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Reader. Gamer. Binary Mystic.
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Saturday, August 21, 2004
I.
I came to loathe the sound of the hospital pager more than any other sound in the world. After a month at the hospital, I was able to tolerate my wife's nagging, my neighbor's barking dog, and the bumps and clangs of the apartment radiator, but the sound the a 3 ounce demon would inject a dose of fear into my heart. I was never able to get used to it. The pager conveyed it's message in the simplest form: a string of piercing beeps that could not cease until I viewed the page. It's message was equally simple. All the pager would tell me was, "You're needed somewhere. Go."
I started work about one month after the language implant. The installation of the implant was an outpatient affair. I walked into the clinic, slid my pay card, sat in the chair, got shot up with pain killers, heard some drilling going on behind me, slept for a few hours, then drove home. My wife would test by whispering obscenities in various languages during dinner. She would recite trite sentences that she pasted together from dictionaries. "The balloon tastes like green peas, " she told me in Italian. "The sky likes to play golf on Jupiter," she said in Hungarian. "Humans are really small elephants," she uttered in Basque. She did this to make me feel like the implant wasn't working. I'd typically respond something in flawless German, which was her native language. This enraged her since she knew that I never studied a word in German a day in my life.
At nights I'd walk through the streets of Little Haiti and here the Creole creations criss cross through my brain. I would dine in Spanish restaurants and speak with a Gaelitian accent. A few days after the implant, I applied in person at the county hospital for an interpreter position. There weren't any openings there but there was on at one of their satellite hospitals. The pay was the same so I took the job.
For weeks, everything was a breeze. Permutations of languages would flow through the hospital doors, and I'd jump into my role. My tongue would twist and turn; my vocal cords would make new vibrations. Language became flexible and tangible. It wasn't until my second month that the trouble began. It started with static, soft and subtle static. The static was always centered around a certain area of the hospital, around a certain door. I was never called into that department and would avoid it as much as possible. One day I looked up the hospital map on the intranet and sought out the department's name. It was the morgue.
My hospital access was limited to primary care centers. I couldn't enter departments that didn't directly handle patients. The bulk of my time was spent in Labor and Delivery and the Emergency Department. There was no tangible was for me to enter the morgue. And then I remembered Brian.
Brian was a morgue technician. That's a nice way of saying that Brian cut people up during autopsies. He had been doing that job for about 5 years. During lunch hour, he not that people were quite rubbery and how the human esophigas reminded him of a turkey's gizzard. He had ocular implants and viewed everything magnified. He confessed to loving the autopsies for individuals with tattoos. He was able to scan the tattoo and discern how long the person had their skin art. He could see the strokes and color variations. He flirted with the idea of getting a tattoo himself but realized that it might become an obsession.
5:22 AM
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