Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See by Juliann Garey Page A

that gem. That euphemism. There are no expensive little soaps in the ECT suite; no minibar stocked with Stoli and Perugina chocolate and six-dollar cans of Coke. I’ve spent a lot of time in hotel suites over the last decade, but not one of them had a bed made up with rubber sheets or came with an in-room defibrillator or a guy in the next bed who thought he was Jesus.
    I wonder if I am the only ECT patient who’s noticed. I’ve come to realize lately that if you’re really crazy most people assume you’re also really stupid. They either speak to you in a quiet, slow voice as if speaking to a retarded child or enunciate and yell as if addressing a hard-of-hearing, demented senior. Either way, I resent it. True, I can’t always remember who’s president when they ask me after I wake up in the suite. Or what day it is. Or the name of my doctor. But is that really a fair assessment of my mental acuity? I don’t think so.
    I think that when I have the energy I will put a slip of paper into the suggestion box at the nurse’s station. I will suggest they change the word “suite” to “lab” or “chamber” or “electric fun house.” Just to let them know I know.
    Somehow I got from there to here. My room, my bed. My head feels dull and thick—like the time I tripped on bad mushrooms in Yemen. Only, then, I awakened next to a naked girl. I can’t tell you who’s president, but I remember every detail of that blow job like it was yesterday.
    I lie back on my Styrofoam pillow enjoying the memory, recalling the fine points that might be gone tomorrow. Heat, sweat, scent. I feel myself getting hard and try to locate my dick inside the complicated folds of the hospital gown and the oversized paper pajama bottoms I’m required to wear to ECT. You’d think the scavenger hunt would be enough to lower my flag, but if anything, I’ve gone from half-mast to full. I don’t know, maybe it’s the residual electricity floating through my bloodstream, but ECT always makes me horny. So much so that I’ve taken to hoarding tubes of the good lotion and hiding them in my night table. I have a feeling Milton, the Jamaican orderly in charge of the linen cart, knows what I’m up to. Lately he’s been handing me two or three tubes at a time and winking at me. Milton knows a man has his needs. Even when he’s locked up having his brain lit up like a Christmas tree three times a week.
    I have managed to pull the enormous tent-like pants off and toss them onto the floor along with the sheet and blanket and have hiked the hospital gown up onto my chest. I am treating myself to an expert double-fisted hand job.
    I am in Yemen, in Thailand, in Santiago. I am remembering—girls with skin the color of coffee, of saffron, of cinnamon. I am remembering how they smelled and tasted and felt as my dick slips and slides up through my left hand and circles down through my right in an endlessly delicious loop.
    And then there is a sharp knock at the door, followed, without pause, by the swift banging of the door opening against the opposite wall. And then Milton is backing into my room, pulling a wheelchair.
    “Mr. Greyson Todd, please to be meeting Mr. Tyrone Washington, your new roommate,” he says before he turns around. And when he does, turning the chair with him, he is rather stunned by what he finds. The kid in the chair—tall, skinny, black, catatonic with depression—does not even register what’s in front of him. His wet lips and slack jaw hang slightly open. His hands, palms turned up, sit curled in his lap, looking like sick birds. His ECT shunt sticks out of one wrist. And still, I am hard as a goddamn brick.
    And having worked fucking hard to get to the exquisitely painful point of eruption, I have no intention of stopping now.
    “Milton,” I say through gritted teeth, pumping myself once or twice to show him I will not be intimidated, “a moment if you wouldn’t mind.”
    Milton looks from my face to my