Opportunity

April 7th 2005

I work the night shift at the university hospital. I am a watch dog. No, I don’t watch for criminals or even for relatives of patients trying to sneak in after visiting hours; instead, I watch over patients who are up to no good. It’s like this: there are these patients who are sick, sick in the head, really. After a brain injury or dementia or God knows what, they don’t realize where they are or why there’s all this tubing and cords around on and around them. So, they start pulling at stuff randomly: IV tubing, PICC lines, nasal cannulae, gastric tubes, anything.

Before, we would just tie or drug them up. Now, we have to be nicer. So, we hire people to sit with them and make sure they don’t harm themselves or pull at stuff, people like me. Since we do such a valuable job –or is that invaluable?- the nurses want to make us feel comfortable: a nice blanket, a recliner, the occasional snack… but no light. So, I do what any normal human being would do: I sleep. Maybe they should tie people up after all, but who am I to complain? I’m getting paid to do something I’d be doing anyway, so life is good. And no, just in case you’re wondering, I don’t feel guilty and I have no shame. Someone has to have an awesome job: why not me?

April 29th, 2005

I won’t be watching over patients anymore; I hated that job anyway. I mean, who wants to sit in the dark for 8 hours when he could be sleeping in his bed at home? Stupid job! I was always fighting with those dumb patients. “Stop it. Don’t do that. You’ll start bleeding. Leave that alone. Oh shit!” After these and so many similar phrases, repeated ad nauseam, yelling, it was only natural that I would welcome the news that I wouldn’t have to return to that job.

I was pretty good at it, though. I even had this technique: I would hold their hand, like I was being nice, so no one would suspect that I was, in fact, restraining them. Why didn’t they just tie them up anyway? In any case, I was just about done with that job, you know, ready to move to the next step in life, when I got a phone call from the agency. Had I been sleeping on my shift? The bluntness of the question, right after a cursory introduction, took me by surprise.

“Um, well, no, not really.”

“You were not really sleeping? So you were kind of sleeping?” the woman asked? She asked the latter question in deceptively friendly tone.

I paused for a second.

“Well, there was this one time when it was dark and cold in the room, and I had a big blanket on and…”

I paused again. I wondered whether I should finish that sentence. Was that really the best defense I could come up with?

“Go on.” Her voice was sweet and silky. She was caressing me with her words. Maybe she’d fallen in love with my voice. Maybe I could ask her out and ask her to forget about all this sleeping-on-the-job business. “Hello?” There was not the slightest tinge of impatience in her voice. 

I decided to finish my sentence.

“Well, I may have dozed off for 5 minutes or so, here and there. I mean, I don’t remember sleeping, but I guess I did catch myself waking up a couple of times. So, I guess if you could conceivably call it slee…”

“You’re fired.”

“Oh?”

And that was the end of that conversation, no more dreaming, no more silky voice, and no more job. Someone must have snitched on me. Bastard! But it’s all right, because I hated that job anyway.



May 23rd, 2006

I have not written much in the past three weeks. Writing is always an act of looking in the mirror, and, feeling disfigured by recent events, I have not felt inclined to gaze at my own reflection. But here I am. Then, I was sleeping at night while being paid to watch over others; now, I am awake every night, tormented by my own thoughts and by a torrent of nagging questions: how will I pay for rent? How long can I purchase food on credit? How will I find another job? Should I have acted differently? Will this storm come to pass?

         Like a murderer returning to crime scene, I return incessantly to that fateful night. A ghost traveling in time, I observe myself, slowly falling asleep. I yell: stay awake. Get some coffee. Read something. Talk to someone. Do anything, but please stay awake!  But the ghostly voice, silently loud, never reaches me. And helplessly I watch as I inexorably sleep myself out of a job. I watch the patient, slowly pull at his bandages. I watch them fall on the floor. I watch his burned skin, black and red in the open air. I watch the horrified look on the face of the nurse moments later –how long had it been?- and the shriek that my sleeping self does not hear. I watch her take a glance at me as I read disgust in the lines of her visage. I watch her not wake me up and quickly get to work on the patient’s wounds, which quickly disappear under a blanket of fresh bandages.  I watch myself slowly rise out of my torpor, oblivious to the events of the past few minutes, a smile on my face, the last that would visit it for a while…

         For a second, I wondered whether I had been caught. No, the nurse would have confronted me. I was sly. She couldn’t have known. I had probably adopted a position that had fooled her into thinking that I was awake the whole time. She’d probably not even taken a glance in my direction. All was fine. In the morning I would return home, and the next evening I would return to the sinecure that this job was proving to be. What a great job, I thought…

         They say that calamities occur for a reason, that they are life’s way of equipping us with the tools we will need to solve problems to come. I am not usually one to believe in such platitudes, but forlorn and dejected as I am, o, how I wish this could be true right now.



June 4th, 2006

I’ve never spent this much time staring at a computer screen, but it’s been exhilarating. I scan the numbers, waiting for them to drop as I frantically refresh the page. When one drops to my target price, my limit order kicks in and I buy. Then I place another limit order to sell for a higher price and I repeat the process again and again. Who knew that salvation was just a fingertip away?

         I don’t know how I first got the idea. Maybe it was despair, or the outburst of creative energy that is often its companion, but a couple of weeks ago, I saw my way out of the hole I had dug myself in. I had received a balance transfer offer from one of my credit card companies, which gave me the option of receiving the money as a check. I’m not sure why anyone would “transfer” $1,500 to someone in my situation, but who am I to ask questions? I opened a trading account with an online broker and started trading, or, as I prefer to call it, making some mad cash.

         I’ve quadrupled my money in 5 days! Am I a genius or what? Who needs a job when you can make so much money with penny stocks? I’ve paid my rent, stacked up on some food, and now I’m ready to live the life. No more wondering what I’m going to eat or where I’m going to sleep, no more dating Rosie Palmer or shying away from asking a pretty girl out, no more sleepless nights or headaches, no more of any of that! I’m going to be rich, call up that woman who fired me and tell her to go to hell!

         Life is beautiful! I spend every week day from 9:30 to 4 in front of my computer, but I’ve never been happier.



June 22nd, 2006

In the past two weeks, my fortunes have stalled a bit, but I’ve been okay. I still have about $10k to invest, and I’m sure it’s just a temporary reversal, part of the cyclical vicissitudes of the stock market. I’ll just use the opportunity of this current downturn to invest, and I’ll make that much more money when the market rises again. Anyway, can’t write much more. I have to go watch some stocks.



July 6th, 2006

This temporary reversal has lasted a bit longer than I expected. It’s been more than 6 weeks now, and I’ve lost a bit more than last time I wrote. My investments have fallen from a high of $12k to a mere $2k now. My friends say that I should stop investing, put the rest of the money in savings, and get a job, but what do they know about being an investor? A job? Who the hell do they think I am? I’m the one who knows how to quadruple my money in a week. I’m the one who’s going to be a millionaire by year’s end. I’m the one other investors in my group come to for advice. What’s the point of being a genius if your so-called friends can dictate to you where you should put your money? Anyway, enough for today, I have some trades to place.



July 21st, 2006

         $7k in the red in and not a cent left to invest. In short, I have known better days. At first, I used to find refuge from the boredom of my job in sleeping. Then, after sleeping cost me my job, I found refuge from my financial worries in stock market successes.  But since those successes at what turned out to be nothing more than camouflaged gambling were, in the end, fleeting, what will I turn to now for a refuge?

         I was not, after all, a genius. I was the worst sort of fool: an imbecile unaware of his imbecility. I stopped talking to friends who told me to get a job, and I’m too proud to ask them for help now. I stopped communicating to other investors in my group, since I couldn’t bear the shame of having to report yet more losses, week after week. I’ve stopped responding when my phone rings, for fear that it will be yet another debt collector. And now, jobless, hopeless, penniless, and friendless, I wait in dread for the day when I will be evicted from my apartment. But too cowardly to set myself free, I am merely awaiting the end of an existence that long away ceased to be much of a life.



August 8th, 2006

         It seems that I am good at finding ways to buy myself some time in periods of crisis. Last time, I had fooled myself into believing that something else was going on, that I really had found a solution. I am not under any such illusion right now. This is but a reprieve and a day of reckoning is coming. This time, my escape came from education. I decided to go back to college and get a student loan. With the $10k that I got for my living expenses I was able to pay back some of my debt, catch up on my rent payment, and buy some food supplies, but now it means that I have 3k to survive on for the remainder of the semester. I sell my blood for $50, but I can only do that every 6 weeks, so I sell to 2 different centers every 3 weeks. But even that can help me only for so long. I need to find a long term solution. Maybe I should find a job. Maybe I should go to class. I had no idea what I wanted to study –I didn’t want to study anything- but I had to think of something to tell them, so I told them I wanted to be a pharmacist. They put me in a bunch of science classes and the professors might as well be speaking Arabic to me. There’s no way I can pass any of those classes. Maybe I can just run away with the money that I have, but then I’ll be on the hook for it immediately. What to do? What to do?



August 19th, 2006

         I still haven’t decided what I should do. I didn’t fail my first chemistry test and, to my own surprise, I did pretty well. The professor wanted to talk to me after class. I was scared, but she only wanted to tell me that she was impressed and she thought I could do that stuff for a living. Me, a chemist? Give me a break! Besides, I have much more pressing needs. I’ve got so many holes on my arms that I look like a freaking strainer. I can’t do this blood stuff for much longer, I’m getting weak. Last week an old acquaintance told me of a great opportunity. He knew of a guy I could sell a kidney to for $10k. That sounds really good right now. I’m supposed to give him and answer by tomorrow. It will have been 7 days. I’m hesitating. To sell or not to sell, that is the question. Does that make me a prostitute, if I sell my body for money?



August 21sth, 2007

“Do you know what they looked like?”

I woke up on a bed in a brightly lit room, with a tall, fat man peering into my face.

“Do I know what who looked like?” I was confused. The lights were too bright. I closed my eyes again. The man stayed silent for a few seconds.

“Those men, do you remember what they looked like?” he said, talking slowly, as one would to a third grader.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You got my money?”

“Money, huh?” He chuckled.

“What’s so funny? Isn’t it done yet?”

“Oh yeah, it’s done all right. They took your kidney and left. Now, do you remember what they looked like?”

At the sound of this, I opened my eyes again. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe I could still catch up with them and get my money. I tried to sit up, but I felt a sharp pain in my left flank and some cords pulling on my arm. I winced and fell back in bed. I looked at my interrogator again and only now noticed that he was a cop. “Great,” I thought, “I’m totally screwed.”

“Where am I?” I asked. But before he could answer, I noticed the IV tubing on my arms and the sound of a pump. “Let me guess, the hospital.”

“You got lucky. You’re the fifth person we found in your situation this month and the first one we found on time. So just how much money were you expecting?” 

It was too late to deny anything, so I told him.

“10 grand.”

“And you thought you’d get that by going to an abandoned warehouse and sell your kidney? You must be a genius! What, did you think they would wait for you to wake up, hand you some orange juice and write you a check?”

“I…” I said, but nothing else came out. He was right. I was an idiot and I knew it. I felt used. I had sold my body for money. I was a mere whore, except without the money to show for it.

“You what? You’ve got to know at least something about one of them. Come on!”

I tried to describe the acquaintance who’d told me about this “opportunity,” but I found that I didn’t know him enough to give any details.

“No.”

“Useless, totally useless.” He threw up his hands. “The one survivor we get is a total idiot. Why couldn’t we find a smarter one? Oh wait, smart people wouldn’t get into this in the first place. I’m out of here. I’ll be back tomorrow. Maybe you’ll be less slow, then.”

And with that, he left me to face an even harsher interrogator, the mirror my own conscience. Unable to look away, I gazed to see truths I had long tried hard to remain blind to: I had constantly sought the easiest way out every time I had been in trouble, finding momentary respite but finding myself in a deeper hole when inevitably time came for the temporary, flimsy shelters I had erected for myself to crumble. And where had it all led? I was deeper in debt, more isolated, and in worse health than I had ever been. But apparently that was what it needed to take to make me realize that easy solutions are never durable ones and that I would have to work hard if I wanted some measure of success. Education, it seems, is very expensive indeed.