a final pay-per-view

 

Eclectic recollections on the scalp masseuse,

according to the sendoff of her clients. 

 

Said one: she tried to get inside my brain, 

the matters grey and wending. Being not my therapist, 

I wouldn’t let her in, but watched her through my windows.

 

Said another: saved me from a plague of lice,

she did, and taught me how to nip them at the nit—

 

Another: that really makes me sick! And then she’d delve

her ungloved hands into the coif of maybe me an hour later.

 

Riposte: it would give your naked soul more dignity.

 

The first: her job was but to knead our knotted frets away,

not to bake our self-esteem like some soufflé. To each

her own, I tend to say, but I was only there to—

 

Go away! Your sanctimony does not translate well.

 

                        And neither does the way you say ‘her ungloved hands’,

                        as if she were a Harijan. And by your surly squint

                        I gather that you don’t know what I mean.

 

                                                An unheard voice: I know what you mean. And yes,

                                                her lack of filter is a reason why I came.

            

            That sounds unprofessional: families, even friends,

            need filters. A lack of trust builds trust.

 

                                                Says your therapist? 

 

                        Or the molding of your windowsill?

 

                                    Again, you make me sick. I just came to say goodbye to 

                                    someone sometimes creepy, if mostly in my mind.

 

                                                Even now, she’s smiling like that movie Smile.

 

Indeed, the scalp masseuse was pleased

with how this went, having brought

these heads together for a final pay-per-view.

 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2022)

 

Dangling

 

            Seven in the morning, somewhere in the thick of suburban traffic on a gorgeous autumn Friday. Jerry tapped his padded steering wheel at 10 and 2, jamming to the riff within his earbuds. His tie was loose, eager to be fully off by noon, when he would leave the office (prearranged) and pick up his kids at their school for a quick departure to their weekend home. This had become a favorable routine since Jerry and Beth’s divorce a couple years before—not every weekend, to be sure, but enough to calm the question of ‘custody’ in more familiar terms.

            Bikes were racked behind the trunk and snacks were packed and—BAM—the airbag blasted Jerry’s chest and chin before he’d see the backwards letters forward in his rearview mirror.

            Since his was an older car, the engine didn’t automatically shut off. Jerry swore and shook his head, then pulled the parking break to leap outside and surveil the damage. The driver of the ambulance was already doing the same, not having to tear his way through an airbag. His paramedic partner was viewable from deep inside the cab, scrambling to set some apparatus up to attend to this new trauma on whomever was the cargo of this run, lying out of sight.

            Jerry fumbled an apology that wasn’t sought, as the ambulance driver spoke brusquely over him: “undo the lock on this, pronto!”—the ‘this’ being a child’s bike half-buried in the grill. The exposed half was just as enmeshed with the next bike closer to Jerry’s trunk, a melee of training wheels and gripping pedals and festooned handlebars.

            “Don’ know if I can,” Jerry surmised, as the ‘lock’ was actually a set of U-bolts around the spines of these bikes, none of them uncrunched enough to let in a hand.

            The ambulance driver whipped up another plan: “I’ll go in reverse, you go forward—”

            “Um, okay, but—”

            “NOW!”

            

            By this time, other commuters had surrounded this demolition derby, offering advice and their own cars to rush the needy bloke in the back to ER. Someone had found out, however, that he was in cardiac arrest and tied to too many wires—as entrenched as the bicycles, perhaps. Plan B wasn’t working, a lack of horsepower on both sides. Smoke rose in wisps from each radiator and the rubber burns below these hamster wheels going clockwise, counter…. In twenty seconds the ambulance driver waved off the effort and hopped out to drum up a Plan C.

            “We just gotta wait for another crew,” he conceded, looking around for someone to call 9-1-1 before remembering he could use his own radio in the cab. The traffic lanes were log-jammed due to the spectacle and natural congestion this time of day, so it was hard to know if a patrol car was on its way, or if anyone outside the scene was even aware of the snafu. Voices, varied, lifted to whosever’s ears:

            “Patience, friends—another ambulance should come in seven minutes or so.”

            “Patients? Are there more than one inside?”

            “I heard six minutes was the window before someone can sue—”

            “Depends on a lot of things.”

            “Depends on some numbnut not wearing earbuds to block out the world.”

            “He’s taken one of them out, at least.”

            “Listen, the wait is gonna kill the guy! We gotta get him in a backseat or—”

            “And have that vehicle weave through rush hour without a siren? Stupid.”

            “Stupid to just stand here. Like watching the planet die.”

            “Huh?”

 

            Jerry, meanwhile, was sawing at the carbon steel pipes of the carrier with one of the minuscule options of his Swiss army knife. He was distracted, naturally, with the potential playout of this day: he’d be late to work only to leave early; he’d mull whether the car would be drivable and when to have a mechanic ‘retuck’ the airbag; he’d imagine his son and daughter in some awe of the story, due sadness about the status of their bikes; he’d rehearse how to frame this all to Beth, who couldn’t interfere with his weekend rights but could call foul on how they might be used, circumstances such and such.

            “That obviously won’t work,” the re-emerging driver declared, having checked his partner’s efforts to keep their ward alive. “We gotta plow ahead.”

            “Plow ahead?” Jerry echoed.

            “You know the way to Resurrection Hospital?”

            “Yeah, but—”

            “Get back in and keep the car in neutral. I’ll push and your job is to steer with as little resistance as possible.”

            Scratching his head, Jerry demurred: “wouldn’t it be better if I were in drive?”

            “No! Cuz then our braking would also have to be in synch, adding fuel to this fire. The road ahead has cleared out for the time being, but I’ll have the sirens on to part the waves, so to speak—”

            “As long as a driver isn’t wearing earbuds!” someone from the side decided to remind.

            The ambulance driver didn’t wait for Jerry’s endorsement of the idea, replacing any further discussion with his trademark “pronto!”

 

            Resurrection was nominally Catholic, as was Jerry. Perhaps their ER workers prayed through triage routines or had their subtle ways with divine unction and the like. Though Jerry had no knowledge of the afflicted person he was towing, sort of, he tried to imagine his best chances at, well, resurrection. Arguably, the hapless person would survive or succumb regardless of this coupling of vehicles—fate is not a flowchart, per se, and probably prefers to go off those arrowed lines once in a while.

            “I mean,” Jerry mused, concentrating enough on his conservative steering to a weirdly unzipping road, “how do any of us wake up to face or efface plans? Our own and those of anyone whose path we’re bound to cross?...”

            Miraculously, the engine of the ambulance didn’t overheat: autumn extends its form of grace. Sliding into the ER ramp, they stopped. Hoping for due urgency, Jerry jumped to help—

            

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2023)

 

Coils

            My son Ben is studying product design at ČVUT, a campus of eclectic buildings in a pleasant neighborhood of northwest Prague. He has to do some old-school things like free-hand sketches and three-dimensional prototypes and applied calculus, but the ‘T’ in the university’s title compels a ‘tech’ mandate to be ahead of the curve in terms of robotics, A.I., optimal alloys and such. He’s happy with the facilities at ČVUT, if equally focused at his huge drafting desk in his bedroom, which also happens to be the only place in our house that still has a functioning phone jack. That jack no longer supplies a ‘landline’ telephone number yet vitally enables our Wi-Fi router to work.

            Eight years ago this spring, when Ben was away at some scouting weekend, I spent hours in his room trying to telephone a hospital in Columbus, Ohio, six times zones away. My brother Josh was in the last throes of cancer, accustomed to the disease for half his life, battling less to die than have us feel alive for any chance occasion—throwing horseshoes at our folks’ backyard, going to Ravinia to see, say, Steely Dan (the New York band who seemed to love Chicago’s northside), owing all his happiness to a peace that passeth understanding. I had heard from my relatives how his platelets were not keeping up with chemo, and time was running out. Illinois clinics having given up, the Buckeye state was now on the case.

            “Hello?” I bellowed through the landline, putting me on hold and sometimes forcing me to “Press 1 for English, 2 for Esperanto, 3 for Are You Kidding Me,” as well as reasons to release this tendril of a vine no longer viable.

            “Yes,” finally, an unfamiliar voice: “can I help you?”

            “Oh!—thanks—you see, I’m trying to reach—” my brother Josh. You’d know him, Nurse, if only he’d be able to be himself. Listen to your jokes, precisely as he’d let you know how much he’d want every voice to be, well, heard by somebody. His own was sometimes raspy, but always waiting in the queue to let more urgent cogitations through.

 

            Again on hold, I twirled the coils of this twentieth-century phone around each finger, discretely, as if the product was designed that way. Deliberate. The furls of teen-aged hair, before or after primping for a public face. With little else to do, I studied how my son had organized his room: the foosball table sometimes used, scouting badges not quite ready for display, homework as an afterthought, a picture of a grandpa he had never met, posing as an American G.I. in West Germany, prepared (I guess) to storm the commies of the East. His smile, bequeathed to Ben, suggested otherwise.

            “Hello?” my echo through the afternoon. Nurses’ desks are polynesian posts, each integral to a culture we can never know by dropping in, demanding details of some delivery that may be docked within the still-birthed time of night. “My brother Josh—”

            “Lamken?” the fifteenth island ascertained, and gulping too much—

            “Yes! That’s me—him—both of us! Though ‘Vold’ is also who we are—our older brother Jonathan having checked Josh in, and while Josh and I took our step-dad’s last name, Jon retained our—”

            Disconnect. The nurse, I’m sure, was just as apoplexed. I slammed the plastic piece of shit into the windowsill of Ben’s good room and threw myself onto his bed. I knew I’d need to do this all again and cursed the fact that mobile phones would also have to “Press 1 for English” in the ongoing scourge of Moore’s Law. Progress made the process more arcane, regardless of the payment plan.

            For as it happened, Josh could finally receive my under-ocean landline call, through the coils of friction on my end and, I must imagine, his—a phone some nurse would tighten to his ear, tinnitus wracking anything he’d claim to hear. “Dan?”

            “Yes! Josh! You can—”

            “I can’t hear you, Dan. Can you—”

            “Yes! I can! I can hear you—”

            “hear me? Dan, I can’t—sorry, this ringing in my ear is—”

            “That’s okay, Josh,” I gauged the decibels to scream or shriek, aiming for the softness he would naturally receive. A pillow on Ben’s bed would mute the agony or be within the stretch of coil to let me give my head a rest, contingent on the minutes next to beg my brother hear: “I love you, Josh—you do not need to—”

            “I cannot hear a thing. Are you still talking, Dan?”

            “I’m here,” my lungs expelled, “not to talk but to—”

            “What? I cannot hear. I’m sorry, Dan. This damned disease—“

            The only time I heard him curse outside a joke. Still, without a hint of hatred for what seemed such a loathsome thing. “Cancer,” I might have broached, but... nothing worth revisiting. “God,” I’m sure I said, interrupted by my brother’s patient sighs, “bless your—”

            “What? I cannot hear you, Dan. I wish I could but... thanks for—”

            Disconnect. Or more likely, I couldn’t hear myself, for all the coils inside my head, hoping to fast-forward to a glimpse of heaven semi-seen on earth. Columbus problematics, Prague ambivalence, thoughts and prayers to victims plagued beyond the call of vigilante souls.

 

            End o’ story, if it ever was. Ben’s room is still the epicenter for Wi-Fi clarity, if most of what we have to say remains in bubble screens and twitter taps to satisfy the agency to filter thoughts, as ‘filling silence’ is less an issue, technologically.

            I have to think, though, how phonelines worked the psyche more than cyber-updates. When my dad died, 1989, and I had a hundred calls to make, everything went through such coils. No emojis preconsigned, only guilt if I cut a conversation short or reassurance if I didn’t have a hint of what to say—and someone on the other end was listening, anyway.

 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2024)