Arterial Spray

“Arterial spray,” Rachel McAdams exclaimed when she saw a dark, dried splash of the stuff sticking across the walls of a tiny shack in the second season of True Detective, torturers like naïf action painters leaving behind DNA evidence in their terrifying art. We were watching this ongoing mystery on my brother’s ragged leather sectional couch in his Fairlawn apartment on the third night of trying to convince our mother to kill our father or unplug him or end his suffering, whatever you want to call it, whatever the medical ethicists have dressed it up as. And we were failing. But she had power of attorney, and our father was out of it, nonresponsive, all manner of ailments piling on, staph infections, pneumonia, dementia, COVID, a lifetime of hard work and hard play, booze, and smokes. Grief, though, had made my mother almost as nonresponsive, teetering from sloppy, snotful fits of crying to a passive and stoney acceptance, but never quite landing on the decision everyone knew she should, she had to, make.

“Arterial spray,” I said to myself on the couch, exhausted and feeling like an inconvenience even though my brother swore I was always welcome and that his girlfriend June actually liked having me around, liked the company. She was nice enough, offering me endless bowls of treats I didn’t want, walnuts and golden raisins in matching sets of replica mid-century modern bowls she bought at West Elm or trays of chopped veggies with the same bowls full of tahini dressing or organic ranch oozed out of some overpriced bottle. I thought about my father’s arteries. Surely, they were clogged from years and years of a diet consisting mostly of pork chops and porterhouses served with oven-baked and salt-saturated Ore-Ida potatoes. Yet his arteries were functioning, remarkably. No matter how much a malfunction might have suited us and spared my mother the awful responsibility of her decision, his heart kept on pumping, his arteries kept on flowing with blood while variations of the same blood flowed through me and my brother as we sat on this couch watching True Detective and brainstorming ways to convince our mother to kill our father while rejecting bowls of walnuts regardless of the kindness inherent in their offering.

June sat down beside me and said, “Did I miss anything?”

“Arterial spray,” I said, my own heart racing.

“Arterial spray?” June asked.

“Sounds like a band name,” my brother said from his side of the couch.

“Arterial spray,” I said again, but this time everyone ignored me. I have this tic. It’s not Tourette’s, as far as I know, it’s just I get anxious sometimes and I start saying random stuff out loud, repeating stuff I hear or just riffing off sounds in the world. A door will creak and I’ll say, “Creak, squeak, Little Bo-Beep,” or someone will fart and I’ll start muttering, “Shart, fart, smelling up the K-Mart, shart, fart, fucking on the BART, shart, fart, wanking in the H-Mart,” and on and on, fixating on a word or sound or image which is what I did that night with arterial spray. “Arterial, sidereal, what’s the matter, Miss Material,” I said to myself as June shot a concerned look at my brother. She’s an art therapist and is used to helping people with mental illness, trauma, patients acting weird and lashing out. My brother is a mechanic. He’s used to transmission fluid and worn rotors and leaky radiators. But he’s also used to me so he just shrugged, signaling to June to let it pass.

“Arterial spray,” I said again though I’d wanted to say, like the articulate and honest and well-adjusted fellow I aspired to be, ‘It’s ok, guys, don’t worry about me. I’m just a little sad, understandably, because even though my father and I didn’t always get along, I love him and he loves me though we can’t communicate those feelings now. And I’m a bit overwhelmed by it all. Life and death decisions. Human suffering. Grief and all its different stages. My own fears and loneliness. And I’m ashamed too because I’m the older brother and I have a college degree but I have a shit job as a knowledge worker while really I’m an idiot for going into debt to study communications and I can barely make ends meet at forty. I’m broke. I’m single. I’m staying with my working-class younger brother who makes triple what I do and getting babied by his girlfriend and just repeating random shit from a TV show like a total weirdo so I apologize on all counts and thank you for understanding.’ But as I said, I didn’t say that, despite my degree in ‘communicating.’ Instead, I said, “Arterial spray.”

June asked, with her art therapist intuition, “How about a joint?” and I nodded and my brother, tired from work and from arguing with our distraught mother and looking at our unconscious father, at the bit of half-animate alien matter he’d become lying on his hospital bed and tired also, I suspected and feared, of taking care of his odd and useless older brother, groaned and went to the kitchen to retrieve his weed and rolling papers from the urn-like ceramic container one of June’s students had made as part of his therapy.

“Joint, point, lick it off my toint,” I said, not knowing really what I meant, what a toint was or why I’d want anyone to lick it or why I felt compelled to pronounce it with a cockney accent. I ran my fingers along the familiar cracked leather. This had been our parents’ couch before the bank took their home and a series of other stupid investments—even, in hindsight, partially demented investments, with my father’s cognitive impairment present but undiagnosed—left them broke, living in low-income senior housing, and hounding their two sons for money and food with twice-daily guilt-trip phone calls. “Leather, pleather, have a roll in the heather,” I said, though I hadn’t had a roll with anyone in a long time and saw no opportunities to do so in the near or distant future.

My brother lit the joint, took a few hits, and then passed it to June, who took a quick, demure drag before handing it to me, her newest patient. My brother then rewound the episode because he said he’d lost the plot so he brought us back to the cabin, to Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams getting paid to pretend to be burnt-out but dogged cops trying to solve murders and massive corruption cases, which made me think of my own corruption, “Arterial spray,” McAdams said again, so I said, “Hey, hey, arterial spray, here to slay,” and as I took hit after hit off my brother’s joint with his girlfriend June mothering me by pushing that bowl of walnuts and raisins in my face, I thought about blood and my father’s hardening arteries and the way my life had hardened around me without my knowing it, landing me in a city I didn’t like, a job I hated, wearing clothes that never seemed to fit, housed in some stranger’s skin because it wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to make a difference in the world and have a career, a calling even. I was supposed to follow my bliss, to have a love and a life. A whole slew of supposed-to’s that didn’t pan out and whose fault was that? “Arterial spray,” I scream-coughed as the drama played out on the TV and I sat forward violently, knocking the bowl of raisins and walnuts off my lap and onto the thickly carpeted floor and those nuts there looked like tiny, dusty, discarded brains. “Arterial, schmerial, how’s about a beerial?” I said and June looked at my brother who understood me and my tic-riddled language and said, “He means he’s sorry.” Then I stood and said, with strained focus and determination, “Mom,” and I walked off to the guest bedroom/gym/office, closed the door, sat on the rickety weight bench, and called my mother even though when we left her apartment earlier in the evening that was the one thing she asked us not to do. She’d said, “Please, just give me the night off. I need to think. I need to rest. Please.”

She picked up on the third ring with a weary hello. I said, “Arterial spray.”

“What was that, honey? What now?” She knew me: my voice, my gibberish, my late-night calls.

“Arterial spray, hey hey, there’s no other way.”

“I know your mind, honey. I do. And your brother’s. And your intentions. I’m not questioning those.”

“Arterial spray, seize the day.”

She started to sniffle a little. Not a full-blown cry. She might have been cried out. “I know your father wouldn’t want to live like this either, but they’ve got him so doped up that who knows what he wants now? What he’s feeling? Who knows?”

I leaned my back against the bar and looked at the walls in the dark room, at the faces hanging from them. More of June’s patients’ therapeutic creations. Works of art wrought from trauma, assigned to alleviate panic or anxiety or stress. I wondered if they’d done their job. If June was good at hers. “The nose knows,” I said. “The dope’s eloped,” and I started crying now because this wasn’t what I’d wanted to say but it also was.

“OK, honey,” my mother said after a long pause, defeated, resolved, her sniffling over, her voice firm. “Tell your brother I said OK.” And she hung up.

I stayed a while in the guestroom, the office, the gym, examining June’s patients’ projects—paper dolls, cardboard houses, and papier-mâché masks, and in the dimness they looked like a gallery of everyone I’d ever known: half-forgotten childhood friends and bullies, ex-loves, ex-obsessions, my mother’s soon-to-be-widowed face now thirty-miles away in her lonely bed, father’s hard and angry features when he was young—a fierce carpenter with a shaggy beard, the change in those features revealed by the nurses’ daily shaving of him—softened by drugs and dementia. I imagined what the wall would look like covered in arterial spray, covered in my blood, which was also my father’s and my mother’s and my brother’s, which was also everyone’s, the arteries of the world cut open at once, as if we were all trapped in that cabin, tortured in some strange woods until our arteries were slashed and our secrets and histories and collective life force sprayed across the ramshackle walls and this stain was the only trace we left.

My father died the next day, not long after getting taken off the ventilator. My brother paid for the funeral arrangements. June said some nice things at the service and read a poem one of her patients wrote, though I can’t remember what it was about.

I’m better now, mostly. I’ve made peace with it, with my life, wife, grab a sharp knife. That’s not what I wanted to say. I meant to say I’m doing fine, with time, a stitch in, a bitch is, back nine. Fuck. I miss my father. Arterial spray, fuck a duck you stupid schmuck. I miss my mother, mother, mother, there’s too many of you crying. I miss my brother. There’s too many of us dying. Brother, smother. I diss—miss—the person I was opposed, transposed—supposed—to be.

____

Jon Doughboy is a hobbyist scribbler. He prefers not to but can’t help himself.