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.'
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