The Book of Stone. Jonathan Papernick
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body, a slow, distant banging of a drum.
“All right, all right,” the caller said. “Let’s play blackout bingo. Winner gets the big payout. Mark your cards. Be careful now.”
The crowd buzzed in anticipation, raucous chatter bouncing off the chrome and ebony walls.
“Okay, boys and girls. Eyes down.”
There was instant silence.
The next game began with an increased intensity. Muttered prayers and curses floated through the air, a collective desperation voiced by the bingo players. Pinky moved with martial precision among the tables, his pale body stretched out like a piece of gum pulled from a child’s mouth.
“G-33. Thirty-three rpm.”
A woman with crossed fingers scanned the array of cards before her and slammed her hand onto the table.
“B-5. Still alive.”
The room spun like a carousel, a phantasmagoria of grotesque faces melting in and out of focus, slowly at first, then faster as the caller barked out letter-number combinations with a mystical inscrutability as if the correct combination would solve some eternal riddle. Rows of lights glittered above the tables, so pretty, like precious gems, and Stone wanted to go to them, hold them in his hands, press his lips to them, but could not, suspended as he was in a sticky, weblike darkness.
HE LAY ON the cool floor of the bingo hall. Pinky’s face came back into focus, as if through a rippling sheet of water. Stone’s head pounded in a new way. He must have passed out and hit his useless skull on the floor. The caller matter-of-factly said, “B-8. Don’t be late.”
“What the fuck,” Pinky said. “You okay?” He signaled to somebody behind him in the far distance—an ambulance? A hearse?
A small crowd had gathered around Stone. A woman leaned in and asked if he wanted a glass of water. This would be a perfect time for somebody to shout, “Is there a doctor in the house?” But a doctor was not likely to be among this crowd.
“I’m dying,” Stone said.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Pinky said, pulling Stone to his feet. His legs were rubber bands, his tongue swollen like a dried-out sponge. As his eyes came back into focus he saw the overhang of a balcony beyond Pinky’s profile, pushing closer like the prow of a great ship. In the darkness, he thought he saw the outline of figures moving about behind the brass railing. He saw a glimmer of light, as if someone’s glasses had caught a snatch of light in their lenses.
“I’m taking you home,” Pinky said.
“I-17. Sexy and seventeen,” the caller said, and the bingo game continued.
Though Stone had told him he was fine and didn’t need to see a doctor, Pinky dropped him off at the walk-in clinic on Atlantic Avenue. He said he had things to do and would pick Stone up in a couple of hours. Stone sat in embarrassed silence in the passenger seat of his father’s car the entire drive over, hoping Pinky would just take him back to his room and another round of the glorious morphine. But Pinky would have none of it.
The waiting room was crowded. Stone was prepared to leave when a seat opened up in the corner, its stained cushion welcoming his exhausted body. Stone sat and quickly drifted off into a fitful sleep. Sometime later, a dreadlocked nurse in pink scrubs woke Stone with a clammy hand on his cheek and asked him to join her in the examination room.
She left him alone in the bare room and told him to undress and slip into a disposable gown. He waited nearly fifteen minutes until the nurse returned and took Stone’s pulse, blood pressure, and temperature. He felt as if he were being processed rather than being treated. She pressed the cool disc of a stethoscope to his chest and back and asked Stone a few rote questions, ending with: Are you a smoker? She wasn’t even looking at him when she asked the questions, not the slightest show of investment in his answers. Stone had only this one life; the least the nurse could do was pretend to care, he thought. Wearing just a thin paper gown, he knew he must have looked frail and disposable, of no consequence. The nurse left and, again, Stone was alone beneath the fluorescent lights of the examination room. He could hear a child crying in the waiting room and was about to get dressed and leave this misery behind when there was a soft knock on the door. It was the doctor asking to enter.
The doctor introduced herself as Dr. Xiao, and Stone was immediately comforted by her presence, her soft, compassionate eyes. “Your temperature is just a touch above normal, but your blood pressure is very low,” Dr. Xiao said. “I’m not surprised you blacked out. Are you taking any prescription medications?”
“No,” Stone said.
“Illicit drugs?”
When his father had taken the morphine, it had not been illicit. Stone answered, “No.”
“Did you eat breakfast this morning?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Perhaps hypoglycemia?” Dr. Xiao took out a pen and wrote something down. “Is this common for you? To lose consciousness?”
“I don’t think so.”
She asked him if his thyroid levels had ever been tested, or if there was a history of diabetes or hypotension in his family. “Sometimes we inherit things from our parents that we would rather not receive. Genetics can be a bit of a dice game. Wouldn’t it be great if we inherited only our parents’ strengths?” She smiled. “I’d like to do some blood work, a basic metabolic panel to rule out any underlying issues.”
The doctor was small, just under five feet, with an almost childlike build; her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. Her black eyes reflected a surprising warmth. There was something trustworthy about her, and Stone wanted to tell her everything.
“My father just died.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Dr. Xiao said, and she really did seem to be sorry. “It can be very challenging to deal with the loss of a loved one.”
She allowed a moment and when Stone responded with silence, his mind stuck on the all-purpose term loved one, she continued.
“My father died when I was eleven, when we first moved here from Guangzhou. It was very difficult, so many mixed emotions. I was full of regret and anger and confusion. He wasn’t supposed to die so soon.”
Stone nodded his head. She understood his loss.
“Were you close with your father?”
It was almost too painful for Stone to answer, but he managed to say, “Not really.”
“I apologize for asking. But I understand,” Dr. Xiao said. “Parent-child relationships can be complex.”
She peeled back Stone’s eyelid and flashed a small penlight into his iris. His pupil constricted, a dull ache flooding back through his retina. His head pounded.
“Did you love your father?” Stone asked.
Dr. Xiao smiled and said, “Yes. Yes, I loved my father.”
Perched on the edge of the doctor’s table, Stone examined the glossy anatomical chart pinned on the wall across from him, the gaudy horror show of human anatomy. He saw a man’s round head flayed on one side, exposing incessant multiplying networks of blue veins rising from the thick cords of the neck to delicate tributaries in the face and skull. Stone took in the pink fibrous muscles and tendons, a rich garnet cord twisting up through the neck into the jaw. His eyes drifted down to the digestive system and the variegated shades of brick, rose, and scarlet; the nut-brown liver; the warm pink of the smooth stomach, tight as the skin of a newborn; the intestines coiled like sleeping nudes; flaming valves and tubes Stone could not name but could not turn from; and the layered walls of the stomach in cross section, piled high like the silty deposits of an archaeological dig. Amazingly, every color of the spectrum