Stimp, the Prophet Man

Voices: In the Waiting Room

Photo by Ante Samarzija on Unsplash

This is episode 3 in a storytelling experiment. I’ve broken a short story I wrote a couple of years ago into “episodes.” They work as standalone chapters, and as a whole.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

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-Recap-

Stimp makes his way to Three’s place. He’s depended on him for safe drugs for years, their relationship built off mutual trust. Stimp never tells about his source, and Three always gets paid. By the time he leaves, he’s feeling good. Hopeful even. The sun is bright, shining brighter by the moment. What could go wrong?

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Voices

Stimp didn’t skip down the street when he left Three’s apartment building, but he was feeling pretty damn good. The bag in his pocket was a guaranteed relief, the beautiful blue pill that would take him back into the Matrix with all the contentedness of the businessmen who passed him in their suits on their way to lunch. They never so much as glanced his way. That’s how good they felt.

He took a right on Cascade and made his way past a block of old shanty houses badly in need of repair. The hospital towered to the left, a blinking blue cross lit up on the top of the faded brick building. Stimp saluted it as he passed, a traveler’s so long to suffering. The buildings on his left were suddenly ornate, and the houses across the street transformed into old estates of shimmering opulence in the sunlight. He stopped and looked at one. It was painted yellow, and the rose bushes that dotted the front of the covered porch held proud buds. Soon they would bloom in paint splotches of red and pink.

In his mind they were swirling like Van Gogh’s Starry Night and he could smell the perfume of them lightly in the air. Stimp decided to cross the street to get a better look at the plants in the yard. He wanted to smell the freshly cut grass and imagine the yard in the full bloom of late spring. He stepped off the curb without looking to the left or the right, caught in the hypnosis of plants and starlight. 

He was thinking of rose petals when the driver finally looked up from their phone and saw Stimp in the street. Reds and yellows and blush pink. They were swirling like the sky. The sky in the painting, the sky hidden by sunlight. That endless moving universe that swirls overhead, marked by stars and constellations and planets that indicate times and seasons. Stimp snapped back from his daydream for a moment, pulled into reality by the sound of squealing tires and the sick smell of burning rubber. 

The swerving vehicle made a strange, high pitched sound in his ears. The image of the petals, beautiful only half a minute before, tore in half and hung there. There was the sound of tires, but there was something else too. He strained to hear it. Just before he was tossed into the air by the cold bumper it became clear. The sound resonated deep within his body, coming up from the asphalt road beneath his feet and vibrating his bones and blood, buzzing the empty squish around his organs. 

The sound was not the truck or the screams of the busy people on the sidewalk. 

No. 

The sound was a voice. 

It spoke three words, cheery and bright. 

“See you soon.”

Then the all the lights in the world went out.

At first, Stimp was reborn into the conscious world a blind man. He could hear but he couldn’t see. There was the steady pulse of yogic breath. Inhale. And breathe. Exhale. It was punctuated with a steady, syncopated beep. He focused, trying to make out other sounds to orient himself. There were voices, but they were far away, beyond some acoustic barrier. A door maybe, or a window pane. 

He tried to move but his legs were sandbags. Only his fingers would lift. When he flexed them he could feel plastic tubes draped across them. Then he could feel the plastic in his nose, a hard snake down his throat. The thought sent him gagging. Choking. The beep sped up in time with his revving heart. He tried to move his arms, pulled at the cords that were laced around his nostrils and mouth, tangled all over his torso and neck. He could not lift them, could only choke and die here.

Of all the ways and in all the places, Stimp never imagined he would be taken out this way. A blind man choking to death on plastic tubing, left to die in god knows where. He pictured the nights of fights and muggings on railroad tracks, the close call overdoses, the knife threats from johns and their hookers. All that bullshit, but it came down to the beeping, whirring plastic of the 21^st century. He was a sea turtle caught by a fisherman’s floating net, choking to death on the modern world.

What a marvel.

The thought calmed him. He actually smiled a little. A door flew open and there were voices. Two, no three. Voices chittering, sound with no meaning. Squirrels in a tree fighting over acorns. They reached his bed and removed a plastic cup from around his mouth. Then they were pulling the wire and cords out of his lungs. Miles and miles of it poured out of his mouth, clipping his esophagus and throat. 

He sputtered and choked, a muffler for a mouth trying to start, and then, a breath. Inhale. And breath. Exhale. Only this time it wasn’t the pump of a machine breathing for him. It was him, his own lungs, taking in the world for the first time. They talked to him, said they would give him something to help with the pain, and Stimp breathed again. He knew what that meant. And he liked it just fine.

A few moments later he started feeling nice, real nice. And his thoughts drifted back to the swirl of raindrops on roses and starry, starry nights, and Stimp thought he could see again. And then he remembered he was just asleep and dreaming. 

He thought he was dreaming when the voice came to him, a familiar other world voice. 

Like many voices. 

Like rushing waters.

“Hey.”

He was waiting for something to appear. A vision or a man or an angel, but there was only darkness. 

“I told you I’d see you soon.”

It was the voice that spoke to him in the whir of the car crash. He remembered that now. There had been a car crash. The driver was on a phone. 

“Who are you?” Stimp asked, expecting his words to echo and move around the room the way the voice did. Instead, the vibration of his vocal cords rushed him out of the etherial and back into his body. He was aware again of the beeping and the noise and the smell of a hospital room. Awake. He opened his eyes but there was only blackness.

“You’re not gonna believe it, but it’s me buddy. God.”

Stimp lay still. He got the feeling that he understood what was going on here. And he didn’t like it. 

“You’re not God.”

“Why do you say that?”

“God isn’t real. And if he was he wouldn’t talk to me.” 

Stimp felt around his bed. He patted at the sheets. Sometimes they gave you a pump. He could push it and morphine would pulse through the clear slippery slide into his veins and he would conk out and fall asleep. He wanted to do that, push the button for a hard reset.

“I need you to do something for me.”

Stimp moaned. It was official. He had lost it. Like the guys in line at the soup kitchen who talked to calculators about secret missions and droned on about dinosaur conspiracies and CIA agents. Paranoid fuckers who might knife you over an accidental glance. There was no morphine pump. No getting out of this for now.

“Come on Stimp. You do something for me and I’ll do something for you.”

Stimp laughed, cackled a little.

“Oh yeah, like what?”

“I’ll let you see again.”

Stimp thought about that a minute.

“So you did this to me?” he asked.

“I didn’t do it to you, but I let it happen. That’s kind of my thing.”

“Jesus Christ, it must be you after all. Only you would think to blind a broke mother fucker like me. Right before I got my medicine too.”

“You’re not gonna be able to get any medicine if you can’t see the way to Three’s door again.”

“Okay God, what do you want?”

“There’s a church next to the soup kitchen. An offshoot of the big one up north. You dig?”

“Yeah, I know it. And no one says dig anymore.”

“No one believes in God anymore either.”

“You got me there.”

“I need you to tell them something for me.”

Stimp laughed. 

“You think those stuck up churchies are going to listen to me? They’re gonna shoo me out with the rest of the rats. Only I’ll get a bag of groceries to go with it.”

“Will you do it?”

“Yeah, yeah I’ll do it. Right as soon as I figure out if I can walk again. What’ll I tell them?”

A great wind rushed around Stimp then. He could hear papers scattering. Something clattered to the floor. Then silence. He sat waiting in the darkness.

“Hello? God?”

There was nothing. The room was devoid of whatever he felt a moment ago. Stimp sighed and opened his eyes, lifting heavy lids to see if he could take a look around him. The light was blinding. He had to move slow. There were fluorescents buzzing above him, the light waving in and out of focus, a violet halo around them as Stimp strained his eyes. 

God damn. He could see.