Freebird

by John Raymond

  The coffee stop took longer than planned, the line being incredibly slow in the Starbucks drive-through, and by the time he pulled out of the parking lot en route to the Desert Regional Medical Center, it was actually 11:11 AM, slightly later than his worst-case scenario. More texts had been coming in from his mom during the drive, urging him onward at great haste. He now knew his uncle was in room 435, north wing. He knew the prognosis was still unknown.

  “Unknown” was better than some options, he thought, watching the dot on the GPS inch along the screen. “Unknown” wasn’t “dead” yet. “Unknown” might not even be that bad. He’d talked to his mom three times so far over the morning, and each report had been “holding steady.” When the initial news had landed, around 8:00 AM, his mom had told him that his uncle had been involved in some kind of chase in the desert in Palm Springs. She’d been told by the police that he’d been injured, but no one would confirm how. The details were hazy, if not contradictory, but the death of Shane Larson, the radio guy, was also part of the story. They claimed that his uncle was in critical condition and that the Life Flight helicopter had been delayed or possibly not called until too late. But also that the Life Flight had never arrived.

  So even the information they had was unreliable. There was so much bad information out there, he’d reassured her, so many false memes. Fake articles passing for real news; opinions masquerading as facts; sheer idiocy becoming sanctified as significant and never going back. Aaron had learned long ago to distrust all data until confirming it with his own eyes, or at least a couple of reputable news sources, and this case seemed especially true in that regard. He would wait and see what the day presented, and until then he would refuse to get too worked up. Hopefully it would all get resolved before his grandpa ever had to know.

  He’d borrowed Joel’s car to go meet his mom, and the drive to Palm Springs had further worn away his concerns. The desert was such a beautiful, boring landscape, it repelled the very idea that life-changing events were possible. How could a sudden, terrible event be possible in this geologic nullity? How could a man who’d made it through firefights in Afghanistan and Somalia possibly meet his demise in Palm Springs? It made no sense.

  During the drive he’d been in contact with Karl and Joel, both of whom were monitoring the day’s events on the Internet. It was from them he’d learned some other disconcerting tidbits, namely, that his uncle was being called a terrorist and a serial killer. But again he put the rumors out of his mind. The Internet was so demonstrably untrustworthy, one had to dismiss most of what it said as a matter of course.

  He drove on, letting his mind wander to images of sex and gold, both things he’d like a lot more of in his life, almost enjoying the spell of air-conditioned suspense. His mom was such a drama queen, he thought, always ready to declare an apocalypse. Take off your shoes or you’ll track radioactive dust in the house. The earthquake that destroys Los Angeles is already three hundred years overdue. Soon enough all would be divulged. Until then, he’d take an hour or so to think about Dana Star in that green halter top she liked, drink his coffee, and drive incredibly fast through one of the most gorgeous landscapes on earth.

  The Desert Regional Medical Center was a strange complex, half Mission church, half science-fiction colony on the moon. Under the desert sky, with the bell tower butting up against the glass skyways and the beige brickwork, Aaron could almost convince himself he was stepping not into a medical facility but into a humongous bank branch from the not-so-far future. He hurried through the front doors with his strong, lukewarm coffee in hand, unable to enjoy it for the small pangs of guilt the delay had cost him, for he was in full seeking mode now, searching for his uncle’s room, speed walking and even trotting for stretches down the hall.

  The nurse at the desk was sharp and no-nonsense. Aaron uttered Uncle Ben’s name, and after a brief glance at her screen, the nurse pointed him to the third floor, intensive care. Entering the elevator, pushing the button, he was almost surprised by the ease of the transaction. He hadn’t had to provide ID or anything. He could be anyone. Although he guessed not many people were actively trying to sneak into this building.

  Rising, he wondered again what was in store. Most likely, he was on the verge of a great deflation. Life so rarely made good on its patches of suspense, offering at least a thousand near misses for every promise of dramatic sparks. If his own healthy body was any indication, nothing painful was going on in this hospital at all, and momentarily he’d only have to turn around and drive home.

  The extreme realness of the situation hit him only when the elevator door parted and he caught sight of his mother, wailing. She was crumpled in the waiting room, clutching the arm of the chair, the only person in a long, empty row. Her face was contorted, and her shoulders were convulsing. She pulled her hair and wrung her hands. He’d never seen her like this, not even close, and at once all the petty meanness he’d been harboring toward her lately vanished from his system. All the shame he felt in her presence disappeared, to be replaced by a powerful drive to protect her and return her life to some normalcy. He knew without a doubt his own arrival would help, and he hurried directly to her side, feeling the blood in him freezing over, conducting every tiny tremor of perception. Why in God’s name had he stopped for that coffee? That was something he’d never forgive himself for, not in his whole life.

  “Mom,” he said.

  His mother reached out and felt for him, gripping his arm.

  “My brother, my brother,” she said. “He’s bleeding.”

  For a moment her face emerged from her mask of hair, another mask of mucus and tears. He held her by the quaking shoulders, and her body felt incredibly tiny and fragile. She buried her face on his chest, and the full, true weight of what was happening entered him, sinking into his stomach and guts, turning him into lead. Uncle Ben was his mother’s brother. They’d grown up in the same rooms, spent their mornings fighting over the same bathroom sink. They’d endured the death of their mother together. They’d watched their father grow old. Ben might not appear to his mom in the flesh very often anymore, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t in her thoughts at all times, or that he wasn’t in the fiber of her very nervous system. Down in the depths of her memory, in the honeycombed chambers even Aaron himself didn’t know, he was in there, and he always would be.

  The sobbing kept rising and falling, the keening of a broken animal, and eventually Aaron glanced around the room, realizing that he and his mother were not alone. The waiting area was populated by other people, some of whom looked like patients or relatives of patients, but some of whom were dour-looking men in uniforms. There must have been at least a dozen cops or other agents of government authority in the small space, politely pretending Aaron’s mom was not racked with pain. They were careful to keep their eyes on their magazines and phones, but they were definitely watching her, scrutinizing her grief. They remained in their posts as she gathered herself together and took some deep breaths and closed her eyes. They all waited while she wiped her face and wiped her nose. Either she didn’t notice that the room was full of watchers, or—more likely—she didn’t care.

  “It isn’t looking so good,” she said in a low voice, with hard-won composure. “I talked to the doctor, and he told me some things I haven’t told you yet. I don’t want to tell you. But I’m going to have to tell you some things because I need to talk this through.”

  “Tell me,” he said. He beamed his full attention on her face, wanting only to help his mom through this tribulation. The cops and other patients evaporated from his mind, as did the voices of Karl, Joel, and everybody else that usually chimed in to guide his actions, or keep him from acting, as the case might be.

  She told him her brother had been shot in the head. The doctors called it a transtentorial gunshot wound. She hadn’t understood what they meant at first, but it meant the bullet had gone in one side and out the other, which was not a good situation. He’d also been shot in the leg and the butt, but t
hose wounds weren’t so concerning. It was his brain that was the problem. His vital signs were all okay, his heartbeat was steady, his lungs were inflating, but everything above the brain stem was in major trouble. They’d done a CT scan and found evidence of intercranial hemorrhage. “Destruction of brain architecture,” the neurosurgeon had said. He’d also talked about bony fragments and bilateral skull fracture, all of which sounded very grim.

  “So where is he now?” Aaron said.

  “He’s on a ventilator in the ICU.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “They won’t let me in. But soon.”

  “And so . . . ?”

  His mom shook her head with stunned slowness. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “So what do we need to do?”

  She breathed deeply and girded herself.

  “Ben doesn’t have a spouse,” she breathed, “and he doesn’t have a living will that anyone knows of, so the medical-decision power goes to the next of kin. That means Grandpa. I know you just drove all the way out here. I should have been thinking more clearly when I first called, but I wasn’t. I think the first thing you have to do is drive back and get him.”

  Grandpa Sam was waiting when Aaron arrived at his mailbox. For the first time in recorded memory, he was ready and waiting. He had a fanny pack belted around his waist, a thermos of water in his hand. He was sitting on the curb, the house locked behind him. He was climbing into the car before Aaron had even stopped.

  “You were at the hospital?” Grandpa Sam said, arranging his provisions on his lap. “All the way in Palm Springs?”

  “I was.”

  “And you saw Benny?” He sounded at once vacant and disturbed. Aaron had rarely heard his grandpa talk about his son, and when he had, it had always been Ben, not Benny. But today was different from other days. Uncle Ben was with them again, and time was getting all mixed up.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Is he okay?”

  Aaron paused before saying anything. He’d assumed his mom had been telling his grandpa everything she’d been telling him, but maybe that wasn’t the case. Maybe she was keeping the worst news from him until the last possible moment. If that was the strategy, Aaron didn’t want to be the one to spring anything unexpected. If today’s events were coming as a shock to his mom, what they meant to his grandpa, he could barely imagine. Your son is a killer. Your son has been shot. An army of pundits and citizen-bloggers is dissecting the significance of his actions and ideology, invading every corner of his public record, casting judgments on his very life. Aaron didn’t know if Ben was okay. No one knew. That was part of the whole ordeal.

  “I don’t know,” Aaron said. “We really don’t know that much yet.”

  Grandpa Sam received the news with a truncated grunt, followed by another question: “Does he have a good room?”

  To that question Aaron didn’t know how to respond. Good room, bad room, what difference did it make? If Grandpa Sam was asking if his son had a nice view or a loud roommate, he was out of his mind. And maybe he was. His son, the soldier, was out in the desert, comatose, accused of great crimes. It was enough to crush anyone’s spirit. Aaron watched uncomfortably as his grandfather tried to twist off the lid of the thermos, holding his water between his knees, and finally tucked the thermos between his thighs, giving up. His hands continued trembling, and he put them on his knees.

  “A good room, yeah,” Aaron said, recognizing that the right answer had nothing to do with the truth right now. “I’m pretty sure it’s good.” And with that they headed back into traffic, plagued by yet a new kind of silence—anguished, curdled, borderline nauseous. After all they’d been through, all the miles they’d put in, Aaron could only guess as to the deep, inaccessible feelings roiling in his grandpa’s body. The feelings were in there, he knew. They might be far away, and cloaked in thick fog, but they were definitely in there. And whatever they were, whatever one called them, they had to be utterly hellacious.

  They entered the waiting room to another burst of tears from his mother. The sight of her father seemed to knock her back like a fist. She recovered quickly, though, and gave them the most recent report. Uncle Ben was attached to life support. He also had a bolt attached to his skull, a monitor for the intercranial pressure, or brain swelling. His liver and his lungs were fine. They would hear more about his brainwaves, or lack thereof, soon. None of the information seemed to be getting through to Grandpa Sam, however. He listened with his head bowed, and when the report was over he had only one question: when could they see Ben?

  “I don’t know that yet,” Aaron’s mom said. “They haven’t said anything about that. He’s still in critical condition, Dad. No one is saying anything about visitors.”

  “Who do we talk to about seeing him?” Grandpa Sam said. He only wanted to see his son, nothing else. He could make the diagnosis himself if they’d just let him through. His voice didn’t sound very urgent on the surface, but Aaron knew by now just how resilient his grandfather could be. Woe to the cop or G-man who would stand in his way.

  “There are a lot of reasons why we can’t see him,” his mom tried to explain. “He’s still in really delicate condition. And there are legal factors.”

  “We should be able to see our relative,” Grandpa Sam stated.

  Aaron wasn’t sure whose side to take, or if there even were sides, but in the end he didn’t have to decide. One of the men pretending not to listen stepped forward and flashed an FBI badge and asked Grandpa Sam to please come with him and answer some questions. For whatever reason, Grandpa Sam complied, possibly thinking the man would lead him to Ben, and Aaron and his mom were left to themselves. The only thing to do, it seemed, was to find seats in the waiting room and settle into the life of the hospital, possibly the life they would live until the end of time.

  Aaron killed a few minutes firing off texts to Joel and Karl, hoping they knew enough to avoid sharing anything with the public at large, and glanced up to find nothing had changed. He took the dimensions of the room and noticed the hospital was in fact a lot grosser than he’d first realized. The floorboards were speckled with grime. The lights were at once harsh and dim, with numerous missing tubes among the overhead fluorescents. The air was too cool, the smell too sharply antiseptic. The TV was much, much too loud. His mom, who was also staring ahead, and also seemed to be sensing the general shittiness of the institution, shared with him a look of rue.

  “I hear Eisenhower is even worse,” she said.

  “So we’re lucky, I guess.”

  She shrugged. “You know, if you’re hungry, you can go find something. There are places not too far away.”

  “Why?” he said. “Do you want anything?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Then I’m fine, too.”

  He wasn’t going anywhere. He was planning to stay at his mom’s side as long as this took, he’d already decided. When she pulled her phone from her purse, he allowed himself to pull his iPod from his bag, but he didn’t turn it on yet. He held it loosely in his hands, staring at a nurse, then a man cleaning his fingernails, waiting for the right moment to ask the question that had been nagging him for hours and that he had to think was nagging everyone else, too.

  “So,” he said eventually, “what do you think is, like, going to happen?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. Her attention had become absorbed in a medical website featuring a reasonably professional-looking logo. Her scrolling was by turns quick and measured.

  “Is he going to”—he debated how to phrase this—“make it through all right?”

  “I really don’t know,” she said.

  “They haven’t said anything?”

  “It sounds like there are cases where people come through. A few, anyway. That’s all I know.”

  His mom continued scouring the website, then another, and Aaron went ahead and inserted his earbuds, spinning the wheel until he came to Zuma, by Neil Young. As the consoling chords of “Barstool
Blues” flowed into him and the world knit into its spell, the room filled with a wistful, piercing light. The people seemed to slow down, and the ugly corners turned more inviting. His mom, hunched over her phone, continued her tapping, unaware of any changes. Aaron wished she could relax, but he knew there was no point in saying anything. Throughout all the campaigns, all the coalitions, he’d never once seen her pause to rest. Even now, with so little hope, she kept on fighting, learning the names of every nurse and doctor in the hospital, figuring out the definitions of every Greek and Latinate medical term they used. Her focus amazed him.

  The song was still playing when his grandfather returned, already seemingly exhausted, and took a seat near the fish tank. He looked over at Aaron and allowed a deep communication of submission to pass between them. Aaron was almost relieved when the wordless look finally ended. How could it be possible, he wondered, that his grandfather’s fate, already so harrowing and immense, was still not yet done?

  He looked out the window as a cluster of birds lifted together from a concrete bench, swatting light from the air. The song ended, and he skipped ahead to “Cortez the Killer.” Neil’s sound was that of the trees, the earth, and the clouds themselves. He’d come to California and found songs seeping from the ground, cracked rocks and found songs inside. People should build totem poles out of boom boxes and stick them on every corner of every street in America and play Neil Young songs twenty-four hours a day, Aaron thought. He wanted to live inside Neil’s music for the rest of his life.

  Late in the afternoon a doctor came and delivered the latest prognosis, much like the ones before. Uncle Ben had suffered a serious head wound, he said. The bullet had gone through the skull above the temples, and the brain was extremely damaged. As with every report, new bits of information came out, unseen facets emerged to light. This time, they learned more than they ever wanted to know about the danger of brain herniation, or the possibility of brain matter squeezing outside the structures of the skull, through the nose. Thankfully, the doctor said, brain herniation didn’t seem to be a danger for Ben, but forever onward it was a horrific image that would never leave their minds.