Octopus Intelligence

TIMOTHY QUINN

OCTOPUS INTELLIGENCE

PROSE SERIES 84

GUERNICA

Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)

2009  

CONTENTS

Hematocele

Cephalopod

Revolución

Thunderstone

Antivenin

Landmarks

Regression

Connectivity

Predation

Boxes

Trauma

Montauk

Seawall

For Ingrid, Annika and Gabriel

HEMATOCELE

The waiting room reminds him of jolting predawn flights into Mactan-Cebu. The despairing scrutiny of a Philippine ground crew encamped beneath cocktail lounge fluorescents, a stink of gasoline, crevassed tarmac. At seventy-eight, Charlie Weyl has a certain experience with third-world airports and New York City hospitals.

He reconnoitres the ward for a newspaper and then eases down into an armless plastic chair which has been bolted to the floor. It’s been an hour and a half and the room’s population has dwindled to a decrepit sampling of minor traumas and intestinal failings. No tourniquets of bloodied tensor bandage or severed digits in ziploc bags of ice, no jigged bone carving knives or bloodflecked cross-trainers. The livery chauffeur beneath the TV bears the only mark of violence: a bruise near the left eye which shows the well-defined edges of a blunt tool.

An orderly peers out through key-scored plexi. Weyl.

Weyl begins to rise and the orderly waves him down again.

Airports and hospitals. Weyl has learned to think like cargo, to surrender himself to the assembly line of registration, processing and transit. He stares at the wall, resigned now to having forfeited a whiskey and soda at the Beekman for warm papaya juice from a fucking vending machine. The lithographs above the magazine rack have been well chosen to reinforce his role as a ward of the state: cattails in a violent prairie, laundry abandoned on the line, a dilapidated trawler negotiating heavy seas.

An ambulance dopplers past and the security guard by the window makes the sign of the cross with knobbed fingers. Fear is the force that will keep a man waiting on his fate. It’s a lesson Weyl learned printing dissident broadsides from a padlocked warehouse on the outskirts of Manila, cranking onionskin through a portable German press as Navy sentries scuffed across the chain-link perimeter and flicked Super 25s into the South China Sea. That had been Cole’s op, and the sight last week of his former employer behind the smudged windows of a Metro North train had shaken loose a decade of memories: Manila, Taipei, Mexico City, Tegucigalpa.

The triage door rocks open and another of the remaining supplicants is led from the room. Weyl shifts position and exhales slowly at the discomfort in his groin. The pain is a mysterious grumous density, a loose knot of sovereign nerve endings and tectonic bucklings in his core. In less than a week, it’s become as familiar as a discordant second heartbeat, a larval presence which neither grows nor wanes. It bides its time, waging a war of endomorphic attrition on his nervous system. He has had to shorten his nightly walks, turning off Lexington and walking past the Seventh Regiment armoury to the bridge where the slap of a late night basketball game echoes off wet brick and he can smell the brine of the river. He has meant to limit his route to the evening shuffle between supermarket and drugstore, but it’s the constancy of rough cement and angled streetlight which keeps him from hanging himself with telephone cable or whatever else is at hand at three-thirty in the morning. Only now have his knees begun to buckle during the final few blocks back from the river, an omen that the telephone cable might soon become his only escape from the rumble of air through his bedroom vents and the soft ticking of a clock he can’t find.

The nurse returns, holding the triage door open with the heel of her shoe while she scans Weyl’s clipboard for obfuscations. He lets her wait as he folds his coat over one arm and pats the breast pocket for his glasses, then precedes her down the tile corridor and into a sterile six-by-seven examination room dominated by a padded table and a stool on steel casters. She yanks a fresh length of butcher’s paper across the table, directs him to lower his pants and judiciously avoids his gaze as she grills him on whether he’s suffered recent injury or sadomasochistic sex. He can hear someone complaining loudly about the wait as the door swings closed behind her, and then it’s quiet again and he can feel a faint vibration through the cold tile beneath his bare feet as of a generator labouring under great demand. He reads the laminated posters while he waits. The room is plastered with the trademarked iconography of antidepressants and aphrodisiacs, like a stock car turned queasily inside out.

The doctor on duty enters without knocking and perches on the stool. He wears battered All-Stars and affects an inoffensive grin, but his receding hairline and wrinkled knuckles betray his age. He has the look of a missionary who’s worn out his welcome in some forgotten corner of the developing world.

How can I help?

Weyl has exhausted his patience in the waiting room and offers a dark stare. You tell me.

What I see here is that you have a persistent pain in your left testicle, the doctor announces, putting down the clipboard and clasping his fingertips together in apparent consternation. When did this start?

Wednesday night. Eight, nine o’clock. 

Last Wednesday?

Last Wednesday.

Do you have a family physician? 

No.

The doctor has turned half-around to scribble something on the clipboard. If this turns into a chronic problem, I’d like to have someone managing your longterm care. How old are you?

Seventy-eight.

You look good for a man in his late seventies. When’s the last time you had a physical?

A couple years. Look, what about my nut? 

Let’s take a look.

The doctor pulls a latex glove over his right hand, then takes up the pen again in the other.

Is it sensitive to pressure? More so than usual?

No.

The pain comes and goes? 

No.

He glances back at the clipboard. What nationality is that? Weyl.

American.

I mean your ancestry. 

It’s German.

Hmm. How does this feel? 

How do you think it feels? 

What about now?

No.

There’s no discolouration I can see. I don’t feel any unusual growth. You’ve got what might be a small abrasion under there, but it looks as though it’s healed.

The doctor strips off the latex glove by the wrist and drops it in an open waste bin.

Any fever? Nausea? Back pain? 

No.

Headaches? No.

Recent weight loss? 

No.

Unusual discharge? 

No.

History of testicular cancer in the family? 

No.

The doctor scribbles something else. 

Any stress or anxiety?

No.

Financial problems. Court case. Love life. Death of a pet.

No. 

Nothing. 

No.

Any depression at all? 

Next question.

I was going to ask if you had any unintentional hair loss, but it looks like you shave your head.

Yes.

You’re retired? 

Yes.

What’d you do? 

Consultant.

Okay. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. 

I’ve got a Merck at home too. How about a fucking X-ray?

I really think it’s nothing. If there were a hematocele, some kind of growth, I’d be able to feel it. I think you probably stretched a muscle, or there might’ve been some incidental friction with your shorts, but either way I think it’s going to feel sore for a few days at most and then it’ll go away. Now, if it’s still bothering you by the end of the week make an appointment with a GP and they’ll run some tests, but otherwise go home and don’t worry about it.

You’re going to give me some painkillers.

You can take some over-the-counter pain medication if you have trouble sleeping, and try soaking in warm water. Go ahead and get dressed.

I don’t carry insurance, you know. I’m paying for this.

Get a GP. All I do here is patch people up. Have a nice evening.

Sit the hell down. 

What?

You can’t rule out cancer unless you do an X-ray. 

You don’t have cancer. I’m not going to do an X-ray because there’s no indication we’re dealing with anything more serious than a strained muscle or abrasion. It’s a waste of your time, and it’s a waste of my time. If you want a second opinion –

I’ve got time.

If you want a second opinion, take the subway up to St. Luke’s and see what they say in Emergency there. Otherwise, make an appointment with a private practitioner, okay?

The doctor squeezes his shoulder quickly enough to avoid being grabbed and then ducks out into the corridor. Weyl watches the door swing closed and begins to dress, careful to allow some slack in the elastic of his boxer shorts. It seems only recently that he’s awoken from middle age to suffer the condescending disregard of first-year surgery residents, waiters with a poor memory for special orders and cab drivers who affect chatty detours around Columbus Circle or linger too long in the wrong lane. His tattoos and machete scars no longer earn him the few seconds he needs to collect his thoughts, and so he resorts now to short declarative sentences and a sniper’s blink, the tools of a trade he no longer practices.

He loops the tie around his neck but leaves it undone as he wanders out into the corridor. It’s three or four in the morning and the bars along Second Avenue will be closed, the bodegas uptown doing a sluggish business in bagged fifths of Smirnoff and Cuervo White. He passes through the waiting room where a paramedic slumps beneath the television. The security guard glances up from stepping out a cigarette as Weyl hikes the ramp to the street and struggles to gather the folds of his coat about his frame. He listens for a descending murmur of traffic from Park Avenue and then turns to take the longer route home, shunning the startled glances of dozing doormen for the empty storefronts and bowed subway grates of Lexington. There’s a 24hour copy shop on the corner, flooding the intersection with light and revealing a spray of broken glass across the crosswalk. He waits at the intersection, struck by a sense of unfamiliarity, a disquieting anti-déja-vu, before crossing against the light and walking north past the gates of All Souls with a prickling on his forearms and a quickening step. Something is different, although he can’t tell whether it’s an absence of scaffolding or the smell of recently watered hyacinths from a darkened cross-street. He has the sense of having returned unexpectedly to a half-struck soundstage. He stops to regain his bearings, wondering for a moment if he’s taken a wrong turn, walked up the wrong street and passed the wrong church, but the shuttered market across the street is where it’s supposed to be and the liquor store at 79th is still in sight. He can feel his sense of uncertainty fading now, a diffusion of dream terror that leaves behind only an abstract dread. He continues cautiously up the block, passing a dry cleaner, a children’s clothier, a showroom of handmade dollhouses, a beautician, a realtor, a dealer in rare coins and collectibles, a darkened antiques stall, a lingerie boutique, a ceramist, another dry cleaner, a narrow linens shop and then a final cluttered window of antiques. The dollhouses are what capture his attention; they bother him somehow, the careful arrangement of tiny chairs and cutlery-laden tables in intricate scale replicas of cut-away brownstones and plantation manors, the inscrutable wooden gaze of children’s playthings. They remind him of failed coups and midnight raids that hinged on an unknown informant’s placement of enemy assets: a bodyguard in the kitchen, another in the hot tub with Barbie.

It’s the pain, he realizes, as he resumes his pace. Swaying somewhere beneath his centre of gravity as he moves, the knot in his groin is a ubiquitous pressure pinching off the flow of reasoned objectivity, reducing shapes and feelings to a single controlled bleed of information, a one-octave opera in which every idling car and trickling faucet is rendered in gradients of discomfort. A pain in his extremities would have been tolerable – a broken arm, a sharp jab behind his eyes from staring too long into the sun – but this is like a fever; it lies entrenched at the very edge of consciousness, as unassailable as vertigo.

He remembers staggering the night streets of Luanda with some sort of stomach flu after escaping the sixth floor cocktail lounge of the Presidente Meridien, and this pain is similar. He wandered for hours through the poorly lit backstreets of the baixa until the patter of Portuguese was replaced by the closed-door murmur of Umbundu and Kimbundu, and in sickness the streets became a decrepit everycity, a patchwork metropolis of grotesque tessellations and unseen vanishing points in which flooded sewers separated Bangkok’s tarp-covered massage parlors from the tin music of Tijuana’s outdoor taquerias and a wet dog chained to a pipe was like a foreign road sign you stare at in the headlights, hoping to deconstruct meaning from the random arrangement of alien typography. Pain is the leveler, a decontextualizing force that strips places and things of association, robs food of taste or smell, renders even familiar faces unreadable. Pain feeds on certainty, determination, specificity.

He’s reached the edge of Carnegie Hill, an invisible perimeter of early morning activity beyond which the windows of townhouses remain dark and traffic lights regulate the infrequent groan of transport trucks delivering produce from the outer boroughs. He finds himself negotiating by habit the newsstand on the corner and pausing in front of the Rite Aid to consider a sixpack of Rheingold and a carton of Dunhills, then walks on, feeling the gently crooked slope now in the back of his knees as he ascends slowly into a darker grid of cross-streets favoured by double-income families and late model European cars with hair-trigger alarms.

He can see the park to the west, a negative boundary where ambient streetlight drops off and NYPD patrolmen pace between awnings with thermos cups of hot coffee. He avoids this end of the park by day, surrendering the benches along Fifth Avenue to the everexpanding orbit of Mount Sinai’s outpatient community: the early morning clutter of crutches and walkers, the snuffled meandering of loosely tethered guide dogs. He has little patience for the culture of infirmity, its support groups and foxhole camaraderie, its infantilizing hunger for the strained pity of strangers. He feels no sense of aggrandizement as a foreign presence quietly metastasizes in the soft inner tissues of his penetralia, and dreads the respect his victimization might eventually earn from the clinicians and rumpled specialists that lunch along the park’s northeastern boundary.

The flag suspended above the Y furls and unfurls in the breeze. He favours the leg opposite his compromised testicle and tries to maintain a loping pace, hitching to a stop as he realizes that he’s deliberately walked past his block in a habit abandoned long ago. He turns and retraces his steps to the front door, hearing his laboured stride on the crumbling steps come faintly back from the far side of the street. He unlocks the door and steps inside. There’s a vaguely musty smell which he attributes to the removal of old carpeting, and for an instant before dissipating through the open door there’s a trace of sulphur, as if someone’s lit a match rather than hunt for the row of switches at the base of the stairs. He shuts the door and turns on the lights, shedding his coat onto the banister and moving purposefully into the kitchen where he pours himself a glass of water and drinks it standing up at the sink. It’s half past four, but he’s unable to remove his shoes and lower himself onto the mattress he’s laid down on the dining room floor. He checks that the back door is latched and watches for a moment as a moth bumps against the yard light. It’ll be another couple hours before the sky lightens above his narrow back lot, and several hours more before the first glint of direct sun finds its way to the ground. In dragging his mattress down from the third floor bedroom, he’s gained both an extra few hours sleep and a proximity to both entrances that compensates for the range of his hearing aid. He has considered buying motion sensors and electrical contacts for the doors and windows, but whoever broke in last week demonstrated an aptitude with the lock that suggested more than a passing familiarity with home security.

He leaves the kitchen light on and ventures upstairs, stepping over splintered wood and bent