corridor.

  The ceiling panels are discoloured with age and intermittently stained by leakage. Every now and then a panel is missing and you catch glimpses of piping and ancient bits of insulation. It occurs to you that this is how you are going to see the world—through a small window directly above you—for quite a long time.

  Countless prostrate patients must have experienced this before you and you make a mental note to share your small epiphany with your architect friend, Felipe: hospitals should be designed around their ceilings because this is what sick people see of them. This suddenly feels like a really important idea. You haven’t felt such conviction since you had a brilliant flash (when stoned at university) about all mankind saving the Earth from a collision with a giant meteor by travelling to one country so the displaced human mass would make the planet wobble on its axis, which would alter its orbit just enough for the meteor to whizz past into intergalactic oblivion. You can see now that your ceilings epiphany will change the way future hospitals are built and will one day be regarded as another beat in the long, slow pulse of your unfolding genius.

  A wave of pain turns into nausea and you think you’re going to vomit and you’re frightened you will choke on it because you can’t move your head.

  A bank of fluorescents travels towards you and stops overhead, glaring like a science-fiction sun. You hear Wendy’s voice amid the hospital clatter but it’s a female police officer who peers over you and asks how it’s going.

  ‘Good,’ you reply (!).

  The policewoman tells you she will come later to take a statement and disappears. Wendy takes her place; she’s silhouetted by the alien sun but you can see her eyes are red and puffy. She smiles and says, ‘Hi Bubba,’ and you say, ‘Hi,’ and suddenly an Indian doctor takes Wendy’s place and introduces herself and you try to hold on to her name but it’s complicated and polysyllabic and now it’s gone.


  She bundles Wendy off to a waiting room and you can feel a prick in your arm and she explains in her rhythmic Hindi accent that she’s taking blood and putting a shunt in your arm in case you need a drip and/or meds. Then you hear her drop something and say, softly, ‘Oh damn,’ and she fusses for a bit and you feel another prick.

  She looks into your face and smiles and offers you morphine. You say, ‘No,’ and explain that you want to be aware, stay in control. It’s only a glimmer, the slightest spasm of her facial muscles, but you can tell she thinks you’re an idiot. She asks you to move the toes on your left foot.

  There is a pause while you try to locate your left foot in your head and send it a message. She asks you to move it again, a little impatiently now, but adds please to take the edge off.

  ‘I’m trying,’ you say. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘We’ll send you up for X-rays,’ she replies and walks away.

  You feel a lurch in the pit of your stomach.

  The curtains slide shut and an efficient voice announces that she’s Shirley, your nurse, here to clean you up and she’s sorry but she’s going to have to cut those clothes off you, she’s afraid. You remember that you’re still in your jogging gear—dark blue T-shirt and shorts—and are only now aware they are wet with sweat and probably blood.

  Underwear.

  You realise she’s going to cut off your underwear and think,

  (a) I’m wearing the black cotton shorts, a little worn but not too bad, and

  (b) I don’t want Shirley inspecting my cock.

  As if she can mind-read, Shirley places a towel over you and reaches under, cutting down your left side from hip to thigh, then your right. A gentle tug and the whole kit comes away like a disposable diaper and you’re so relieved to have held on to this shred of dignity that you don’t even notice how she removes your T-shirt.

  Your arms keep slipping off the bed as she bathes you and she comments how these silly hospital trolleys are too small for a big man like you. There’s something about the way she says ‘big man’ that tells you she finds you attractive and a number of thoughts form and synthesise into something like this: That’s not very appropriate but it’s good if she wants to have sex with you because she’ll make sure you’re alive aren’t we absurd everything comes down to sex in the end even when we’re dying does she have a nice body you’re pathetic what about Wendy who knew it was possible to feel this much pain surely childbirth couldn’t be this bad? Only in your head, the thoughts don’t happen one after the other like they do on paper, they all happen at once; it’s like simultaneously watching five different movies but being able to understand everything.