The
doctor stares down at his hands in disbelief; it is incredible, unutterable
that which he has asked them to perform. Again he takes up the telephone,
crushing the handset between his shoulder and the side of his head,
simultaneously trying to thumb the requisite digits into the numbered buttons
of the main unit, his thumb thick in the grip of intoxication. When this
attempt also fails, he allows the whole mass of plastic to drop at the floor,
landing and spilling apart, kicked at savagely.
Later,
when he too is stretched out alongside, he gathers it to himself and finally
finds focus enough to correctly enter what he needs. In the moments of ringing
tone he understands the purposelessness of breathing, understands this unclean
and fibrous push and pull and push and pull, that here is something happening to
him, without any
deleted name: Hello?
Doctor:
You can’t bandage ash dammit you bastard
there
is noise elsewhere to which he is as deaf.
Doctor:
Don’t you understand, that there’s no amount of money in the world can BANDAGE
FUCKING ASHES
sobbing,
and something pale and green and luminescent high in his head even there where
he lies, sprawled and exhausted and his ear thinning out and away from the
constant droning to which it finds itself target.
