knew I was not in a natural place, I wasn’t on a frozen lake, I was in a building, but some kind of otherworldly building with nonreal characteristics, and that is when I became convinced that I had snuck in somewhere I was not supposed to be, and that eventually they were going to figure out I was in here and I was going to be in unimaginable trouble. When I tried to think about who “they” were, I realized they were some kind of angels or aliens, beings from another level of reality, and I was not supposed to be in their area, and they would send me away, and in being expelled I would most likely die. I wanted desperately to sneak out while I still could, but I could not move my arms or legs.
When I woke up, there was a nurse near me, and I cried, “I’ve been in a car accident!” I kept telling people that, because I thought if they found out that I had been beaten for being homosexual then they would refuse to treat me. But no one would talk to me. The nurses and doctors kept having hushed conversations with one another, but they never addressed me or told me what was going on. At one point, I was in a huge shopping mall going up thousands of escalators. I bought myself a blazer as yellow as the sun and one of the nurses tsked that I was selfish. And then I remembered the orderly telling me I was not in a real hospital, and I thought: Of course! What kind of real hospital has thousands of escalators and elevators in it and sells yellow blazers!
My aunt Deedee came to visit me and told me she was incredibly disappointed in me. I wanted to tell her that Jason had been the one who did this to me, that it had been him and his friends, but that I had pushed him to it by means of sickening shade, that it was my incredible, ingeniously sharp tongue that had done me in, that my wit was dangerous and second only to Oscar Wilde’s or Dorothy Parker’s. She cried and told me the TV would be watching me and then she left, and I didn’t know what to make of that, and I became terrified of having the TV on because I thought the people inside it could see me through the screen.
Perhaps the most ridiculous part of all this is that Ann Marie kept coming into my room. She kept talking to me about Jesus and how he wanted to do this weaving in my internal organs, and how they were going to take a wire and put it in my veins and then explore my whole body with it, and Jesus himself was going to do this as performance art.
The sounds that I could hear from my hospital bed were extremely loud and I figured out that the nurses were Foley artists practicing making sounds. Crinkle, crinkle, crunch. Footsteps, footsteps, footsteps. They were working as nurses while they got their degrees as Foley artists so they could work in radio. There was going to be this big resurgence in old-timey radio serials because of podcasts. These nurses were so visionary! I rooted for them, but the sounds they made were also extremely annoying.
Anthony came at one point, and I became aware that my aunt Deedee was also in the room, and that shit was tense. “You guys are going to have to communicate via radio,” I kept saying. “So you don’t have to talk, but you can radio from inside your head, and then he can radio from inside of his head, like, Roger that!”
Anthony held my hand, and he kept crying, and he said he was sorry because he couldn’t be with me anymore, that he had been very foolish, but he just couldn’t risk his family and his marriage, he owed it to Hank. “I think that’s really on point,” I said. “You’re gonna get an A.”
I asked Aunt Deedee when she was gonna kick me out, but she said we could talk about it later. I asked her how it felt to be the mother of a murderer, but she said, “You’re not a murderer.” She seemed to have no idea Jason had killed me.
By the time Bunny came, I was feeling a lot better. Aunt Deedee had been gone for maybe days, and the only