Words died in my throat.
"I'm really sorry about this, really, Luke, I can't tell you enough."
* * *
I still couldn't open my eyes. I felt a subliminal bliss. The machines, bursting with mechanized life, filled the air with sounds that accumulated into dense white noise. A dull headache coursed into the base of my neck, then into my forehead. It morphed and translated over the hemispheres of my brain like a snaking nuisance.
I hoped my cactus was doing okay.
* * *
"They're gone, Luke," Jessie whispered. "I just switched 'em on and sent them out and one of them's on a plane to Ireland and has no idea why - can you imagine? Jesus, right?" She laughed, a sneaking cry breaking her. "I was only supposed to make you fall in love with me to end your cycle, but I looked at you on that train and something shifted and for a second there, you made me feel human. You didn't know that before but now you do."
I wanted to move my fingers to acknowledge her. My eyes were still glued shut and my brain, bogged with confusion and drugs and the chime of Jessie's voice, told me I must've have moved them. I believed myself and prayed Jessie noticed.
"I don't want to end you," she cried, soft and hiccupped. "I don't want to see you go."
* * *
Things were quiet for a while. Sometimes people use the term 'deafening silence' and I suppose it applied to my situation. I was happy that my ears worked when my eyes couldn't, hard as I tried to peel my eyelids back.
I felt calmer with each day - days being my own constructions of time passage when I considered at what time I was conscious and what time I was not. Jessie hadn't visited in a while. I hoped she'd visit today.
An insect tickled my arm and buzzed, a fizzed whine dying into the air as it flew out of my area. I heard the cellophane of the balloon I'd seen upon first arriving clipping into the wall.
Thank -
Clip.
- You!
Footsteps. Jessie.
"I'm getting you out of here," she hissed into my ear. Sharp rips pulled at my flesh as she yanked IVs from my arms. I groaned. Warm rolls of blood. She rolled me backward and my stomach lurched. "You have to be quiet, understand?"
I did.
We rolled into something that felt like an enclosed space. Buttons were pushed, angry smacks of plastic. Jessie muttered under her breath, frustrated we weren't moving faster. The floor slowly fell beneath us. Elevator.
The door dinged open. Jessie sucked in a wheezing breath, surprised.
I wanted to ask her what was going on, wanted to help her. She didn't move or say anything. Something delicately clicked.
"Stop," a man said so quietly I thought I'd imagined it.
Jessie pressed back into me, trembling.
"Surrender him and you'll be on your way," the man said. Jessie's ice-cold hand planted onto my thigh. I shivered and vomit climbed my throat. "Otherwise I'll have to shoot. For everyone's safety."
Silence. My innards twisted with the pain of the unknown.
Jessie clawed into me. "I'm sorry, Luke."
Her hand left. An explosion hit the air and deafened me, my only sense, into a shrill ringing that rattled my brain and burned my eyes. When the ringing was done, the elevator door closed and the floor moved up. I felt no one in the elevator with me, nothing but dense air and my own limp body, the clatter of gurney wheels.
Softly, filtered through old speakers, a song lullabied.
La vie en rose.
END
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