I Wrote A Piece of Fiction Today
A detour into the fictional as part of my daily meditative practice of writing.
As readers of the Frontier Psychiatrists are likely aware, I write it every day. I have a couple of collaborations in process, but they're not done yet. This piece of writing did get done, so I can publish it for today. In my mind, it's the beginning of a novel, but I've never written a novel, and it seems like a lot of work. For my health enthusiast readers, this is a thing I do for my health, which is write every day. If you're looking for some awesome review of the evidence, stay tuned for tomorrow. I'm sure they'll be more of that coming! I have no idea if the following ever turns into something else.
It's frustrating. That's the bottom line. There's a sense of frustration. A sense of wanting to attend. Wishing to pay attention. Morning. Warning. Mourning. It's not right. Not the way it is.
John would spend every morning this way. Every morning this way for about a decade. In the years before this decade, John would regret his first name. He wished it was something more outstanding. More…unique. That's before the stalking began. Before long, his very ordinary first name became his closest thing to a refuge.
It's hard to stalk somebody named John. It's hard to ruin that particular good name. It's like trying to destroy “Richard Smith.” Yeah, but which one? John is almost like a cloak of invisibility.
John was a pretty surprising first name, given the compromise involved. It was a compromise between an uncompromising woman and a compromised man.
Salvatore DiNapoli was an Italian man, by ancestry. He married a white woman. That woman, a northern European mutt, had a natural thing for the Beatles. That's where the first name John came from. John DiNapoli was stalkable. But he could go by Double Doctor John, all day, every day, and no one would be sad, because they just wanted to avoid having to pronounce his last name. Doctor John was a physician, and a Ph.D.
So, that's what happened.
He woke up, today, like every day before it for about a decade, wishing.
For a guy who had written a book about radical acceptance, he did very little of it. There is a grudging quality to most of the things he does. That first step on the ground in the morning, that's grudging. There's a biological reason for his hesitancy, of course. There's a reason for everything John does. There's a very clear reason for everything. He is a particular man.
That first step, it's slow, and painful, because he has plantar fasciitis, and at this point, a decade in, he has decided not to give a fuck. He's not going do anything else to make it any better. He's not going to wear orthotic shoes. He's going to step, painfully, slowly, during that first step of the day, onto the floor, and he will lower himself down. He does this every morning. One foot, the other, and then he is getting down on his knees, the toes curled under his feet, in this yoga position. The whole point is just to curl the toes under. And this is what he does in the morning, every morning. Every morning starts with slow suffering.
It's enough to make him remember he's alive, still. The pain is searing. It's only getting worse. Most people don't know, and the few that know something is up don't know Why.
Double Doctor John sure as fuck is not gonna tell them.
John DiNapoli is dying. Slowly. He knows why. Of course he knows why. He's the one who figured out why anybody dies of the problem he is dying from. He just didn't have the heart to tell anybody else the reason he figured it out was because it was killing him also.
John DiNapoli, this morning, is tired. He's exhausted. The 4 AM phone call awarding him the Nobel prize in medicine was exhausting. He accepted it. He had a sense this was coming. You generally have a sense. He had enough people sniffing around, blonde people. Nordic people. To figure it the fuck out. But he didn't have time for this bullshit. And it robbed him of about an hour and a half of sleep. John DiNapoli had shit to do.
And he pushed his hands down onto the floor. He slowly had his ass move almost straight up in the air, into downward dog. There's an audible crack, and then another, and then a third one—shoulder, hip, elbow. A slow, low groan escapes his mouth. A slight cough and a few drops of blood hit the ground. From his nose this time. It's a lot of nosebleeds.
This one is a real fucking game changer, though. He holds his right hand over his nose, trying to compress it, up by the bridge, but the blood just doesn't want to stop this morning. He's been getting worse. He holds about 10 minutes of gradually replaced bathroom tissue up to his nose and eventually just decides to say fuck it, turns on the shower, and blood running down his face and then chest, and the leg, and then down the drain. He just takes the fucking shower while his nose is bleeding.
Eventually, it stops. So, to, does the water.
John steps out. He's not really a sight for anyone’s eyes anymore. He's thinner than he used to be. He has the distinctive visual appearance of somebody who lost a hell of a lot of weight. Most people offered congregations to him, related to this. Unfortunately for him, he knows what it means.
The lower part of his abdomen hangs loosely, down to about a centimeter above where his pubic hair begins in earnest. Objectively, it's gross. Subjectively, he would describe it as “addressable.”
This is a lie. I mean, he could have it addressed, but it's a bit like doing an upgrade or a repair on an ancient laptop computer, more trouble than it's worth. You're just gonna get a new one. And this one's gonna get thrown out. That is the natural history of devices. It's the natural history of the body that John is left with.
He limps, unsteady, over to the sink. To this day he just won't condescend to brush his teeth in the shower. Floss, brush, brush some more, rinse. He reaches, awkwardly, naked, down under the sink, pressing it on the cabinet, Spring pops, and the refrigerator beneath the sink is visible. He squats down, awkwardly, inflexible, and it opens the latched mechanism on the refrigerator that is awkwardly but completely fit beneath his bathroom sink. The door opens with a little “shhhhhaaaaaaa”
A blast of icy air hits his kneecaps. John removes a syringe. He looks down at his addressable abdomen. He grabbed a bottle– chlorhexidine–sitting on the edge of the sink right next to the toothpaste, poured a little on his hand, wiped it on his stomach, made a little circular wiping motion, and squeezed some skin together. In, the needle goes, and slowly, with his knees shaking slightly, he depresses the plunger.
“God, fuck, Christ,” he says through gritted teeth. Every morning he wishes he didn't use citrate as the dilution agent, and every morning he remembers that it provided the best solubility of any acid experimented with before he created this fucking stuff. Not that anybody can know he's taking it. Nobody can know.
It's done.
He gets himself dressed. This part isn't worth describing in detail because it's awkward and boring. He has trouble getting his pants on.
He wears Tighty Whiteys. It's not like anyone has seen him in his underwear in a romantic context for as long as he can remember.
He's going to die soon anyway.
He would know.
Thanks for reading!