Green rooms are never green, that’s just a lie, Dad doesn’t know why. Dad never knows. All he says is, That’s a good question, Son. The doctors say I’ll be dead (I heard them tell Mom when I was in the machine) in a month so I guess I’ll never know. Maybe I’ll ask today’s Host, though. But if I do he’ll just ruffle my hair and laugh over my head at the audience, saying, What a curious young man!
My name is Russell Dagger, but you probably know me as “Li’l Russ.” That’s what the press calls me. On TV today the crawl underneath the broadcast will read 12-YR OLD MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SURVIVOR, POET, PEACEMAKER, LI’L RUSS DAGGER. This is a day-time talk show, which means there will be mostly women in the audience showering me with consumer products provided by the show’s advertisers. I have no use for remote-control cars, action figures, or baseball mitts. Maybe one of those motorized wheelchairs would be cool, but my mom would worry that if I went too fast my blood-pressure would go through the roof and I’d have another stroke.
They all think I’m so dumb, adults—but it’s the adult world that’s dumb, and phony like that book Mrs. Hendrix assigned us said.
Someone just entered the room behind me. The Host, probably. A loud, low-diaphragmal voice that sounds practiced and carries. I can’t move my head to confirm, so I just look, analyze my field of vision, to memorize the colors and shapes for when I’m dead. Observing things and describing them as accurately as possible is my favorite thing to do. What people call my poetry is just this, accurate descriptions of floor tiles and institutional windowpanes and machine tubes that I dictate onto a computer by blowing into an instrument attached to my larynx. I know it’s not poetry though; poetry has to mean something, and I don’t mean anything. But I play along when they call me a boy genius because it seems to make everybody happier.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if my response to the Host’s question were honest, if I were to say: I’m just a little kid who’s dying, nothing more, okay, Dude? But it would make everyone so sad, especially Mom. And everybody is trying to help, I guess. I mean I’m sure they think they’re doing a nice thing, but sometimes it makes me so lonely, like the nocturnal emissions I’ve been having lately. I asked Dad about it but he laughed nervously and said, There’ll be time for that later, Son, but there won’t be. I know my penis and the stuff that comes out of it has something to do with touching other people and making babies, a chain of being is a phrase I heard before. It makes me feel sad, to be honest, to think that I’ll never get to be a part of that chain.
Now Dad is calling me Buckaroo and asking if I need to go to the bathroom or have my oxygen bag changed before we talk to the Host, who apparently is a really interesting fellow and fan of mine.
That’s nice, I say.
As Dad wheels me past the other woman in the green room with the “mixed drinks” and big titties she kneels down beside me and tells me how inspirational I am. She’s speaking like people often speak in green rooms after they’ve had mixed drinks.
Can I taste your drink? I ask, but she laughs at me and ruffles my hair. Dad laughs too and says, What a jokester Li’l Russ is, as he wheels me onto the stage and everyone claps. The Host buttons his blazer and stands to greet me, and then flexes down on his knees so we’re face to face. His eyes look beyond me toward a sign, and I can hear the producers talking to him through his ear.
You don’t have to pretend you like me, I want to tell him: I’ve learned to Go Clear. Do you know what Going Clear is? I hear myself say, We should just give peace a chance. I hear the Host say, There it is—Li’l Russ says give peace a chance, and I for one think we should take his word for it. All the women rise and clap, following the sign’s instructions.
But the other me, the real me, Gone Clear, floats overhead, serene, thinking of what the world is for me and what the world is for other people. Of the beauty of certain shapes and sounds, the smell of cut grass, the view from my hospital bed, life-events I’ve heard of but will never experience, like having a mixed drink or touching a girl’s titty. It’s this splitting ability that’s…I think the word is “palliative,” not the power-chair or respirator or “happy drugs” or transplants or grafts, but being able to hide, in my own little green plot in the sky, chair-less and ambulatory, where nobody can pretend to like me for being the opposite of who I am.
James McAdams has published fiction in decomP, Superstition Review, per contra, Literary Orphans and B.O.A.A.T. Press, among others, as well as creative non-fiction and academic essays in such venues as R.kv.r.y Quarterly Literary Journal, Kritikos, and Wreck Park Journal. Before attending college, he worked as a social worker in the mental health industry in Philadelphia. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Lehigh University, where he also teaches and edits the university’s literary journal, Amaranth. His creative and academic work can be viewed at jamesmcadams.net.