Ostrich: A Novel by Matt Greene Read Free Book Online Page A

have.)

Part Two
Taking an Interest

Chapter Six
    It’s funny how time works in hospital. When you come in the front door they put you in the waiting room, where time goes backward, but the farther in you get, the more of a rush everyone seems to be in. I’m as far in as you can go and still come back. They call it the ICU. In here I’m hooked up to an ICP (through a hole in my skull), an EKG, and two IVs (which makes eight in Roman Numerals). Everything in the ICU has an abbreviation, which proves how much of a hurry everyone’s in (except me). (If the ICU were a person, it would be the sort who walks up escalators, which would make it a walking tautology.)
    In the other wards I’ve been in, the nurses do things ASAP, but here in the ICU they do them asap. The fact that asap is two syllables shorter than ASAP means that it conveys a deeper shade of urgency. (The extra two syllables it would take the nurses to say ASAP would eat unacceptably into time that could be better spent starting to do whatever it is that needs doing.) While the nurses and doctors buzz around like flies I have a lot of time to think (which hurts less than I thought it would). One of the things I’ve been wondering about a lot is the first time someone used the abbreviation ASAP.
    Although we probably won’t ever know the exact circumstances that this happened in, I have decided that it’s reasonable to assume two things:
    1)  That the person who first coined the term was in a rush. It is reasonable to assume this because the one thing we do know about him for certain is that he needed something done as soon as possible.
    2)  That the person who first heard the term didn’t understand what it meant. It is reasonable to assume this because no one had ever said it before.
    Therefore, it is also reasonable to assume that the conversation probably went something like this:
    MAN 1: I need you to do something ASAP.
    MAN 2: What does that mean?
    MAN 1: It means that I need you to do something as soon as possible.
    MAN 2: Well, why didn’t you say that, then?
    MAN 1: I did say that.
    MAN 2: No, you didn’t. You said you needed me to do something ASAP.
    MAN 1: ASAP is short for As Soon As Possible.
    MAN 2: Since when?
    MAN 1: Since now.
    MAN 2: Says who?
    MAN 1: Says me. Think about it. People only ever say “As Soon As Possible” when there isn’t a second to spare, right?
    MAN 2: So?
    MAN 1: So if there isn’t a second to spare, then surely it makes sense to have an alternative phrase that takes a third less time to say. Which is where ASAP comes in.
    MAN 2: Well, that’s all well and good. But how the eff did you expect me to understand that “I need you to do something ASAP” meant that you needed me to do something as soon as possible?
    MAN 1: I didn’t. But sometimes you have to speculate to accumulate. Moreover, I hope now you can see that, if anything, my decision to risk confusing you by using an unfamiliar abbreviation was, in itself, testament to the exigency of the circumstances that we currently find ourselves in.
    If you think about it (which I have (a lot)), this represents a net loss of 264 syllables, when all Man 1 was trying to do was save himself two in the first place. In conclusion, this means that inthis situation saying ASAP was exactly 44 times less efficient than it would have been to say As Soon As Possible.
    (All this is really unlucky for Man 1 and Man 2 (because by the time Man 1 was through explaining, their house would most probably have burned down), but for me, it’s great news. I don’t know how many hours it took me to figure this out because I fell asleep and had to start again quite a few times, but the fact that I can still do mental arithmetic means I don’t have major brain damage.)
    This time when I wake up, Mum and Dad are Siamese at the foot of my bed. Mum faces away from me, her hair lank and shapeless and her head bowed into Dad’s clavicle, which is another word for collarbone. Dad is