my wedding ring

emergency surgery!

A flap like a hat,
Dead white
Then that plush red.

—Sylvia Plath

I was having dinner with my wife and two friends on the rooftop deck of our apartment building. It was a warm summer evening. My wife had made a peach tart for dessert and we were sharing it from the coffeetable between the patio couches on which we sat. The low iron-frame glass coffeetable caused us to feel that somewhat uncomfortable overflexion of the hips as we leaned forward to eat our tart. My friends, Sohrab and Darwin, like all who tried Sanna’s cooking, were flabbergasted by the quality of the food.

We’d had quite a bit of the New Zealand sauvignon blanc, which Sohrab and I would customarily enjoy while dropping acid (to take the edge off), and which we were now glad to share in more restrained circumstances, so I had to use the bathroom. I felt quite good, all of the aforementioned being happy things: food, friendship, and a summer evening on a roof.

The bathroom was in the kitchen in the rooftop room that contained the elevator, a kitchenette, a small interior dining room—a consolation for residents who could not enjoy the rooftop, or for that matter the courtyard, during the three-fourths of the year encumbered by snow—and the emergency staircase. Coming out from the rooftop hut, I looked at the great iron pergola that canopied two-thousand of the deck’s four-thousand square feet, broad and imposing, coal in color, contrasting with the white weatherproof sofas, which now, in the incandescent light of the bulbs slung along the balcony rails and the artificial gas fires dotting the deck, glowed an inviting yellow.

As I drew closer to the couches I had the impulsive thought to do a chinup on one of the buttresses of the pergola. As I neared it, I jumped and caught the crossbar. But under the pads of my fingers, I felt a rough, bent edge; it sent a searing pain into my ring finger, and because of the shape of the twisted metal, folded back on itself on the inside of the iron buttress, I could find no hold, and was scraped off the pergola, and thrown forward a few feet, at a velocity hardly diminished from the initial forward thrust of my jump.

My first thought, on landing clumsily, was embarrassment, in case my friends had seen me fumble the chinup. It seemed they perhaps hadn’t, and I went sheepishly to the couch. But looking down at my finger, I saw that my flesh had gone white above my ring, in the way that flesh engorges and blanches with clear liquid before the body has realized the injury and sends blood flowing from the wound. But even as I watched, the blood came. I took a napkin from the table and covered the wound. My wife was regaling my laughing friends with a story and they didn’t notice my inchoate distress. I looked down at the napkin and it had soaked through. I peeled it off and looked at the finger. It has started to swell and put the wedding ring into the cut above it. It was irritating. I tried to take off the ring. It wouldn’t fit over the wound. I tried to force it off: with every extra pound foot of force, the pain increased in my finger as if it were a decibel of sound unbearable to my ear. I wouldn’t be able to pull it off, and it worried me—was my ring going to be stuck on my finger? And would it blood be choked off to everything above the first knuckle?

“I think I fucked up my finger,” I said, to no-one in particular, though a bit more to Sohrab, who was nearest to me.

“yeah I noticed a bit” he said.

“The cut is like, above my ring” gesturing, holding my hand out.

“I can see that,” he said, looking over “can you get the ring off?”

“No,” I said. “I tried, it’s stuck.”

“Hm,” he was concentrating.

My wife and Darwin, meanwhile, were rising into a riotous discourse. They were unable to attend to my crescive anxiety. And I was as one who is uncomfortable to disturb a good time with his bad news, as animals conceal themselves when they are sick. I was fortunate to have Sohrab to dote on me, since I needed it, or so I thought, and since my wife would generally have as little to do with my troubles as she could, not because she lacked compassion, but because I so often cried wolf, and she already did enough; to her, there was no longer much telling the true from the false alarm.

“I think we should try to get it off,” Sohrab said.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Yeah I think it might like—like if you don’t—it might swell up you might not be able to get it off.”

“Yeah… Jesus,” I blanched like my dead skin.

“Guys,” Sohrab said, addressing Darwin and Sanna, “we’re gonna go downstairs, gotta take care of something.”

Sanna drunkenly waved us off through a broad smile that bespoke the beauty of the balmy, hedonic evening, the pleasure she always unselfconsciously felt at having pulled together a good dinner party, the embodied bliss that was the consummation of her culinary art. The effect, in which I’d so recently partaken, a brushstroke in her creation, had shattered for me, revealing the underlying frail horror of existence. I was glad that Sanna and Darwin could persist in the superstructural pleasure: it can calm the anxious person to know that the world will go on without them, once they have effected their retreat.

We got into my apartment and hurried, I to the bathroom, Sohrab to the whiskey. He brought me a glass which I downed. He said, “try soap.”

“Yeah I was thinking that.”

I lathered my hands and pulled at it.

“I can’t get it,” I called to the kitchen, where Sohrab was washing his hands.

“Let’s see?!” he called.

He came again to the bathroom and stood next to me, drying his hands on a cloth towel.

“It gets caught on the cut… like basically the cut is raised up over the edge of the ring,” I pulled again, the pain electrifying the nerves in my neck.

“Hm. Can you like press it down?” he went to grab my hand.

We tried. “No… I think I have to try to flatten the cut, like if I cut the extra piece of skin off.”

“Yeah?!” he asked with some excitement.

“I think so… here, I have something—can you go in this drawer; I have a heavy pair of nail scissors, they almost look like pliers.”

He sought them with alacrity.

“Here,” he held them out to me.

“Can you sterilize them? I have some alcohol.”

He did.

I held the clippers against the cut. I took as much of the dead flesh as I could between the blades. I tucked as much into it as I thought would place me against the edge of pain without throwing me into it. I pressed the levers together; it came off clean, revealing the layer of my body beneath, who was far from ready for it, but who nonetheless was now called up to become skin.

I lathered my hands in soap again. This time as I pressed the band over the chasm, the burning was flatter and more distributed across the surface of my body. I pressed very hard.

“I did it!” I said. “I fucking did it!”

“Oh ho-hohohohoooahhh!” Sohrab called out.

We returned to the rooftop, triumphant.

“Good job,” Sanna said, with a goodnatured drunkenness.