The Hole

When they wheeled him into the operating room it was fifteen till four. A black table with extended arm rests lay in the center of the high ceilinged room. It was the only piece of furniture that was not blue or dazzling white.

The doctor glanced at him and shook his bushy eyebrows, mouthed something that made his surgical mask rise and fall slightly then turned to prepare his equipment. The anesthesiologist instructed him to scoot from the rolling bed onto the black table, and after getting hopelessly tangled in the series of wires and tubes that ran in and out of his body, he made it.

Several orderlies descended upon him like quick clawed vultures. They applied cold packs that tore the hair from his legs and proceeded to wrap his hand and forearm in something that looked like a giant rubber band. Soon his exposed fingertips were blue and completely numb and his arm was entirely asleep.

Next, the attendants placed a tourniquet just below his right shoulder, successfully cutting off the rest of the blood flow to his arm. A nurse informed him that they were injecting Demerol into his IV and something else that would numb the rest of the nerves in his hand. It was Z--- something. It burned. Every nerve in his hand seemed on fire for about two minutes and before he could look to see what the crowd of physicians were doing there, all gathered around his hand like bobbing pelicans, they threw a large sheet of cloth about the consistency of tissue paper over the majority of his body. He could see nothing but this sea of translucent blue and his eyes naturally gravitated towards the only visible shore, which consisted of the linoleum floor to his left and the pacing feet of his attendants.

With no other stimuli available he listened intently to the nurses as they talked amongst themselves. One woman provided the primary topic of conversation.

“Oh, I’m sorry I was late getting here,” she said. “I got another ticket. That’s the third one this year.”

“It’s only February,” said a voice.

“I must be just about the worst driver in the world.”

Someone mumbled a disinterested response and another woman chirped in, “Now what’re you doing speeding, Rebecca? You gotta learn to slow down.”

“Oh, I know. It’s just, I get all caught up in that traffic.”

“It’s horrible.”

“And I just want to get on through it, you know? Well, I’m always in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a nice young man. But I tell you, they don’t cut you no slack at all.”

  He wanted to voice his agreement with this last statement, but he felt invisible under the cover. The woman’s name startled him, but he pretended not to notice. After all, he didn’t want to distract them.

“Who the police?”

“Yeah. You know, he said something, I don’t remember what it was, but I might be losing my license. How many points does it take to lose your license?”

“Oh, I think it’s something like four or five.”

“Seven,” a third voice said.

“Well, I’ve got just about a hundred already,” Rebecca said. “Sometimes they’ll drop them if you go to the driving school. You think I can get this one dropped?”

“I don’t know. How fast were you going?”

“Fifteen miles over the limit.”

“I’d say you’re stuck with it then.”

Some time had passed and his arm began to feel sore around the shoulder, as if it were raised straight up. At one point the doctor’s voice echoed, “Do you feel this?”

“Feel what?” he asked.

“That’s the right answer,” the doctor replied.

Though he could see nothing, he got the sense that the operation had now begun but this made very little sense to him, as it still felt like his arm was raised into the air.

He reasoned that they must have laid it flat on the table by now, and he even assumed that the combination of decreased visibility, the Demerol, and the constricted flow of blood might make it difficult for him to determine the actual location of his arm.

He accepted this and yet, the desire to know how his arm was positioned became overwhelming. Instinct compelled him to move the limb in order to re-calibrate his mental picture of how his body was arranged. His mind knew that the arm was laying flat on the table, while the physical sensations he received told him that the arm still pointed skyward. To move now might prove disastrous to the operation, yet the feeling was becoming stronger, the impulse to suddenly and violently shake his hand almost more than he could bear.

For a time it was like he had two arms, one which was being cut on by the doctors, and another that floated disembodied in his mind, an inverse ghost limb he could feel, and yet which was in complete contradiction to the probable facts.

Of course, he did have two arms. One on the right, one on the left, that was not so unusual. He could feel two of the limbs, so he reasoned that there must be a third because at least one of the arms he was feeling had to be an imaginary one. Not to mention the one he didn’t feel at all. He stopped counting when he realized it could go on indefinitely and that he still hadn’t come any closer to resolving the issue.

The thought had almost compelled him to do that which he knew he shouldn’t do, when a much simpler means of resolving the inconsistency came to mind.

“Excuse me,” he asked.

A nurse stuck her head under the blue sheet like a wrinkled child playing peek-a-boo. The woman pulled her mask down and smiled. She had on entirely too much eye-shadow and red lipstick coated her teeth. “How are we doing?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he said, not sure who else she was talking to. “I was just wondering, is my hand in a vertical or horizontal plane? I mean, is it pointing at the ceiling or laying flat on the table?”

“Why, it’s on the table honey.”

“Thanks, I wasn’t sure.”

“I got it,” the doctor said.

“Can I see?” he asked.

“Sure. If you want.”

The blue cloth fell up and across the ceiling, then vanished in his periphery. He lifted his head and looked over to the right. The clock on the wall read, “four twenty-four.” It seemed like he’d been there longer. His vision reeled and then came to rest on a small square that had been cut out of the blue paper.

The window revealed gray, lifeless flesh which had been peeled back to expose a dark fissure. Bloodless, it marred the surface of his hand like a cavernous fault, a miniature abyss which rested but an arms length away.

The doctor held something like a piece of uncooked chicken between a tool that looked like metallic chop sticks. The doctor held the lump like a gorged tick, freshly plucked..

“This is one of the biggest ones I’ve seen,” the doctor said. “See this?” He ran a scalpel along the side of the sack and something like honey oozed out. “That’s the fluid. Good thing you came in for this. It could have grown into the nerves. Now let’s get you sewn up.”

He’s head fell back to rest on the table, but not before he made another quick glance at the hole in his hand. The blue sheet swallowed him again and he continued to stare up into it, weary of waking, but determined to outrun sleep.