Sinister Shorts

He stopped in his tracks, eyes riveted on the show. “That reminds me of my dad.” He watched for a few seconds. “I was just a kid. Nineteen fifty-five, we got our first TV.”

Fu

A German boat submerged. Cut to the men inside, lowering a periscope.

“Friday night on Potrero Hill. See, that was payday,” Mike said, one hand on his hip, more animated than she had ever seen him. “He'd go out and buy himself a few beers… get a few beers in him.” He stood between her and the television, concentrating on the screen as he spoke. “We had the five hamburgers for a dollar.

“Yeah, he'd get a few beers in him. Those were his favorite shows. Victory at Sea, you know? Black and white. All that old war stuff. He was Army. Friday night, that's when all of us gathered around the new TV.”

Mike began to pace in front of the television, slapping his knee. His voice, an emotionless, unaccented one, changed to a Southern dialect and rose in pitch. “See up there,” he said, parading, prancing back and forth, and she could see his father forty years ago, proud of some remembered or imagined glory. Mike lifted an arm straight up and pointed to the set, still talking in his father's voice. “See, kids? That there's Guadalcanal…”

“Mike, where are you?” said a voice over the loudspeaker.

He startled, putting his hands to his sides as if standing at attention.

“I'm taking Ms. Watkins's vital signs,” he called out.

“Could we borrow your muscle for a minute?” the voice said. There was affection in the words.

“Sure thing.” He walked out the door.

While he was gone, she noticed the pile of best sellers on the refrigerator. She didn't want to make an extra trip back to clear them out when the time came to leave. She had her toiletries, the flowers… too much to carry in one load, even with her husband helping. Once she left that room, she never wanted to return. Maybe she could give them away.

Mike returned almost immediately and started toward her with the cuff. As he adjusted it around her upper arm she said, “You a reader?”

He stepped back from the bed and fiddled with his machine. “Oh, I sure used to be,” he said. “As a kid, I read everything. History and science were my favorites.” He flipped a switch, punched a few buttons.

“Because I wondered if…” she began, but Mike was still talking.

“But I don't much anymore. Got bad eyes,” he said.

She was thinking, how strange. They were so alike, and she had thought them so different. Her dad bought steak on payday and the kids ate take-out burgers for a treat when she was a kid, and now she had two pairs of glasses, one for distance, and one for close-up. Neither one seemed to work worth a damn.

“I was in Vietnam,” he said.

The mumbling of visitors in the rooms nearby grew louder, and the bright stars outside looked brighter. Her mouth was open, but she closed it without speaking.

Mike was lost in thought. Suddenly, he turned his back to her and reached behind his head. “See this?” He pointed up at the back of his skull to a lumpy scar, significant-looking. About six inches long, it curved like a long evil smile above his neck underneath his nubby hair.

“Yes.”

“I spent eighteen years in the hospital,” he said. “There was shrapnel stuck back there and they couldn't take it out. Looked like I had a second head. Couldn't go anywhere, anyway. Looked like a freak.”

He turned sideways for a moment, long enough for her to imagine behind him, his second head.

He put the cuff on her arm, puffed it up, and watched the red numbers on his machine going down.

“Had me on psychotropic drugs. Everything. Because sometimes, I'd feel bad about what I missed.”

The highest reading ever. He noted it on a piece of paper.

“Then they found a way to take it off.”

He pushed the machine toward her door. “Sometimes I think about life,” he said, passing under the television, “how much I missed.”

She would leave the thrillers behind, she decided, find something better to read now that her mind had awakened, something like the books she had read in the summer. She had learned in those books what made mountain climbers climb and people go to war. Not courage, she had finally decided. A mysterious force drove them on. That same mysterious force had motivated her to go under the knife-something beyond survival, some greedy spirit full of valor, something vestigial like her anomaly, something as outlandish as Mike's second head.

She lay back against the pillows watching San Francisco blink, and thought of a young man and how long life should be and what it should be. Her husband came into the room, greeted her, and pulled a chair closer to her bed. He took her hand. “How are you?”

She squeezed his hand. “Better,” she said. “They say I can go home on Sunday.” Days, as opposed to years… a lifetime that could so easily be cut short by misery, bricks, metal.

Let the kid live. He had been hanging from her like shrapnel, but Mike had cut him off her.

“But… you're ready? They won't make you leave if you aren't ready…” She saw now how afraid he was. “Why are you smiling?” he went on.

“Come here.” Her husband bent down and she kissed his bald head. “Because the operation was a success.”

Chocolate Milkshake

One night, after a movie, she and a woman friend dropped into one of those anachronistic ice cream parlors modeled on the fifties, where an actual soda jerk in a white cap sponged behind the counter and silver-haired denizens licked their spoons as they no doubt had been doing for years. They sat across from each other in a mahogany booth. Her friend ordered a root-beer float from an ornate leather menu. That started her thinking about when she was sixteen and Charlie Almquist took her to the Bob's Big Boy on Willow Street and they ordered the most wonderful dripping burgers and huge thick chocolate milkshakes with whipped cream. For old times' sake and in a spirit of middle-aged daring, she ordered the chocolate milkshake, thinking you can't bring back the past and that she must be out of her mind to order such a mountain of calories. When the milkshake arrived it was better than the Bob's, taller, with cream that tasted freshly whipped and semisweet chocolate tempered to bland mild perfection with milk. She sipped it slowly through the straw, finding it difficult to make conversation because it had been thirty years since anything tasted this good. When it was all gone she was full, really full, her brain still savoring the taste and her cells still lapping up the cream.

She did not dare to repeat this experience, nor did she tell her husband about it, because although they had smoked pot and even sniffed cocaine once in younger wilder days and had drunk about a thousand bottles of wine together, this was an experience he could never share with her, a truly illicit, downright obscene pleasure, and besides he was a saturated fat and salt eater, who at night in front of the TV snacked on salted nuts and nacho chips, while she usually tried to content herself with tea, since she gained weight easily and had to be careful; but after the milkshake experience she began sneaking Hostess Cupcakes in the kitchen, eating two sandwiches in the daytime when he and the children were not at home, and having a second breakfast of microwave waffles with loads of real maple syrup, which helped her sleep better and maintain the bland sweetness which he and the children needed, deadening her to the irritations and lack of money and the fact that she really didn't seem to care about her husband anymore; and then she started to put on weight, and she had to buy some bigger clothes at the Pe