Lopped

Until today, Faye never noticed how her name became truncated on hospital bracelets, the last characters of her first name—her paper name—lopped off for barcodes and snap-closure notching. Until today, Faye also never gave much thought to redundant acronym syndrome and tautologies. But post-op, deliriously pleased as if awoken from the best nap of her life, Faye laughed and laughed, consumed by names and words, their excess tails and lopped off ends. She counted tautologies she could think of, in languages she knew and didn’t.

Dam dam. River river. Mountain mountain.

“Oh god, and the acronyms, Darrell! Everyone asks me about working in the ICU Unit and you know how that drives me crazy! And I never say it, I never do!” She said this to her husband at her bedside, holding her hand.

“That’s right,” he said, rubbing the back of her hand. “You seem good, baby. I’m glad you’re good.”

“Gobi Desert. Sahara Desert. Desert Desert…”

“It’s just funny, no?” Faye said this to him, and then to no one in particular as nurses foreign to her—each one somehow younger and more supple than the last—checked her vitals or passed by. Her body was laid up in a patient bed, but her rushing mind was elsewhere, altered by the lingering Exparel and Gabapentin flowing through her veins.

“ATM Machine. And PIN Number! RSVP Please?!”

Darrell told her he’d leave now; no longer necessary here himself. He was off to spare the babysitter from being called in. Faye kept listing.

“ATM Mach—dammit, I said that already!”

She was still laughing when he leaned over to kiss her forehead goodbye. “You’re in good hands and spirits.” Faye nodded, his soft lips pressed against her skin.

“If you need me, I’ll be here, me and all the other redundancies!” She stage-whispered this as he held the back of her head, hovering where he’d kissed her brow, smelling of their commingled bodywashes and detergents, of his salty pheromones. As he uprighted himself, something shifted inside Faye, and rather than saying, “Ow,” she made an abrupt thumbs-up to Darrell. Once he departed, she exhaled through the surge of incoming pain, lowering her dumb hand and whisper-whispering to herself, “The other redundancies and me.”

She thought of the worst yet—keep me abreast of my breasts, Doc—and tensed at a shooting, worsening pain inside of her.

***

Darrell was the one this morning who forgot the duffel Faye packed for her hospital stay—a bag that, once zipped taut on her bedroom floor, resembled sausage casing rammed fat and bulging with her creature comforts: fluffy pillow; eyeglasses; moisturizer; toothbrush, toothpaste, floss; phone charger; soft headband; deodorant. Tweezers. Ambitiously, an uncracked hardback a friend sent her, not to mention clean sweats and underwear, the unmentionables. Whomever deposited it in the car’s trunk this morning, Darrell should’ve carried it in for her, of that she was sure.

Yet Faye didn’t remember her forgotten bag until well after the redundancy jokes tired and her meds wore off; until long after Darrell drove away from her—bandaged, tubed, bedridden—back homeward, to fetch their children from school, her bulbous bag in tow.

The last time she’d been in a hospital bed was delivering them years ago, her fetching little offspring. Bedridden then too, she sweat through the scratchy blue gown, and despised her hair’s static cling; she’d longed for Chapstick as if parched and stranded in the actual Sahara or Gobi or some other desert desert. But back then, Faye’d been so elated, really, to hold her brand new babies. She didn’t mind her own discomforts really. Her body contracted in a pain that, somehow, hurt so good when they latched on, yanking at her tenderest parts, clamping taut but so painfully right. Birthing them only moments earlier had been one thing—grotesque, loud, animalistic—but feeding, cradling, hearing them make baby sounds from their baby mouths, now that was what rendered Faye a real woman woman. Making her babies and their milk, all her organs and hormones and insides working in harmony, why, that right there was it. What changed her. What made her feel natural, bountiful, complete. Necessary.

But with Faye’s own patients over in the ICU, every time she walked into their room and smelled their soupy odor, or clocked the scraggly cracks on their ashy skin, their blistery patches of dead skin on chapped lips, she remembered her discomforts. Though it was awkward asking patients if they wanted a toothbrush or some lip balm, not wanting to offend them, for her actively nurturing them and being of service mattered. Faye knew if she ever returned to be confined to a hospital bed, forced to recover as the passive participant of some man-made bodily trauma, she’d be better prepared, make herself more comfortable.

So here today, recovering as she was, Faye felt foolish. First, when she couldn’t find the bag in sight. Where was the goddamn bag; oh, this was so typical of her, wasn’t it? Then she felt anxious, worrying it had been lost or misplaced, who the fuck knows, really? And lastly, Faye felt, perhaps most honestly, resentful. Her chest and insides throbbed constantly now, and her leaking fluids weren’t milk. She thought about reaching for her phone on the hospital tray, about calling her husband to somehow make it right.

“Darrell?” She’d say, her phone itself hemorrhaging without its power cord packed inside her meaty bag of essentials.

“How you doing babe, the kids miss you!” he’d go, them crashing and clamoring in the background, making the big noises of small people.

“My bag,” she’d say.

“What?” he’d ask her, louder now.

“My bag? I don’t know where you put… where it is?”

He’d tell her he doesn’t remember, wait hang on, oh shit, yeah shit it’s still in the trunk sorry! He’d say he can drive back out if she needs it now, did she? He could get it to her, somehow, even though the kids weren’t allowed in and up to see her, but he could call the babysitter over if she thought that was a good idea, or maybe ask a coworker to help? And Faye’d say, “Nevermind,” and he really would, a man masterful at dropping things.

“Sorry, babe. But how you feeling?” He’d ask her. She’d hear her children in the background. And though they were miles away and her breasts were gone now, she’d feel that tugging pain in her chest; echoes of hormonal aching, throbbing fullness when they were unbearably close once upon a time. And it all began here, in one of these beds, but it was they who were thirsty, who latched, relieving her. Faye knew she wasn’t a soldier with phantom limb pain, not exactly. But she was something else. Perhaps a barren sandscape herself now; a mistranslated desert, a disfigured hourglass.

“I just,” she’d end the conversation at its lost beginning again, her tongue thick and dry, “I just wanted my Chapstick is all. It’s fine. Stay home and do regular bedtime routines tonight, I’ll be alright.” She thought of RAS Syndrome—No! Just RAS—again; but of different maternal echos these days, of telling her kids the same things over and over: to “chew their food and eat their dinner,” or to “take a bath and wash their bodies,” or to “go to bed and go to sleep.” Those were tautologies, Faye knew, but they weren’t funny anymore; somehow, they just seemed sad and tired now. Overworked, over-uttered words; a different redundancy.

“I’ll have one of the nurses get me Chapstick, it’s fine, Dar,” she’d say, and knowing as much, she wouldn’t make the call at all, just let it play out in her mind. Instead, she’d think about asking the doctor if—no, when—she could have her breasts back, after they’d be run through pathology. Perhaps her breasts were in a formalin-filled vessel to be clinically, ritualistically handled, like some mommy mummy’s canopic jar. She left her phone resting dormant on the hospital tray, beside her water, which had moments earlier been filled with sonic ice and was becoming plain water again.

Faye rotated her hospital bracelet, tracing her thumb over her given name, or at least, the first half of it printed.

When Faye’s parents fled the war and migrated here decades ago, none of Faye’s neighbors and classmates could pronounce, or spell, or remember her name correctly. So she became known, from five until now, simply as Faye. Her older, longer paper name was rendered redundant—something inconvenient, useless, difficult—but she carried it inside her still, like a hefty tumor pressed against her intestines, or some calcified crystal clinging to her bones. It was a name she didn’t see in her reflection, or hear when called within earshot, but only ever encountered— sometimes startled by—in ink when, say, confronted by sentinel government figures, or asking banks for some permission. And she saw it outside of her at times like today, when checked into the hospital and made to wear Tyvek jewelry on her body, repeating who she was. Partially, at least.

***

There was a patient years ago in the ICU named Dolores who didn’t wear a hospital bracelet. A wiry, silver-haired woman who lived in a cottage by the water, who let gardening take up the majority of her adult life. When Dolores first bought the cottage, it had been surrounded by a patch of flat grass, and a little gate separating her property from the sea. But Dolores told Faye she’d ripped it all out with her bare hands—"that lame-ass grass was not made for that plot of land!” she’d said—creating a wild meadow seed-by-seed instead, with mounds of greenery and touchable, smellable life.

“You should’ve seen my old garden back in California,” Dolores would tell Faye during rounds. “I’d plant cacti without gloves back there, just like my Aunt Ruth did.” Dolores would go on to tell Faye how when she moved here, the winter rendered Dolores’s cacti maladapted, or irrelevant, of course. So Dolores pivoted, planting tulips and camellias, waiting—sometimes impatiently—for sprouting proof of life; for her babies to blossom through the snowy mass.

“I wish we’d met in other circumstances, Dolores,” Faye told her, once while checking the bandaged stump on Dolores’s wrist where her frostbitten hand had been, applying lotion as needed to Dolores’s sponge-bathed skin.

“I’ll write to you when I get out of here, and we can meet again!” Dolores said. Faye fought the urge to give Dolores a goodbye thumbs-up, instead saying, “You know where to find me.”

One day, Faye received a piece of unusual mail at work, a chicken-scratch, hand-addressed envelope with an enormous Elvis Presley stamp in its corner. Inside was a picture of tulips bursting through the snow, like a little multicolored Lite-Brite on white. “Mother Nature doesn’t quit, and neither will I!” the sender’d messily written on the back, signing off as “D.” Faye push-pinned the photo into the cushioned ponywall of her cube, alongside photos of her family. Both the family she created here with Darrell, and the family who created her, no longer.

***

She wanted them back. She pressed the call button, and waited for a nurse, counting how many seconds it took here in this wing for help to arrive, answering a patient’s call.

One.

Two…

Five.

Six.

Faye prided herself on trying to get to a patient’s call in under six seconds, especially the first time they did so.

Eleven…

Faye stopped counting after twenty seconds. “Oh her?” She imagined them saying at the nurses’ station, “She’s a nurse here too, she’s fine.”

***

When someone finally came in and stopped the call button, Faye thought she seemed familiar, and scanned the body for identification, the name tag with photo. Laney. Faye didn’t know her. The ID was clipped on Laney’s bony hips, shadowed beneath a rounded bosom Faye suspected was part silicon, part flesh, like hers would be. Scrubs were forgiving of bodily truths, but telling of details those who wore them knew too well, of projections Faye ruminated over.

“Laney, hi. When can I speak to the doctor?” Faye asked, using her hands to push herself further upright in her bed, everything around her ribs hot, aching, raw. Laney asked what Faye needed, if there was anything she could do for her; she wasn’t sure where the doctor was, but—

“Could you get him for me, please?” Faye asked. “When you do know where he is. I’m not sure how often your patients ask this but, I want to keep everything that was removed from my body when it’s done at pathology. I, I was distracted this morning and forgot to mention that to him then,” Faye said. Laney looked around the room, then back at Faye, scratching her scarless collarbone with a manicured hand.

“Okay, I can ask that. Do you need anything else?”

The question almost made everything turn funny again to Faye, but the light in the room had lowered, and hit different now.

“Just that. My physical property, if you will,” Faye said. Her jokes weren’t landing, not even the inside ones. So she added, “And a Chapstick, maybe? That’s really all I want, Laney. A Chapstick, please.”

Laney beamed at her, her own mouth wide and toothy, glossy-lipped. “Yes! Chapstick is essential, I’ve got you.” She clicked her tongue and pivoted in her Hokas back out into the hallway.

Faye thanked Laney before she was out of earshot. Once alone again, she wondered how it would feel to hold her insides outside herself this time; if she’d open the lid and try to touch them. If she’d be bolder still and fish them out of the liquid, cupping and cradling them, feeling what temperature and weight they’d be in isolation, the gravity of her chest in her hands, smelling of formaldehyde, liquid dripping down her knuckles. She wondered how long it would take for her to hear back from the doctor, if he’d come with the paperwork first, jars second, or neither: if he’d brush her off and not take her seriously at all. She wondered if her request might go forgotten and discarded, like how the -ahtemahs of her paper name went missing, lost, forgotten.

Lopped.

Until today, Faye had never really thought about it much before. She reached for her melted water and sat alone with her thoughts, recovering in her hospital bed and calling no one.