THE AMAZING INVISIBLE MAN
You can't make the mistake that Sands likes hospitals. Likes them, or even remotely thinks they have a purpose, whatsoever. Period. He tells everyone that comes in, and everyone that goes out: I, quote, fucking hate hospitals.
The nurses that check his gauze and feed him pills know. The three doctors and a half that poke and prod and make him wince know. Visitors, patients, the rats in the walls: they all know.
And he does, he really fucking hates hospitals.
The smell, the feel, the voices. And if he still had his eyes (here's thanking whoever he doesn't at the moment) the bright lights, the white everything, dying people in wheel chairs, blood stains, waxed linoleum, the endless halls, rubber, steel.
Hospitals are unnatural purgatory. You're stuck until you realize you were dead to begin with.
He's sharing the room he's in with a perpetually wheezing no-name and the twenty-pieced family from some sadistic circle of Hell. Screaming kids, skidding shoes, clanking metal, rapid-fire Spanish. That, and completely despite that fact that he's unhinged enough as it is, can drive you mad.
Three steps to Crazy Town.
Step number one...
Get fucked over in Mexico.
Check.
Ten hours earlier he was in the back seat of a junky car, screaming over the wind whipping through the passenger window, and bleeding himself dry on the upholstery. Four hours out of Cuilacan and headed to wherever.
"You fucking ass-rammer! Close the window!"
"I can't! There is no window!"
"What!"
"There IS no window!"
So Jorge'd come back.
He'd been all the way down the street, was going to turn the corner, be done with Mexico and smoke cigars and live life, but he came back. Came walking right back and stopped before he caught the smell of death.
Death was Sands slumping against the wall his hand was braced. Death was Sands shaking all over, bleeding all over, stuck in a Mexican shoot-out Kodak moment.
"I'm going to bleed to death before you find the next gas station..."
"No you're not."
"Yes, I really think I am."
A long silence with wind tunnel background music. Sands was beginning to hope he did bled to death, and wasn't about to mention that he'd been waiting for something like it to happen ever since getting here. Mexico: crazy other-world land, with crazy other-world people. Just about anything can happen, it was a fluke that murder over fraud became number uno.
It's only because you can't go tip-toeing through cartel country and not get stung. Or shot. Or gutted. Or blown away. It just doesn't happen.
"Hey." Jorge, from somewhere in the driver's seat.
"What?"
"I think I see someone on the road..."
You know you're in a backwater hospital when they let you keep your clothes on and you're bleeding rivers from five different holes - all of which shouldn't be there.
Almost like they know what they're doing, they put you out. Enter drugs, fade to delirium. When you wake up, clawing to the surface of whatever, you feel like you've kissed the steel-toe of a boot, been kicked off the highest building, been run over, buggered with a cactus, and run over again for the sake of good measure.
Nothing didn't have an ache, a pain, a hemorrhage. His head was humming live wire, his back hurt, is fingers hurt, and his limbs were swollen voids and stabs of fire.
Plus. It was hot. One hundred and fucking inferno degrees.
So the bleeding might have stopped, so he wasn't going to die, but the gauze they pulled around his lack of eyes itched like a son of a bitch. It might have eclipsed every subtle voice, but when it came down to it... it meant adding new names and a place to his Reasons to Engage in Massacre list.
An itch you couldn't scratch is just what Sands is.
Three steps to Crazy Town, step number two.
"Fancy meeting you here, El. Going our way?"
"El Mariachi?" Which is the sound of Jorge almost surprised.
"That's the one, we're best buddies." Sands trying to steady his voice around the reek of blood and the threat of figurative black out.
"Not best buddies. Nothing." El. Enough said.
"How could you tell without..." There's Jorge again.
"Pants."
"What?"
"His PANTS, you deafmook. He jingles like a bell to its cat."
"Oh."
"Yeah, oh, now can we get going? I can't feel my fingers."
Step number two is finding a free-willed, killing-machine mariachi that does what you want, but not when you need it.
Check.
Half the time he's actually awake, chances are someone else is too. And they're wheezing like a dying horse, and they're kids are running around, or making noise, or getting yelled at and probably pointing. He's shot for sight, obviously, but like the kids don't seem to grip, he's not deaf. He can hear the whole lot asking the nurses about him. The hombre sin ojos.
Man without eyes.
If his throat wasn't red and raw and packed with clingy, invisible cotton, he might say something. Freak the fuckers out. Tell the truth and say something like, this is what happens if you stay here too long. Get out.
He's been in Mexico going on two years, and regrets the second he thought it was the land of inopportune opportunity. Which is just what it is, and that's just what got him hooked. As in line and sinker. Images that might be real may be illusion.
It crossed his mind all of once: getting out. Call it inevitability, but he couldn't even if he'd really wanted to. The CIA has sharp claws, eyes on every crossing, and hungry teeth. His mobile never stopped ringing - questions here, questions there. Cell phone number one became quick friends with the street three windows vertical.
He rang them whenever after that.
"Don't let him fall asleep."
"What'd you say?" Sands even sounds far away and down a well to himself. His mouth tastes sour.
"If you fall asleep..." Jorge and manly guts cross once every blue moon.
"What the fuck? Speak UP."
"You fall asleep, amigo, you're dead."
"And you're fretting about this because... why?"
Enough with the dramatic pauses and not-so silent silences.
"Aww, no. You don't have a soft spot for me, do you? I'm flattered. The CIA would be grateful..."
"I was under the impression CIA doesn't like you." So maybe Jorge did have guts. Or just the hollow skull.
"If I wasn't shot up or having an outrageous nicotine fit, I'd nut you."
El finally enters existence. "Nut?"
"Yeah," Sands tries easing off his arm and side, and fails, "Sure. Fuck, ow. Have a smoke?"
"No."
"Christ. Your parties suck wind, Jorge."