The Diary - April 17 2010 or I Do Not Know What the Fuck is Going On

It was morning, and no one was putting their balls on my head.

Josh and Dave jerked back in alarm as I sat straight up, arm out as if I was about to karate chop.

'Jesus christ, Mike,' said Dave. 'You scared us.'

'If you didn't want me to scare you, you shouldn't have traded 20 cents for your balls on my head,' I said. Josh looked down shamefully, and I think it's a pretty telling sign that Dave merely grinned.

There was a red patch on his shirt, I realised. It was just where his appendix would have been if he had one. 'Your scar's still bleeding,' I said.

He looked down and shrugged. 'Oh, yeah, but I wouldn't worry about that.'

'It shouldn't be bleeding anymore,' I said. 'You really need to see someone about that. Maybe your stitches have come undone.'

Alex's head poked around my door. She looked tired, but she didn't seem to look all that bad. She still hadn't mentioned that night a few nights ago. The girl kept her cards pretty damn close to her chest.

'Did you know it was Easter and we didn't even notice?' she said.

'What? When?'

'12 April. The day we decided to go and do this whole thing.'

I turned to Dave. 'Did you know it was Easter?'

'No,' said Dave.

'I didn't either,' said Josh.

'Well that's pretty retarded, I guess,' I said.

'We owe each other Easter presents,' said Alex.

'There's no such thing as Easter presents,' said Josh. 'That's just Christmas presents because Jesus was born that day.'

'There is no such person as Jesus,' said Alex.

'If you believe that to be true,' said Dave, 'then why the hell do you want to celebrate Easter?'

'Because Jesus died on Easter,' said Alex.

'That's callous, Al,' said Josh.

'Besides, if Jesus didn't exist, how could he die?'

'He came into existence,' said Alex, 'right before he died.'

'So, what, he was just all "Hey, let's get existing so I can die immediately"?'

'Sounds about right to me.'

'We're not celebrating Easter by giving out presents,' said Dave. 'That's stupid and you're a big stupid-head. The only presents acceptable on Easter are chocolate eggs.'

'Well, let's give each other chocolate eggs,' said Alex.

'What?' cried Dave incredulously. 'Why the hell would we do that?'

What could she say? The death of Jesus of Nazareth was no reason to give out chocolate eggs. That was an absurd way to celebrate Easter.

Dave was fingering at his appendix scar. It was staining his fake doctor's uniform red.

'You should take that to a hospital,' I said.

'Along with the rest of my body?' asked Dave. 'No thanks.'

'What are they gonna do?' I asked. 'Arrest you? They're a hospital, not the police.'

'Ever wonder why the police and the ambulance are the same number?' asked Dave. 'It's not a coincidence, Dave. They're together.'

'You're insane. We're not even criminals.'

'If we're not criminals, we're insane. You just said that yourself. If we go in there and they check our criminal records and see we're not criminals, they'll lock us up.'

'They won't lock us up,' said Josh. 'They don't lock people who aren't criminals up. That's how prisons work.'

'They'll lock us up for being crazy,' said Dave. 'They'll lock us in the loony bin.'

'There is no possible reason why they should do that,' said Alex.

'They'll lock us up because we're crazy,' insisted Dave. 'We're madmen.'

'That's insane,' I said. 'We're the sane ones.'

'See!' said Dave. 'It's insane! It's all insane. We're insane.'

'We're not insane,' said Josh. 'You sound like a madman talking like this.'

'You're a madman too,' said Dave. 'And you, Alex. Oh, and you, Mike. You're the craziest bastard in here.'

'Stop with this crazy talk,' I said.

'I'll stop with the crazy talk once you stop talking crazy,' said Dave.

'I'll kill you,' I said angrily. 'I'll rip open your stupid infected appendix scar and pull out your insides.'

'You're mad!' said Dave. 'You're crazy!'

'Call me crazy again and I'll cut your tongue out,' I said.

'Hey,' said Josh, 'let's not get crazy here.'

'We're already crazy,' said Dave.

'Speak for yourself,' said Josh. 'I'm as sane as I was the day I was born.'

'You were crazy the day you were born,' said Dave. 'You were born a madman.'

'You're obviously pretty stressed right now,' said Alex. 'Just let us take you to the hospital and we'll fix up your scar.'

Dave turned and punched me in the face. I felt my nose crack and wetness spread through it. 'What the hell, Dave? What the hell?'

'I panicked!' he shouted. 'I panicked and punched you in your stupid Steve Buscemi face!'

'We're taking you to a hospital,' I said, my voice slightly strained, holding my hand to my bleeding nose.

'A psychiatric hospital?' asked Dave.

'No, not a psychiatric hospital.'

'But I'm crazy,' protested Dave.

'You're not crazy,' said Alex. 'You may be an idiot, but you're not crazy.'

'I'll go to the hospital,' said Dave. 'I'll do it. Just promise me one thing.'

'Okay?'

'You'll promise me whatever I ask?'

'I will,' I said.

'Promise me you won't let them take my liver,' he said, his face strained, his eyes watering. 'Please.'

'I promise you I won't let them take your liver.'

*

'We'll need his liver,' said the enthusiastic young doctor with a clean shaven face and good shoes.

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm afraid I can't let you do that to Dave.'

'Well, then, what are you doing here?' demanded the doctor, and threw us out of the hospital.

'One of these hospitals will have to take us,' said Alex. There were more than twenty hospitals in Brisbane, but not one had allowed us in; most of them threw us out for having Teddy Kennedy with us, and once we put a fake moustache on Dave, they threw us out for trying to conceal the fact that we had Teddy Kennedy with us. The other hospitals just wanted all our livers before we were allowed in.

'My stomach hurts,' said Dave. 'My stomach fucking hurts.'

'It's your guts falling out,' said Josh. Dave shrieked in alarm.

'But I like my guts!' he said. 'If there's one thing I would like in my body, it's my guts.'

'I'm sorry, but if we don't get into a hospital soon, they'll just be spilling out all over the pavement,' said Josh.

'That's true,' said Alex. 'I've seen it happen.'

'It's nasty,' I added helpfully.

'Get me to a hospital,' said Dave. 'I can feel them. They're pushing against my stomach.' At that, I thought of Tandy Smith, and spiders, but cast it from my mind.

'We should go get a coffee,' said Josh.

'I dunno, I'm kind of hungry,' said Alex. 'I think we should go to a restuarant somewhere.'

'That's a stupid thing to think and you're stupid for thinking it,' said Dave. 'We should go to a hospital.'

'What?' I said. 'Why would we go to a hospital? I know you broke my nose, but we cleaned that up, and I hardly think we have to go to the hospital for it.'

'I can feel my intestines!' shrieked Dave. 'They're coming out through the scar, you granny-bashing, thunder-tossing, butt-licking sons of bitches.'

'You're mad,' said Josh. 'That's madman talk.'

'We'll have to take you to a hospital or something, you're so mad,' said Alex.

'Yes! I'm mad. I'm crazy. I'm crazier than a bag of fucking angel dust.'

'He sounds pretty mad,' I said.

'Pretty mad,' agreed Josh.

'Quite mad,' said Alex.

'We'd better take him to a hospital.'

'We'd better do that.'

'We've tried all the hospitals in Brisbane,' I said. 'None of them want him, or do and want his liver.'

'Take me to a street-surgeon,' said Dave.

'A street-surgeon?'

'You know what I mean!' said Dave. 'Some guy good with a knife. I want to fix up this stupid scar.'

'I'm presuming, judging by that idea, you also want HIV,' said Josh. 'Jesus Christ, Dave, a street surgeon?'

'Better than a real surgeon,' said Dave. 'At least these guys get the job done without fucking around.'

'Tigers get the job done without fucking around, as well, Dave,' said Josh.

'I'm not getting surgery done by a god-damn tiger,' said Dave. 'What do you think I am, an idiot? No, it's the dodgy street surgeon for me.'

'Did someone say "dodgy street surgeon"?' said a voice behind us. We turned. There, standing in front of us, was a dodgy street surgeon.

You could tell he was a dodgy street surgeon because he was wearing a black coat with lots of pockets and he had the kind of hungry look that either a drug dealer or a dodgy street surgeon would have. Also, he'd just stepped out of a dark alleyway and was inquiring whether someone had said something about dodgy street surgeons. That was a pretty big clue.

'Oh, good,' said Dave. 'A dodgy street surgeon. I think I'd like some dodgy street surgery, dodgy street surgeon.'

'No you wouldn't,' said Josh firmly. 'If there is any one thing you don't want, it is dodgy street surgery.'

'Don't lie, you liar,' said Dave. He turned to the dodgy street surgeon. 'What would be the price for some dodgy street surgery?'

'Depends what dodgy street surgery you want,' said the dodgy street surgeon.

'I just want you to re-do my stitches,' said Dave. 'They're coming out and my guts are going to fall out the hole.'

'That's a fact, actually,' said the dodgy street surgeon. 'I've seen it happen.'

'He's seen it happen,' said Dave to Josh. Josh turned to me.

'He's seen it happen,' he said. I turned to Alex and informed her that he had seen it happen. She turned to the dodgy street surgeon and told him that he had seen it happen.

'Who's seen it happen?' demanded the dodgy street surgeon suspiciously.

'Some dodgy street surgeon,' said Josh.

'He sounds shifty,' said the dodgy street surgeon.

'I don't trust him a bit,' said Dave.

'Neither would I,' said the dodgy street surgeon. 'So when do you want me to re-do your stitches?'

'Right now, if you can,' said Dave. 'I've heard that if your stitches come undone, your guts come spilling out. I know a guy who's seen it happen.'

'He sounds shifty,' said the dodgy street surgeon.

'Dave doesn't trust him a bit,' said Josh.

'Neither would I,' said the dodgy street surgeon. 'Now come into my alley.'

*

It was the cleanest street surgeon's alley they had ever seen. It was the only street surgeon's alley they had ever seen.

A festering heap of garbage lay sprawled against the wall, rats scurrying from it to the table that surgery presumably took place on, which was covered in cigarette butts and had a dark red stain that the dodgy street surgeon told us was tomato sauce. Dave tasted it and discovered that it was, in fact, tomato sauce.

'It's tomato sauce,' he told us.

'Of course it's fucking tomato sauce,' said the dodgy street surgeon. 'What else would it be? Blood? What do you think I am, a barbarian?'

'I don't think you're a barbarian,' said Dave kindly. 'I think you're a dodgy street surgeon.'

'Damn right I am,' said the dodgy street surgeon. 'Now, lie down on my table.' Dave pointed out that it was covered in cigarette butts, so the dodgy street surgeon brushed them off and told him once again to lie down on his table. Dave lay down on his table and complimented him on the fact that it wasn't covered in cigarette butts anymore.

'I keep a clean table,' said the dodgy street surgeon. 'I would never allow cigarette butts on my table.'

'You allowed cigarette butts on your table before,' pointed out Alex.

'That was before I met you,' said the dodgy street surgeon. 'I'm a changed man now.'

'You're a liar,' said Josh. 'I'm only letting you do this since Dave wants you to.'

'I'm only doing this because I thought you wanted me to,' said Dave.

'What? I'm the one who said you shouldn't do this!'

'I thought you were doing that weird sarcasm thing you do!' cried Dave. 'God damn, you didn't want me to do this?'

'I never wanted you to do this,' said Josh. At that, Dave leapt up off the table.

'Let's go,' he said. 'And be a little more clear next time, Josh.'

'Yeah, let's go,' I said.

'We should go,' said Alex.

'No,' said the dodgy street surgeon, 'we shouldn't.' There was a small click of metal that sounded as loud as a gunshot in the silent alley. He was aiming an old revolver at us. It was probably a Colt or something. I didn't know much about guns.

'I'd say "not so fast", but that'd just be cliche,' said the dodgy street surgeon. 'So I'll just tell you that if you try to leave, I'll shoot you in the knees.'

'Please don't shoot us in the knees,' said Alex.

'If you won't leave, I won't shoot you in the knees,' said the dodgy street surgeon. 'That's my offer.'

'I think we should leave,' said Dave confidently.

'I think I should shoot you in the stomach first,' said the dodgy street surgeon. 'I won't even bother with the knees.'

'Shoot me in the stomach,' said Dave. He fluttered his eyes towards me and made a small clandestine wink that had no discernible meaning to me.

'Okay,' said the dodgy street surgeon. He aimed the gun, held it for a second, then shot Dave directly in the stomach. Dave dropped to the ground and moments later I was sprayed with blood as the dodgy street's surgeon's head exploded.

*

He introduced himself as Dusty Jim, and he was a rotund, stretched man who wore a hat that was too tight for his head and socks up to his knees. He looked like an old explorer ready to venture into the Amazon, and he held a rifle in both hands like he was cradling a baby. He looked stark-raving mad. He was the one who had shot the dodgy street surgeon in the head.

'I shot him in his stupid head,' he said. 'He was mad.' He reloaded his rifle. 'How's your friend?'

Dave groaned, and coughed up a little bit of blood.

'I know a doctor,' said Dusty Jim.

'Is he an official doctor?' asked Alex. 'Or a "doctor" doctor?'

'He's a "doctor" doctor,' said Dusty Jim. 'But he's a good doctor doctor.'

Alex looked to us and shrugged. No hospitals would have Teddy Kennedy, because necromancy was illegal, or Josh wouldn't let them because they wanted his liver. This doctor doctor was as good as any other.

'I think Dave would like that,' I said. 'He just better not be crazy.'

'He's crazy,' said Dusty Jim. 'He's a madman.'

'Is he a good doctor, then?'

'Who the hell said he was a doctor?'

'You.'

'Who the hell is "Yu"?'

'I mean you did. You. Your personage.'

'I doubt I'd say something like that,' said Dusty Jim. 'When did I say that?'

'You said you knew a doctor,' said Josh.

'I know that,' said Dusty Jim. 'When did I say I knew a doctor?'

'You said before that you knew a doctor. "I know a doctor," you said.'

'How far before?'

'Moderately far.'

'How far is "moderately"?' said Dusty Jim. 'Moderately could be 20 seconds to a million years, depending on your perspective.'

'My perspective is that fuck you,' said Josh.

'Hey,' said Alex. 'Let's not get angry here. This is the guy who's taking Dave to a doctor.'

'A doctor doctor,' I corrected.

'Does that mean he's double as good at being a doctor?' asked Josh playfully, and chuckled.

'No,' said Alex sombrely. 'No, that's just silly.'

Dave groaned again, probably to remind us he was still there and with a bullet inside of him. I turned to Dusty Jim. 'How far away is this doctor doctor?'

'We could get there in ten minutes, running,' said Dusty Jim.

'Pick up his head,' said Josh, who was already grabbing Dave's legs. 'Alex, just run with us. And don't get shot.'

'I won't get shot,' promised Alex, 'if all of you promise not to shoot me.'

'I promise not to shoot you,' I said.

'Same for me,' said Josh. 'Once I learn how to even work a gun, I promise to not shoot you even then.' He looked to Dusty Jim, who shrugged.

'I can't promise anything,' he said. 'Because, well, shit happens and I don't know who I'll have to shoot. But I promise I won't be happy about it.'

'Oh, that's good,' said Alex. 'You promise not to be happy about it.'

Dusty Jim grinned and stroked his gun like a baby.

*

The doctor's office was an old abandoned warehouse and the only other patient there was an old man riddled with bullet wounds who wouldn't stop moaning in pain as the doctor, who wore a fedora and an eyepatch and a white coat, extracted bullets from him with a pair of long metal tweezers. He moaned so long and with such a torturous whine in his voice that he soon set off Dave moaning in the same way, who moaned because he was worried his guts would soon fall out and spill across the dusty wooden floor.

'My guts'll fall out,' he moaned to Josh, clutching at his elbow with one hand, his eyes rolling madly. 'My fucking guts'll fall out.'

'Your guts won't fall out,' assured Josh.

'That guy,' said Dave. 'The guy who shot me. He said he saw a man's guts fall out.' And he moaned once more, and clutched at his bleeding wound with his free hand, as if to stop his guts slithering out and spilling out bloody and ragged across the floor. The doctor with the fedora and the eyepatch just continued his job, not looking at us, but slowly and surely using his long metal tweezers to pick bullet after another out of the old man and place them in a dirtied yellow container next to him. The old man's abdomen was peppered with so many bullets that, from what I could see, all his clothes, which had been ripped off and discarded, were stained red. Every individual bullet hole was a bloody, ragged entrance into the old man's body that wasn't meant to be there, and he moaned desperately that his guts would fall out through them and spill out and slither on to the floor.

'See?' shrieked Dave, then curled up in pain. He added, mumbling, 'He said his guts'd fall out. And he's old. He's wise.'

'He's a madman,' said Josh, his face stricken with deep worry lines. 'He's stark-raving mad. And the guy who shot you, too. He's stark-raving mad too. He's never seen anyone's guts fall out.'

Dusty Jim sat in the corner of the room, quiet, calm and composed, like an ancient statue regarding the scene. The whole thing could be a piece of art: the old man spread out, his ragged, bloody clothes beside him, the doctor with the fedora and the eyepatch over him with his long metal tweezers; the three friends in the corner cradling a moaning peer, and big, bloated Dusty Jim, wearing a hat too small for him and polishing his gun, regarding the whole scene impassively.

'Get Dusty Jim,' said Dave weakly. The doctor in the corner continued picking bullets out from the old man. There seemed to be an inexhaustable supply of them; they came out, one after another, like they were being produced in a factory line, each one followed by a pained moan and a declaration from the old man that any moment now his guts would come spilling out of his body and on to the floor. I turned to Dusty Jim and told him to get over here. He looked up from polishing his gun and walked over, his face still blank.

'Get Dusty Jim,' deplored Dave once more.

'He's here,' said Josh. 'Dusty Jim is here.'

'I'm here,' said Dusty Jim.

'Get Dusty Jim,' continued Dave, his arms clawing at nothing, his feet kicking with the pain, 'get Dusty Jim.'

'He's here,' said Josh. 'He's here.'

'Get Dusty Jim,' wailed Dave. 'Get Dusty Jim.'

'I'm here,' said Dusty Jim in his rough, deep voice. 'I'm here.'

Dave looked up, saw it was Dusty Jim, and grabbed at him weakly. Dusty Jim leaned down, and Dave grabbed his collar tightly and looked Dusty Jim in the eye.

'Dusty Jim,' whispered Dave. 'Dusty Jim.'

'I'm here,' said Dusty Jim. Over at the doctor's table, the old man moaned once more and told the doctor his guts were going to fall out. The doctor didn't say anything; he simply deposited the last bullet in the dirtied yellow container and continued on to the next bullet hole in the old man.

'Dusty Jim,' said Dave. 'Have you ever seen a man's guts fall out through a hole in his body?'

Dusty Jim stared at him, and brushed his hair behind his ears. Always his face remained passive and emotionless, and it was with no expression that he told Dave that he had once seen a hole blown in a man straight through his stomach and out through the other side with a cannon, and he had seen the man's guts come out and collapse on to the ground while the man screamed in pain and died minutes later.

'It was my father,' said Dusty Jim bluntly. 'It was my father that screamed while his guts came out. He'd been a business man, and he'd owed some money to . . . some people. And they practised inventive ways of killing. But this is not a cannon you have been shot with. I am sure your guts will not come out and collapse on to the ground.'

'How sure?' demanded Dave.

'Very,' said Dusty Jim, and departed back to his corner to polish his gun and regard the whole scene with no emotion at all. Another bullet was pulled out of the old man and deposited in the dirtied yellow container with a faint clang. Dave now stared at the ceiling in silence, and we all regarded him. We had nothing to say, so we didn't say anything. To tell him his guts would not fall out and collapse on to the ground would only remind him of the whole issue, and trying to distract him from the guts issue would only remind him of why we were trying to distract him, so we remained in silence and tried not to stare at the slow spread of blood from Dave's wound, which he clutched at with one white, clenching hand.

Another bullet came out of the bullet dispenser that was the old man and was transferred to the dirtied yellow container. Dusty Jim had already polished his gun and had now took off his hat and was polishing that too, all the while as he stared at the scene still without any expression. All three of us looked fixedly at Dave.

After a few minutes, I noticed the caustic smell of piss in the air, and an absence of any moans that his guts would soon spill out of his body and on to the floor from the old man. I looked up to the doctor, who had stopped his surgery on the old man. The old man was dead, and without anything to control his bladder muscles, had pissed himself. The doctor regarded him for five, maybe ten seconds, then dragged him across the floor to a place that was presumably far enough away so as to not smell the piss so badly. Then the doctor with the fedora and the eyepatch turned to the four of us and gestured for us to come over. We picked Dave up carefully and carried him over to the doctor's table, which was a simple, white, scrubbed bench.

'Problem,' barked the doctor.

'He got shot,' said Josh.

'Location.'

'In the, uh, stomach. The wound is pretty obvious.'

The Diary - April 17, 2010

This is Part Eight, and it has linked at the start of it up to Part 7.

Part 9.

April 17, 2010

When I woke, I had managed to roll on to my broken arm, my old bandages had stripped off my leg, and my abdomen hurt like a son of a bitch. I groaned then turned to my phone that was blaring like a bomb-siren. I picked it up and answered groggily. 'Hello?'

'Honey?' asked my mother's voice. 'Honey, is that you?'

'Yes, mum.'

'Are you alright?' she asked. She sounded worried.

'Yes, I'm alright. What's wrong, mum? Did the dog drink some paint again?'

'No!' she said. 'Well, yes, he did, but that's not the reason I'm calling you.'

I looked at the time. 'It's four in the morning, mum.'

'Oh, sorry,' she said. 'Time zones, you know . . .'

Mum spent her time drinking tea, reading literature, and feeling richer than she was. Occasionally, about once every two years, she did the same thing, except over in a foreign country. She'd pack a shitload of literature, a shitload of teabags, travel to a country less well off than Australia, then observe how less well off they were, while reading Jane Eyre and with a hot cup of tea clutched in her bony hand. She was insanse. Currently she was in England, experiencing, in her words, "English high culture". I had laughed too. Although not too loud.

'It's really six at night here,' she said.

'Great,' I said. 'Why did you want to call me? What's wrong?'

'The hospital managed to contact me,' she said. 'You were in a car crash!'

'It was more of a car ruckus,' I said. 'Not much of a crash, really.'

'Oh, honey,' she said. 'I'm so glad you're alright! I mean, ever since your father passed away . . .'

Ever since your father passed away, Mike . . . Ever since he's died, Mike . . . Ever since old Joe had kicked the bucket . . . every time, always the pause at the end of the sentence. Always the words left unsaid. My mother was a master at that. She could go years without saying anything, and she'd managed it so far. You tried to talk to her about it, but she insisted she was fine. And there was no backing down for her, because if she backed down, well, she wouldn't be . . . herself. She mistook strong for idiotic, and brave for heartless.

She still wouldn't accept that my father had died taking too much meth, too. She knew it, but she sure as hell wouldn't accept it.

'I'm alright,' I said. 'Apart from the broken arm and my scratched up leg, I'm fine.' I decided not to mention I only had one kidney now. I was pretty sure that wouldn't go down too well.

'Where are you?' she asked. 'Are you still in the hospital?'

'I am still in the hospital,' I lied.

'Don't lie to me,' she said.

'I am still in the hospital.'

'If you're lying to me . . .'

'I'm still in the hospital,' I said. 'Here, I'll prove it to you.' I took the phone from my ear and made a few vague whizzing computer noises. I returned it to my ear.

'Sounds like a hospital to me,' she said.

'Exactly,' I said. 'Anyway, mum, I gotta go. It's late right now and the - uh, I don't want the doctors to hear me. The hospital doctors.'

'Of course, honey,' she said. 'Call me, okay? I'd like to talk.'

Of course she'd like to talk. But it was never anything more meaningful than a chat with her.

'I will,' I said. I said goodbye and hung up and curled back in bed. Cold air must have been leaking in from somewhere, because I felt my skin prickling with the temperature. I pulled the blankets around me and made myself a coccoon, then put my phone back next to my wallet-

Hang on, my phone? My wallet? Weren't they were lost in the crash?

I scrabbled around next to the phone and the wallet and my hand fell upon a scrap of paper.

I found these around the place. Thanks for pulling me out of that pool.

-Tandy

Okay. I guess a dead dude just found my phone and wallet for me. Thanks, Tandy.

I tried not to worry about, you know, how the hell he had found them and how he had got into my room, and also about the fact that he was fucking dead. I was already tired enough that I drifted back to sleep within minutes.

*

They say dreams are your mind's way of interpreting all the shit that's happened during the day, it's just that it all gets screwed around in translation, and you get dreams. My personal theory is that your mind deliberately mucks it all around, twists your transistor, so you're not just running over the events of the day again. Instead you've got exciting shit happening, like car chases.

I don't usually remember my dreams, being inclined to keep a sleep schedule roughly equivalent to that of a grumpy, constipated owl and all, but I remembered this one vividly. I woke up under this big birch tree, in the shade. Around me was the desert; big wide, stretches of sand dunes, and here in the middle of it, a birch tree. I remembered thinking three things: 1) I did not fall asleep in the desert 2) what the fuck a birch tree in the desert, and 3) seriously this is a desert what the fuck is a birch tree doing in the desert.

I got up and walked out on to the sand dunes. They weren't hot. They weren't cold or anything, either. They were just . . . nothing. Not even room temperature. They didn't have a temperature. The sun wasn't beating down on me because, I realised, there was no sun. Just eerie, open blue sky everywhere. Somehow, everything seemed to be doing alright without the old guy.

There was an army major sitting in the sand dunes a few metres away from me. I knew he was an army major because as soon as he noticed me, he stood up and enthusiastically shook my hand and told me he was an army major. Then he punched me straight in the nose and called me an un-American son of a bitch. My nose didn't hurt, or even bleed. Just . . . nothingness, like the sand.

'I'm not American,' I said. 'I'm Australian.'

'A-ha!' exclaimed the major. 'So you are an un-American son of a bitch.'

'I never said that.'

'You said you weren't American. Sounds pretty un-American to me.'

'I'm Australian, you American son of a bitch,' I said. 'Why should I be American in the first place?'

'Americans are Americans in the first place,' pointed out the army major.

'That's because they're Americans.'

'Well why,' blustered the major, his face going red, his hands pawing at me like a wild animal, 'aren't you?'

'Get away from me, you American son of a bitch!' I said frantically, pushing him away. He looked up and laughed raucously, then his legs collapsed underneath him and . . . split in half. Just split in half like they were two loafs of bread. Big, hairy, ugly spiders poured out of his collapsed legs, and then the whole major ripped apart at the seams like a cheap shirt and more spiders poured out of his body. I wasn't scared of spiders myself, but there's something about a swarm of black spiders that just burst from the body of a patriotic major that puts you off. The spiders rushed towards me and before I could move they were rushing up my legs in a tide. You know how I said before I couldn't really feel anything in this stupid-ass dream? Not now. I could feel vividly the thousands of legs swimming over my own.

I tried to bat them off, but that just seemed to make the little bastards pissed at me.

Then, without warning, I was covered in gasoline. I felt it hit my head and then splash down across my face and into my clothes. I could smell the stench of gasoline all over me. I turned round. Tandy was there, holding an empty tin.

'Thanks, Tandy,' I said. 'Now I'm covered in spiders and gasoline. That really helps.'

'Stay still,' he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter.

'Hey, hey,' I said. 'Let's not go crazy here.'

'It won't hurt,' he said. 'Don't worry.'

'Yeah,' I said. 'I'm sure being lit on fire will not hurt at all.'

'Do you want the spiders off or not?' asked Tandy. I wanted the spiders off, that was for sure. They weren't biting me or anything, and hadn't yet, they just sat there, chilling on my legs with their hairy little bodies.

'Is there any way you can get the spiders off without me being lit on fire?' I asked.

'You could slice your leg open,' said Tandy.

'How the hell would that help?'

'Well, they wouldn't be on you you any more. Not technically. More inside of you.'

'I'll take the fire, thanks,' I said. 'Are you sure it won't hurt?'

'It won't hurt,' assured Tandy. 'And feel free to reconsider any time. I went the spiders-inside-of-me route, and I'm healthy as ever.'

'You have spiders inside of you?'

'We all have bacteria inside of us,' said Tandy. 'We've evolved with them so much that, without them, we couldn't live without them. And they couldn't live without us. It's like the Cattle Egret and the . . . Cattle. The Cattle Egret eats the bugs the cattle stirs up when it's eating, and in return it keeps lice off the cattle. It's just my Cattle Egrets are a little . . . bigger than yours.'

'That's fucking disgusting, Tandy,' I said.

He sighed. 'Maybe, maybe.' And then he lit me on fire.

Have you ever been on fire before? I'm guessing that since you're reading this, you haven't. Have you ever been on fire before, but with no pain? I'm guessing again that no, you haven't.

You can see the flames and the smoke, but you can't feel the pain, and I dunno, your mind thinks you're a jerk or something because of all the conflicting signals, and it just shuts down while the flames roar. I felt the spiders flee from my legs until I was completely free of spiders, then Tandy clicked his fingers. They instantly disappeared. I looked over my skin. It wasn't burnt or anything. I'm sure I would have noticed if it was.

'Alright,' said Tandy, and started walking off.

'Hey, hey - hang on!' I said, running after him. He turned to me and raised one eyebrow. 'What is it with you, Tandy?' I asked. 'What . . . are you?'

'That's the wrong kind of question,' said Tandy.

'Are you dead?'

'I was, that's for certain.'

'So you're a zombie, then.'

'No, no. Look, Mike. I don't mean to sound like a hipster asshole, but you're just trying to fit me into a category you can understand. I find it's best to think of me as Tandy Smith.'

'That's just a name,' I said.

'And "zombie" isn't?' Tandy asked. He turned around and began strolling down a sand dune. Tandy Smith looked too alive to be a zombie, too dead to be a human - and he was definitely too full of spiders to be considered not filled with god-damn spiders. He was an enigma. I decided to follow him.

Tandy turned to me suddenly and told me if I even thought about following him, he'd chop off my hands and feed them to his spiders. He looked deadly serious for a moment, and then his face lit with laughter and he walked away.

I turned around and came face to face with a skeleton. He was wearing a suit, and he had the kind of look on his skull that suggested he was the kind of skeleton that listened to The Mars Volta while reading classic literature in coffee shops. He looked like the kind of skeleton that polished his skull and bleached his bones.

'Wake the fuck up, you lazy bastard,' he said in Dave's voice. Then he added soon after, in Josh's voice this time, 'I dare you to put your balls on his head.'

'Jesus blasphemous Christ,' I said.

'How much?' asked the skeleton, then answered himself: 'I'll give you twenty cents.'

I woke.

The Diary - 16 April 2010

At the start of this post there is an index of all the shit so far.

______________________________________________________________

The first thing we noticed was the dead body in the pool.

We'd arrived at about seven at night, with Josh still groggy and Alex still asleep - or knocked out, or whatever she was - and we didn't notice the peeling walls or the doors that had their locks broken off, or the homeless man sleeping under a flattened box outside; no, we noticed the dead body in the pool. He was lying face down and he was bare naked apart from an extension record wrapped tightly around his midriff.

'Maybe we should go to a different motel?' suggested Dave.

'No, this one seems nice,' I said.

'You mean apart from the floating dead bodies?'

'Look,' I said, 'I'm tired, I've had a long day, I don't feel like walking any damn further around this place, and I'm the one with the gun here, so I think we're staying here. Besides, I like the name.'

Even Dave had to admit that The Shitting Virgin was a good name for a motel.

We went into the foyer and I sat Alex's prone body down in a green, ugly seat. A tired, bloated lady looked up from the desk and fixed us with an expressionless, tired look.

'We'd like a room that can fit four of us,' I said.

'Every room can fit four of you,' growled the woman. She sounded like she'd smoked all her life. 'Do you want something that can comfortably fit four of you?'

'Sure,' I said.

'That'd be the Midnight Pleasure room,' she said. 'Sixty bucks a night.'

We didn't have any money. All our money had been lost in the crash; all our wallets, all our cash, all our spare change. We were broke. We'd only been able to hire out the doctor costumes because Dave had promised the guy a handjob and double the money when we got back with them.

'There's just one thing,' I said. 'We kind of don't have any . . . money.'

'No money, no room,' said the lady. 'This ain't a charity.'

I looked to Dave expectantly. He shook his head quickly. Of course, he'd only promise to give handjobs to dudes.

'I don't care if you even are doctors,' said the lady, 'you're not staying the night without pay.'

'We'll clear the dead body out of the pool if you let us stay the night,' I said.

'There's a body in the pool?' asked the lady.

'A dead one,' said Dave.

'Pablo!' cried the lady. 'Pablo!' A man came down the stairs. He looked young, and he didn't look like a Pablo.

'For the last time,' said Pablo, 'my name is Jim. I don't know why you think it's Pablo.' The woman laughed, and turned to us.

'Thinks just because he immigrated here now he's an Australian!' she said laughing.

'My family has been here since the 1800s,' he said.

'1700s!' cried the lady, jabbing herself in the chest emphatically. 'Here before you, Pablo, my boy! Eat it, eat it!'

'My ancestors came from Scotland,' wailed Pablo. 'I'm not even Spanish!'

'Who said you were Spanish?' demanded the woman. 'You think just because your name is Pablo you're from Spain? Don't be a racist, you damn dirty Spanish son of a bitch!'

'I quit,' said Pablo. 'I quit your stupid fucking job.'

'Good riddance, Pablo. We don't want your racist Spanish kind around here, anyway.'

Pablo stripped off his uniform and into his underpants and marched out. The lady turned to us. 'I was going to get him to clear out the dead body, but I guess he's gone off to have some burritos or something. If you guys take out the dead body, I'll let you stay the night for free.'

'We can do that,' I said. Dave sat Josh down next to Alex. We went outside to the pool. The body floated in the pool in much the same way it had been floating before. Dead, that is.

'Scissors, paper, rock to see who goes in and gets the poor bastard,' said Dave. I agreed to it and we played. I put down rock. He put down paper.

'Go for it,' said Dave.

'If I get Hepatitis, I'll slit your throat,' I said.

'If you slit my throat I'll give you Hepatitis,' retorted Dave.

I slipped into the pool. The water was freezing. I sank in until my calves were covered, preparing myself for the dive that would send the whole of me under the icy water and stand my hairs on end. I didn't have that dive, though, because Dave pushed me and I careened into the chilly waters uncontrolled. The water felt kind of greasy, like there was a little bit of oil through it all, and a thick carpet of leaves covered the surface. I swam through the murky, tepid water and grabbed the dead dude. He floated among the leaves and pigeon shit and smelly water like a cancer cell amongst cancer cells. My doctor's uniform stuck to me and weighed me down as I climbed out of the pool brushing dead leaves off me and dragging the guy by his extension cord.

'I smell like an ass,' I said.

'So nothing's new, then,' said Dave. 'I'll go and ask the crazy lady where to put him.'

'Sure,' I said. Dave walked off to the foyer, and I sat down next to the pool with the dead guy. He was stiff, and his eyes were glassy. Definitely dead, by all accounts. I didn't have a hand mirror on me, but I'm sure if I did it wouldn't have fogged up. Therefore, I was pretty surprised when he sat up, brushed the leaves off himself, turned to me and said, 'You look awful.'

'Speak for yourself, buddy.'

The dead dude held out his hand and I shook it. He still felt cold and clammy, but there was a bit of warmth coming back to him. 'I'm Tandy,' he said. 'Tandy Smith.'

'I'm Mike,' I said. 'And . . . well, I don't mean to be rude, but weren't you dead before?'

'Well, yeah,' he said. 'But that was ages ago, dude. You gotta move with the times.'

'Oh, I see,' I said. 'Well that makes perfect sense.'

Tandy stood up and looked over to the parking lot and out to the road. 'Nice to meet you, Mike,' he said, 'but I reckon I'll be going.' He unwrapped the extension cord from around him and tossed it on the ground.

'Where?' I asked.

'Oh, I dunno. We'll see where shit takes me.' Tandy got up and wandered down to the parking lot, stark naked. Moments later, Dave came back out of the foyer.

'She says put him in a bin somewh - hey, what happened to him?'

'He walked off,' I said.

'The dead dude?' asked Dave.

'Yeah,' I said.

'The dead dude walked off?'

'That's what I said, yeah.'

'That's retarded,' said Dave. 'He was dead.'

'What hasn't been retarded today?' I asked. 'He's gone anyway, so let's just go up and sleep.'

'It's half past seven, dude. Too early.'

'I'm tired,' I said.

'You just had three days of rest,' said Dave.

'Well a few more hours can't hurt, can they?' I said. 'Come on. Midnight Pleasure, right? Right.'

*

Vowing to myself that I would go to bed no later than eight, I resiliently didn't keep to that promise. I stayed watching the clock until eight, climbed into pajamas, smoothed out my bed, and was immediately shanghaied into watching the complimentary copy of Freeballs the motel had left as the only film next to the DVD player.

Freeballs was an amateur, low-budget film produced, directed, and acted by two guys who had won a few million dollars in the lottery. It was about two vampires trying to start a hair metal band. It was the kind of film that reached so-bad-it's-bad status, went past it to so-bad-it's-good status, then transcended even that to an unintelligible plain where humour, irony, or even emotion, no longer existed and the whole 100 minutes of the film blended into one solid stream of a man with fake rattling vampire fangs having sex with a girl in a bear suit that was supposed to be a werewolf groupie. Calling it a film in itself was an insult to film-makers; hell, calling it rubbish was an insult to hard-working discarded packets of two-minute noodles. It was beyond terms, or labels, or anything making any kind of believable sense. Needless to say, it was Dave's favourite film.

I watched all 100 minutes, saw it was 9:40, and vowed then to go to sleep. Alex hadn't woken up at all and was still asleep; Josh had mumbled his way through a few half-hearted conversations then collapsed into bed, probably still a little concussed, and Dave was insisting that we play chess with two old packets of macaroni cheese in the cupboard. I didn't know how that would work, but I didn't want him to even think I was interested, so I declined politely and collapsed into bed myself. I came out again twenty minutes later, and Dave was watching porn. It was a pretty simple affair; one guy, one girl, both of them having sex with the other. He wasn't wanking or anything, just watching it with dull interest. Probably admiring the cinematography.

'Hey, Mike,' he said. 'Watch this.' He rewinded back from the bit he was currently watching, where two people were having sex, to a bit before it, where the same two people were having sex.

'That's definitely some sex right there,' I said.

'Didn't you see it?' he said. He rewinded again. There was a five-second close up the girl's face, then it went back to good ol' sex.

'That's definitely a face right there,' I said.

'Watch the eyes,' said Dave. He rewinded again and this time I watched the eyes. The clip was short, but I did notice something . . . a gleam in her eyes, or something?

'Rewind it again,' I said. He rewound it again, and I watched carefully. It wasn't a gleam in her eyes. She'd cried a single tear. Who the hell even did that these days?

'She was crying,' I said.

'I know, right?' said Dave. 'Weird.' He turned off the television and dropped the remote on the floor. 'Hey, I thought you were going to bed.'

'I tried to but I kept imagining you coming into my room and filming me sleeping,' I said.

'Pretty weird thing to imagine, dude,' said Dave.

'Hey, I'm not the one that would actually do that,' I said.

'I'd never film you when you were sleeping,' said Dave. 'That'd just be weird. I'd only film Josh or Alex when they were sleeping.'

'Thanks,' I said.

'No problem,' said Dave. He rolled over on the couch and stretched. 'What do you want to do, man? You wanna go pick up some chicky-babies?'

'At 10 at night in a shitty motel? No thanks.' I sat down on the couch next to him.

'We could write erotic fiction,' said Dave.

'What?'

'Not, like, gay erotic fiction,' he said. 'You know, straight erotic fiction.'

'It's a good idea, but I don't feel like it,' I said. 'Also, that's a horrible fucking idea.'

'I don't hear you coming up with anything,' said Dave.

'I think I'll go to sleep.'

'Sleep is for pussies.'

'Then I guess I'm a pussy,' I said. I went back into my room and fell back on to the bed. My head spun over Macy Flake, and the corridor full of 12s, and the magical Tandy Smith and, lastly, the fact that somewhere in my room was the gun. I slipped on to the floor and picked it up then crawled back in to my bed like an ancient sea creature. I slipped it under my pillow, and soon all of my ponderings were so much that they melted into insignificance and I fell asleep, not thinking about anything at all.

The Diary - Still 16 April, 2010

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

___________________________________________________________

Each one of the policemen were aiming a gun at me, and they had the serious, hardened look of men whose job was to look serious and hardened and aim guns at people. Eight of them had moustaches; the other twelve didn't but looked like they should.

'Freeze!' said one. I froze.

'Put down the gun!' said one. I put down the gun.

Four of them came up to me, guns aimed carefully, eyes like tiny stones. I let go of Josh and Alex and they slumped carefully against the wall, then, slowly, I made a finger gun; with a sudden change of pace, I brought it up swiftly and aimed it at the nearest policeman.

'Freeze!' I said. He gave a short, quick efficient burst of laughter.

'That's not a real gun,' he said.

'Prove it,' I said.

'Of course it's not a real gun!' cried one of the policemen. 'You're just making it with your hand.'

'Prove it,' I said.

'It won't shoot! You've just put two fingers together and your thumb up.'

'Prove it,' I insisted.

'The proof is self-evident, you idiot!'

'He's mad!' said Nurse Hetty. 'He's a god-damn stark-raving madman.' I turned on her and aimed the finger gun at her heart, cocking my thumb like it was a hammer. She involuntarily pulled back from it.

I turned to Dave, who had brought his own finger gun up and was aiming it at the four closest policemen. They stayed in their place warily. It was like Schrodinger's Cat. You knew it wasn't a real gun, you knew it couldn't possibly hurt you . . . but you couldn't be sure, could you? Some bizarre coincidence could have happened, the Universe could have dealt you a wild card - anything could happen, really. There was no certainty that it was or wasn't a real gun until a bullet was propelled from it. Hell, there was no certainty in the world apart from a certainty that there was none.

'Dammit,' said one policeman. 'Just walk up and arrest them.'

'Oh, and get shot?' asked one.

'What's he going to shoot you with?' cried the policeman obstreperously. 'His finger gun?'

'What else is he going to shoot me with? Of course with his finger gun!'

Me and Dave turned our finger guns on the policeman who had told the four to walk up and arrest us, and he looked at us with sudden, debilitating fear.

'Drop your guns!' said Dave, and he said it with such convinction and shrieking determination that two of the four policemen in front of us lay down their guns.

'Now give us the guns,' I said.

'Don't give them the guns,' said Ogre-Sloth. 'Then they'll have real guns.'

'They already have real guns,' pointed out a policeman.

'They don't have real guns! They're just finger guns!'

'If they didn't have real guns, then how come those two lay down their arms, huh? It's not like they'd have laid down their arms if they were just finger guns.'

'The man has a point,' said Dave.

'You only say that because he has a point,' said Nurse Hetty. 'It's not like he has a point or anything.'

'Shut your mouth or I'll shoot you,' said Dave. 'You don't make sense.'

'You can't shoot me with your hand,' said Nurse Hetty. I turned on her with my finger gun and she told me flatly to shoot her with it.

'How the fuck could I shoot you with it?' I asked. 'It's my hand, you idiot.'

Ogre-Sloth leapt on this. 'You heard him!' she said feverishly to the police officers. 'It's just his hand!'

'He's just being humble, I reckon,' said one of them. 'I reckon he could shoot any of us if he wanted to.'

'You're an idiot! You're all idiots!'

The policemen turned to Ogre-Sloth together and stared at her. She shrunk back. 'You know,' said one, 'I think that could technically be considered assault, what you just did there.'

'Arrest me,' retorted Ogre-Sloth, 'and I'll report you.'

'To who?' asked one. 'The police?'

She fell silent.

'Look,' said Dave, 'can you guys just arrest her and get this over with? I didn't call you here for nothing.'

'Sorry, sir,' said the policeman who was apparently the leader. 'We'll get her out of here as soon as possible.'

'I called you in!' said Ogre-Sloth. 'To arrest him.'

'Now you're just making things up,' said Dave.

'She's making things up,' agreed Josh groggily.

'You see?' I said. 'He's got a concussion and even he knows you're making things up.'

'You can't argue with that, lady,' said the policeman, and they promptly cuffed her, said she was a dirty son of a bitch, and took her out of the hospital, the whole troupe of burly police officers following the arresting officer and her out like ducklings.

'She was a dirty son of a bitch, anyway,' said Nurse Hetty.

'She was stark-raving mad is what she was,' said Dave.

'I wouldn't call her stark raving mad,' said Nurse Hetty. 'Just a dirty son of a bitch.'

'She was both,' I said. I picked up my gun, then lifted up Alex from her position slumped against the wall. She had fallen asleep and came to slowly. She looked around herself, apparently decided she didn't like it, and went back to sleep.

'Pick her up,' said Dave.

'You pick her up,' I said.

'You're her boyfriend, dude. Pick her up.'

'I'm not her boyfriend,' I said.

'I'll agree to that if you agree that I'm not going to pick your girlfriend up.'

'I can agree to that,' I said. I picked Alex up. She wasn't heavy, but she wasn't light either. She was a reassuring weight that reminded me no matter how retarded things had been in the past few days . . . Alex was still there. Alex was still a solid shoulder to be mutually leaned on.

Josh stumbled up and Dave slung his arm around Josh's shoulders. The four of us walked outside. The broken Suncorp Tower told me it was flickery green line past another two flickery green lines.

'Well that was stupid,' said Dave. 'Where do you want to go, now we've got no car?'

'Let's shack up in some motel somewhere,' I said. 'I mean, unless you've got any other ideas.'

'I'm up for that,' said Dave. 'You up for that, Josh?'

But Josh wasn't listening and just made a small groan and hand movement that could have either been a recitation of the dread sigil odegra or approval of the motel idea.

'I just hope there's no dead bodies in the pool,' said Dave, and both of us laughed.

The Diary - April 16, 2010 - A Lot of Stupid Shit Happens for a Change

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

____________________________________________________________

'I'm sure this will help us get Josh and Alex,' said Dave, twenty minutes and two doctor costumes later.

We were standing outside the hospital again. I had a dull throb in my abdomen where they'd taken out my appendix, and my leg felt itchy from the bandages. My arm was still broken and it hung limp against my side like a leg of lamb. All in all, I was in a pretty bad condition; Dave, I'm sure, wasn't much better. His appendectomy scar was red and bleeding a bit, which I was sure was a thing it wasn't meant to do, and judging by his walk his ass was still hurting from the surgery. We looked all the world like two guys who weren't doctors trying to look like doctors.

It occured to me that there's probably people out there who do this for fun. Scammers, con artists, identity thieves and creepers. Dress up as a doctor and get access to patient records. Or then again, maybe there weren't. I doubt anyone would be so stupid as to try it.

Apart from us, that is.

And that was the plan that Dave had finally imparted to me. I didn't know why I was going with it, because 1) it's insane, and 2) it's fucking insane. Maybe I was just feeling adventurous, or maybe it was because I had no other ideas. We could pretend to be Alex and Josh's uncles or something, but neither of us looked particularly avuncular. Also, that was a stupid fucking idea.

So there I was, dressed up in quite obviously fake scrubs that identified me as "Doctor Hunk" on the lapel, preparing to undertake something probably highly illegal.

I hope no-one ever gets to read this stupid-ass diary.

We walked through the doors confidently and into the foyer. The whole crowd from before had departed. A few patients sat, one of them wearing a face-mask. I regarded them with the kind of look that I thought a doctor would regard patients with.

'What do we do?' whispered Dave.

I turned to him. 'This is your plan, dude. Is this really as far as you thought? "Let's dress up as doctors"?'

'Kind of, yeah,' said Dave.

'Alright, let's not panic,' I said.

'I'm not panicking!' cried Dave in a panic-stricken voice.

'We'll go up to the counter,' I said, 'and we'll ask the receptionist or head nurse or whatever she is to see the patient records.'

'And if she says no?'

'We tackle her and we slit her throat,' I said.

'Her throat?'

'Her throat,' I said.

'That's illegal,' said Dave.

'Pretty much everything we've done on this stupid trip is illegal,' I said. 'We might as well sneak some throat-slitting in there.' I walked up to the lady sitting at the reception area. She was a tall lady with drawn skin but sagging eyelids, and she wore a cardigan that looked two sizes too small. She was too thin, almost as if her height had stretched her out, and she towered over the counter that also looked two sizes small like a skyscraper. She wore glasses, too: one of those flashy designer pairs that made you look like a person who actually gave a shit about glasses. Her nametag announced her as Nurse Hetty.

'Hey, Hetster,' I said casually, trying to attempt a leaning-on-the-wall position without an actual wall. 'How's it hanging?'

Nurse Hetty looked up from a long list of numbers with a thunderous look. If her face had been the thunder, the lightning had been the click her rings had made as she snapped the sheet of paper down in front of her. The rain was, I dunno - the ceiling fans or something.

'Who are you?' demanded Nurse Hetty.

'We're doctors here,' said Dave. 'We've always been doctor's here.'

'I've never seen you before,' said Nurse Hetty.

'I've never seen you before,' retorted Dave, 'so I don't know if I can really trust you at all. But I'm choosing to, because I'm a nice guy. A nice doctor guy.'

'I'll look you up in our database,' said Nurse Hetty, looking to his nametag. 'Doctor . . . Sexy?'

'It's German,' said Dave.

'German for what?'

'It's German for "water-tower",' said Dave. 'It's named after where I was conceived.'

'What, a water-tower?' asked Nurse Hetty.

'No, you see, "water-tower" in German means "Alabama",' said Dave.

'So you were born in Alabama?'

'Conceived in Alabama,' corrected Dave. 'I was born in Germany.'

'You don't sound German,' said Nurse Hetty.

'We moved out of Germany when I was three,' said Dave. 'To Water-Tower.'

'Alabama, you mean?'

'No, Water-Tower, it's this nice place in North Queensland,' said Dave. 'So that pretty much explains all the retarded stuff I just said, right?'

'I think it does,' I said.

'Sweet,' said Dave. 'Now give us the patient records.'

'I'll need to check your name first in our database,' said Nurse Hetty. 'Like I said, I've never seen you before. For all I know you could be some psycho who had just wandered in here.'

'That would be bad,' said Dave. 'Trust me, we are not on the side of the psychos. I see a psycho, I report him to the . . . Psycho Watch.'

Nurse Hetty looked up Dr. Sexy and Dr. Hunk in the database. Surprisingly, she found nothing.

'You must have spelled "water-tower" wrong,' said Dave.

There was no Dr. Water-Tower either.

'Are you sure you're not psychos?' asked Nurse Hetty.

'I'm sure I AM a psycho,' I said, 'but that's the first sign of sanity, isn't it? Psychos don't think they're psychos, do they?'

'So you are a psycho?' asked Nurse Hetty. She had one hand on the telephone, and she was watching us warily. No doubt she had the Psycho Watch on speed-dial.

'No, I'm not one,' I said. 'I'm the only sane one here because I recognise I am a psycho. I thought I explained this.'

'I recognise I'm a psycho,' piped up a tiny wizened little man sitting on a seat reading a newspaper.

'See, he's sane too,' I said. The whole thing was causing quite a stir amongst the customers that were listening.

'If being sane means admitting I'm crazy,' said a fat man with a loose shirt on, 'I'm going to have to come out and admit I'm stark raving mad.'

'You're not stark-raving mad,' said Nurse Hetty, and turned to us. 'Look what you've done. Now he thinks he's stark-raving mad.'

'He is stark-raving mad,' said Dave. 'I saw it with my own eyes.'

'He cut me,' I said.

'He was the one who broke my leg!' shouted a woman who had a cast around her arm.

'You've got a broken arm,' said the man who was stark-raving mad.

'You're mad,' said the woman. 'You're stark-raving mad. I've got a broken leg, not a broken arm.'

'I really am stark-raving mad?' asked the man who was stark-raving mad.

'You're not,' snapped Nurse Hetty. 'None of you are stark-raving mad.'

'Prove it,' I said. 'Prove they're not stark-raving mad.'

'I can't prove that,' said Nurse Hetty. 'How could I know? Only yourself would know if you were stark-raving mad.'

'Except you wouldn't,' said Dave. 'Madmen don't know they're madmen.' He turned to the crowd of patients and told them all that if they admitted now they were stark-raving mad they had proven they were completely sane and could leave.

'That's not how a hospital works!' wailed Nurse Hetty. 'Besides, this isn't a psychiatric hospital.'

'I'm stark-raving mad!' shrieked a girl of about 13 from the corner.

'Mad!' said Dave excitedly. 'Stark-ravingly so! You heard it, Hetty! She's mad.'

'She's not mad,' said Nurse Hetty. 'She's just getting caught up in the moment.'

'How do you know she isn't mad?'

'Because she just admitted she's mad,' said Nurse Hetty. 'You said it yourself! Stark-raving madmen don't know they're stark-raving madmen.'

'I know I'm a stark-raving madman,' said a stark-raving madman from his seat.

'Prove it,' said Nurse Hetty.

'He can't prove it if he's stark-raving mad,' said the elderly man from before. 'Stark-raving madmen don't know they're stark-raving madmen.'

'Then if he was a stark-raving madman and so didn't know he was a stark-raving madman, why'd he say he was a stark-raving madman, huh?' demanded Nurse Hetty.

'Stark-raving madmen would say anything,' said the fat man who was a stark-raving madman. 'You can't trust them.'

'You wouldn't know,' said the 13-year old girl. 'You're mad, you are. Stark-raving mad.'

'You're stark-raving mad,' said fat man. 'You said it yourself!'

Just then Ogre-Sloth swept down the corridor, gasped when she saw us and grabbed us both by the elbows. She threw us out, and told us if us dirty politicians came back again she wouldn't pay her taxes at all this year. When we pointed out that was illegal, she pointed out that necromancy was also illegal, and if that was Teddy Kennedy, how had you brought him back from the dead, huh? And they had to concede.

'Alright,' I said, 'your stupid ass plan didn't work.'

'Hey, at least I had a plan,' said Dave. 'What have you got, huh? Sometimes these days I think I should be Dr. Hunk instead of you, you know what I mean?'

'I think I should threaten to shoot them in their face,' I said.

'Exactly,' said Dave, then paused for thought. 'Sorry?'

'I think,' I said, 'I should threaten to shoot them in their face if they don't get Alex and Josh from wherever they are. Before they remove their organs, too.'

'To be fair,' said Dave, 'the appendix isn't really an organ. I mean, it just hangs around there weighing you down. Oh, and yeah, that's an insane idea.'

'Better than inane,' I said. I felt the cold weight of the gun in my pocket. I knew that if push came to shove, I couldn't shoot a person. Well, maybe Hitler. So I guess I could say that if push came to shove, I couldn't shoot a person, unless he was Hitler. But I sure could threaten.

'I refuse to take part,' said Dave.

'If you don't take part, I'll shoot you in your face,' I said.

'You couldn't do it,' said Dave.

'I could,' I said. 'You just watch me. Any face-shootings you've heard about lately? That was me.'

'I haven't heard about any face-shootings lately,' said Dave.

'I haven't been shooting faces lately,' I said. 'You'd know when I've been shooting faces, because you'd have no face. Because I'd have shot it off.'

'This is ridiculous,' said Dave. 'We're not doing this, Dave.'

'Your face is ridiculous,' I said. 'It's so ridiculous I just might have to shoot it off.'

'You know, I'm starting to doubt you've shot any faces,' said Dave.

'You doubt my face-shooting ability?'

'I suppose you could say I do.'

'I see,' I said. I walked back into the hospital, dragging Dave along in my wake. I don't know what had gotten into me. Maybe it was because they'd taken out my appendix, or because they'd taken Alex, or because I had a gun and they didn't. In any case, some faces were about to be extremely threatened to be shot off.

Ogre-Sloth was still there, talking to Nurse Hetty. She turned around when I entered, her eyes boggling like a couple of billiard balls.

'Out!' she screamed. 'Get OUT!'

I pulled my gun out and said, 'I will shoot you in your face.' She froze for a moment. Probably considering whether she'd look better or worse after being shot in the face. She apparently decided worse, because she put her head down and her hands up and told me to please not shoot her in her face.

'I won't shoot you in your face if Nurse Hetty gives me the patient records,' I said. I turned to Nurse Hetty, who sat in her seat slack-jawed. 'Nurse Hetty, if you don't give me the patient records, I will shoot you in your face also.'

Dave hung behind me, looking, I realised, a bit sheepish. Not frightened, or excited, but sheepish - as if my threats of face-shooting were somehow embarrasing. Myself, I was surprisingly calm. I'd never been involved in holding up a hospital before. Or any place, really. I'd expected to be sweating profusely like a lizard in the sun, except of course lizards were cold blooded and didn't sweat.

Some of the patients were starting to lie down on the ground; I turned on them, gun in hand. 'I'll shoot you guys in your arses, just to mix things up,' I said. 'Get the hell up. Don't be scared. Just sit in your seats. The only thing you have to be scared about is me shooting you in your arse.' This didn't seem to have the desired effect. They did get up, but they looked as terrified as ever.

'Nurse Hetty!' I shouted. 'Patient records, dammit! If you don't get me the patient records right now, by God as my witness, I will shoot you in your face and your arse! Nobody wants to be shot in the arse and face, Mrs. Hetty!'

Nurse Hetty clicked around with the mouse a bit until she presumably found the patient records. I vaulted over the desk, and Dave followed more mellowly.

'Search for Josh Hatters,' I said. 'And Alex Saules.' Nurse Hetty searched for Josh Hatters and Alex Saules.

'Third floor, rooms 12 and 13,' she said.

'Are there any injuries?' I said. Please let there not be injuries.

'They both have pretty heavy concussions,' said Nurse Hetty.

'So floor three is the concussion floor?' asked Dave.

'No, floor three is the broken bones floor,' said Nurse Hetty. 'Floor four is full.'

'He asked about floor three,' I said. 'Not floor four.'

'Floor four is the concussion floor,' said Nurse Hetty.

'Then whyever aren't both of them on the concussion floor?'

'The concussion floor is full,' said Nurse Hetty. 'I just said that.'

'The concussion floor is full? I'm surprised you've even got a whole floor for concussions anyway,' said Dave.

'You'll be surprised, sir, the amount of concussions that happen around the place. It's quite likely that someone, somewhere, is getting concussed right now, in fact.'

'Who?' demanded Dave feverishly.

'What?' said Nurse Hetty.

'Who's getting concussed right now?'

'However should I know?' said Nurse Hetty hotly.

'Then why would you bring up that stupid fact in the first place, if you didn't know who was getting concussed?' shrieked Dave stridently.

'Anyone could be getting concussed,' said Nurse Hetty. 'You could be getting concussed.'

'I'm not getting concussed,' said Dave.

'Ah, but I said "could," didn't I?' said Nurse Hetty. 'All I'm saying is it's possible that you could be getting concussed right now. It's possible you could be in some autovehicle crash right now, or in a fist fight, or being beaten up in jail, is all.'

'Shut up, both of you, or I'll shoot you both in the face,' I said, interjecting.

'You wouldn't dare,' said both of them at once. I was so stricken with this that I aimed the gun at the ceiling and fired. I'd expected something excitingly explosive to happen, but instead I felt my wrist twist around like it had gears, and a light rain of plaster settled over me.

'See?' I said, trying not to make out that the only wrist of mine that wasn't broken was now twisted. 'That is how serious I am about this.'

'That's pretty serious,' said Nurse Hetty.

'Deadly,' I said. 'Third floor, rooms 12 and 13, right? Right. The broken bones floor.'

'The concussion floor,' corrected Dave.

'No, no, it's the broken bones floor.'

'They've got concussions, not broken bones,' said Dave.

'Yes, but the concussion floor is full,' I said.

'That's stupid.'

'You're stupid, but you don't hear me complaining, yeah?' I said. Dave and I swept past Ogre-Sloth, who was quivering in silent rage. No doubt she was angry that politicians could simply wander into hospitals and threaten to shoot people in their faces. Next thing you know and they'd be ruling the country or something.

We rode the elevator up to the third floor and went into room 12 first. Alex was there, her head lying down on a pillow and her eyes slightly open. She looked dizzy, and pretty out of it.

'Who are you?' said the currently attending doctor, who was about 50 and had a slightly greying beard.

'He's got a gun,' explained Dave.

'That's right,' I said. I took the gun out of my pocket again and waved it around helpfully. I could understand the guy who had tried to rob me now. Waving it around was simply fun. I'd never had so much power in my life as I had now, waving a gun around. People paid attention to a waving gun.

'We need to take the patient,' I said.

'Why?'

'What do you mean, "why"?' I asked. 'I've got the gun, you've got the patient. Pretty simple exchange to understand here.'

'Exchange?' said the doctor. 'You're going to give me the gun?'

'I meant that I'm going to shoot you if you don't give me the damn patient,' I said.

'In your face,' said Dave. 'That's where he'll be shooting you.'

'Yeah, right in your stupid doctor face. I bet you didn't get a degree for not-getting-your-stupid-doctor-face-shot-off, did you? You had to go ahead and get a degree in medicine.'

I pulled Alex out of bed and supported her under my arm. We hobbled along to the next room, where Josh lay surrounded by doctors.

'Cancer,' said one.

'No, acne,' said another.

'I can't see any acne.'

'You can't see unhappiness either, but unhappiness is a thing, yeah?'

'Are you endeavouring to suggest acne is intangible?' asked one.

'I'm endeavouring to suggest your dick is intangible,' said another. A ripple of chuckles ran round the circle.

I pulled out my gun again, my wrist still aching terribly. 'Everybody shut up with the doctor shit,' I said, trying at once to hold a gun with a twisted wrist and support a concussed lady with a broken arm. They all shut up with the doctor shit and turned around to look at me, Dave and Alex.

'Who are you?'

'I'm the guy who has a gun and can shoot you in your face with it.'

'Oh, okay.'

'Give me the patient,' I said. 'We have to leave.' Why we had to leave I honestly have no idea, but what I did know is that, by God, we had to leave.

'But he's a medical marvel!' said one doctor.

'Josh isn't a medical marvel,' said Dave. 'Josh is fat and ugly.'

'Well, yes, but that's just personal hygiene and eating too much,' said the doctor who was apparently the leader. 'It's just, well . . . he has no sicknesses.'

'And?' I said. 'I have no sicknesses.'

'Slight depression,' said one doctor.

'And prone to ear-aches,' said another.

'I don't have slight depression and I haven't had an ear-ache in the last 8 years,' I said.

'Unusual happy mood,' proscribed one doctor.

'Decreased levels of regular ear-ache rate,' said another. 'Possible cancer risk.'

'The other one has jaundice,' said one of them.

'Bullshit he has jaundice. He's got conjunctivitis.'

'He's got jaundice and conjunctivitis,' concluded a third doctor. 'He's got Hepatitis A.'

'Hepatitis B,' said a fourth doctor.

'Hepatitis F,' said the first doctor.

'There's only Hepatitis up to E,' said the second doctor. 'There's never been any cases of Hepatitis F.'

'Yeah, exactly. Until now,' said the first doctor.

'I think we're getting off the point here,' I said. 'The point is that give me my fucking friend.'

'Low anger threshold caused by spousal abuse,' diagnosed the third of the doctors.

'I don't have a spouse,' I said angrily.

'Low anger threshold caused by luck of spouse.'

I swept into the ring of doctors and pulled Josh up and handed him to Dave. We started to steer him and Alex out through the doors.

'Wait!' cried a sixth doctor. 'Don't leave! He's a medical marvel!'

'Just let us get a liver sample,' said one.

'Why the fuck would you need a liver sample?' I demanded angrily.

'So we can sample his liver, god-dammit,' said the first doctor. 'Don't you know anything?'

'He's got not knowing anything caused by high blood pressure,' said the third doctor.

'My doctor says my blood pressure is perfectly fine,' I said. 'If anything, it's a little low.'

'Not knowing anything caused by low blood pressure.'

The four of us swept out of the room, except of course I was the only one sweeping; the other three seemed to be performing some kind of slow ballet, and both Alex and Josh didn't seem fully conscious yet. I herded the four of us into the elevator and we travelled quickly down to ground floor, where Ogre-Sloth, Nurse Hetty, and twenty policemen were waiting.

The Diary - 16 April, 2010

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

This is certainly some written words! All together got about 14800 of them.

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'I don't think this'll work, Mike,' said Dave, both hands clasped protectively over his naked crotch.

'It'll work,' I said. 'You just need to pull out your drip and we won't look like patients at all.'

'Yes, but then we'll just look like a couple of naked men in a hospital,' said Dave.

'Exactly!' I said. 'And who in the world is going to pay attention to two naked men in a hospital?'

'Everyone?' hazarded Dave.

'No, no, no. Look . . . remember a year ago, when we went down to your grandma's place, and two men in the same leotard tried to arrest you for public indecency because your top button was undone?'

'Vividly,' said Dave.

'And remember when it turned out they'd been filming us the whole time, and we turned up on some weird-ass Bulgarian reality show?'

'Yeah, that was pretty retarded.'

'Yeah!' I said. 'Are you getting my point? These days, we've got Punk'd, and all these stupid reality shows where people are stuck in a big house, or they're singing at you. I guarantee they'll just let us run out of here, because, one, no one wants to tackle a naked dude, and, two, they'll think we're actors, or pranksters, or we're doing a street theatre kind of thing. And they'll all avoid us. No one wants to be on the camera.'

Dave looked doubtful, but he said, 'I'll go with that.'

'Better than your stupid jumping out the window idea,' I said. 'I mean, there's practically no danger involved in MY plan. Now rip out your drip from your wrist.'

'Are you sure this won't kinda kill me?'

'Pretty sure.'

'How pretty sure?' asked Dave.

'Well, it's all relative, isn't it?' I said. 'I'm not as sure as I am that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I'm a hell of a lot surer than Jesus was when he said to Ice-T: "Sweet ride, dude." Because Ice-T's ride is shit.'

'That never happened,' said Dave.

'I'm pretty sure it did.'

'How pretty sure?'

'Look, just rip the damn drip out,' I said. 'I took off my plaster cast.'

'You left the bandages on.'

'Yeah, but if I took them off, I'd just be bleeding everywhere and that'd be pretty obvious that I'm a patient here, wouldn't it?'

'How do you know I won't bleed if I pull the drip out?' said Dave. 'And besides, I just had a chunk of my prostate taken out, and my appendicitis ripped out of me like Poland was ripped from the Polish by Hitler.'

'That's a stupid metaphor,' I said. 'And I had my appendix out, too, but you don't see me having any morphine.'

'That's because you were in a mini-coma for three days,' said Dave. I simply raised my eyebrows. He looked from the drip to my eyebrows and back to the drip, then shrugged. 'Oh well, fuck it,' he said, and pulled. The drip came out inch by inch, uncurling like a snake, and then it was out. A drip of blood came to the hole it had left in his wrist and trickled down his arm.

'I'm bleeding!' he shrieked like a retarded banshee. 'Jesus Hannibal Lecter fucking Christ!'

I hit him in the face. Not hard enough to break anything, just hard enough to stop his whining. I wiped the blood off his arm and pointed to the door. 'Let's go,' I said. 'Walk slowly, walk calmly. Walk like you own the world, walk like you're the biggest dude in the world.'

'The biggest dude in the world can't walk,' pointed out Dave.

'What?'

'He's some fat-ass Mexican dude. He can't walk. They pick him up in a truck.'

'Well, walk like you're the most IMPORTANT dude in the world,' I said.

'It could be argued that, according to yourself, you yourself are the most important person in the world,' said Dave.

'Well, walk like you're you and you've just had a coffee and you're out to take down a god-damn velociraptor,' I said.

'I can do that,' said Dave. He set his jaw hard, his head high, and opened the door to our room just as the nurse did the same from the other side. He jumped back, turned, then slipped on to the floor, crashing to the tiles in a twist of limbs.

It was the nurse from before. She looked from the bare ass of the prostrate Dave to me, covering my crotch and standing next to Dave's leaking IV tower. 'Get back in your beds,' she said. 'You've just had your appendixes out. And put some damn clothes on.'

'No,' I said. I darted over and pulled Dave up, then tried to pull the IV bag off to throw at her. It was fiddly as hell, though, so instead I just picked up my pants, threw them at her face and ran, pulling Dave behind me.

'Look like you're an actor,' I hissed, slowing to a light jog as we came into the corridor. A nurse coming out of a room stopped and looked at us in shock.

'We're actors,' explained Dave. The nurse immediately set about fixing her hair for the presumed cameras. We jogged past her and into the elevator. A man in a business suit was standing inside, one hand in his pocket, the other idly drumming a beat on his leg. He looked us up and down, his brow furrowing as we stood slightly sweaty next to him.

'Hi,' I said.

'We're actors,' said Dave.

The man coughed. 'Good on you.' He looked around the elevator; maybe he was looking for cameras, maybe he was just uncomfortable. Maybe both.

Dave had long ago abandoned covering his crotch and now stood with his legs slightly apart, leaning against the wall casually. 'Up or down?' he asked, leaning forward suddenly, causing significant movement.

'Up and down,' said the man, trying not to stare. 'I mean . . . uh, down.'

'Cool,' said Dave, pressing the ground floor button, 'we're going the same way. I'm Dave, by the way.' He extended his hand and the man shook it gingerly, as if it were disease-ridden. Which was, considering where it had been, probably accurate.

Dave tried to make small talk, but the man didn't seem very receptive.

We stopped at ground floor and the man got off. We followed him, me trying to look as much like an actor as I could. To tell you the truth, I wasn't very good at it; I wasn't a good enough actor for the task. I think by this point Dave was just enjoying himself too much to care about what our original purpose had been. If we even had one.

A big, heavyset nurse in scrubs and brandishing a stethoscope like it was a sword confronted us in the foyer, her moustache bristling with anger, her ass wobbling about in indignation like a whale breaching the ocean. She looked 30 or so, and she was holding the stethoscope so tightly that her hand was going white. Have you ever seen those statues of Aphrodite, the Greek god of love and beauty? This nurse looked exactly unlike Aphrodite.

'Explain yourself!' she roared. She sounded kind of like Zeus, if Zeus had been a three-hundred pound ogre-sloth.

'We're actors,' said Dave.

'If you're actors,' she said, sounding as if she were pointing out some great fault in our excuse - which, coincidentally enough, she was, 'where are your cameras?'

'They're in the ceiling,' I said. She looked up. There was nothing in the ceiling. I tried to push past her but she blocked my way like she was a mountain and I was a passenger plane. Dave tried to sneak under her arm; she brought her ham-like fist down directly on the crown of his head. He collapsed, groaning, clutching at his head.

This wasn't how it was supposed to go. I didn't know how it was supposed to go, but it certainly wasn't meant to go like this.

'Look,' I said, 'it's a long story and you wouldn't want to hear it. There's not really many interesting parts, and most of it will just be me recounting conversations about nothing.'

'This is public indecency!' cried a doctor from behind her. Quite a crowd had gathered around us. Dave, slightly dopey on morphine, and very dizzy, was trying to part them with his hands like Moses.

'It's a reality show,' I said. 'Secret hidden cameras are in the ceiling and we film the reactions to, uh . . . naked patients. Or something.'

'You're patients here?' asked Ogre-Sloth.

'We're doctors,' said Dave from the ground, and giggled.

'You're doctors?'

'No, don't listen to him, he's stupid. We're famous actors. I'm Steve Buscemi.'

'He does look like Steve Buscemi,' said someone from the back of the crowd. There was a murmur of agreement from the crowd.

'And who are you?' asked the nurse to Dave. Dave giggled and looked down at his crotch.

'I have a very small penis,' he said, frowning.

'Ah, Carrot Top,' said someone.

'He doesn't look like Carrot Top,' said another anonymous voice. 'He looks more like JFK.'

'No,' said another. 'More like Teddy Kennedy, really.'

'Teddy Kennedy is much older. And dead.'

'I mean young Teddy Kennedy.'

'Now that I think about,' chipped in another, 'he does look a bit like Teddy Kennedy.'

'I'm not Teddy Kennedy,' said Dave, who still hadn't risen from the ground. 'I'm Dave.'

'Ah, yes, but that's exactly the kind of thing Teddy Kennedy would say, isn't it?' pointed out someone. 'Wouldn't want to reveal his true identity, yeah?'

'He's Dave,' I said.

'What do you know? You're only Steve Buscemi.'

'No, he's Dave,' chimed in someone.

'No, no, he's Steve Buscemi. The other guy is Dave.'

'No, that's Teddy Kennedy.'

'Then who is Dave, if that's Teddy Kennedy, and that's Steve Buscemi?'

'I'm Dave,' said Dave, to the concern of no-one in particular.

'No one's Dave,' said someone angrily. 'Who the hell said anyone was Dave?'

'I did,' said Dave, but no-one was listening.

'I didn't say anyone was Dave,' said Ogre-Sloth. She looked around at the crowd accusingly. 'Whoever said anyone was Dave stand up right now.' Dave stood up. Ogre-Sloth turned her brutal, focused rage on him and told him to sit down again, and he did. She once again demanded that whoever said anyone was Dave stand up immediately. Dave stood up immediately, and she was taken with such a rage at him that she promptly kicked us out of the hospital, with an armful of hospital clothes each, charging us with public indecency and being Teddy Kennedy. We put the hospital clothes on and wandered aimlessly out into the Brisbane afternoon. The Suncorp Tower, which had a digital clock on it that was seemingly eternally broken and only ever showed the time on one side and even then sporadically, told us it was half past the bottom line of something that could be a three, a five, a six, an eight or a nine.

Dave looked at his watch instead. 'It's three-thirty,' he said. 'I know a costume place like 10 minutes from here that closes at four.'

'Why are we going to a costume shop again?' I asked.

'So we can get doctor costumes,' said Dave.

'Oh yeah, I remember that,' I said. 'Yeah, sure, let's dress up as doctors, I'm sure that'll help us get Josh and Alex.'

The Diary - April 16, 2010

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

12500 words done! That's one quarter. Sweet.

This one actually ends at the end of a scene!

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(Continued from last entry)

We bought a frozen pie for the road, but then Dave ate it so we had to buy another frozen pie for the road. The Polonez was standing up fine, and it hadn't stalled or done anything retarded, but then again we'd only driven for a few hours. I had a stupid feeling that we'd just stop in Brisbane and go to a cafe and then head back to town afterwards, as if the whole road trip wasn't real at all. But maybe that was just hope.

Dave and Josh swapped drivers and we took the freeway through Brisbane and skipped the whole place. By now it was about 4 in the afternoon, pretty much 24 hours since we'd decided to do the whole thing.

Alex still hadn't talked about last night.

Another 20 minutes of driving, another obscure band, this time from Alex. It was a French synth-pop kind of thing, and the singer sounded like he was swallowing a frog.

'You guys have awful taste in music,' I said.

'Oh?' said Dave, who had decided to take off his shirt for some reason. 'And your tastes are so much more REFINED than ours, I suppose?'

'Well, yeah.'

'Sorry if we don't all listen to classical music, Mike,' said Alex.

'Music from the 60s is not classical music.'

'I bet that's what they said about classical music back in the old days,' said Dave. ' "This isn't classical music! This is modern! This is hip!" '

'Well they didn't call it classical music back then, yeah,' I said with authority, hoping authority could compensate for actual knowledge.

'Well what did they call it?'

'They called it music.'

'You're an idiot, Mike,' said Josh. 'You're a piss-idiot.'

'I'm not a piss-idiot!' I protested.

'You're a pretty big piss-idiot,' said Dave. 'Sorry, dude, but you are. Biggest piss-idiot in the whole car.'

'What the hell is a piss-idiot supposed to be, anyway?' asked Alex.

'Look it up in the dictionary,' said Dave.

Alex took out the dictionary we had in the car and looked it up. 'It's not there,' she said after a few minutes.

'I don't need it, anyway,' said Dave. 'I know the definition.'

'No you don't,' I said.

'Oh, suddenly a piss-idiot thinks he can correct me,' said Dave. 'I'm not having some piss-assed son of a bitch piss-idiot correct me.' He turned around in his seat and threw an apple core I didn't know he had at me. I ducked and it bounced off the seat behind me, hit the roof, then landed in Josh's lap. He swerved with sudden ferocity as the apple landed in his lap that I felt like my bones were being pulled out of my skin. As we skidded sideways across the freeway, I felt my seatbelt go taut, and I slammed forward in the seat, then was slammed back again as something grazed the side of our car and we went spinning off the freeway and crunched sickeningly against the concrete wall. I heard a beep, a scream of brakes and then I was flying through the air as the whole car bounced down the freeway in a way that I definitely thought cars shouldn't move in.

April 16, 2010

There's something extremely disconcerting about waking up in a hospital.

Maybe it's the sterility of it all, or the fact that the last thing you remembered was being whipped around like a yo-yo, or the thought that you, Michael Hockings, should be, by all rights, dead, flattened against the road like a pancake. Or maybe it's the fact that hospitals are fucking creepy.

I'd had my appendix out when I was 15 or so, when my plans to not have a retarded swollen appendix fell through. I remembered, every morning, waking up and panicking before realising where I was. There's something unfamiliar and alien about hospitals, like you've stepped into another world where everything is white and smells slightly like a new car. I'd always wondered about the whole white sheets, white walls, white clothes thing about hospitals. Was white more clean, or sterile than any other colour? They should have an Action Man motif sort of thing. You could be nostalgic about your childhood right before they put you under and cut a tumor out of your brain.

Still, even with that, there's something even more disconcerting than waking up in a hospital, and that's waking up in a hospital with a face an inch and a half away from yours.

I shouted and inadvertently punched the guy in the chest before I realised it was Dave. He wheezed a few times, then laughed and tried to grab my face. I pushed him away and he laughed again.

My arm was in a plaster cast and my whole leg throbbed dully and was bandaged. Apart from that, I seemed fine.

'Hey,' he said. He was in the white hospital clothes and he had a drip in his arm connected to an IV tower, but he didn't appear to have anything wrong with him. He sounded pretty out of it, though.

'Hey,' I said. 'Are you drunk or something, dude?'

'Morphine,' he explained, then added helpfully, 'you've got a pretty mouth, by the way.'

'Thanks,' I said. He giggled.

There was a metal lump under me. I pushed my hand under and extracted it. It was the gun.

'There's a gun under me,' I said.

'There WAS a gun under you,' corrected Dave helpfully. 'Yeah, you had it in the hotel, remember? As the paramedics picked us up, I grabbed it from the wreck and snuck it in here.'

'And no-one noticed sneaking a gun into a hospital?'

'Well, a few people noticed it,' said Dave, 'but they didn't say anything because I had a gun. Anyway, I figured it was yours so I slipped it under there. I hope you don't mind.'

'I don't mind you slipping a gun under me.'

I heard a few footsteps from outside, so I stuffed the gun back under me. Dave hobbled back over to his bed with his IV tower and managed to get inside just as the door to our room opened and an old nurse came through. She looked like an old nurse trying to look like a young nurse, but unfortunately the young nurse she was trying to look like looked like an old nurse.

'Hi,' I said. She looked at me like I was a Cocker-Spaniel that had just tried to engage her in conversation.

'Hi,' she said.

'How are you feeling?' I asked.

'I'm feeling all right,' she said. 'Kind of got a headache, but what can you do, you know? Apart from that, yeah, I'm fine.'

'Don't need any extra morphine?' asked Dave.

'No, I'm good,' said the nurse. 'The scar's healing up fast . . .' She trailed off, looked at us like we had committed some great calamity, then blushed. She coughed and looked at us officially.

'How are you feeling?' she said.

'I'm feeling all right,' said Dave.

'Kind of got a headache,' I said, 'but what can you do, you know? Apart from that, yeah, I'm fine.'

'Don't need any extra morphine?'

'No, I'm good,' I said.

'The scar's healing up fast,' said Dave, smiling. The nurse looked at us like we had committed a second great calamity, and blushed again. I smiled at her, and she blushed a third time.

'Your friend was very lucky,' said the nurse.

'He's not my friend,' I said.

'I thought he was your friend.'

'Well he's not.'

The nurse turned to Dave. 'Aren't you his friend?'

'No,' said Dave. 'I'm Dave.'

'Hi, Dave,' I said. 'I'm Mike.'

'Hi, Mike,' said Dave. He turned to the nurse. 'I think we're friends now, miss.'

'Your friend was very lucky,' said the nurse to me.

'I'd call him more of an acquaintance, really.'

'They said you were in the same car,' said the nurse.

'Dave had been hitch-hiking,' I said. 'So I picked him up. Where were you going again?'

'Greece,' said Dave.

'Greece is a long way from here,' said the nurse.

'I know,' said Dave. 'That's why I was hitch-hiking. It's hardly like I could walk all the way.'

'That's true,' said the nurse. She turned to me once more. 'Your acquaintance was very lucky.'

'Oh?'

'Yes, very lucky indeed,' said the nurse. 'You see, not only was Dave not injured at all in the crash, but in our post-crash examination of him, we discovered he had prostate cancer just starting up, and managed to cut it out before it spread.'

'That's why I'm on morphine,' explained Dave.

'No, that's because of your appendectomy,' said the nurse.

'Dave had appendicitis?' I asked.

'No, Dave didn't have appendicitis. We just thought since we were there, we might as well get out his appendix, too, it's useless anyway.'

'Sweet,' said Dave. He lifted up his hospital clothes. There was a thin red scar across his lower abdomen.

'Hang on,' I said. 'If all these operations were going on, shouldn't I have noticed?'

'You were in a mini-coma for three days,' explained the nurse.

'Why was I in a mini-coma for three days?' I asked.

'Well, we were taking out your appendix, but we accidentally gave you too much anaesthetic and put you in a mini-coma for three days.'

'Why were you taking out my appendix?'

'Well, we were cutting out Dave's prostate cancer and taking out his appendix, and we figured since we were taking out one appendix and you were still knocked out, we might as well take out two, they're useless anyway.'

'I appreciate the gesture,' I said, 'but shouldn't I have given consent first? Isn't that highly illegal?'

'Isn't endangering people's lives by crashing on the freeway highly illegal?' said the nurse. 'I bet those people didn't give consent for their lives to be endangered.'

I had to admit, she had a point, even if she was an old nurse trying to look like a young nurse who looked like an old nurse. After a few minutes of fussing and making sure we weren't dying of any debilitating diseases, she left us alone.

'We should escape,' said Dave immediately.

'I'm fine here,' I said. 'Oh, and where are Alex and Josh?'

'They're in the hospital somewhere,' said Dave. 'That's why we have to escape. To get costumes.'

I knew somewhere in there, in that crazed mind of Dave, that combination of words had made sense. But I wasn't, gladly enough, in Dave's head, so I said, 'What?'

'We have to escape,' explained Dave slowly, like he was talking to an ape, or a Canadian, 'so we can get costumes.'

'Why,' I said, 'do we need costumes?'

'So we can pretend to be doctors, of course.'

'Oh, okay,' I said. 'That makes perfect sense.'

'I'm glad you see from my point of view for once.' Dave stood up and walked over to me with his IV tower. 'So what I'll figure we'll do is this: we jump out the window, then--'

'Hang on,' I said. 'We're going to jump out the window?'

'Yeah. How else are we going to get out the window?' said Dave.

'We could NOT jump out the window,' I said.

'Sorry, you've lost me,' said Dave.

'Why don't we just . . . walk out?'

'That'd just be us walking out of the window instead of jumping out, wouldn't it?' said Dave.

'No, walk out of the whole hospital.'

'How exactly are we going to achieve that?' said Dave. 'It's not like we can go invisible.'

'We can go naked.'