I mention the above in the context of my waking, or my first memory of waking, post-surgery with my metal Harrington rods bone-spackled into place. Thanks to morphine and whatever other drugs rowing merrily down my bloodstream, I couldn’t open my eyes when I returned to myself. To be blunt and to the point: man, my back fucking hurt like nothing else I’d felt before. The pain dove deep, agony units measured in fathoms and Mariana trenches. Something must’ve gone wrong; a rod or two must’ve unmoored and now skewered and Hellraisered my rent flesh. Holy shit, was my entire week in the hospital going to be like this? No one properly warned me. Had I known, I would’ve stuck it out with my question-mark existence.

Verbing a Clive Barker movie. You are a monster.

Voices of nurses and doctors ricocheted around my amorphous room, though I knew I was the amorphous one and not the room, and then the owners of the voices moved me, changed my bed position, turned me onto a side, yet with my eyes still closed, I couldn’t tell which side I was on or facing, but there was a fire, a conflagration splitting my skin and muscles apart. I whimpered and, in my head, I asked them not to move me or touch me, and they were sorry, but I had to turn and rotate and be split apart at my new seams again and again. Eventually I’d pass out, but when I would wake again, the pain was there, tapping an impatient foot. The sole comfort was passing time. And based on the number of times I thought I’d been asleep and then awake, I tabulated multiple days had passed since my Monday-morning surgery. I hoped I was sleeping through the worst of it and when I next opened my eyes it would be Friday, or Thursday, or Wednesday evening at the very least.

When the stones of my eyelids finally rolled away, I was in a private room and the ceiling seemed especially high from the valley floor of my bed. The walls were a light sky-blue. Mom was seated next to my bed and Dad stood by the tall windows (and now, in this memory, they are both young and beautiful in the blue room). I asked them what day and time it was.

A resurrection riff?

It was Tuesday morning, a little after 9 A.M. I’d only been out of surgery for twelve hours. A one-thousand-page novel titled Despair (not the Nabokov novel) might come close to capturing my domitable spirit that sunny Tuesday morn in June.

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