The Reason You're Alive
Matthew Quick
1.
The doctors were giving me the mushroom treatment—keeping me in the dark and feeding me bullshit.
I didn’t call them on the subterfuge because I just wanted out of the hospital ASAP, and that required making the people in charge think I was docile. I knew without a doubt that your current employer was still keeping tabs on me, almost five decades after my discharge.
“Who is Clayton Fire Bear?” the doctors kept asking, only they used his real name, because I apparently kept saying it over and over when I first woke up postoperation. To protect the innocent, Clayton Fire Bear is the fake name I’ll be using in this report. I’m not gonna tell you his real name. I also wasn’t about to tell those civilian morons at the hospital what I’m finally telling you right here and now.
Doctors are only ever one of three things: pill pushers, needle pokers, or people cutters. All of them love money. Needless to say, they get paid regardless of what messes they make of our bodies. Even if they kill us dead, the doctors’ paychecks remain healthy, and their bank accounts grow.
The people cutter in charge of my brain surgery shit show said I absorbed a twin when I was in my late mother’s womb, back in 1944, which would make me a murderer before I was even born. You people would love for that to be true, because it would take the United States government off the hook for teaching me how.
My dumbass neurosurgeon said part of that aforementioned alleged twin grew in my brain for almost seventy years, and the mass they removed from my skull had hair and three tiny teeth that looked like uncooked grains of rice. I was shown a specimen in a bottle of formaldehyde as proof, but you and I and everyone else with a working brain know they had a million and one of those exhibits before I even walked into the hospital, so that little bottle doesn’t prove shit. Furthermore, he said my condition was so rare, he was gonna write a story on what he calls “our surgery” and get paid again, and why wouldn’t he?
If you believe that absorbed-twin horseshit, you deserve the dumb life you’re currently living. I know it was Agent Orange. The cover-up continues.
I’m also one hundred percent certain that, at the request of the US government, my surgeon chopped out some of my memory when they were inside my skull, erasing the vital military intelligence I once possessed and even personal memories too, about my wife and my presurgery life, just to be sadistic. But no matter how many chemicals they spray on you, no matter how much of your memory they slice away, you never forget seeing an entire jungle disappear overnight. One day everything’s full and green and lush and breathing. The next day everything’s melted thin and black and stagnant—as if the world were a candle and the sun were a blowtorch. I remember death’s stench darting up my nostrils like an ice pick. You can never unexperience that. Never get entirely free of that chemical decay smell either.
I have a visible souvenir too: seven little white spots on my left forearm. The doctors say it’s simply damage from the sun, but they don’t know shit, or else you people—aka the government—have paid them to lie. Seven drops of Agent Orange hit my left forearm when I was in the jungle. I’ve been wearing the unlucky constellation ever since.
My son says if you connect the white dots with your mind, it looks like a map of Vietnam, but that’s bullshit too. Hank may be a hotshot art dealer now, but he still doesn’t know goddamn anything about my war or my life.
I’m surprised you people didn’t pay my surgeon to saw off my entire fucking arm when they had me knocked out—just to get rid of all remaining evidence that incriminates your traitorous boss, Uncle Sam.
But, ironically, at the end of this report, you’ll see I was most grateful that your surgeon’s scalpel tickled my memories of Clayton Fire Bear—that big motherfucking Indian—and got me thinking about righting my wrongs.
But I can’t tell you everything about Fire Bear before I put it all in context. I want you to understand, and understanding is difficult. Takes time. Patience. Which I hope you will really have, like you’ve assured me so many times already.
The aforementioned girly-man surgeon has never even fired a gun. I asked him. His nose wrinkled in disgust. I told him the great jihad was on, and that the Muslim suicide bombers would just keep coming if we don’t do something serious about it, and quickly, but he didn’t care enough about that to respond. Too much people-cutting to do. Too much money to make. Too much high living in the land of the free.
When I pushed the issue with the people cutter, referencing the two scumbags who blew up the Boston Marathon, my surgeon said he didn’t want to speak about politics. And why would he, really? He’s on top here at the hospital. Big dog. Things are working out just fine for him right now. He probably has no family in the military, no blood on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. My surgeon still has all his limbs and all his easy happy civilian memories. No thick red scar stapled shut on top of his head. No little white dots on his forearm either. No recurring nightmares for fifty fucking years. No daily horror show playing inside his skull.
I obviously needed to buddy up with the guy, so he’d eventually release me once again to walk among the civilians. So I asked him what he liked to do for fun when he’s not working, and without making eye contact, he said he enjoyed “quaffing fine wines.”
Dead end.
I was a beer guy before all the brain troubles. American beer. Budweiser. Miller High Life. PBR. With the medication I was already on—a fucking arm’s length of orange pill bottles full of shit I can’t even pronounce—my drinking days were done. Turns out I liked breathing more than brewskies.
I know what quaffing means, but I’d never use that word. Makes you sound like an elitist asshole. You can tell a lot about a man by the alcohol he drinks. “Quaffing fine wines” meant we were at an impasse.
You can also judge the strength of a man’s character by the condition of his hands. My surgeon’s hands look like they’re made of the smoothest china. He wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds in the jungle. I might have put a bullet in the back of his head myself as a safety precaution. You don’t get out of the jungle alive with men who “quaff fine wines.”
“Try not to think about upsetting things like politics and war,” my surgeon said to me. “Happy thoughts are your brain’s vitamins, so try to think happy thoughts with each breath in and happy thoughts with each breath out, okay?”
He balanced on one foot, closed his eyes, put his left ankle on his right knee, and—pressing his hands together in front of his heart—he did some deep-breathing yoga bullshit. Then he said, “Can you do this for me, Mr. Granger?”