In the lead up to the NaNoWriMo challenge - National Novel Writer's Month where entrants aim to write a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of November, I thought I'd post a short story I wrote two years ago On Living Without A Television. I was in a similar space, starting out in a new city in a foreign country, with minimal possessions and a new job. Last time I was in Oxford, UK as a physiotherapist. This time it's Vancouver, Canada as a worker in an Australian bar.
It's a story that is dear to me and came out effortlessly in one night. I'm hoping a similar thing will happen this time around except in longer format in a slightly longer timeframe. Writing a novel in a month is a big ask but I'm going to throw my hands on the keys and see what happens. This is my pledge to myself. Wish me luck and encouragement.
The novel will be called Affinity. It will be a work of science fiction, like the series of blogs I started of the same name and purposely did not finish for the sake of this longer format.
This is the short story, my first, from a tiny cubicle of a room in hospital accommodation apartments attached to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. May next month's novel be even greater.
ON LIVING WITHOUT A TELEVISION
The boy is experimenting with living without a television.
The boy is not actually a boy, but rather a 25 year old young man. He still feels like a boy however for the following reasons;
1) At work people ask him how old he is, and ask when he finishes his training. (The boy finished training a long time ago).
2) His facial hair growth is at a rate where he can get away with shaving every fifth day.
The above reasons are rather immaterial to the story however it can be noted that these annoy the boy and have done for many years.
The boy has found himself on the opposite side of the world, in a cubicle of a room, about 2 meters by 2.5 meters at best, and it is reminding him of his university days when he resided in a hostel, but with noticeable differences.
First of all, there is no vomit. Secondly, there is no sex audibly jumping through the wall and into the boy’s head, not yet anyway, and lastly, there is no one round house kicking his wardrobe in the adjacent room.
The room is rather bare. In the corner, next to the door, there is an empty wardrobe, inside of which nothing is hanging. Adjacent to the door there are some small drawers, also empty, and across from this, a single mattress on a single bare bed frame, the type that is cheap to buy, has springs and wire meshing, and is assembled in ten minutes. On the bed there are no sheets, no pillow, and no duvet.
The room feels anaesthetized.
The only possessions that the boy has brought into the room lie in his backpack which leans against the small bedside table cum cupboard. There is no T.V.
Upon arrival, one of the other residents told the boy that there was an unused television in the storage cupboard at the end of the hall and that he was welcome to it. The boy closed his eyes, placed his hand over his closed lips, then shook his head in dismissive fashion. It was a very monk-like response in a sacrifice to a desire. He looked like the ‘speak no evil’ monkey.
“No really.” The resident said. “You don’t have to be polite. No body uses it. Take it.” “I’m experimenting with living without a T.V” the boy said.
The resident scratched his head and went back to his room.
Tomorrow is the boy’s first day at work. He lays his sleeping bag out on his bed and rolls up his jumper to use as a pillow. He has done this work before. He hated it. He felt it slowly suck his soul into a vacuum. He wished he knew where that vacuum was so he could go about retrieving it. Could it be retrieved? He wished he knew more about the properties of vacuums.
But that was before, thinks the boy. That was before the revelation that life should be lived without a T.V. He hopes that things will be different now. That his calculations have been accurate. Before he believed that it was the work that was making him depressed, but now he believes that it might not have been the work, but interpreted as such because of all the lies and false ideologies that were fed to him through the T.V.
Everything is clear now, thinks the boy. Everything will be okay. I have detoxified from all the rot that box has caused. I am now in touch with reality.
He goes to sleep knowing these things.
The boy is at hospital. He is at work watching an old man in an untied hospital gown kiss the wall. He strokes it gently with his hands. He is in total bliss and adoration for the wall and his ass is fully showing.
It doesn’t surprise the boy. Things like this happen from time to time.
The boy has been going through his list, seeing the patients he needs to see, and casually striking a line through them. The boy has great satisfaction in doing this. The striking the line part, that is.
The old man is not in bliss with the wall anymore. He is agitated, angry.
“Talk to me!” he is yelling.
“Talk to me!”
A nurse attends, ties the string up at the back of the old man’s hospital gown, and tries to persuade the man to go back to his bed.
The old man pays no attention to the nurse. He fends her off with one hand indicating that she should not interrupt. He is making it clear: This is between him and the wall.
“Talk to me!”
His pleads are honest, desperate.
“Talk. To. Me.
Talk! To! Me!
Talk to me!!
Why won’t you talk to me?!”
The boy is reading his next patient’s notes. She is a failed suicide attempt. She had tried to take her life by overdosing with pills, now she is brain damaged and cannot move her body or communicate.
He can hear her coughing from behind the curtain. It is not like a normal cough. She has a tracheostomy so suction tubes can be stuck down her airways to clear secretions when required. It is like a plastic box with a cap on it. The cap is currently closed. Her coughs are like a vacuum cleaner sneezing.
The boy’s reading is interrupted.
“Are you the new trainee student?” one of the ward clerks asks.
She has already looked at the badge which the boy is wearing which says otherwise, but then looked back at the boy, took note of how definitively youthful he appeared to be, and asked the question anyway.
“No” says the boy.
She looks confused, like her personal belief system has just fallen apart. “How old are-”
The boy leaves and enters to see the patient through the curtain.
The patient is lying in bed, her eyes gaze at the ceiling but do not focus on a particular spot. They sometimes gaze around the room, but not at anyone. It’s like they gazed at you but avoided you at the same time.
The boy thinks about what he should do with this patient. She cannot talk. She never will. She cannot move. She wanted to die and now everyone is keeping her alive. The irony. She is a joke, screaming at the face of modern medicine. They want her eventually in a specialized wheelchair, totally dependent, incapable of intelligent thought, but still breathing. “Alive”. That’s what medicine does. It keeps people “alive”.
The boy is trying to get himself in front of the woman’s gaze. He believes he can stare at her, and her at him, and they will be able to communicate telepathically. He wants to recognize that somewhere, somewhere in there, the woman still exists. He wants to pray for the woman, believing, trusting, that if her eyes remain in contact with his and his with hers, he can speak on her behalf, ask for a miracle to happen, that her health and life be restored if she wished to live, as she did before, that she was sorry, and ever grateful for the second chance. Or, on the contrary, to die, to not muck around, to call it quits and exit this place, because what is happening now is a mockery. It is injustice. It is salt in a devastating wound.
“Fuck you all. See this? This is my middle finger and it is raised. It is raised for you.”
The woman should be allowed to say these things, and leave having said them, but this. Not this.
This is all the boy can think of doing. He does not much care about the medical plan.
Back in the hall, a second nurse is trying to convince the old man to bid his adieus to the wall. The wall has still not conversed with him and he is devastated.
“Talk to me!” the man yells, but this time to one of the nurses. He seems to have given up on the wall.
“I am talking to you” she says calmly and sympathetically. The words hug him like a giant soft teddy bear.
“Where am I?!!!” yells the man.
“You are in hospital. Come on, let’s go back to your bed.” The old man scans his eyes around the place.
The boy does the same. He sees old people slumped in bed, trying to move up the bed, get comfortable, but the beds are too soft, and they are too weak, incapable. It is futile trying to move in those beds. He sees colliding zimmer frames, people wheeled on commodes, saliva seeping from the corners of mouths, vacant stares out windows. Televisions, apparently just on for the sound.
But the boy wants to see what the old man sees.
He wants to feel what he feels.
He wants to think what he thinks.
“Hospital?!!” he yells, his feet slowly shuffling as he is led back to his bed.
“I don’t want to be in hospital...” He no longer yells, his tone one of realization, his voice as if straight from his head, unfiltered, honest.
The boy is back in his 2 meter by 2.5 meter cubicle of a room. He nods his head in agreement with his thinking. He is thinking about the day, how it went, the ups and downs, and is okay with it.
He is sitting on the side of his bed and can feel the springs. If he shuffles his weight from one side to the other, he can feel the springs bending, stretching, reacting, adapting. He can see what they look like without actually having seen them before.
The boy feels no rush to do anything. He takes his time and is deliberate about doing so. He decides to do press ups. He does this on the floor space beside the bed with his feet elevated on the chair which he moves. Whilst doing this he takes note that, potentially, he could also in future do them across the width of the room between the end of the bed and the closet and across to the drawers.
There are two positional possibilities for push ups in this room.
The boy lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling, then at the walls that surround, then at the ground. He knows that at times it may be difficult to live without a T.V. but that is just weakness and he must persevere through it. He sees some scrap paper, three pieces, lying on the floor. A smile comes across his face as he reaches for the paper and inspiration motivates him to sit up. He begins to fold the paper into paper planes. Three of them. Each one different.
The boy wonders how many other 25 year old men are folding paper planes for pleasure worldwide at that particular moment: Not enough.
The first plane is a short one with wide wings. It is nose heavy and nosedives into the floor immediately after release.
It disappoints the boy.
The second and third planes are the same design, long, sleek, but the second has embellishments on the wings and the third has been kept basic and simple.
The boy releases the second plane. It is the one with the extra folds. The deluxe wings, special features, some would say unnecessary but visually appealing. It flies fine, but the whole time it spirals. It heads in one direction but it is also out of control. There is no way the passengers on that plane would know where they were going thought the boy. This thought frightens him and the plane crashes to the floor before it hits the wall.
The boy holds the last plane in his hand and looks at it. It doesn’t have much riding on it after watching the previous two planes. There is not much expectation. The boy is questioning his paper plane making skills.
The boy releases the last plane. It glides through the air. It is effortless. Beautiful! As he watches it, even for its short flight time, he can imagine what it would be like to be the paper on one of those wings. Slicing the air, feeling it separate and pass over its top and bottom. He is in the wing. He is in the molecules! The boy wants everyone to experience what he is experiencing now. To be present, in awe, aware of the wonders and beauty of the small things in life. He wants to go back into the hospital, walk up to that old man, pull this paper plane out from behind his back, hold it in front of his face until he is transfixed by it and throw it. The old man would see. The old man would know.
He wants the lady with the tracheostomy to have known the beauty of a paper plane in flight as he does now. The boy is convinced that if she did know, if she really did know, there would have been no way she would have taken those drugs.
You see. It’s a simple thing. You must pay attention. You must be present and aware of what is happening. The plane is soaring. Gravity is its nemesis but air is its friend. The plane is conquering, winning, until it hits the wall and flight time is over. It makes you wish you had a bigger room. It makes you wish you were outside.
You don’t need a T.V. You really don’t.
