Flesh Wounds, page 20
Perhaps it was Eva’s dedication and empathy. Without hesitation, Eva goes that extra distance. Every time.
Case in point: My chart says I’m to be exercised daily, but most of the nurses consider me a lost cause. Why waste their time when there’s gossip to spread, coffee breaks to take, and a television vomiting soap operas at the nurse’s station? Eva’s different. It’s enough that the chart says do it. My muscles and joints are stiff and unyielding, but Eva persists, fighting their lack of elasticity with as much determination as I fight the tethers of life.
It was during one such exercise session that I first noticed the rift between Snider and Eva.
Eva’s hands as she exercised me were cool velvet on my flesh. Her uniform was a pale blue, tight across the velvet swell of her bosom. I could smell her hair. Denied the comfort of Death’s welcome embrace, I was at least compensated with Eva’s company. A would-be corpse couldn’t ask for more.
Rhinoceros in heat is the kindest analogy I can find to describe Snider’s sudden entrance. “Schüpfheim! I told you to quit spending so much time on that vegetable!”
“Doctor Monrowe’s orders, Nurse Snider. He’s to be exercised every—”
“I know what his chart says! And you know how short-handed we are.”
“I’ll be done in just a minute.”
Nurse Snider screwed her into a scowl. “I don’t know how much longer you expect to work here, Schüpfheim, but—”
“All right already!” Eva drew the sheet back up to my neck and stomped out of the room. Snider followed. I could hear the old bitch’s voice as she followed my Eva down the hall.
Linda next. Linda, who had dreamed of being a singer before a brain tumor and surgery to excise it had put her here. To we who could hear it, her voice had carried clear and strong from the wasted woman on the hospital bed.
Just before her body failed her, she sang to me. Her voice was weak and quivering, but her eyes smiled.
Though I would gladly trade for Death’s bittersweet kiss, sponge baths with Eva have long been the highpoint of my existence, serving as erotic interludes in banality. It was during one such bath that I learned there are always limits, even to silence.
The sponge left a tingling trail of warmth as it slid across my flesh. Eva’s fingertips, riding the side of the sponge like outriggers on a canoe, were cool and soft. Her nails sent transparent shivers coursing the length of my body.
As the sponge slipped along my inner thigh, over my genitals, and across my lower abdomen, something triggered a reaction in her. I could see it in the startled look on her face. She saw something: some minuscule change in skin coloration, the twitch of an excited muscle, or perhaps a shift in the depths of my empty eyes. Whatever, I’d made that first contact.
She leaned close. “Johnny? Can you feel that?”
Oh yes, my Eva. I can feel the sponge where it presses warm against my belly. I can feel your other hand like fire on my thigh.
“You can,” she whispered. And pulled back. There was doubt, and maybe just a trace of fear, on her face as she drew the sheet back to my neck. Quickly, she gathered up sponge, towel, and bath water. And then she fled the room, leaving me terrified she might never return.
Behind me, one of the elevators emitted a startling ding! A second later, the doors slid open and out rolled a noisy mop and bucket, followed closely by one of the night janitors.
Snider spun, nearly pinwheeling off her feet. When she saw him, she screamed like a cat with its tail caught beneath a U-haul and stormed down the hall. An orderly had left an IV stand near the water fountain. Snider snatched it up as she ran by.
The janitor spit several curses in Spanish and dove back into the elevator. As Snider charged by, the IV stand whirling bola-like about her head, I could hear his fingers stabbing frantically at the elevator buttons. The doors closed just in time.
“Hurry,” I pleaded. It wouldn’t take him long to get help.
Despite my fears, Eva returned the next day.
Her eyes were guarded. When she finally looked at my face, she froze, studying, wondering, searching for the empathy she’d felt earlier.
The desire to say something swelled in my chest and surged forth in utter silence.
Her face softened. She touched my cheek. “I wish you could talk to me, Johnny. I need a friend right now.”
I’m here for you, Eva.
“It’s this guy I’ve been living with.” She ran her hands nervously over her face and looked fleetingly at the door. “We decided not to date anyone else—that’s the only reason I agreed to move in with him. We weren’t ready for marriage... too much of a commitment.
“But he’s been seeing other women for some time. And now... Well, he’s hurt me, Johnny.” Her voice broke there at the end and I knew that by hurt she meant he had physically abused her.
You deserve better, Eva.
“I know I deserve better. I should leave him, but then I’d be alone. And, there’s this.” She pulled a pill bottle from her side pocket. My eyes were too far gone; I couldn’t make out the contents.
As if she understood, she explained. “This white powder has gotten a tremendous hold on my life, Johnny. Stronger than any feelings for that two-timing bastard, Clint. Stronger than even my love for nursing.”
Cocaine?
“Clint started me on the coke. He keeps me supplied with it—Hell, I wouldn’t know where to begin to look...”
The door slammed open, halting whatever else Eva was about to say. The pill bottle vanished back into her pocket. In the doorway stood Headnurse Snider, a shaggy blur to my failing vision, a hulking neanderthal come for my Eva.
“I knew I’d find you in here again! This is my last warning. The next time I catch you spending all your time in here, I’ll see that you’re fired!”
As Eva slid past her and through the doorway, Snider bellowed after her, “And don’t think I can’t do it either!”
Letting the door swing closed, the hag crossed the room to stand beside my bed. “Goddamn vegetable. Why don’t you do us all a favor and die already?”
Why don’t you do me a favor?
Snider rested a wrinkled hand on the ventilator beside my bed. “You take space and time that could be devoted to important patients.”
You can solve that problem.
She glanced at the door, not unlike Eva just before she’d opened her heart to me. But as Snider checked to make sure we were alone, her thoughts were as black as the ice that night on the overpass.
Do it, I begged.
Her hand rested on the large dial on the ventilator’s front panel. I knew from clearer days that the numbered dial regulated the percent oxygen being supplied to my system. Shutting off the machine would sound an alarm; she couldn’t have that. But she could turn down the amount of oxygen being supplied. It might take several minutes for me to expire, but it would work.
Minutes, even hours, seemed no more than a heartbeat to the eternity that I’d lain there.
Do it, bitch!
“I should do it,” she mumbled, whether to herself or me, I couldn’t say.
Her eyes were small black gems sunk deep in the blur of her face. Pig eyes, I thought. Kill me, pig.
“But you want me to kill you, don’t you?”
God, yes.
“Dying’s easy,” she said, as if quoting some obscure text. “It’s living that’s really torturing you.”
Her hand slipped from the instrument’s dial. As she turned to leave, she laughed softly, cruelly. A second later, the door closed and I was left alone.
Damn you, bitch!
That day, I dreamt clear, palpable visions of her death and dismemberment. A music video screaming with heavy metal. It was a wet video. Wet and red.
Just before Snider entered my room, she looked down the hall, almost as if she knew I was there. Her eyes were all white and iris, her pupils tiny pinpricks of midnight.
“Go on!” I screamed at her, terrified that I alone would be left alive.
After Linda, Snider had gone to Peter, the youngest of the Magnificent Seven. Peter gave us that name. Only nine years old, he’d spent the last two of those in Ward C.
Peter’s older sister had pushed him out on a frozen lake. The ice had broken. Despite the most ardent of rescue efforts, Peter had been trapped beneath the ice for over an hour. When they’d recovered his body, a well-meaning paramedic had administered CPR. Peter’s body had resumed a facsimile of life, but he had never regained consciousness. His parents had brought him here, hoping the experts could save their son, sentencing him to Hell with the rest of us.
The silence of the life-support machines had frightened the boy. He’d been even more terrified when darkness began closing down around him.
“It’s alright, Peter. We’ll all be together on the other side.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“I wish you could hold me.”
“I do too.”
“Johnny?” His voice was distant and weak.
“I’m here, Peter.”
“Linda’s singing... there’s... light. I—” And he was gone.
“I’ll be right along,” I promised.
I spent Eva’s day off contemplating her addiction to Clint and the cocaine, concentrating with the absolute mental exertion only the comatose are capable of, as if sheer force of will could rid her of those two evils.
My efforts paid off.
“I did it, Johnny!” Eva’s exuberance flooded the room, sweeping me up in a maelstrom of little girl giddiness and mirth. She flopped presumptively down on the bed beside me and laid a hand on either side of my face. “I packed my things and just walked out. Not a single backwards glance. Oh, you would have been so proud of me.”
She stroked my beard and leaned close, searching, hoping. “I can beat that other thing too, Johnny. Just watch me.” She swallowed. “And help me. I know you can.”
Her eyes probed mine, their blue a commanding fire. “I know you’re in there. I can feel you... thinking at me. I don’t understand it. Empathy, telepathy—I don’t know what to call it. But I know you’re alive in there. Alive and alert, and in some way connected to me. I’ll find a way to bring you out of this coma.” Eyes locked on my soulless brown orbs, she pressed her lips against my cheek.
And shattered my world.
There was a sinking feeling at first, a tugging at the roots of John McIver. I felt as if the world had suddenly dropped out from under me. Gravity had failed and I was plunging. But it was a uniform fall, not the gut-wrenching plunge of a rollercoaster or the sudden altitude change of an airplane. All of me had suddenly been yanked aside.
I found myself standing just behind her. My vision was perfectly clear. I could see the way her hair flooded like silk over her shoulders. Her skirt had ridden up to reveal thighs that flowed like finely carved maple to meet sculpted calves and tiny ankles.
I barely heard her as she said her farewells to the empty shell on the bed. She walked right past me and out the door, blind to the miracle.
How had this happened? Like some Disney character, I found myself kissed and given new life, a Sleeping Ugly not entirely whole, for on the bed I still saw the real me. There lay the shell I’d become, stretched out like a collapsed two-liter bottle, wasted limbs like curling dry bones beneath the sheets. I hardly recognized the face as my own. Sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. Woefully thin. Yet, there was the crook in my nose where Nick Panzarati broke it in high school, there the scar where I’d fallen down the stairs as a child. Beneath a dark beard lay my arrogant jawline. My hair was long. One ear was mangled, and there were new scars on my forehead and left cheek.
But it was definitely my face.
I reached out to touch the face of the mirage on the bed, but my hand passed right through. Through flesh. Through pillow. Through mattress, frame, and everything between. One of us was not real. Which one, I could not with certainty say. But logic told me that I must be the projection and that... that corpse was the real McCoy.
It was too much. I stumbled to a corner of the room and collapsed, shuddering against the cold white wall.
Geoffrey next. Geoffrey had been the only one of us who didn’t require life-support. Snider smothered him with his pillow. He screamed and raged and begged me to stop her. There was nothing I could do.
Drunk one night, Geoffrey had lost control of his vette on an interstate exit ramp. He’d rolled over an embankment railing and come down on the road below—right in front of a Toyota pickup. The husband and wife in the truck survived. Their two children, carelessly allowed to ride in the back, were killed.
“When they were released from the hospital,” Geoffrey had told me, “they came to see me. The man spat in my face and cursed the coma that kept me from him. The woman slapped me, then wept and apologized.”
“They should have never been allowed in here.”
“Snider watched the whole thing.”
“I’m sorry.” I hadn’t known what else to say.
“No need to be.” He’d looked away then, his eyes ghostly as they hovered over the dead mask worn for the real world. “This is my punishment for murdering those two children, Johnny. I’ll lay here forever, denied death, denied peace. Denied any kind of life worth living.”
“I think those parents deserve some of the credit for—”
“I killed them!” he had screamed.
I had few conversation with Geoffrey after that. Because he preferred to be left alone, I never really got to know him. Pity, because as he died under the pillow, I never got to say goodbye to him either.
Of the many mysteries in our universe, some have ventured that the human mind is the single catacomb the depths of which mankind shall never fully fathom. Like the adrenal gland, the mind is a stronghold of incredible power... if only we knew how to tap it.
I’ve come to accept, for lack of any better hypothesis, that this presence, this shadow-McIver who walks among the living, is a mental projection. My mind, for so many years the single most exercised organ in my failing body, has broken whatever barriers kept it fastened within the confines of my cranium.
As I learned the first time I tried to touch my face, I lack the ability to interact with my environment. I pass through anything of substance: the wasted body on the bed, the door, the walls, the water fountain in the hall... even my dear, sweet Eva. How fine it would have been to have held her just once, to have felt the warm velvet of her flesh against mine, to have stroked her hair.
But contact with the real world is impossible. Standing in my room, staring down at what time had made of me, I longed to terminate that tube-fed cocoon of a man. What would have then become of the projected me is anyone’s guess. Would the projection have blinked from existence? Or would I have remained, forever, this ethereal affectation, this powerless ghost?
No matter, I’m doomed to continue this pathetic pretense, albeit no longer confined to the bed. Within a finite distance, roughly equivalent to this ward of the hospital, I can roam at will. Any further and I experience that sinking feeling, that pulling at every atom of John McIver, and I find myself back in the withered body on the bed.
Though I remain Death’s most earnest suitor, my concept of that absent benefactor changed on the day of my resurrection. From the bed, I had zealously believed Death to be a god I could summon. But on the day I rose, I declared Death a distant effigy, impotent and uncaring. There is no Grim Reaper. No scythe-wielding savior whose succor I could call with prayer. Hence his absence despite years of cajoling. Death is merely death, lowercase D. A random encounter. A happenstance. Something that comes to each of us at some point in time, but by no predestined schedule. For surely if there was a schedule, I was long overdue.
I thought death beyond my control.
I was wrong.
The elevator sang out again. This time I was expecting it, so rather than a startling chime, it seemed soft, bitter. Snider couldn’t hear it from inside my room. Nor could she see the three men that spilled forth when its doors opened.
The discarded IV stand, lying half in and half out of my gaping doorway, was all they needed to point the way. The two interns were young and fast. The rent-a-cop was old and wobbled as if one hip had been broken. He followed as best he could, but it was obvious who’d reach her first.
The next day I followed Eva on her rounds. That initial exploration was filled with many discoveries, first and by no means least of which was the realization that I was not alone. WARD C, read the sign by the elevators. As I followed Eva from patient to patient, it became clear what the C stood for.
I’ve since heard it called a number of names: The Coma Clinic, The Coma Research Center, The Research Center for Lethargic Illnesses... even The Dead Zone by a few nurses who had perhaps read a little too much Stephen King. By whatever name, the ward is a prison for those such as I, bound this side of the razor’s edge separating life and death.
The realization that there were others would have been discovery enough for that first day, but it paled in comparison to the knowledge that I could communicate with them.
I met Shelby Lloyd first. She might have once had her pick of men, for even in the emaciated shell on the hospital bed there remained something of beauty. Her hair was burnished copper which Eva kept clean and brushed. It lay warm across the pillow, framing her quiet face in sunrise. Her eyes were the most startling pools of emerald green. As I watched over Eva’s shoulder, I noticed that Shelby’s gaze had fixed on me. I moved. Her eyes followed.
“You can see me!” I gasped, startling myself with the sound of my own voice. Until that moment, I didn’t know I could speak.
“Are you Death come at last?” Her lips shaped the words as if unobstructed by the tube running down her throat. Her words were clear and musical, a voice to match the beauty that had once been Shelby Lloyd.
Eva gave no indication that she heard either of us, nor did she appear to sense anything out of the ordinary. She ran a washcloth over Shelby’s face, cleaning lips I had just watched move.
