Chapter Twenty-Two

Derrick had had enough. After all his threats to leave the caravan, he finally had. He got on a bus and headed home.
It wasn’t the same without Derrick. The convoy began to feel like a funeral procession. Ben’s poetry took on an elegiac quality, the flowers started to droop, and a sad feeling hovered.
One afternoon, they were drooping along a straight stretch of highway, vacant fields on both sides, the sun shining high overhead. Ben read The Mosquito King, his new poem which lamented the extinguishing of a citronella candle.
“The cold wind blew you out,” Ben recited. “A hot plague of insects swarms the naked convoy. Did you fall off the mountain, or did the mountain fall off of you?”
“Sorry to interrupt,” Big David Schweitzer’s voice blasted over the CB radio, “but there’s a motorcycle trying to pass us. Over.”
“A motorcycle gang?” Ben asked. “Over.”
“Negative. Just one motorcycle. Over.”
“You interrupted The Mosquito King for a single motorcycle?”
“It’s got a sidecar.”
Ben spun his head around to see this strange sight. A huge black motorcycle with black low-riding sidecar on its right side passed the desert greenhouse and came up fast on the rose-truck. The driver was dressed all in maroon: maroon leather jacket and leather pants, maroon boots, and maroon motorcycle helmet with a mirrored visor. The sidecar passenger was dressed the same except all in sky blue and his visor wasn’t mirrored, but darkly tinted. They both looked like astronauts.
Larry Shoemaker stuck his hairy, freckled, suntanned left arm (his right arm was pale as an Englishman) out his window and waved them past.
The motorcycle drew parallel with the gazebo truck and slowed to match their speed. The man in sky blue in the sidecar lifted a rifle and pointed it at Ben. Ben tried to drop to the floor, but his seatbelt bolted him down.
With his free hand, the man in the sidecar lifted up a megaphone and spoke into it. Then he noticed that the megaphone wasn’t turned on, awkwardly moved the switch with his gun-toning hand, and spoke again.
“Pull over!”
Elizabeth pried the CB receiver out of Ben’s frozen hand. “This is Grey Goose here,” she said to the convoy. “I don’t want anyone to panic, but we’re being hijacked. I don’t want anyone to try to be a hero. Especially you, Bobby. Just let them have the flowers. The flowers can be replaced. Your lives can’t. Over.”
“That’s a negatory,” Larry Shoemaker’s voice came over the CB. “What if they’re planning to crash the trucks? Didn’t you learn anything from nine eleven?”
“Now Larry,” Elizabeth said. “You can’t just never trust anybody ever again. Over.”
“Trust them? They’re trying to hijack us!”
“Just pull over, Larry! We don’t need another high speed chase!”
Larry slowed and pulled over. The rest of the caravan did the same, stopping on the shoulder of the road.
The motorcycle skid to a stop in front of the gazebo-truck and Sky Blue hopped out of the sidecar. He was short and fat and jiggled around in his tight sky blue leather pants. He dropped the megaphone into the sidecar, and ran, jigglinig and bowlegged, at the driver’s cabin, shaking his rifle at Larry Shoemaker.
“Get down from there!” he yelled in a nasally squeak. “Keep your hands where I can see ‘em!”
Larry opened the door and hopped down with his hands up. He landed hard and put his palms on the ground to stop from toppling over.
“I said keep your hands up!”
Larry put his hands up and glared hatefully at the short man in sky blue who had a rifle trained on him.
The man in maroon dismounted the motorcycle and strolled to the gazebo platform. He was tall and solidly built. He removed a handgun that was stuffed in his red leather pants.
“Get down from there!” he called in a powerful voice.
Ben and Elizabeth hopped down.
Ben saw his reflection in Maroon’s mirrored visor and noticed that his hair was windswept. He always looked good after riding on the gazebo-truck.
“Don’t shoot us,” Elizabeth said. “Just take the flowers. They’re yours.”
Maroon laughed deeply and shook his head.
“You hear that?” he called to Sky Blue. “She thinks we want her flowers.”
Sky Blue squealed and giggled.
Maroon turned back to Elizabeth and Ben caught a glimpse of his wind-swept reflection.
“We don’t want your flowers,” Maroon said.
“I told you so,” Larry Shoemaker muttered.
Maroon pointed at Elizabeth like Uncle Sam. “We want you,” he said. “Your rich husband’ll pa a hefty sum to get you back. Now get in the sidecar.”
“I’ve never been in a sidecar before.”
“Well, there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there.”
“Before I get in the sidecar, would you like to see our flowers?”
“No,” said Maroon.
“Yes,” said Sky Blue.
Maroon turned towards his partner. Sky Blue straightened up and pointed the rifle more diligently at Larry Shoemaker.
“We’re not going to look at the flowers,” Maroon said.
“But I like flowers.”
“I know you like flowers, but we don’t have time for flowers right now. We’re on a tight schedule.”
“It won’t take long,” Elizabeth promised.
Ben knew what Elizabeth was thinking. If she could get them to look at the flowers, they would see the error of their ways, and decide not to kidnap her. They might even join the flower caravan.
“We could just take the flowers,” Sky Blue suggested.
“No.”
“We’re already kidnapping. What does it matter if we take a few flowers?”
“You can buy as many flowers as you want with your share, but we need to get the ransom first.”
“I have a chocolate tree,” Elizabeth said.
“Really?” Sky Blue sounded excited.
“She’s lying,” Maroon said. “Chocolate doesn’t grow on trees.”
“Yes it does,” Elizabeth said.
Maroon pointed his gun at her face and cocked it.
“No. It doesn’t.”
“You’re right,” Elizabeth said. “It’s a root. It grows underground.”
“That’s better. Now get in the sidecar.” He gestured with a flick of his gun-holding hand.
Elizabeth skulked towards the sidecar and shot Ben a meaningful glance that said, “Quick! Use a poem!”
Ben’s workingman poems were useless here, and would just encourage the kidnappers to believe they were entitled to Howard Roseman’s money. Ben had to use one of his sellout poems, one that reinforced the view that the rich had a right to their money. And Ben thought those poems were useless; he had been an anti-sellout-poem racist. He silently apologized to sellout poems for thinking badly of them.
He cleared his throat and recited:
The part of you I love
I can’t see empirically,
but the part of me in love
knows instinctively;
your particle of love
is a Higgs Boson to me.
A silence hung in the air for a few moments. The wind creaked by.
Maroon cocked his gun again.
“What was that?” he asked. “That think you just said.”
“A poem.”
“Yeah? Well, it sucks.”
Ben nodded. “That’s what I thought, but the truth is, every poem has its place and its purpose. Just like every person does. Even a kidnapper like you.”
“Every poem may have its place, but this is not the place. Neither the time nor the place for poetry.”
“I don’t just read poems in the ‘appropriate’ places where they want poems to be read. I’m a workingman’s poet. I’m bringing poetry to the people. I bring poetry everywhere.”
“So you’re one of those poets who scribble on the walls of men’s rooms?”
“I might have to. You’re stealing my patron.”
“You’ll get her back when the professor pays the ransom.”
“Let’s hear another,” Sky Blue said.
“No,” said Maroon.
“Why not?” Sky Blue whined.
“We don’t have time to listen to his poem.”
“But I like poems.”
“We’re on a tight schedule. Look, after we get the money, you can sit around on a bed covered in rose petals, and read poetry about lovely lily pads all day long if you want to. But right now we have to go. We don’t have time for this.”
“Let’s take him with us.”
“No. We’re not kidnapping the poet.”
“Why not?”
“Because no one’s gonna pay ransom for a poet.”
“Not for ransom. He could read us poetry.”
“No.”
“I liked his higgsy bo jean poem.”
“Just stop, will you?! I can feel a fit coming on! You’re gonna give me a seizure.”
One of the trucks in the caravan blared its horn, encouraging them to hurry up. Ben didn’t know which truck it was, but thought it might be David Schweitzer in the daffodil truck.
“See!” Maroon said. “Even they want us to get going!”
Sky Blue skulked over to the sidecar and got in with Elizabeth. Maroon mounted the motorcycle and started to rev it up.
“You better not go to the police!” he called. “If you ever want to see her again!”
“You’d better follow the Geneva Convention,” Ben said.
“What?”
“It covers the treatment of prisoners…”
“I know what it is,” Maroon said. “And it’s only for wars. It doesn’t cover kidnappings.”
Ben scoffed. “That’s what they always say: It doesn’t apply here, and then they can just do whatever they want, with no respect for human rights. You gonna tell me Elizabeth’s an unlawful combatant?”
“We’re not gonna torture her.”
“There’s more to the Geneva Convention than not torturing her. She has rights: tobacco rations and access to musical instruments.”
“I don’t smoke,” Elizabeth said.
“Do you play a musical instrument?” Sky Blue asked.
“No, but I’m willing to learn.”
“I can teach you the harmonica,” Sky Blue said excitedly.
“You wanna be quiet?!” Maroon screamed at his partner. “Quit giving them clues!”
“I’m not giving clues.”
“They know you play the harmonica. Keep talkin’ and they’ll figure out who you are!”
“Aren’t you at least going to give her a helmet?” Ben asked.
“Does the Geneva Convention give her one?” Maroon asked mockingly.
“It was written before helmet safety laws,” Ben admitted.
“Well, there you go,” Maroon said. “It’s out of date.” He looked at Elizabeth. “I’m sorry ma’am. I’d give you mine. I don’t mean to be ungentlemanly, but if I took off my helmet, you’d see my face, and then I’d have to kill you.”
Elizabeth nodded understandingly.
The horn blared again from back in the caravan.
“All right, all right,” Maroon shouted. “We’re going!”
He revved up the engine and they started to speed away.
“Don’t stop!” Elizabeth called over her shoulder. “Keep showing the flowers! Don’t let it end! It will go on without me!”
***
י''ב בתשרי תשס''ח
ירושלים
September 24, 2007
Jerusalem

Chapter Twenty-One

The party was breaking up. Elizabeth accompanied her husband in the ambulance, the valets brought the guests their cars, and Derrick seemed to have disappeared.
Ben walked down the street and over to the bus stop. He waited about half an hour until the bus came. On the bus, he saw his reflection in the glass and realized he had a couple spots of blood on his face and that his white shirt had a red blood stripe across it like a sash. The other passengers avoided looking at Ben and tried not to notice the obvious bloodstains on his shirt.
He got off the bus in his neighborhood and walked quickly towards his apartment. When people saw him approaching, they walked to the other side of the street.
A police car slowed down and stopped next to him. The officer in the passenger’s seat shined a flashlight on Ben, examined his bloody shirt, and then shined the light on his face, causing Ben to shield his eyes.
“Are you hurt?” the officer asked.
“It’s not my blood,” Ben replied.
“Well, be careful,” the officer said. He turned off the flashlight and they drove away.
Ben walked into the lobby of his building and waited for the elevator. When the elevator door finally opened, Tyrone came out, carrying a toilet brush.
He looked at Ben and was silent.
“It’s not my blood,” Ben explained.
Tyrone grinned and waved his toilet brush dismissively.
“Don’t have to explain to me. None of my bidness how you got all bloody.” Tyrone giggled and grinned, his white teeth flashing. “Bloody. Oh BLOODY hell! Zat really a swear word over there in Britain? Bloody!”
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“Hey Ben. You do me a favor? Teach me some other swear words? In British.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Come on. Go ahead. Just us boys here.”
“I’m really tired.”
“Just a couple. The nastiest ones you know.”
Ben didn’t know any British swear words. Just bloody. But everyone knew that one. He tried to think of some filthy Briticisms, but couldn’t. He would have to make them up. Well, he was a poet. It was his job, sort of. He was more of a word organizer than a word inventor. Now he would have to invent words.
British. Ben had to think British. He thought British and the first thing that popped into his mind was croquet.
“Wicket,” Ben said.
“Wicket,” Tyrone repeated, savoring the feel of the word on his mouth. “What is a wicket?”
Ben thought that a wicket was that thing you hit the ball through in croquet. He said it was something else and Tyrone howled with glee.
“Tell me mo’!”
What proceeded was the filthiest conversation Ben had ever had in his life. He coined several new words and phrases, including: spulgers, vulvicy, minding the gap, squidge, thuffers, and javving. He also invented several lewd acts of depravity which included crumpeting (it didn’t involve pastries,) Hufflepuffing (had nothing whatsoever to do with the dorm in Harry Potter) and fox-hunting (its only relation to actual fox-hunting was that many in Britain wanted it banned.)
When he finally managed to shake Tyrone, and get up to his room, he felt that he had more than just blood to wash off.
***
The next morning, Ben got an earlier bus and arrived forty-five minutes early at the garden. He went around quietly, reading My Name is Higgs Boson to the flowers.
He sat on a wooden stool in the tropical greenhouse, reading to the chocolate tree when the door squeaked open, and Elizabeth walked in.
Ben closed his notebook so she wouldn’t see the bloodstains on the page.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said, standing up.
“I wanted to apologize,” she said. “I’m sorry that you weren’t able to perform your poem for us last night.”
“Oh, that’s okay.”
She seemed to be waiting for him to say something.
“I’m sorry I stabbed your husband in the windpipe last night,” Ben said.
“You didn’t stab him in the windpipe. You stabbed him in the voice-box.”
“Oh.”
“The doctor says he’ll heal, his voice will come back. Voice-boxes are very resilient.”
“That’s good.”
“Howard wants to speak to you.”
“Okay.”
“But he can’t. You stabbed him in the voice-box.”
“So how do I…”
“He has to communicate with a computer.”
“He has one of those talking computers, like Stephen Hawking?”
“No. He types what he wants to say, and you read it off the screen.”
They walked out of the greenhouse and towards the house together. There was a nice breeze outside.
“I should warn you,” Elizabeth said, “The painkillers have made him very emotional.”
“Okay.”
“So he’s using a lot of emoticons.”
They walked into the house, through the kitchen, and down a narrow hallway to professor Roseman’s study. Elizabeth rapped lightly on the wooden door. There was no answer. She gently slid open the door.
“Howard?”
They entered the room. Sunlight streamed through a circular window, casting a hazy, yellow light on the bookshelves stuffed with old books that lined every wall. The room smelled of mothballs and the old books.
Howard Roseman sat on a worn leather chair and tapped his fingers gently against the arm rest. A thick white bandage covered his throat. He picked up his laptop from a low glass coffee-table and waved Ben over, indicating a wooden rocking-chair for Ben to sit on. Ben sat in the rocking-chair, but didn’t rock; he wanted to stay alert, in case Roseman attacked him again.
There were no sharp objects in view, but there were some dangerous looking paperweights on the coffee table. Dangerous and beautiful: tropical fish frozen in lumps of smooth glass.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Elizabeth said and closed the door softly behind her.
“How are you?” Ben asked.
Howard Roseman punched at the keyboard with his index finger. He hit just two keys and turned the monitor towards Ben. It was an emoticon:
;(
A frown. But not a normal frown. Professor Roseman used a semicolon instead of a regular colon for the eyes. The frowning face winked at Ben.
What did the wink mean? Ben had dropped out of college before they could teach him how to use semicolons. He just knew it was the punctuation of the bourgeoisie, winking at each other, enjoying the knowledge that they would never have to do any real work; that they could just coast along on the sweat of the workingman. Ben preferred simple periods and honest commas. When he could, he avoided punctuation altogether.
Ben looked at Roseman, frowned, and winked. Roseman glared back at him, audibly grinding his teeth. He turned the laptop, pounded the keyboard with his thumb.
Maybe Ben was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t a wink. It was one of those complex old-man emotions. Possibly nostalgia. And Professor Roseman thought that Ben was mocking his nostalgia.
The professor turned the screen back, the font size was only four-point and Ben couldn’t read it.
“I can’t see it,” he said. “It’s too small.”
The professor waved him closer to the screen.
“No.” Ben shook his head. “I’m not falling for that one.”
Roseman raised his hands innocently, but Ben wasn’t fooled. The professor just wanted Ben to lean closer so he could slam the laptop shut on his face and then hit him on the top of the head with a tropical fish paperweight.
“Enlarge it,” Ben said.
Roseman shrugged and squeezed his eyebrows together. He was an old man and didn’t understand all these newfangled computers. But Ben wasn’t fooled.
“You shrunk it. If you know how to shrink it, you know how to enlarge it.”
Roseman ground his teeth and turned the laptop back towards him. He stabbed angrily at the keys. When he turned the screen back towards Ben, the font was one-hundred-point. It said: GET OUT!!!
***
“Poor Howard,” Elizabeth said. “I wish there was some way to cheer him up. But he doesn’t like anything.”
Ben and Elizabeth sat in the gazebo, sipping ice tea. Birds sang to each other in the trees and the sprinklers sprayed the soil. It was like this for a while, until finally Elizabeth broke the silence.
“How was the party,” she asked. “I mean, aside from the choking incident. How do you think it went?”
“Honestly?”
Ben took a swig of iced tea and cleared his throat.
“There were two many semicolons,” he said.
Elizabeth squinted up her forehead and looked perplexed.
“Everyone was winking at each other,” Ben explained. “It was a party for rich people. How come only rich people can come to the garden? Why don’t you let the downtrodden in?”
“I wanted to inspire my friends with the beauty of flowers.”
“Poor people like flowers too,” Ben said.
“I suppose you’re right. I suppose I could have a garden party for them.”
Elizabeth stood up and started to pace around the gazebo. She did this whenever she got inspiration. Ben knew what it felt like. He sometimes had to pace when the idea for a new poem came to him. It was like every neuron in the body was set off. Finally, Elizabeth stopped pacing, walked up to the glass table, and leaned over it towards Ben.
“I have a great idea,” she said. “Howard’s birthday is in a couple weeks. We’ll have a surprise party for him.”
Ben nodded. It was the worst idea he had ever heard.
“It’ll be here, in the garden. This time, everything will be perfect. We’ll invite all your downtrodden friends. And this time, you’ll get to read your poem for sure.”
“Great idea,” Ben said.
“You’ll bring the downtrodden people?”
Ben nodded, but realized that he didn’t really know many actual downtrodden people. Despite being their poet, he hadn’t managed to meet many of them. He supposed he could ask Tyrone to bring some friends. Tyrone knew lots of downtrodden people.
He wondered how Professor Howard Roseman would react when Tyrone and his friends jumped out from behind the bushes and yelled, “Surprise!”
Probably surprised; the professor didn’t even know his birthday was coming up.
Ben wondered what the emoticon for surprise looked like.
***
ד בתשרי תשס''ח
ירושלים
September 16, 2007
Jerusalem

Chapter Twenty

Derrick’s arms fluttered wildly as he fell off the side of the mountain.
“Man overboard,” Elizabeth called out on the CB radio. “We’re pulling over. Over.”
Ten-fours rang out over the CB from the drivers. Larry Shoemaker slowed and pulled the shattered gazebo-truck over to the shoulder of the road. Behind him the entire convoy also pulled over, including Rattlesnake in the rose-truck.
Apparently knocking Derrick off the mountain didn’t satisfy Rattlesnake’s bloodlust. Or maybe he had stopped to confirm the kill.
Rattlesnake opened the carriage door and dropped down to the street. He kept his eyes on the ground and walked towards the gazebo truck. Fingering the splintered wood hanging from the back of the gazebo, he kept his eyes to the ground.
“I’m sorry,” he said sheepishly. “I guess I lost my cool.”
“You’ll lose more than that!” screamed Larry Shoemaker. He was running at Rattlesnake, brandishing a tire iron, and swinging it wildly.
A couple of the other drivers stopped Larry before he could hit Rattlesnake and one of them relieved him of the tire iron.
“You’re sorry?” said David Schweitzer, who drove the daffodil truck. “You killed Derrick and all you can say is you’re sorry?”
Rattlesnake shrugged. “I have trouble managing my anger.”
“So do I!” screamed Larry Shoemaker, grabbing the tire iron back and running at Rattlesnake.
“Larry Shoemaker! NO!!!” screamed Elizabeth.
Several of the other drivers tackled Larry Shoemaker to the ground and held him there.
“I know I messed up,” Rattlesnake said. “But if you could just give me one more chance.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “This was your second chance. I’m sorry, but I can’t have drivers doing this. You’ll have to find a new job.”
Ben climbed down the side of the ruined gazebo, crawled over sharp rocks to the edge of the cliff and peered down, hoping to see that Derrick had landed safely on a ledge below. Instead he saw a sheer drop of about eight or nine stories. At the bottom was a tranquil blue lake about the size of a football field. At its center, the smashed gazebo roof was floating lazily. At the thirty yard line (or where the thirty yard line would be) Derrick was dog-paddling frantically. It was a long way down and Ben could barely hear Derrick’s splashing and yelping.
“He’s alive!” Ben called back to the caravan. “He survived the fall!”
Down Syndrome Bobby started clapping his hands. Everyone else didn’t want to seem undelighted with Derrick’s survival, so they also clapped. There was a roaring standing ovation.
“There, you see,” Rattlesnake said, as the applause died down. “I didn’t kill him. Everything’s fine.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “What you did was wrong,” she said. “You owe Derrick an apology.”
Rattlesnake nodded.
“A heartfelt apology,” Elizabeth added.
Rattlesnake stopped nodding and his eyes narrowed.
“An apology,” Elizabeth corrected herself.
Everyone was silent. They didn’t want to antagonize Rattlesnake. Rattlesnake seemed pretty calm and rational now. Well, not rational, but certainly calm. And they needed to keep him calm.
Ben figured it was best for him to stay quiet also. Poetry couldn’t help here. His workingman poetry would just get Rattlesnake thinking about how Elizabeth exploited him. The main thing was to keep Rattlesnake calm until they could get him to the authorities. Ben hoped that was Elizabeth’s intention and that she didn’t intend to give Rattlesnake a third chance, but with Elizabeth, it was hard to tell.
Ben looked back down to the tranquil blue lake. Derrick had stopped splashing and was floating face-down. Oh right, Ben suddenly remembered. Derrick didn’t’ know how to swim. His parents had never sent him to swimming classes, afraid that swimming pools were full of diseases. Derrick had been planning to learn, but wanted to lose a little weight before he went to the swimming pool.
“He’s drowning!” Ben shouted. “He can’t swim!”
There were groans all around. They had clapped for nothing.
“If he drowns, that doesn’t count as me killing him,” Rattlesnake said.
Ben felt like a lifeguard, looking down from a nine story lifeguard tower. He had no experience as a lifeguard, but he could figure it out as he went along. He had seen enough episodes of Baywatch, and he remembered how the lifeguards acted at the public pools, blowing their whistles when children splashed too much. Ben didn’t have a whistle, and even if he did it wouldn’t do any good, unless a dolphin heard the whistle and came to rescue Derrick. But this was a freshwater lake, and dolphins only lived in the sea.
Ben backed up, ran towards the ledge and leapt off, aiming at the patch of water between Derrick’s body and the gazebo roof. He wasn’t sure if he should shout Banzai or Geronimo as he leapt, so what came out of his mouth was a mixture.
“BANZARAMO!!!”
Cold air whooshed past him. He didn’t want to belly-flop or land on his back. Or his groin for that matter. He put his hands together over his head in diving position, but somehow couldn’t turn his body; he was falling feet first. The clear blue water came at him fast. Ben took a deep breath, covered his crotch with his hands, and hit the water hard. The water crushed him from all sides, shot up his nostrils, and tasted like cigarettes stuffed in his sinuses.
Ben looked up through the clear water and saw Derrick staring down, his eyes open, and the sunlight reflecting off the water above him. Ben kicked with his legs and swam up towards Derrick.
Ben flipped Derrick over so he was floating on his back and his head was above water. Derrick wasn’t breathing, just staring blankly at the sky. Maybe a fish was lodged in his throat. Ben opened Derrick’s mouth and looked in there like the bartender had done to Howard Roseman. It was clear. No fish, just Derrick’s pink tonsils.
Ben couldn’t perform CPR in the middle of a lake. If he pressed on Derrick’s chest, it would just push him underwater; he needed Derrick on solid ground. He wrapped one arm around Derrick’s chest, paddled with the other, and kicked their way towards the pebbly bank against the mountain wall, where several lonely trees grew.
When they got to shallow water, Ben was able to walk through it and drag Derrick along the surface. He dropped Derrick on the muddy shore, and knelt down over him. Derrick’s eyes were still wide open, staring vacantly up at the sky, and his skin was pale white.
Ben put his hands, one on top of the other, on Derrick’s chest and then stopped. Was he supposed to press on the heart or the lungs? He wasn’t sure. He just knew that if he succeeded, Derrick would regain consciousness and spit up water. That’s how it always was in the movies when someone lost consciousness from drowning and someone did CPR.
It didn’t really matter if he wanted to press on the heart or the lungs, since he wasn’t sure exactly where the organs were. He just knew that heart and lungs were under the rib cage; if he pressed the rib cage, he would hit something. Ben started pumping on Derrick’s chest.
“One! Two! Three! Four! Five! CLEAR!!!”
It was the best he could do without a defibrillator.
He placed two fingers on Derrick’s neck to check for a pulse and realized that he probably should have checked for a pulse before he started CPR. Derrick’s heart was beating, slowly and steadily.
But he wasn’t breathing. Blue splotches sprouted up on Derrick’s pale face. Now Ben would have to do the other part of CPR. The more unpleasant part.
He didn’t want to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He didn’t know exactly how it was done, except what he saw on TV, and also, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was really gay. He was already a poet and worked in a traveling flower show. That was two strikes against him right there. If he performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Derrick, he would strike out and have to walk back to the dugout, his head hung down and his teammates smirking, shaking their heads, spitting chewing tobacco on the ground, and muttering “homo.”
But Derrick’s life was at stake and there was no choice; he had to do it. He just wished that Derrick had been more assiduous in his flossing.
Ben took a deep breath. Fortunately, this time he could take a deep breath to prepare him for what he was going to do. This wasn’t like sucking neck skin from a pen. He was blowing in, not sucking out, and a deep breath was the proper preparation. The calming oxygen swam through his brain, girding up his courage.
Ben squeezed Derrick’s nostrils shut with his left hand and yellow mucus bubbled out of Derrick’s nose. Ben knew he had to form a tight seal on all oxygen pathways. He needed to cover Derrick’s entire mouth, so he opened his mouth wide like a goldfish, wrapped his lips around Derrick’s, and blew, inflating Derrick’s chest cavity. Derrick coughed up water into Ben’s mouth. It tasted terrible, like soda water flavored with vomit. Ben started to gag as Derrick coughed up water onto the pebbly shore and sucked in deep gasping breaths.
Ben fell backwards down into the mud, trying spit out the lung water. His stomach lurched and contracted violently; he puked up the mostly-digested remains of his trucker’s lunch.
The two of them lay there on the pebbly shore, both gasping for breath.
“Why were you kissing me?” Derrick asked.
“It’s not kissing. It’s CPR.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“You weren’t breathing. I think you might have been clinically dead.”
Derrick sat up and rubbed his eyes. “I think I had a near-death experience,” he said. “I saw a bright light.”
“Well, you’re eyes were open,” Ben said, trying to spit up the vomitty remains from the back of his throat. “That might have been the sun you saw.”
“You just left my eyes open? Why didn’t you shut them?”
“I didn’t want to give up on you. That’s what they do when there’s no hope of reviving the victim. The doctor closes your eyes. Then he looks at his watch and announces the time of death.”
“Now I’m going to be blind from staring directly into the sun.” Derrick squeezed his eyes shut. “I can still see the light. It’s burned into my cornea. It’ll keep me up nights and I’ll have insomnia.”
“At least you’re still alive,” Ben said. “Can’t you think of anything positive to say?”
Derrick wrung the water out of his hair and considered this. “At least you didn’t jam a pen in my eye,” he said.
Ben spat into the lake. “There was no time to shut your eyes,” he said. “I had to hurry with the CPR. If I stopped to close your eyes, you could have gotten brain damage from lack of oxygen.”
“I probably did get brain damage,” Derrick said. “Now I’m retarded.”
“Don’t say retarded.”
“Why not?”
“It’s offensive.”
“I’m allowed to say it. I’m one of them now. You’re allowed to say it about your own people.”
***
כ''ד באלול תשס''ז
ירושלים
September 7, 2007
Jerusalem