Dream of the Serpent

by Alan Ryker

  She was very intense, gesturing with her small hands to emphasize her points, her forehead bouncing like crazy somewhere behind that wall of hair.

  I liked her a lot. I liked her looks. I liked her passion. I liked how serious she was about it, never making light about her subject, or seeming apologetic for caring so much for something most people found silly.

  When she was done giving me the basics, she stopped dead and just watched me. I knew that what I said next would determine if I got to talk to her again.

  “Are you an undergrad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What year?”

  “Junior.” It felt like I’d walked out onto thin ice again. Given her stature and baby face, she probably got pegged as a teenager all the time, and seemed to be waiting for me to say something about it, to prove that I was as boring and predictable as everyone else. With this girl, I was betting it was all thin ice.

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-one.”

  “Oh, I would have guessed forty, but you must hear that all the time. Seen a lot of hard living, huh?”

  Her eyes opened wide and she stared at me in total shock for a moment before she hiccupped out an awkward laugh. She tried to find something to say, and it was funny to watch her mouth move without words after the long, eloquent lecture she’d just given.

  “I’ve got to get to class,” I said, “but do you want to go get a drink sometime soon? Like, tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  At the end of my hospital stay, my metabolism dropped and my wounds closed, so I no longer needed massive quantities of protein poured into my stomach. On the breathing front, I was out of critical condition, and the infection seemed to be the last time I’d need a machine to keep me alive. I could also get out of bed without too much fear of a delicate graft ripping open, and spent quite a bit of time upright in physical therapy, so the liquid no longer settled in my lungs. So they removed my trach tubes and let the hole heal.

  It was fun, the first time my parents visited and I was able to say, “Hi, guys.” No one had told them. The people who worked in the burn unit orchestrated these happy surprises, I guess to balance out just a bit of the tragedy they dealt with all day every day. My mom started sobbing so hard her legs almost went out from under her. My dad caught her, and Nurse Jake slid a chair beneath her. Seeing her reaction made even me a bit misty, a bit of moisture welling up in my eye. But what I soon learned was that the long weeks of silence—stretched to a seeming eternity by nearly unbearable pain—had turned inward. I no longer wanted to talk. It seemed a silly thing to do. Words were incapable of expressing what I’d been through, what I was still going through, and if they couldn’t communicate that, they couldn’t communicate anything worth saying. I wasn’t interested in chatting about the weather or what was on television. I was no longer interested in arguing politics with my dad, a blue collar, economic liberal but social conservative, me a free market economic conservative and social liberal. The conflict of ideologies had seemed so important to me before. I’d watched 24 hour news stations like an addict while I endlessly refreshed news websites on my computer or phone. It had seemed like the world was ready to collapse into chaos from a thousand different causes. The people championing their causes made me believe that with their fervor. And yet I fell away for weeks and came back and the prominence of the various catastrophes had shifted, but the same arguments were being made with the same level of boundless energy and I saw it for what it was: distraction. People needed to believe that what they did and thought mattered. I’d learned that wasn’t true.

  Regulation or free market?

  Fracking or coal?

  Shimano or fixed gear?

  Legal pot smoking or illegal pot smoking?

  This celebrity versus that celebrity?

  So much passion wasted. Ignore it for a few days, weeks, years and see what happens. See how much it counts for. What would have happened if we hadn’t argued about it? Talked about it at all? Thought about it? The only problem I could see was obvious: too many people. It was a problem that we couldn’t solve with policy, but which would eventually take care of itself.

  For awhile, I tried to make small talk, and found that it took more effort than reading one of Madison’s books on continental philosophy, so that I wished I had never regained the ability to talk.

  “Who do you like in this fight?” my dad asked me, about an upcoming MMA event being advertised on television. I was the one who’d gotten him to accept the transition from boxing to MMA, to see the skill and strategy in the match instead of “two guys hugging for fifteen minutes.”

  It was a big fight, the light heavyweight title. I shrugged.

  “I think the champ is staying put,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the division who has a skill set to challenge his.”

  I nodded.

  “What do you think his weakness is? I’d say wrestling, but he’s obviously a good wrestler. That kind of takedown defense is good wrestling on its own, so that people have forgotten what he can do on the ground because he never chooses to take it there.”

  He waited for me to interject. I had once been able to talk for an hour at a time about any given fighter. I tried to respond, fished around inside for something but found nothing that could be put into words. I nodded.

  “He didn’t even wrestle in college, did he?” my dad asked.

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “That’s what’s so crazy to me. How did he get so good so late? Most really good wrestlers start in grade school. I’ve heard it’s not just about learning the skills, but developing that special strength. But he never even wrestled until he started training for MMA, and he’s got this natural skill. Kind of makes you question how far hard word can take you, you know? Other guys put in decades of work, and when they try to use the skills they’ve spent thousands of hours developing, he shoves them headfirst into the mat because he was just made for this. What does that do to a person?”

  It destroys him. For some sadistic reason it doesn’t kill him. It proves to him that life is struggle, but that the struggle is meaningless, and then it leaves him with this meaningless life. It leaves him paralyzed as if it had broken his neck at the fifth vertebrae.

  “These documentaries have been popping up showing these guys training for big fights,” my dad said. There was quiet panic in his eyes, barely covered by light-hearted joviality. I watched him with my one eye from behind my silicon mask. I’d grown to love how it hugged my face, reminding me that it was there between me and the world. He kept his eyes on the television, where they were showing highlight reels of the two light heavyweights. “They put themselves through hell. They bring themselves to a level of physical perfection that can be maintained for only a few days. It takes months of careful planning to get to this point where they operate at what I think must basically be a superhuman level. They get to the perfect weight so that after losing every ounce of water they can they can make their class, then rehydrate and step in fifteen pounds heavier just to match the extra fifteen pounds the other guy has put on. And then it only takes one mistake. I’ve noticed that these documentaries mostly end with the fighters losing. I hate it. You want to think all that work pays off, or you want to be able to ignore it all and just enjoy the competition. To know that the worst performance you’ve ever seen, the dopiest move, the fastest knockout, to know that those guys had worked for months to bring themselves to a level of perfection to perform for say—how fast was the fastest knockout? Eight seconds?—trained like that, sweated like that, sacrificed like that, lived in the back of the gym, lost girlfriends and wives, gave up careers, all that for eight seconds and then to become a joke…It’s horrible.”

  Why was he saying this to me? I couldn’t believe that he would consciously undermine all the energetic pep talks he’d been relentlessly giving me.

  “What should they do?” I asked

  “I don’t think t
hey have a choice. They fight until they can’t fight anymore. They’re fighters. It wouldn’t be tragic if they said, ‘Well, I’ll just go back to psychiatry, now that this hasn’t worked out.’ They just keep fucking fighting.”

  “Should they?” It was more than I’d spoken all day, but I felt that this moment might decide everything. Here was my father expressing what I’d thought inexpressible, what I thought I alone understood. But did he understand? Did he get what a root existential problem he was discussing, or was he really talking about two guys stepping into a cage to punch each other in the face until one fell down?

  “Should? I don’t think should comes into it.” He looked at me for a quick moment before looking back to the television, that great excuse to look away, to avoid facing what you can’t face. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m getting so worked up. Those two, though…I tell you what, I think it’s going to be a good fight, but not a close one.”

  It wouldn’t be a close fight at all. It would be a savage, decisive beat down.

  7

  When they released me, I went home with my parents. There was no way I could live alone, at least not for awhile. I needed too much help. There was too much to adjust to. In the burn unit, I had constant assistance. The real world didn’t offer that. The real world went on, and expected me to catch up or stay out of the way.

  Anyway, I wasn’t making any money. I might get something out of the fryer manufacturer or Pajino’s parent company or I might not, but that was in the future. At that moment, I couldn’t pay rent.

  Luckily, my parents had never done anything much with my old bedroom. It had just been cleared of my personal effects and made into a guest bedroom. So while I was in the hospital, my parents moved my stuff out of my apartment and into their house. What did they go through, to do that? How painful must that have been? I was still in my coma. Rent came due, and the question wasn’t, “Will he still want his apartment when he wakes up?” but “Will he wake up?” I can imagine them stepping into my apartment and seeing it left as if I had planned to come back in just a few hours, as if I weren’t planning to become a vegetable. A few dishes in the sink. Half my clothing clean, half strewn about into different piles based on re-wearability. A very small amount of pot in a little stone box on my coffee table, I remembered with a wince, that my parents never mentioned. Bread grown moldy in the cabinet.

  My mom kept a hand on my arm as I walked through their house, near my elbow, where she could catch me if I fell. My legs worked fine. After lying in bed for weeks it took awhile to get my mobility back, but I’d done it in the hospital. It annoyed me, this kind but misguided gesture. I wanted to shake her off, but didn’t want to deal with the consequence, even if it was only a hurt look in her eyes. I let her guide me to my room, my dad following far too closely behind. She opened the door for me.

  It felt like not only my future had disappeared, but the last decade of my life, with it. They’d set the furniture up exactly as it had been when I was in high school, the main difference being that they’d made space for my television and game consoles. So that was what a decade of struggle had got me. When I was in school, my parents didn’t think I needed a television in my room, that it would only distract me and mess with my sleep. Now I was allowed to have in my bedroom a flatscreen TV I didn’t care to watch and video games I could no longer play due to missing most of my right hand.

  My mom had even put my favorite childhood comforter on my bed, a thick blue one. I sat on it, rubbed it, feeling how the batting inside had bunched up. I was glad it was there. If I was going to regress, I might as well get some comfort out of it.

  “Do you like it?” my mother asked.

  I nodded. Even if I’d had something to say, I don’t think I would have risked a word. I just sat behind my blank mask.

  “The rest of your things are in the basement. If you think of anything you want, we’ll help you get it. We weren’t sure what all was important.”

  They stood there in the doorway like jailers. I didn’t know what to say. Finally I managed, “Thanks.”

  “We better let him rest,” my dad said. “He must be tired.”

  “Okay. Let us know if you need anything, sweetie.”

  When she finally shut the door I felt as if a truck had rolled off my chest. The room depressurized and I could finally look around.

  They’d replaced my baseball curtains with beige ones years ago, but the walls were still the same sky blue I’d chosen to match them. I stood and went to the closet, intending to see what my parents had considered important enough to put in there rather than in the basement, but I froze at the sight of my height chart. Scratched into the brown finish of the door so that the raw pressed wood showed through were lines marking my height at different ages. The highest was age eighteen, the last birthday I’d spent at home.

  What struck me, like a goddamned sledgehammer to the chest, was that I was looking up at it. I’d grown almost another two inches after leaving home. I put my nose to the door and tried to straighten myself, pulled my neck out of its rightward tilt, tried to open my chest and pull my shoulders back.

  It hurt. I felt joints already inflamed from constant strain trying to separate. Tendons cried their threats to snap loose if I didn’t let them curl back up on themselves. And all my red, knotted scar tissue with zero give, zero elasticity—fuck. I stood there shaking, my nose touching the wood, trying to force the tip higher a slow fraction of an inch at a time. I could barely breathe as my stretched scar tissue spread my chest open as if I was being crucified. Finally, when I could feel my body threatening to collapse back on itself, my will be damned, I put my left hand across the top of my head, touching the door with my fingertips and leaving them there as I slumped again. My body shook as if I’d just gone through two hours of physical therapy.

  It took several moments before I realized I was purposefully not looking and forced my eyes up.

  Stretched almost to my breaking point, I was barely taller than I’d been at eighteen. I’d lost almost two inches. Standing relaxed, I was probably three or four inches shorter, but I wasn’t going to check.

  No longer interested in what the closet held, I shut the door on the damn chart and sat back on the bed, still trying to catch my breath.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, breathing hard through the thin, rectangular slot in the mask, I noticed my laptop sitting on my desk. After a moment, I sat before it and fired it up.

  It had been a long time since I’d had internet access. No data signal had made it into the hospital, and they’d offered no wifi. Yet, I hadn’t been that concerned. I really hadn’t been interested in what was going on in the outside world, whether in general or in my friends’ lives. Like some sort of metamorphosing insect, I’d wrapped myself fully in a cocoon, not just in the literal one of gauze, antibacterial creams and cadaver flesh, but also of indifference to everything outside myself.

  My browser automatically opened to the social networks I used to check multiple times a day. I’d received a lot of messages, a lot of motivational quotes, bible verses, and pictures of cats. A lot of “Bro,” “Dude,” and “Man.” Fuck my dumbass friends.

  They talked to each other on the posts they put up on my page, talking like I’d never read it, talking like people at a funeral, people who weren’t close enough to the deceased to be devastated, to be more curious, instead. They even joked with each other. Not about me, but still.

  I closed the browser. I supposed I should go through and acknowledge every kind sentiment, but they’d piled up like a Looney Tunes trap, a huge pile of boulders supported by one little quivering stick, and if I tripped that stick, I’d be buried in an avalanche of questions and well-wishes, and I didn’t have the energy.

  In fact, I nearly shut the laptop and went to lie down. Instead I checked my email. I did all this with my left hand, which had grown pretty nimble. I didn’t work nearly hard enough to regain mobility in what remained of my right hand to suit my occupational the
rapist, but by tapping out messages with my phone I’d nearly transitioned into my new status as a lefty. I thought that maybe I’d become more creative. I guessed since my business life was over I might as well turn into an artistic flake.

  My heart thudded in my chest as I immediately spotted the emails from Madison sparkling from out of the morass of junk mail.

  I moved the arrow over the oldest, but hesitated in opening it. I looked at the date sent. It was from a couple of days before I regained awareness, the time when they were dialing back the narcotics to let me (make me) float up out of my chemically induced coma, out of my dream and into agony.

  I stared at my inbox until the white space around the text burned nuclear rainbows into my eye. Finally, like sneaking up on yourself to do something that’s probably going to suck, like ripping off a bandage or getting out of a warm bed, I clicked the email open without ever concluding the should I / shouldn’t I argument going on inside myself.

  Cody,

  Yesterday you opened your eye for the first time since the fire. I didn’t think I’d ever see that again. I cried. We all did, even your dad. Your mom hugged me. We were all so happy. You were coming back to us. They warned us to temper our excitement. They told us you were still in critical condition, that the prime window for infection hadn’t passed. But we didn’t listen to them. We were so happy.

  I went home and told my parents. They wanted to come see you right away, even though visiting hours were over. You know how my dad is. My mom finally convinced him not to go make trouble at the hospital. I kept quiet, of course. I’ve never convinced him of anything. But she convinced him that we’d go in the morning. He went to tell people he wouldn’t be in to work the next day.

  “Did he see you?” my mom asked.

  I explained that you were still out of it.