Finding Jerry

wine bar, green card, ex-boyfriend, jungle     -fanny               

The first time I saw him, half of his face was swallowed by a thick beard. It was the type of facial hair Dumbledore’s better-looking younger brother might have had, bespeckled with… bread crumbs? Fish flakes? Dandruff? I hope it was dandruff. It had to be dandruff. 

Deep brown strands hung from his face, fizzing into a deeper gray near the curve of his neck. A hairy jungle, truly— one that distracted me so much that I don’t remember much else about him. Then again, I suppose I don’t remember much else about a lot of things that day. It doesn’t really cross your mind to remember things when you’re jogging around town—and you remember much less when you’re knocked off your feet and flung into the air by a speeding hunk of commercially-produced metal.

The way I write about it makes it sound like a joke, but it really wasn’t. I ended up in the ER, tubes snaking around my body and one eye so swollen that I couldn’t see out of it. I was in and out of consciousness. The doctors tell me that my still-beating heart was a miracle— “like magic,” they said, and some news anchors even wanted to interview me. “Sensational.” “Otherworldly.” I didn’t mind the attention, but I turned them down because I wasn’t in the mood to talk. I didn’t even follow up with the doctors. Call me kiddish, but I just didn’t want to dwell so much on dying. Maybe it was a result of brain damage. 

+++

The second time I saw him, I was half-comatose. We were at a wine bar, sipping Merlot—obviously, not real Merlot. Remember, I was half-comatose, so this had to be a hallucination. This time, the man’s beard had been carefully combed through, and I remember the soft scent of coconut oil mixing with the aroma of wine.

“I forget,” I told him. “What’s your name again?” 

He said something about preferring hard liquor, then turned to me and grumbled a confused “I’m Jerry.” The words were so slurred that I questioned if hard liquor was really something he could handle. We went on like that, sipping wine and munching skinny breadsticks as if we had known each other for a lifetime. At one point, Jerry pulled out a stack of green cards— Wizard-of-Oz green— and showed me a magic trick. “I’ll make the Joker disappear.” And he really did. He pulled it out of his beard as if he was splitting open a monster that had swallowed the wild card. I’m telling you, the man might have been Dumbledore’s second cousin or something.

Jerry waved the card in front of me, a beardy coconut oil scent wafting through the air. I swear I saw his chin hairs bristle when he asked me, hours later, “And who are you?” 

It was strange. Maybe the Merlot got to me, because I didn’t know how to answer. 

+++

“Who are you?” I ask the nurse when he comes to adjust the sheets crumpling under my butt. The bottom half of his face is as shiny as a waxed apple; he must’ve just shaved this morning. I see a bottle of coconut water sitting on the counter and instinctively raise my eyebrows. 

“Are you... Jerry?” 

The nurse smiles at me the way I imagine only Jerrys can smile, patting the part of the blanket resting on my stomach. “No, not quite. Remember? My name is Ted.” He stretches out the “Ted” just slightly, like a preschool teacher reading a vocabulary word aloud. “Teeeeed.” 

Ted, whose identity I’m still not convinced of, places a hospital-warmed sandwich in front of me. “Milk or water?” he asks. 

“...Merlot,” I say, eyeing him suspiciously. I realize that “Ted’s” voice sounds similar to Jerry’s. Eerie. Maybe I hadn’t been hallucinating at all—because now I notice a strange, morbid magic in the air. 

“I’ll see if I can get you some grape juice then. Closest thing we have.” Ted/Jerry fumbles with the IV pump and scribbles something down on a pad. I cock my head to the side, looking for other mystic clues.

“What are you doing?” I blurt out.

Ted winks at me. “Alchemy.” 

Call me crazy, but a million different possibilities begin raging around in my head right about now. The most illogical one is that this Jerry—this Ted—is some sort of shape-shifting witch, or, Ron Weasly style, maybe the bitter ex-not-ex-boyfriend of a witch I had somehow wronged. I had always suspected there was something true about the Harry Potter series they reran all the time on that wretched hospital TV. It must have been a clue. They must have been telling me something. Maybe I was in a social experiment. I panic. I panic and my bodily involuntary jolts up and down, left and right. 

“Who are you?” I demand through gritted teeth. I feel saliva foaming at my mouth, and my heart rate monitor shrills BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. Ted looks terrified, as he should, because I’ve finally found him out. His eyes widen into oblong white disks with chocolate centers, and just as quickly, they soften. 

“I’m Ted,” he attempts. “I’m Ted, you have to believe me.” He reaches for the coconut water on the counter and unscrews the cap, but his gentle movements are offset by the BEEP BEEP BEEP and my own raspy breathing. I think I might die from choking, and the closer Ted comes, the louder the heart rate monitor screams. 

I squirm to the other side of the bed, shouting, “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” but Ted follows me, his hand grasping my right arm. I screech, flailing my arms in the air. “Where is Jerry, you liar?! Where is that bearded man?! Get away from me, you witch!” 

Suddenly, the world is swirling around me, and I hear a thump, and the blood in my head hammers at my temples. Plastic snakes filled with medication strangle me, and I feel a cold hardness beneath my hands. The BEEP BEEP BEEP floats further into the distance, and when I try to open my eyes, I see a blur of lab coats. I’m being hoisted onto another bed, being pushed fast down a hallway to God knows where. 

I look up, my vision clearing, and see Ted mouthing, “You’re okay!” Sound rushes to my ears: footsteps, screeching, beeping, screaming. “Ted!” I yell as loudly as I can, which is not loud at all. “Ted!”

He looks at me. “If you’re not him, then where is he? Who is he? Who is Jerry?”

Ted’s voice is haggard, out of breath from running my bed down the corridor. As we wait for the automatic doors to slide open, he breathes, “You… You’re… You’re in… a kind of… hospital. You know, the…” 

His voice slips into the distance as I slowly prop myself up to look around me. The motion is dizzying, but I’m able to catch a glimpse of myself on the glassy hallway walls. A dazed face stares back, sunburned almost. Brown eyes, a flat nose. 

But the thing that stands out to me, the thing I cannot forget, creeps across my upper lip and down below my chin: wiry and thick, a brown fizzing into gray. I sink back into my pillow, gasping for air. I look back up at the nurse named Ted. I glance at the clipboard beside me, labeled “J”-something, scribbles I can’t make out. Time slows down, and I wish that maybe I could have died in that car crash after all.

Instead, my head pounds, alive. My body aches, alive. My memory suffocates, still alive. And the man who is not Jerry rolls the one who is through another door, and another, and another—each one a different permutation of the same thing.

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