Chapter 1: Alan

It started inside of an MRI machine. I felt like gunpowder inside of an eight-foot bullet as I waited to be shot out into the ER, or maybe into Maternity, lying as perfectly still as I could remember to. Every now and then a doctor’s voice would fill the room and tell me to not move. “Please don’t tap your feet to the beat of the song in your head,” Dr. Omniscient said. Now, I don’t want you to think I’m one of these people who go around having MRIs done for the fun of it, challenging themselves to remain flaccid throughout the procedure. I was there for a legitimate purpose. My dad believed that the possibility existed that I was sick. That’s always how he phrased it, too.

I emerged from the MRI confident in my health. Blood rushed back to...well, everywhere. It had been lying there like a puddle and was ready to run around and play again. Penis not excluded, to my chagrin. The nurse led me to a room to get dressed, pretending to ignore the erection that the MRI had brought to life.

It was a curious, lonely room. It was almost a closet with its four off-white walls and an off-white bench. It probably felt teased. All those people who barge in, undress, and then just get dressed again and leave. It doesn’t get to experience any intimacy. Even dressing rooms get to live through a few conversations about how fat buttocks look in a certain pair of jeans, or whether or not a boyfriend will love a blouse. Dressing rooms at least get snippets of people’s lives. If the walls of that room could talk, I imagine they would beg to simply listen. I started feeling bad for the room and sat down on the bench and gazed around, pretending to be a wall.

So I wrote the room a happier life.

In the next coming days, I promised it in ink, you will become the hiding place for a lover’s tryst. Dr. Shelly Bonswick, the head of Pediatrics, and Ralph Niedermeyer, first-year janitor, will ignite their passion within these walls. Shelly, forty-seven, goes home every evening to a loving husband with no libido. Ralph, twenty-three, is a banker’s son who believes he met God during salsa night at a local club. Ralph does not mop the hallways of the hospital; he dances them clean. With a graceful flair and Latin-infused rhythm, Ralph glides across the linoleum, aware of only the heavenly music he hears in his head and his ethereal duty to disinfect. Behind him, he leaves a wake consisting mostly of Dr. Bonswick’s desire.

After weeks of admiration, of yearning, of being aroused by the smell of pine, Shelly will feel a swelling. It begins like a drizzle, not fully felt, but quite recognizable when seen through the windshield of Shelly’s empty sexual life. At first, just one wipe from her morals will erase its trace. Then, the pitter-patter will grow until, no matter how quickly her wipers work, all Shelly will see is rain. And the cloud is Ralph Niedermayer, whose next duty will be to clean the dressing room adjacent to the MRI machine on the fourth floor. Shelley is familiar with the lonely room where patients spend less than a minute. Its four walls and its bench won’t need much cleaning. Thunder will burst, and Shelley will find herself in the room that wants more from life. Clothing will be discarded and forgotten about on your floor, I wrote to the room.

Then I capped the pen, admired the writing in my notebook, which goes everywhere with me, and got dressed. I purposely avoided an ending, to keep the room in suspense. Happy ending or not, I was certain the room would be satisfied with being the setting for a story.

I waved goodbye and left the room, confident that its quality of life would soon improve, courtesy of the throes of passion of Shelly Bonswick and Ralph Niedermeyer. After I closed the door behind me, I saw my father walking briskly toward me.

“They didn’t find anything,” he said and began heading for the exit. “They say the headaches are probably just stress.” He wiped at his eyes. Tears of relief, I guess. Dad worries. “Can you believe it? You, stressed.” He grunted what could only be a chuckle and led me outside, where the sun had already begun to set.

“So I’m not crazy then. You believe me now.”

“I guess I have to.” He smiled weakly. He hates being wrong.

It wasn’t just the headaches that had made Dad put me in a bullet.

It first happened with leaves. I had been staring at a nearby tree while waiting at a bus stop. The tree had been covered in green leaves, and I immediately, perhaps unfairly, thought of the tree as racist. What right does it have to deny other colors from adorning its branches, no matter the season? I opened my notebook and begun to write a story.