FICTION: “The New Normal” by Alexander Jones

Illustration by Maura Walsh.

FICTION
The New Normal
By Alexander Jones

From the sidewalk I grab the flaking wrought iron railing with my right hand, plant my good leg, my right leg, squarely on the first cement step in front of me, and pull myself up. Then I swing my bad leg up, and pain flares from a constant dull ache to a sharp crescendo as I place my bad leg beside my good one, but the pain isn’t too bad, and that’s part of The New Normal. Last, I slip one of my crutches into my left armpit and stabilize my weight distribution with it.

Step one — done. 

Eleven more to the front door of my apartment building.  

I hate this process.

Without letting go I slide my right hand up the railing about a foot. Looped around my right forearm is a plastic bag from the drugstore with my painkillers inside. I’ve also got fresh bagels, and the moist, garlic saturated warmth wafts past my chin.

I’m going to get up the other eleven steps, get inside and take my painkillers first thing, while I’m still standing up, before I park myself on the couch and then eat one of my bagels.  

Unless I dissociate, obliviate, float away on a sea of cognitive dissonance, passing in and out of sleep without being aware of it, like hearing a noise and turning my head to investigate and then, sometime later, wondering ‘Why is my head turned? Why have I been staring at the corner of the room like there’s something there, but there isn’t, when I’m really just trying to watch tv?’ In which case, I’ll eat my bagels when I return to consciousness later, even if they’re a little stale by then.

Juggling my weight between my grasping right hand, the crutches in my left and my bad leg, I step and plant the good leg again and pull myself up again. Then swing the bad leg up behind me again and stabilize with the crutches again.

Step two.

The New Normal has made my good leg much stronger; my calf is now a dense, tense, tight horseshoe from hopping and hobbling around. Having a ‘bad leg’ and a ‘good leg’ is also part of The New Normal.

Step three.  

I’m now a quarter of the way up, and I’ve broken a sweat and I need to fiddle with the plastic bag around my right arm, so I stop for a moment. Catch my breath. Roll my neck until there’s a satisfying pop as I look around. The building to my left has fourteen smaller steps from street to vestibule, and the one to my right has nine larger steps. How different would the climb up each of them be? Would the differences in size, style or building material make climbing one better than the other? Or better than my own building’s?  

I suppose I could try them, but I’m not volunteering for any more steps than I need to. No. The New Normal has narrowed that horizon right down.

After standing here for a little longer than I need to but not as long as I’d like to, after adjusting the stray loop of the plastic shopping bag, I slide my right arm up the railing and lurch back into action, carefully stepping with the good leg. Pain arcs up and then subsides as I put my weight on the crutch under my left arm. 

Step four.

The loop on the plastic bag has ridden up again, and there are rusty paint flecks on the outside of it. Are my bagels getting showered with the stuff? Is it lead paint? Will eating the bagels, if they’re covered with paint chips that have disguised and hidden themselves among the other crusted toppings on the bagel, make me stupider?  

Whatever.  

My bagels are safe inside a paper bag. My pills are wrapped in plastic and, of course, sealed in a bottle, so they’re extra safe. 

They’re what matters most.  

The New Normal makes me calculate everything by the opportunity cost of getting down and then back up these steps.  If the bagels don’t make it, or get compromised by lead paint chips I’ll be sad; if the pills don’t make it, I’ll be going back out again for more after a desperate phone call to one of my doctors to get my insurance to cover them. I desire the bagels; I need the pills.

I hate what this process is doing to me.

The New Normal means a lot of pizza and Chinese delivery.

It was raining the other night and I was too scared of the wet steps down to the street because down is actually more treacherous than up; up requires more exertion, more muscle, more drive, but down takes coordination and balance and finesse, and The New Normal has left me with precious little of those; it’s tough to have finesse when I alternate between shaking in pain or feeling hazy from the painkillers, so I had no cash for the pizza guy and I ended up paying him with the jar of quarters I’d saved up for the laundry room in my last building, my current building only takes a card, not quarters, and I’d never gotten around to spending those quarters. I still came up short, and the pizza guy covered my deficit out of his tips; we’ve been seeing an awful lot of each other and I tip well.  

The New Normal means that I don’t get meatballs and pepperoni so I don’t get fat, or any fatter, since I’ve already started getting fat now that I can’t exercise and won’t be for the foreseeable future.  

If only the future was foreseeable.  

There would be no New Normal and I’d be able to skip up and down these steps and the steps of both buildings to either side of mine, if the future had been foreseeable.  

I hate how this process is making me feel.

Step five.

Step six. 

Half way there.  

Time for another break.  

My break this time is a little longer, a little more introspective, like the summer break between high school and college when you get to be proud of what you’ve accomplished, but know full well that there’s more hard work ahead. I peek behind me at the steps I’ve already conquered, and ahead at the rest to come.

I wipe my forehead, crack my neck again, and bring the loop on the plastic bag back into alignment with the rest of the bag.  That’s futile, but I do it anyway. 

I slide my right hand up the railing again, stepping with my good leg while at the same time I unweight from the crutch under my left armpit. 

  I miss.  

I trip.

My good leg slips off the seventh step, my body pitches backward, I can’t bring the crutches up in time to hold me and my weight comes down on my bad leg.

The pain cuts me like a heavy, rusty serrated blade skewering my knee, the pain worse than any I’ve had a in a while, and I’ve forgotten just how bad it could be, but I hold on, my right hand clamped to the railing, dragging myself forward.

Safe.

I slump there, my head against the railing, with a rope of drool running down my chin and fresh tears in my eyes, trying to catch my breath.

I saved myself on instinct, without even the time for panic, but now I had plenty for the fear, the dread, the paranoia that slips and trips like this produce in me. The worst is the fear that I’ll break the other leg, that the other leg will break and I’ll slide down the concrete steps like a boneless blob of jelly, maybe hitting my chin against each step on way down until I’m lying flat on my back in the middle of the sidewalk, watching the pigeons peck at my bagels which will have rolled out of the bag onto the street beside me. 

I would swat at them, unless maybe I’ve broken one of my arms as well.  Or both of my arms.

There’s a horrible joke I heard in grade school about a guy walking along the beach who comes across a woman with no arms and legs who first wants to be held, so he holds her, and then wants to be kissed, so he kisses her, and then wants to be screwed, so he throws her in the ocean.

That would be me.

I hate the doubt, the fear, the cold, clammy paranoia that’s overtaken me and given birth to The New Normal.

Maybe The New Normal isn’t truly normal yet because then I would have known better than to move my leg and my arm together; they are supposed to be separate, distinct movements, three points of contact with something secure at all times. Never move an arm and a leg in concert.

The roiling fear in my stomach of being the armless, legless drowning woman because I’ve tripped and fallen down my stoop subsides, and now I focus on the new pain.

Pain comes in 57 varieties and right now I’m choking on most of them.  

When I’m sitting still on my couch it’s a steady throb, throbbing in time to my heartbeat- most people don’t figure out that when something is throbbing, like waves crashing and receding and crashing and receding and crashing yet again, over and over, the throb is in time to their heartbeat — when the heart is clenched the throb is at its peak, when the systolic pressure relaxes into the diastolic calm, the pain lessens with it. Unless I move or disturb it somehow; then the baseline throbbing pain, The New Normal, spikes with a sharp, acute agony that always makes my breath catch no matter how used to it I should be by now.  

The painkillers smooth out and stretch out and hold down the waves of heartbeat throbbing, transforming it from a fast paced house beat played at top volume to something slower and mellower, some kind of 60’s surf music or something; I should really do some research on that, what kind of music the pain feels like when the pills are in full effect; after all, I have nothing but time on my hands so I really could afford to spend a little while trying to figure out what kind of music the pain feels like when I’m dopy, but somehow I probably won’t. The painkillers also make the acute pain less acute, hazier, foggier, further away. Could I reinjure myself?  Could I end up believing that I’m not really as damaged as I really am because it hurts less because of the pills, and I end up doing something I’m not physically ready for?

After I catch my breath, I straighten up.

I’m cautious, expecting the pain to ratchet up a little more, but it doesn’t. For the moment it’s receded to a regular background throb, throbbing harder and worse than before I slipped, but not unbearably all unifying. Like Eskimos, or Inuits, I’m not sure which, I remember using ‘Eskimos’ as a kid, but that term seems to have fallen out of favor and might actually be kind of racist, although I’m not sure about that, I have 100 different names for the different ways of pain, like they have different names for snow; it plays such a key role in my life right now, the way snow plays such a key role in theirs.

I dropped my crutches; they’re lying on the step beside me.

There’s no prop guy waiting off stage to hand me new ones.

Very slowly, very deliberately, I turn towards them, grabbing onto the railing with both hands as I get into position above them. Then I lower myself into a squat on my good leg, using the contracting quadriceps and my grip on the railing to control my descent, my bad leg jutting out to my side, and then I stretch out my left hand, grab the crutches, and pull myself back up, until I get the crutches beneath me.

I have two crutches, one for each arm, but I only use them both when I’m on flat ground; otherwise, I use only one, and the second one is fastened to the one I’m using with two Velcro straps my girlfriend rigged up for me when I demonstrated the problem. 

Finished with this distracting, draining detour, I rotate back around, pause, get my grip on the railing reestablished, and climb up, paying more attention to where my good leg goes. There’s nothing on the step itself that should have made my leg slip, but it had, and I’d almost taken a tumble.  

I could have broken my other leg.  But I didn’t.

Step seven.

My girlfriend …  

Was she coming to see me tonight?  I’d made plans with her … right? Definitely I’d talked to her earlier, I was pretty certain, but I was a little zonked on the pills and I remember talking to her, but not what we’d decided.  

I want to see her.  

Is she happy with what The New Normal has done to our relationship? She can’t be; I’m not, and I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t want to see me tonight. Maybe she did want to see me tonight, and her natural instinct was to look forward to seeing me tonight until she remembered what happened to me, what I was like now, what The New Normal has done to me, and her interest in seeing me faded.  Certainly, my interest in being myself fades every morning when I wake up and see what The New Normal has done to me.

The New Normal is having very unspontaneous sex with her on top, taking it easy; I like it and she seems to, but it’s getting a little old for the both of us, and it lacks the springy, animalistic, passionate nature it’s supposed to have; this is careful and weak and always distracted and, worse of all, planned, planned with logistics that must make her feel like an assistant instead of a lover. Once, a week or two ago, or maybe more, I can’t quite remember, we were doing it and my girlfriend came down on the contraption holding my knee together while the healing process ssssslowlyyyy takes place as the grafts and space age plastics and whatever else knit themselves together, one of her ass cheeks landed on it and I screamed and lurched back in the bed and the two of us had a little moment there together, holding each other, the sex forgotten as the tentacles of The New Normal reached for her, too. We’ve only been together for a few months and I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t want to play wet nurse until I’m back together again.

All this thinking about sex adds a little pep to my step as I reach further up the railing for the next move.  

I’ve got a bottle of KY in the bag, with the pills and the bagels. I’ve been jerking off like I’m a teenager all over again, jerking off like I’ve got an itch that I can’t scratch, jerking off with more vigor than I can ever remember, like my body thinks it’s dying and shooting off into a tissue is the only slim chance I’ve got to get my biology out there for the next generation.  I heard that hanged men cum in their pants for the same reason. I don’t know. Whoever told me that may have made it up. Whatever. It’s the kind of thing I have all the time in the world to research, right after I figure out what kinds of music correspond to my pain, but somehow I probably won’t.

Step eight.

Step nine.

I’m going to get inside and take my pills and jerk off and then, finally, maybe eat one of my bagels unless I drift off, dissociate, obliviate, float away on a sea of cognitive dissonance, passing in and out of sleep without being aware of it, like hearing a noise and turning my head to investigate and then, sometime later, wondering ‘Why is my head turned? Why have I been staring at the corner of the room like there’s something there, but there isn’t, when I’m really just trying to watch tv?’ In which case, I’ll eat my bagels when I return to consciousness later, even if they’re a little stale by then.

Maybe my girlfriend’ll have one, if she wants.  

If she’s coming to visit. Was she coming to see me tonight? I’d made plans with her … right? Definitely I’d talked to her earlier, I was pretty certain, but I was a little zonked on the pills and I remember talking to her, but not what we’d decided.  

My left hand has a little a little ache to it.  

I’ve got a blister.  

Not the first time.  

When I get inside, I’ll have to carefully pop it; not squash it flat; instead, I’ll poke two little holes at opposite ends of it and let the fluid inside weep out. After I take my pills but before I jerk off, and then, finally, maybe eat one of my bagels unless I drift off, dissociate, obliviate, float away on a sea of cognitive dissonance, passing in and out of sleep without being aware of it, like hearing a noise and turning my head to investigate and then, sometime later, wondering ‘Why is my head turned? Why have I been staring at the corner of the room like there’s something there, but there isn’t, when I’m really just trying to watch tv?’ In which case, I’ll eat my bagels when I return to consciousness later, even if they’re a little stale by then.

Maybe my girlfriend’ll have one, if she wants.  If she’s coming to visit.

Maybe I won’t get all the pus out of the blister before I start jerking off, and the fresh fluid will mix nicely with the KY and I’ll have some kind of weird necrophiliac thing going, the pus and the KY mixing together, the fresh, baby soft skin under the blister nice and soft against my hard cock in my hand as I desperately bust into a tissue like the hanged men shooting off in their pants because it’s their last chance. The soft skin under the blister won’t hurt because the pills take care of all the hurt.  

God, that’s gross.

And pathetic.

I hate myself.

No, that’s not true. I don’t exactly hate myself. I hate my body. Which is myself, obviously. In some fundamental way, but not exactly.

I hate my body like some poor girl misled into thinking she’s fat and ugly, starving herself until she’s nothing but skull and collarbones because of some model on a magazine cover. I watched a whole show on that, on one of those cable channels, history channel, learning channel, one of those channels that likes to pretend it’s above the fray, not appealing to the lowest common denominator while it does just that, only trying to be a little classier. The show followed around some younger girls starving themselves, and the show’s shrink said that the real reason they starve themselves is because they have no control over anything in their lives but what they consume, that everything else is random except for the decision to eat that tiny sliver of fruit, or not. The shrink said that they don’t hate themselves, after all. They hate having no control over anything in their lives but their diets, so that’s where they clamp down the hardest, because they can.

But I hate my body.

For failing me.

My body failed me, worse than my car seizing up and leaving me at the side of an interstate in the middle of a thunderstorm in the middle of the night, or my phone dying during an important call. Those failures only seemed like failures until something as fundamental as my body failed me and thus revealed those other failures to be inconveniences ignorantly, naively, innocently mislabeled as failures, because The New Normal has taught me the difference.

I’ll get over all this once I get inside. 

As soon as I get inside I’ll take my pills, pop my blister and jerk off and by the time I’m done, instead of hating myself, I’ll be looking forward to eating my bagels, unless I drift off, dissociate, obliviate, float away on a sea of cognitive dissonance, passing in and out of sleep without being aware of it, like hearing a noise and turning my head to investigate and then, sometime later, wondering ‘Why is my head turned? Why have I been staring at the corner of the room like there’s something there, but there isn’t, when I’m really just trying to watch tv?’ In which case, I’ll eat my bagels when I return to consciousness later, even if they’re a little stale by then.

But hating my body for failing me will definitely subside, especially if I treat myself to an extra half pill. If I call my girlfriend and she’s not coming over, I could even treat myself to an extra whole pill, but that’ll probably leave me passed out and drooling on my chest, but at least I won’t hate myself for having a body that failed me.

Step ten.

I haven’t said a word about hating myself to my girlfriend, of course. That wouldn’t be fair, letting The New Normal envelop her too, trying to make her responsible for my despairing self-hatred.

I’d mentioned this to my physical therapist once or twice. A guy named Juan, he comes to my apartment two or three times a week, and I find myself babbling to him as we slowly, slowly bend and flex the rubble in my knee after he takes the contraption off my leg. The exercises hurt and I’ve cried a couple times, working with him, and he shrugs it off because this bromance that’s brewing between us as he helps fold and unfold the damaged joint is strictly one sided. I’ve made a few sarcastic remarks about how I wish fixing my knee was like changing a lightbulb or something, and all he did was laugh and say that he’d have to find another job if it was.

That was the closest to telling anyone how much the failure failed me. He asked me about the painkillers, if I was taking them right, and I’d said that I had, and that was the truth, but The New Normal makes me secretive about things, keeps me from telling people that I hate myself and that I don’t have to wonder how it would feel if I ate the entire bottle of pills all at once- it would feel great, I know it, and that’s part of The New Normal as well, the knowledge that taking the entire bottle would just make me drift off faster and better than usual, and that instead of popping the blister and jerking off I’d just float away and never come back and someone else would get the chance to eat my bagels.

Step eleven.

In the old days before The New Normal, I’d have my keys out already. I would have gotten them out while I was effortlessly climbing the stairs with a body that hadn’t failed me, still foolishly believing that a dead cellphone qualified as a failure rather than an inconvenience, getting the front door key into my fingers and oriented the right way all by touch because the key is big and has a hexagonal shaped head, so all I would have to do is make sure the serrations were facing upward, which would be easy because my sense of touch and feeling would be free to make such a simple exploration with ease, because my sense of touch and feeling wouldn’t be dominated by all the different categories of pain the way Eskimos- Inuits- have hundreds of names for snow because of how much of a role it plays in their lives.

But The New Normal has turned getting the keys out of my pants into its own procedure to be performed only when I’m holding onto the solid brass doorknob of the building, since otherwise I could drop my crutches and then I could fall and break the other leg while I attempt to retrieve them.

If I broke the other leg I’d need a wheelchair, and I’d be living in a hospital someplace, hoping that someone would help me get to the toilet on time instead of dealing with those few inches of freefall between the end of my quadriceps contraction and the bowl. If I broke the other leg I’d hate myself even more, and probably someone else would be feeding me my painkillers, and I’d have no chance to take extras as a reward for sitting on my couch because my girlfriend wasn’t coming to visit because she didn’t want to ride me anymore with caution.

But I haven’t broken my other leg, at least not yet.

Is that optimism? Or, am I just preaching to myself? Have I turned into my own infomercial positivity evangelist because I’ve established a New Normal instead of just hitting rock bottom and wallowing there?

The New Normal has transformed optimism about my future- getting a raise, getting married, moving to a nicer place- into a grim determination to tolerate things getting worse. If I can take this failure without completely breaking, then I can take others, right? If this is The New Normal, then aren’t there are other New Normals that I haven’t had to contend with?  Doesn’t that mean that I am coping with this one?

Step twelve.

I grasp the doorknob to the building and smell the garlic from the bagels; there’s still moisture carrying the smell to me, which means that they haven’t started going stale yet. I get my keys out.

I get my key into the lock and get the door pushed open and I hobble inside, lean against the wall as I pull apart my crutches so I can use both of them together to get to my apartment at the end of the hall.

I’ll pop the blister and jerk off and eat my bagels and call my girlfriend and then, only then, will I allow myself to take one of the pills.  

Maybe I’ll only take half.

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