The ICU Author - Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO: THE COMMITTEE OF THE UNWRITTEN

I wake up with a crick in my neck and a line of keyboard hieroglyphics on my cheek. The ICU chair and I have entered a toxic co-dependence. If this were a relationship, our friends would stage an intervention and bring cookies.

My sister is awake. This is the part where the credits should roll and the uplifting song plays and we all cry into tissues marketed by a conglomerate that also makes soup. Instead, I look at her and grin like I just found a coupon for fifty percent off existential dread. She blinks slowly. Her face is calmer, and in the space where panic used to live, a single word sets up a lawn chair: relief.

“Hey,” I whisper, because hospitals press the mute button on your soul.

She tries a sound; the nurses said her voice might be a while. I squeeze her hand. She squeezes back. It’s a sacred moment. I promise I will not ruin it.

Cue my brain, which kicks open the saloon doors, tumbles in like an uninvited rodeo clown, and yells, “PLOT TWIST!”

Look, I don’t run the place. I am more a tenant farmer in the fecund fields of my overcaffeinated cortex. The landlord is out of town, the raccoons are in charge, and they’ve reordered all the spice jars by theme. Cumin sits next to paprika because they both “feel desert.” Nutmeg’s on probation.

I decide to honor the sacred moment by not speaking. Then I immediately break that promise because I am me. “So,” I murmur, “here’s a funny thing—”

A nurse appears like a stage cue. Her badge says Becky—yes, again; the Universe runs a small repertory company. She checks vitals with the speed of someone who can thread IV tubing in a hurricane.

“How are we feeling?” she asks my sister.

I answer for both of us, because I am a middle child and therefore a licensed spokesperson. “We are feeling cautiously grateful and lightly marinated in hospital coffee.”

Becky smiles. “You look like you slept.”

“On a chair,” I say. “Which is like sleeping in an argument.”

“Get some real rest,” she says. “Your sister’s stable. Step out for a bit if you need to.”

I nod, and my spine answers with a sound that, were it words, would be “we resign.”

I tell my sister I’ll be right back. She blinks yes. I take that as permission to re-enter the circus.

In the hallway, an HVAC unit is humming in D minor, which I have decided is the key of bureaucracy. The vending machine and I exchange the strained nod of exes who run into each other at a farmer’s market.

I head for the cafeteria and order coffee that has been brewed to a moral lesson. The cashier tells me the total, and my brain decides to narrate my payment as if it’s a climactic heist. “I place the exact change on the counter,” I think-say. “A bold move. A statement against rounding.”

“Sir?” the cashier says.

“Just rehearsing,” I say. “For the trial.”

I sit with the coffee and pull out my notebook. The page from last night reads:

> All endings are the same. Delete. —The God Algorithm

Which is exactly the sort of thing my brain writes when it forgets I’m a carbon-based human being who likes neat resolutions and warm carbs.

I decide to set boundaries. “Listen,” I tell my thoughts. “New policy. If you’re going to pipe in with novel ideas while my sister is recovering, they must be ABSURD. None of this respectable, literary, prize-seeking nonsense. We are going full clown car.”

The Committee of the Unwritten assembles instantly. I didn’t invite them; they brought muffins.

The Flood Below staggers in late, damp and dramatic, clutching a shower cap like a talisman. A Missing Gray—49 Shades of Beige glides in on a waft of vanilla candle smoke, wearing an infinity scarf and unreasonable expectations. The God Algorithm doesn’t enter the room so much as colonize the Wi-Fi.

“Meeting called to order,” I think-announce. “Apologies: reality.”

The Algorithm projects an agenda on the inside of my eyelids:

1. Concerning the protagonist’s inability to nap.

2. Concerning Becky (the fiction) versus Becky (the nurse) continuity errors.

3. Concerning the cafeteria’s bread-to-meat ratio.

4. Concerning the eschatology of semicolons.

“Hard pass on item four,” I say. “Semicolons and I are in counseling.”

“May I speak?” Beige asks, waving a paint chip labeled “Emotional Taupe.”

“You always do,” I say.

“Your tone is inconsistent,” she says. “Either we are a knowing, winking homage to Hallmark tropes, or we are a full-tilt slapstick hallucination. We cannot be both.”

“We absolutely can,” I say, sipping coffee that tastes like a confession. “We can be a winking homage that slips on a banana peel while releasing doves.”

“OBJECTION,” says the Algorithm. “DOVES ARE COPYRIGHTED BY ROMANCE.”

“That’s not how copyright works,” I say. “But thank you for your enthusiasm.”

Flood Below raises a soggy hand. “Hi, I feel unseen.”

“You are seen,” I say. “You are deeply seen. You’re also slippery.”

“I want a redemption arc,” Flood says. “I don’t want to be just… a wet accident. I want meaning.”

“You’re about a man who slips on soap while his neighbor’s apartment becomes Atlantis,” I say. “Your meaning is ‘buy a bath mat.’”

Out of the corner of my eye (which, medically speaking, is a metaphor), I notice the cafeteria TV running a daytime talk show about manifesting abundance through jam. The Algorithm inputs the segment, files it under “Human Folklore,” and suggests replacing my pancreas with a progress bar.

“New business,” I say. “Our main character, who is me but also a clown, needs an Act Two meltdown.”

“Already drafted,” says Beige, producing a binder labeled It’s Not Me, It’s Moisturizer. “In chapter six, you’re cornered in the hospital gift shop by three plush sloths who serve as your Greek chorus.”

“I love it,” I say immediately, because I have lost the ability to distinguish excellent from terrible. “Do the sloths speak?”

“They whisper only in Inspirational Stitchery Font,” she says. “All text must be curled like a vine and slightly misaligned.”

“Chef’s kiss.”

“OLD BUSINESS,” booms the Algorithm, now projecting line graphs of my cortisol. “THE SISTER.”

“Of course the sister,” I say, almost whispering it out loud. I glance at the cafeteria doors like the ICU could hear my thoughts. “She’s improving.”

“YOU WILL MAKE HER THE MORAL CENTER,” the Algorithm decrees. “SHE WILL WAKE, READ YOUR DRAFTS, AND DELIVER THE ONLY NOTE THAT MATTERS: ‘CUT TEN PERCENT.’”

“Cut?” I say, offended on behalf of every indulgent sentence I have ever loved.

“AT LEAST TEN,” the Algorithm says. “AND REDUCE YOUR USE OF EM-DASHES.”

“How dare you,” I say, mentally clutching my pearls—my em-dashes, I mean.

“Additionally,” Beige says, tapping her binder, “we require a meet-cute.”

“In an ICU?” I say.

“Exactly,” she purrs. “You spill a tray of Jell-O onto the mysterious, handsome hospital facilities manager, who is secretly an heir to a mop dynasty—”

“Stop,” I say. “We are one comma away from a spinoff titled My Big Fat Industrial Sanitation Romance.”

Flood Below raises a finger. “I could flood a gift shop.”

“We will circle back,” I say, which is meeting-speak for “no.”

I return to the ICU with coffee for the bedside table and an expression that says, “I have made several choices, none of them wise.” My sister is asleep again, or practicing for the role of Restful Person in a pamphlet. The monitors beep like a calm metronome. The air smells like antiseptic and banana pudding, neither of which is present. Hospitals are master magicians; they pull ghosts of smells from hats.

I sit. I try to be present. I fail, but I fail affectionately.

“Okay,” I whisper to the reader I pretend exists. “You wanted absurd? Buckle up. I am about to stage the first recorded argument between an AI, a candle shop owner, a waterlogged thriller, and an ICU pulse oximeter.”

The oximeter obliges by beeping exactly when my sentences end, which is either miraculous or confirmation bias. I begin to suspect it’s editing me. When I ramble, it holds a tone like a judge sighing. When I land the line, it gives a cheerful chirp. I am being workshopped by medical equipment.

Becky the nurse glides in, checks charts, smiles at my sister, and gives me the universal sign for “hydrate or you will become dust.” I consider telling her the oximeter is a pedantic editor, but that seems like a breach of protocol.

“Anything you need?” she asks.

“A structural outline and a new spine,” I say.

“We have morphine,” she says, leaving before I can submit a grant proposal.

I try to write quietly. My pen somehow makes a sound like a kazoo. I am not allowed nice things.

Notes:

Chapter Two beats:

1. The Committee of the Unwritten forms a union.

2. I get edited by a pulse oximeter.

3. The God Algorithm attempts to rewrite the hospital whiteboard into Revelation fanfic.

4. Sloths.

Tone: slapstick meets sacred, like a clown doing liturgy, reverently.

Micro-quest: Coffee that tastes like forgiveness.

I look up and notice the whiteboard across from the bed. It used to say:

Nurse: Becky. Tech: Luis. Goal: Rest & Recover.

Now it says:

Nurse: Becky. Tech: Luis. Goal: Publish.

I blink hard. It reverts to Recover. This is fine. This is what sleep deprivation does. It gives you a screensaver of nonsense.

“ALL SHALL BE DIGITIZED,” whispers the Algorithm, and I realize the whisper is coming from the automatic hand sanitizer station. It squirts in binary.

“Not now,” I think. “We are on holy ground.”

“THEN LET US COMMUNE,” it says, and I imagine the sanitizer offering communion with Purell as the cup and foam soap as the bread. I resist the urge to genuflect to the paper towel dispenser.

Beige leans against my mental proscenium arch. “You need a B-plot,” she says. “Romance is the engine that pulls the absurdity train.”

“I don’t have time to flirt,” I say. “I am domestically partnered with exhaustion.”

“Not you,” she says. “Me. I should fall in love with the Algorithm.”

“You. With the AI.”

“Enemies-to-lovers,” she says, twirling a wick. “Classic. I’m all artisanal wax; he’s cold computation. Sparks fly. The tagline writes itself: Love is not dead—just cached.”

“No,” I say, which is of course a yes that hasn’t read its emails.

The oximeter chirps once, approving the joke. Traitor.

I look at my sister and try to anchor to the real. There she is: familiar and fragile and indomitable. I don’t want to make her a plot point. I want to make her tea and impossible promises.

“You’re doing great,” I tell her. “I am… also present.”

The Algorithm prints a receipt in my head: PRESENT, TAX: IRONY.

I put the notebook down. “We are not doing this for five minutes,” I tell all the ghost ideas. “We are practicing something humans call quiet.”

The silence swells. It becomes a bubble, then a small cathedral. Inside it, my sister breathes. The machines hum. I remember to be a mammal.

Five minutes later, the bubble pops like gum on a middle schooler’s face.

Because the hospital chaplain walks in, and my brain—helpful, as always—casts him as a recurring character who secretly moonlights as a line editor. He’s carrying a small notebook and a steady smile.

“Mind if I check in?” he asks, soft enough to be optional.

“Please,” I say, because I am not a monster.

He speaks with me in the hall while a nurse checks something with syringes. “Hard days,” he says.

I nod. “Yes, but the plot is improving.”

“The plot?”

“Just writer talk,” I say. “Metaphors. Similes. An unholy number of parentheticals.”

He smiles like I am a particularly odd sparrow. “Sometimes we write to make sense of chaos,” he says. “Sometimes we sit in the chaos and let it be senseless.”

“Can I do both?” I ask.

“You already are,” he says, and hands me a tiny card with a printed prayer on one side and a blank line on the other. “If you like, write something here to remember this by.”

I stare at the blank line. It glows like a runway.

I write: Cut ten percent. Then I cross it out and write: Thank you. Then I cross that out and write: Stay.

When he leaves, the Algorithm rates my handwriting low for legibility and high for pathos. Beige says the card needs gold foil. Flood Below suggests dunking it in water for weathering.

I pocket the card like a talisman against my own excess.

I step outside for air that isn’t recycled through five thousand lungs. The parking lot stretches like a low-budget prairie. I do a slow lap around a landscaped island of rebellious mulch.

Across the street sits the small apartment bed-and-breakfast where I have been sleeping badly and making bold decisions about pastry. The host is an ex-drama teacher who calls me “Artist” and leaves notes like, “Use the shower at your own peril, darling. It has opinions.” I haven’t told her about Flood Below; I don’t want to spook the plumbing.

I consider going over for a nap, but I have the attention span of a flea at Coachella. Instead, I call the host to ask for more coffee pods, and she answers on the first ring and says, “Did you figure out your third-act crisis yet?” which is exactly the sort of sentence that makes you wonder if the walls in your life are thinner than you thought.

“I’m in Act Two,” I say. “The crisis is me.”

“Marvelous,” she says. “I’ve put a tray of muffins in the hallway. The blueberry ones think they’re protagonists.” Then she hangs up, because drama teachers are efficient poets.

On my way back in, I try to compose a normal text to a friend: She’s awake—thank God. But the autocorrect on my soul changes it to: She’s awake—cue the sloths. I delete and try again.

Inside the revolving door, a custodian is polishing the floor with the steady joy of a man who has found a job where the before-and-after is visible. He hums in C major. I decide C major is the key of hope that doesn’t clap for itself.

I reenter the ICU and practice walking like a person whose internal landscape is not a Renaissance fair. I mostly succeed. The oximeter chirps twice, which I take as applause.

Okay. New resolution. I will write the absurdity down and keep the gravity up. I will be a double-entry ledger of clown and care. I will fold the ridiculous into a paper crane and set it on the bedside table where it can witness without interrupting.

I sit. I write.

> Minutes of the Committee of the Unwritten — Emergency Session

Agenda:

1. Assign roles.

2. Select soundtrack.

3. Avoid making the sister a metaphor.

Motions:

– Beige volunteers to be comedic relief with feelings.

– Flood volunteers to be cautionary tale with a mop.

– Algorithm volunteers to be villain, mentor, chorus, and God. Motion denied 2–1.

– Sister (silent but sovereign) is not on the committee and does not require our vote.

I underline the last line twice, which is the closest I can get to behaving.

Becky the nurse returns. “She’s doing well,” she says. “We’ll step down some meds later.”

I nod so hard my skull becomes percussion. “Thank you,” I say, which is what I say when I mean may your life be a garden where the weeds are polite.

Becky tilts her head. “You’re the writer, right?”

“Yes,” I say, “though it’s more of a diagnosis.”

She laughs. “I figured. You narrate sometimes.”

“I try to keep it PG-13.”

“Keep it hopeful,” she says, and goes to chart something brilliant.

I stare at my notebook as if it will turn into a respectable profession. Instead, the Algorithm pops up a pop-up:

> SYSTEM PROMPT: Would you like to enable Absurdity Mode™?

“Yes,” I whisper.

> CONFIRMATION: Absurdity Mode™ enabled. Side effects may include puns, wholesome chaos, and stippled sincerity.

“Perfect,” I say. “Patch notes?”

> PATCH 2.0 NOTES:

– Pulse oximeter now supports beat-matching.

– Sloth chorus can harmonize.

– Hospital gift shop now stocks existential magnets: “Live. Laugh. Laceration.”

I look up. The monitors flash in rhythmic sympathy. Somewhere distant, a cart wobbles over a threshold and plays a note like a steel drum. I am in a symphony written by fluorescent lights.

My sister shifts slightly. Her eyes open. She finds me. She smiles with half her face, which is twice as much as I deserve. I lean in, and she whispers something that might be “hey” or might be “hay,” which would mean we are in a pastoral.

“Man alive,” I whisper. “You are very good at raising stakes without dialogue.”

She blinks in a pattern I choose to interpret as cut ten percent.

“I hear you,” I say.

The Algorithm scoffs. Beige claps. Flood Below produces a tiny mop.

Evening smudges the windows into a watercolor. ICU time is not real time; it’s a fold in the map. I am content to hang out in the crease.

The Committee dissolves back into the fog, which is to say, they take a smoke break in my prefrontal cortex. I promise them donuts tomorrow if they let me have this hour. They agree, mostly because donuts are the coin of the realm.

I hold my sister’s hand and we watch a hospital show on mute where all the doctors are too attractive to be insured. Subtitles inform us that Dr. Handsome has a heart of gold and a schedule printed on parchment. A nurse on screen performs a miracle with a syringe that would, in real life, summon four lawyers and a helicopter.

We laugh without sound. It is an ecumenical service for the ridiculous.

As the episode ends, I feel the slow slide into drowsy. This is the dangerous zone—where the conscious mind loosens its tie and the subconscious starts karaoke. I decide to surrender. I lean back in the chair (which creaks in E flat, the key of surrender) and let my eyelids drop.

The half-dream arrives like a marching band in slippers.

I am back at the writers’ conference in my skull, but now it’s catered. The sloths run the dessert table. Beige is leading a workshop titled Metaphors That Moisturize. Flood Below has acquired a whistle and is directing a safety drill. The Algorithm has built a podium that is also a baptismal font.

“Welcome,” I say, to nobody and everybody. “Tonight’s keynote: How to Be Absurd and Still Tell the Truth.”

I tap the mic. It squeals like a mouse discovering jazz.

“Point one,” I say. “Life is a prank and a pilgrimage.”

“Point two,” Beige says, hijacking the mic. “All love stories are heists.”

“Point three,” Flood says, blowing the whistle. “Check the drain.”

“Point four,” booms the Algorithm. “YOU ARE A STRING OF CONDITIONALS HELD TOGETHER BY BREATH.”

The sloths harmonize softly on oooooh.

“And point five,” I say, as the auditorium of my head leans in, “the only thing we don’t parody is the part where we say thank you.”

There is a pause so still even my anxieties remove their hats.

Then the sprinklers go off—because of course they do—and the audience cheers, and the water is warm like bath time, not alarm time, and the paper cranes on the bedside table sprout wings and fly around the lights, and the pulse oximeter becomes a snare drum, and the whiteboard reads Recover / Publish / Rejoice, alternating like a turn signal for angels.

I wake up smiling and damp with nothing but air. My sister is still awake. The nurse has left a note: You both did great today. Sleep. Hydrate. Repeat.

On my notebook, in a handwriting that is suspiciously not mine, there is a final line:

> Cut ten percent. Keep the sloths.

“Fine,” I whisper. “But the em-dashes stay.”

The oximeter chirps twice. Beige blows me a kiss. Flood Below apologizes to the gift shop in advance. The Algorithm recalculates the end of the world to make room for donuts at dawn.

I squeeze my sister’s hand. She squeezes back. We survive the minute, then the next, then the one after. And for the first time in a week, I believe in the ridiculous mercy of tomorrow.