Freebird

by John Raymond

  “So, is there anyone who specializes in this kind of thing?” Aaron’s mom asked pleadingly. “Are there programs? Or treatments?”

  “None that I’m aware of.”

  “Is there some time frame we’re looking at here?”

  “That’s impossible to say.”

  Almost as an aside, she asked if they could see her brother, and to their surprise this doctor said yes, of course. He was a new doctor, and Aaron and his mom were careful not to betray any doubt by looking at each other. Either the regulations had suddenly changed, or else no one had told this doctor they existed in the first place. They knew better than to seem alarmed.

  The doctor turned and led the three of them into the ICU, taking them through the electronic door controlled by the inside nurse. They glided past shrouded rooms holding other mangled patients, catching glimpses of legs in traction, purplish toes, green monitors broadcasting inscrutable, large-font numerals. Aaron followed his mother and grandfather into the main control room, peopled by nurses in scrubs, and then into the room where his uncle was being kept, and suddenly there he was, sleeping. He lay in bed surrounded by big, metal boxes, gridded screens, and the Darth Vader rasp of the ventilator. His face was bruised and scratched, his mouth distended by the plastic breathing tubes. In his nose was another tube. His head was bandaged in thick, white gauze, with two wires extending from the top. His arms looked limp, held in place by the spiderweb of IVs. His legs were only half-covered by sheets and showed nasty cuts and abrasions along the hairy thighs.

  As a final insult, there were handcuffs on his right wrist, attaching him to the metal railing of the hospital bed. And sitting beside him was a military cop, keeping watch. Aaron’s mom gasped at the sight of the handcuffs, but the cop was not ashamed. He had his orders. He sat like a statue, doing his duty, feeling for no one. The fucking prick.

  The doctor nodded the guard off, and he stood and stationed himself in the far corner of the room, making way for the family to approach. Any feelings of hope were blasted by the scene. They shuffled closer, Aaron staying with his grandpa and going to the right of the bed, his mom going left. His uncle’s gown was disarrayed, and along his shoulder the edge of a tattoo was visible. It seemed to be a sentence, but Aaron could make out only the first words. “We sleep . . .” We sleep? Tattoos weren’t allowed among his people, were they?

  No one else seemed to notice or care, however. Aaron’s mom choked and sat on the bed’s edge, clasping her brother’s hand while his grandfather knelt, head bowed. Thin, watery tears spread over his cheeks and the barrel of his body shook and he pulled a hand towel out of his pocket and swabbed his whole face. He’d come prepared.

  Aaron watched his grandfather weeping over his uncle’s body. He didn’t know what to think. His mom rarely talked about her brother, but they were a part of each other, he could see. Her entire body was suffering with him. To see her in such a tortured state was almost frightening. The depths of her animal feeling were darker than he could have known.

  The ventilator continued its gasping intake and output. The doctor hovered in the doorway, and the guard stood with his hands clasped. Aaron could feel his phone vibrating in his pocket, filling with messages from his friends, but right now they would have to wait. Standing with his grandpa, a single, terrible question tolled over and over in his head: How good is life now, Grandpa? he thought. Your family got murdered. Your gold is gone. Your son is a killer and now he’s broken and bleeding in the desert. Tell me, how good is life now?

  25

  The organ harvester had amazing timing, Anne thought. Either that or the medical establishment had some kind of PR company on retainer, some data-crunching consulting operation sending out secret announcements to the relevant bureaucrats, because the minute her brother’s official brain-dead status came back positive, the call came in. Anne had put the guy off at first, but he’d been persistent, and at last she’d relented. So for more than half an hour that morning, she’d talked to him—an utterly normal dude who probably coached his daughter’s volleyball team and bought his hardware at Home Depot—about the future of her brother’s innards.

  The man had given her the hard sell. Her brother was young and healthy, he said. He hadn’t done any drugs or even drunk in excess. His blood type was common. Thus, he was an excellent candidate for donating his kidneys, heart, lungs, liver, all of it, for the benefit of humankind. Talking to the organ harvester, Anne had felt as if she were trapped in some Ancient Egyptian myth. Ben wasn’t even dead! He was still breathing, and they were already talking about spreading his organs over the land as if an army might grow from his dismembered pieces. It seemed insane. She’d been preparing for her dad’s disintegration, not her brother’s. She never could have imagined a punishment this grotesque for her actions. It was just like God, though, wasn’t it?

  Though by another light, she could see, the organ harvester was utterly reasonable, too. Of course the organs should go to the needy. Of course children and mothers should live on with her brother’s recycled tissue. And yet she couldn’t even begin to get herself to entertain the deal. Some primal part of her couldn’t let go of the superstitious feeling that it was simply macabre.

  The waiting room was more crowded today, she noted, nibbling her dried fruit and nuts. After four days, it was becoming almost like a refugee camp. Two more families had entered in the night and staked out their own pitiful sections, and from overheard snippets of conversation, she gathered they were there with car-crash victims. They were waiting for news of full-body CT scans, blood tests, blood marrow transplants, she wasn’t sure exactly what. She didn’t have the strength to question the grief-stunned fathers and brothers or make small talk with the terrified women staring at the posters of pastel mountains and forests throughout the room. All she could do was watch the children playing with their blocks, blissfully ignorant of everything, not knowing that behind every wall people were dying in slow agony.

  Anne’s own shanty was neat and well ordered. She had her dried fruit and a bag of trail mix from Whole Foods, some rice cakes, and a water thermos. That was it. Her main goal at this juncture was just to stay hydrated. And, lo and behold, her thermos was empty. Once again, it was time to make the voyage for a refill. Something to do.

  She’d come to prefer the drinking fountain near the elevators, where the stream was stronger and she didn’t have to touch the mouth of her thermos to the spigot. She’d even come to consider the walk a form of exercise. She got up and took the long way around to stretch her legs and catch a view of the mountains outside the eastern windows, ghosted by her reflection in the panes of glass. After days of sleeping in chairs and brushing her teeth in public sinks, she took her pleasures where she could.

  Afterward, she went to the room and visited Ben. She’d become an expert in the procedure for entering the ICU, picking up the phone and saying her name and waiting for the double doors to swing open, all controlled by an invisible nurse at the deep inner desk. The military cop was still sitting there, still rigid and blank. She hated him so much. How many hours had he watched her sitting next to her brother, watching the machines blow air into his lungs and suck air out? In that time she’d memorized the tubing running from his body to the machine, the nasogastric tube sucking his stomach clean through his nose, the TPN feeding him through the IV. What had this guy learned?

  She’d done her share of talking to Ben while she sat there, even though Ben didn’t respond to anything she said. Mostly she’d been recounting stories from their youth. She’d talked about the little creek down the road with the big, white rock they’d dubbed Alcatraz, and the rafts they’d built every summer, all of which had inevitably capsized. She’d talked about the days of sliding down the golden hill across Alpine Drive on the flattened cardboard boxes and picking the foxtails from their tube socks. She’d talked about the night at Bruce Misner’s house in high school when everyone was doing nitrous hits and she’d passed out and Ben had sat there with her until t
he world had come back to her eyes. She’d entered many forgotten rooms of memory, whole wings of the mansion unvisited for years. None of the stories made it through his sleep.

  This time she just sat, watching him breathe, or, rather, watching the machines breathe. His mouth was warped from the plastic tubing, and the pores on his nose were oily and black. For some reason his hair needed brushing, though she had no idea why. He didn’t look evil, even though that was what the people on the news said. He wasn’t evil. No more than anyone. He was just a product of the system that created him, that was all. He was a soldier doing his job, which was killing. He’d just killed the wrong people this time. No one on the news wanted to say that. If anyone was evil, it was her, the one who’d betrayed all.

  And in the end, it was much bigger than that. It was all just God’s killing, wasn’t it? God murdering God. God in one form rising against God in another. All God’s hilarious rising and smiting of Himself. God must love it on some level, she thought. God, the Grand Inquisitor. From the very beginning, He’d been at his little game. On the first day, He’d laid out the railroad tracks, constructed the huts and the bunkers of the Lager; on the second day, He’d rolled out the concertina wire, erected the electrified fence; on the third day, He’d built the gas chambers and the ovens; on the fourth day, He’d penned in humankind. The rest of the week, He’d tortured them, starved them, pitted them against one another, dangled hope, only to yank it away, given them dreams, dashed them, made them hurt. And on Saturday, He’d herded them into the showers and burned their gray corpses back into the sky. God, the great SS man in the clouds.

  She held her brother’s limp hand, hating him for all the moronic, God-like killing he’d done. Why hadn’t he ever listened? She’d been on him his entire life about the killing of brown people in distant lands. What was the point? Why the bizarre faith in the men who sent him to war? She’d even yelled at him about it again in his coma. She’d worked herself up and found herself yelling at his unconscious face. You really think there are good guys and bad guys in the world? You stupid fucking idiot? Good guys and bad guys. What fucking idiot believes that? That was what you took from Dad’s life? More killing? Fuck you, Ben. Grow the fuck up.

  But, holding her brother’s hand, staring at his bruised eyelids, his loose lips, she didn’t yell anymore. He looked so helpless in the bed, so heavy and thick and disheveled. She didn’t say anything. Their argument was over. There was nothing to say. He was basically dead.

  She returned to the waiting room and called Mark Harris, who’d become her lifeline to the outside world. She still wasn’t sure if she wanted to join his team, or become his lover, or report him to the SEC, but she liked the sound of his scheming voice right now. He didn’t bother asking about her brother, either, and that was nice—his intuition was correct in this regard yet again. Of course he wanted to know the details—everyone did—but he respected that she didn’t want to talk to him about any of that. All she wanted was to be a part of the living world.

  “Any word from the city yet?” she asked.

  “Still waiting on the contracts to come back. No word.”

  “Seems like they’re taking their time.”

  “Always takes a long time with this kind of stuff. This is still the fast track. We’re still at the beginning. Don’t worry. You doing all right?”

  She hung up before things could get personal and texted Susan but could barely force herself to tap out a whole message. She preferred watching Aaron napping on the middle row of chairs, a bunched jacket as his pillow. He’d been in the waiting room most of the time, too, and whiskers were sprouting from his delicate teenage chin. Soft, patchy whiskers, the shock troops of more whiskers. So the long march was already that far along, she thought. God was herding her son into the mountains, preparing to plunge in the bayonet the moment he stumbled in the snow. What would happen up there in his mountains, she wondered? Would he starve? Would he lose his limbs? She watched him sleep as time flowed over him like clear water over stones. Already, God was taking him away from her. The sadist. In a matter of months, he’d be gone.

  The time had passed so quickly the past seventeen years. He’d only just arrived. For a fleeting second he’d been a baby, and she’d held him to her chest, feeling his weight, and then the next second he was a man, walking into the woods.

  Her father was in the corner, staring in the general direction of the goldfish tank. Flashes of gold and black and red squiggled in the cube of water. His eyes were bleary and pink. His sweatshirt was splashed with yogurt from lunch the day before. He’d aged ten years in the past twenty-four hours. His hands hung empty between his knees.

  Maybe it was all her fault, she allowed. The thought kept occurring to her throughout the days. She picked up an old copy of Sunset magazine and wondered yet again if maybe she’d brought this plague of bad luck on the family with her less-than-perfect behavior. But she refused to believe it. Look at all the sick, immoral fuckers out there who got through without a scratch, she thought. If this was her punishment, it surely went far, far beyond the crime.

  She watched her son and her father, wondering what the hell God was trying to do. It would be so easy to believe there was no God at all. It would be so simple just to think that human fate was meted out purely at random, the function of some insane, broken machine. Some people got rich, some people found love, some people were crushed by boulders—you never knew. And yet, back of the days, there always seemed to be some infernal design, didn’t there? Some kind of intelligence exploiting our invisible weaknesses, some consciousness relishing the ironic twists of fate. For every man and woman and animal and plant, a customized suffering, an elaborate machinery of personal, indescribable pain. This was probably the reason she’d made herself hard inside, she thought. She’d never wanted her goodness to invite death and disease into her body.

  She got up to stretch her legs and sat down again. The air-conditioning was too cold, and the guy in the corner was showing much more ass crack than any person should.

  Yes, there was a God, Anne thought, watching the Mexican nurse walk in one door and out the other. There was a God, all right, and God, She was such a fucking bitch.

  She went back to her brother’s room. The white nurse came in, and Anne watched her go about her chores, checking charts, emptying the bag of urine. Her hair was long and smooth and red, held in place with a leather barrette. Anne imagined a country life with a woodstove and pickle jars, a single cow to milk in the morning.

  “The doctor will be here in about an hour,” the nurse said.

  “Great,” Anne said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re doing okay?”

  Anne just laughed, and the nurse left, unperturbed. She was a saint, that nurse, walking into this inferno every day to tend to the dying, pulling God’s victims from the pyre. Doctors were one thing. They lived in the glory, hauling in their shitloads of money, driving their SUVs to the country club. But nurses, they were the true saviors.

  The neurosurgeon arrived three hours later, his tardiness no longer surprising. Anne had fought for this man because he was reportedly the best, and she almost took his tardiness as a good sign. Want the job done right? Ask a busy person. She knew that old saw was true; she’d lived it.

  Dr. Salt was always late, but at least he didn’t hurry once he arrived. He sat with Anne and her dad and explained the diagnosis again in great detail, showing all the appropriate consideration and compassion that the circumstances required. He was a bit remote, but he was thorough. He had a shiny bald pate and homely features; his knuckles were tufted with hair. Throughout the talk, her dad was silent. The information was no different this time around. Ben’s brain was still wrecked. The electroencephalogram still showed nothing happening, brain wave–wise. The real discussion today was not so much about Ben’s condition but rather about what happened next, because very soon they would have a decision to make.

  “So there’s no chance for a change in condition?” A
nne said, voicing what she assumed was her dad’s main, ongoing question. “None at all?”

  “No,” the doctor said, not harshly, but with no trace of ambiguity in his voice whatsoever.

  “There’s no operation to do? No intervention? Or therapy?”

  “No.”

  “Would it make sense to get a second opinion?” Anne said. “I think we want to do that. Don’t we, Dad?”

  Her dad nodded thickly, too sunk in his despair to muster anything more.

  “I can set you up with some other doctors,” Dr. Salt said. “But I can tell you they’re all going to say the same thing. Ben can’t live any longer on his own. Without the ventilator he will naturally die. I think it’s time to start thinking about Ben’s quality of life now. I’d urge you both to think about what he’d want in this situation.”

  “He’d want to live,” her dad muttered, and Anne and Dr. Salt avoided looking at each other out of deference to his pain.

  “Of course he would,” Dr. Salt said. “But the question is, would he want to live in this circumstance? That’s the question you need to ask yourselves now. You need to put yourselves in Ben’s shoes and think about what’s best for him in this moment. And going forward.”

  “What about the police?” Anne said.

  “What about them?” the doctor said, not understanding.

  “They probably want to kill him themselves, don’t they?” she said. “Don’t we have to keep him alive for that?”

  The doctor made a show of seriously pondering the question. It seemed not impossible that the state would want to exact its punishment in some capacity. Of course, it would be utterly absurd to kill a dead man, but the world had seen much stranger things. Was Dr. Salt almost smiling behind those glasses? This kind of lunacy was the spice of life, after all, just so long as the lunacy wasn’t your own. He would go home tonight and talk about this conversation with his wife or mistress. But if the idea amused him, he kept it well hidden. He touched her hand lightly and spoke in a soft, serious voice, only for her ears.