by Gary Braver
In a matter of minutes the outside light grew brighter. The blinds hung at a funny angle, like a gull with a broken wing.
He could smell the ocean. That probably explained why in the dream he sensed being at the sea. Subtle fishy scents from the window had crossed with a dim recall of the jellyfish attack. Crank that through your squeeze box and that explained why he could still dimly make out a dead, bloodied animal near the water—maybe a beached porpoise or harbor seal that had gotten chopped up by some nitwit on jet skis.
(Blood. So much blood. And battered flesh. So vague.)
Which sometimes happened in Buck’s Cove.
Whatever, it was a bad dream that had left his johnny wet and his brain tender. Yet what stayed with him for the rest of the morning was how real it felt. While he couldn’t locate any narrative thread to connect the scraps, his mind felt raw with afterimages that made him feel that he’d not been dreaming but had just returned from a scene of brutal horror.
And what gnawed at his mind like an osprey was that he had woken up with his thumb in his mouth.
LATER THAT MORNING NURSE MARCY BROUGHT him back to the PT room where the therapist had him stand for several minutes at the parallel bars. Then they had him lie on the floor pads, moving his legs and arms in different positions. After several minutes of that, they sat him in a wheelchair and worked on exercising his wrists, arms, and neck.
For his upper body they had him do free weights. The last time in the gym he was doing three sets of ten at thirty pounds, and his arms looked like hams. Now he was working out on five pounds, and his biceps looked like walnuts.
This went on twice a day every day. By the end of the first week he was able to move ten feet on the parallel bars, a major victory culminating in his going solo with a walker. To celebrate, Jack asked if someone could run down to the video store and rent him a copy of The Awakening.
While his body began to strengthen, Jack read newspapers and magazines to catch up on what he had missed.
But God! How the world had darkened while he slept. America was still at war with insurgents in Iraq, where suicide bombings were a daily event. The Middle East was still a powder keg, with Israelis and Palestinians still locked in bloody retaliations. We still had troops in Afghanistan. Massacres were occurring in Africa. Christ! Maybe nothing had changed. Six months, and the world was no better off than when he had slipped into a coma.
On the bright side, Red Sox fans were talking about their boys pulling it off again this year. And on that happy possibility, Jack dozed off.
48
“HEY, PAL, WHAT’S WITH THE Rip Van Winkle stunt?”
Jack opened his eyes. “Where the hell you been?”
“Where the hell you been?” Vince chuckled and took Jack’s hand in his.
Vince Hammond stood at Jack’s bedside wearing a black long-sleeve polo and with a big, exuberant boyish face. His hair was shorter than Jack had remembered and spiked with gel, making him look even younger, probably still getting himself carded in bars. But what struck Jack was the difference in their geometry. Against the light flooding through the window Vince looked as if he’d spent the missing months on a Cybex machine. His neck looked like a hydrant, and his shirtsleeves resembled tubes of grapefruits. He had not let the constant exposure to haute cuisine get the best of him. By contrast, Jack felt like a beef jerky.
“How come you’re not fat and bald?”
“I’m working on it,” Vince said, and squeezed a beer wing. “You’re looking a hell of a lot better than you did six months ago.”
“Hard to look worse, I hear.”
“Yeah, you were something of a mess.”
Jack raised the hand mirror the nurses had given him. “And now I’m the Shroud of Turin.”
Vince laughed and pulled up a chair. “The important thing is how you’re feeling.”
“Like a whoopee cushion for all the gas.”
“What are they feeding you?”
“White stuff.” Jack nodded at the tray of half-eaten mashed potatoes and tapioca pudding.
“When you get your teeth back, some red and green.” Vince held up a shiny red bag with the Yesterdays logo. “There’s a freezer down the hall.”
Jack looked at the bag, which almost looked like patent leather, Yesterdays in art deco gold letters. “Nice understated doggie bag.”
Vince frowned at the size. “Yeah, maybe our portions are too big.”
“I hear you’re doing well.”
Vince pulled a menu from the bag. “We’re doing well.”
He handed Jack the menu, a handsomely designed folder of just two pages, instead of the kind of multipage folios that confused your appetite. Desserts on the back side with the list of boutique beers.
“I’ll have the calimari with polenta salad and seafood risotto.”
“Look, when they let you out, you’re gonna be just fine, eating like a king, I’ll make sure. Another thing, I know some real estate people who’ll find you a nice place. And when you’re up for it, you’ve got a job at the restaurant. So when are they going to let you out?”
“Thanks to you, about six weeks.” The nurses had told him how Vince had come in several times a week to help exercise Jack’s legs and arms, confident that he would come out of it and wanting to make sure he’d wake up “ready to trot.” In two weeks the therapist said he’d graduate to a walker, eventually to a cane. But it was uncertain if he’d have a permanent limp.
“You could be our host, so you don’t have to walk much.”
Jack smiled. “Sounds fine.”
Vince and Jack had been friends since junior year in high school—twenty years of sharing hopes, fears, kid fun, many laughs, some defeats, some painful wisdom, and the kind of closeness that exceeded brotherhood. They both went to Northeastern University, where Jack got his degree in English and Vince in criminal justice because he wanted to be a cop. Four years ago, he got shot by a felon during an arrest and spent two months in a hospital—an experience that made him promise his wife no more police work. So he quit the force, and after some small odd jobs on disability, he saved enough money for him and Jack to begin plans on their restaurant.
“Beth came by.”
“I heard.”
“She’s remarried.” He knew Vince knew but he had to give it official pronouncement.
“I’m really sorry about that.”
“Yeah.” The syllable stuck in this throat.
“But think of it as you turning a new page.”
“More like a new book.”
“Whatever, it beats the alternative. The nurses say your recall is something.”
“So I’m told.”
“But you’re feeling okay?”
“Except for the weird spells.”
“Spells?”
“Like … I don’t know. Like I’m having memory flashes of stuff from my past. Some crazy stuff, some good stuff—when I was a kid with my aunt and uncle, at the beach, in the backyard, teachers, first girlfriends.”
“We all should have such spells.”
“Just that they’re so real. I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “It’s more like I’m reliving them.”
“I can think of a few nights I’d like to relive.”
Jack nodded, but that wasn’t what he meant. His brain felt spongy with painkillers and he squished around for the right words. “Sometimes they’re so vivid I can’t tell if it’s memory or if I’m in some kind of replay.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“I feel like that guy in The Dead Zone who has flashes of the future, except I have flashes of the past. Dumb stuff—like taking pony rides at the Mohawk Trail. Playing kickball in the third grade. Christmas Day when I got my first bike. But they don’t feel like dreams.”
“I don’t see what the problem is. You’ve got a vivid memory.”
“I’m telling you, it’s not like memory. It’s just like … just like I’m there—feeling things, hearing stuff, smelling things
. My heart races.” He looked away, frustrated at the limitations of his words. “Vince, I’m reexperiencing events that I once lived.”
Vince nodded as he took it all in.
“Christ, now you think I’m looney tunes.”
“No, I get it.”
But he didn’t. How could he?
“I have dreams all the time, and when I wake up I can swear I was there, someplace else. Everybody does.”
“Except I’m not asleep.”
“You’re not?”
“I could be outside in the sun, but when I look around I’m someplace else—on a beach or in the middle of a thunderstorm, lightning crashing all around me. Yet it’s clear blue and I feel the sun on my face, but inside it’s storming.”
Vince nodded to cover his concern. “Some kind of daydreams. I get those.”
No, you don’t, Jack thought. Nobody who’s right in his head or not on psychedelics gets these. Even with the mushrooms he had tried in college, Jack always knew he was tripping, his anchor self always lurking in the sidelines or flying the thermals just above the Disney pyrotechnics playing across his synapses. But part of him was always in the audience. But this was different, and Vince didn’t have a clue. Nor did Jack.
“What do the doctors say? It could be your medication needs adjusting or something.”
“They give me some antiseizure stuff that just makes me sleepy, and I’ve logged enough of that.”
“Ask them for something else.”
“Yeah.”
They chatted more until Jack felt himself turn drowsy. Vince said he’d be back in a few days, and Jack thanked him for coming around. Before he left, Vince gave Jack an MP3 digital player with several of his favorite artists downloaded. “It also records.”
Jack thanked him. Maybe the music would help him sleep.
What Jack did not tell Vince was how he dreaded sleeping on his own—without lorazepam or clonazepam or Naprosyn or Tegretol or whatever the hell it was to knock the teeth out of his dreams. No, not the pony rides or schoolyard romps with boyhood chums or lusty moments with Latitia Cole in Erica Hughes’s rec room—but the dark, twisted images that were slightly out of focus and just wouldn’t stick to his consciousness when he awoke but whose aftereffects left him flayed with anxiety. And as hard as he tried, he could not summon details.
It had crossed his mind that maybe those damn jellies had spot-fried his brain, leaving little lesions that put him just this side of sane—and maybe the lesions were spreading. And wasn’t that what all the neuropsycho tests were trying to determine—that maybe all of him didn’t come back?
The flash images, the voices in his head, the spells of naked fright. He had said nothing to the docs because he knew that would only prolong his convalescence. And in spite of the fine professional treatment, even after a week he wanted out. He wanted to be someplace other than in this recovery room, this nursing home, away from drip bags and stethoscopes, beeping monitors, and institutional green walls. But more than that, he wanted to be out of his head, because it was like being locked in a room lousy with ghosts.
That’s some mouse.
He looked out the window, and from behind the unbroken blue sky he heard thunder.
Shit! It came back to him like a tic. Thunder and lightning on a cloudless day.
He buzzed the nurse for something to sleep on, and Marcy came and gave him a white pill that he gobbled. down. And when he was alone again, he turned his head away from the sunshine and the rainstorm raging in his pillow, and he pressed his eyes shut and thought of Beth eight years ago and put her on the moon-washed beach with a sultry breeze and her arms pulling him to her, the heat of her breast lighting his heart.
And he closed his eyes and waited for the Xanax to seep through his brain like sap and douse the lights.
49
Darien, Connecticut
“DID YOU EVER DO IT?”
“Did I ever do what?” Rodney Blake felt his insides clench as he darkly sensed what his cousin Nora was asking him.
“Oh, come on, Rod, you know what I mean, a good-looking boy like you. Did you ever screw a girl?”
The words passed through him like sparks. Even though it was 1946 he had never heard a girl speak of such matters or use such language. But, then again, most girls were not his cousin Nora, who lived in the sticks of Pennsylvania with farm animals. Besides, she was fourteen, and older than most girls her age, and a year older than him.
“Not really.”
“Well, you musta made out with girls.”
“Yeah, sure, of course,” he lied. He’d never even had a girlfriend. Only kissed a girl in Spin the Bottle, and that was a dry peck in front of other kids.
They were silent for a few minutes. They were lying in his backyard looking at the stars. They had asked their parents if they could sleep in the tents that night—one for her and one for him, even though either tent could hold two people. But parents said it wasn’t proper to share a tent, a boy and girl at their age, even cousins. So they lay on the blanket between the tents. The glow of his family’s house through the bushes gave them light so he could see Nora studying him.
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t? How come?”
“I just don’t,” Nora said. “You must jerk off.”
(Did girls really talk this way? Or just Nora?)
Another numbing moment as he tried to conjure up the right response. If he sounded shocked, he’d look namby-pamby, to use his mother’s term. Yet to admit he had done that was mortifying, especially to a girl who was also his first cousin. Father Cardarelli, who had taught him catechism and who had given Rodney his missal with the red leather cover and the prayerful inscription, had warned that “abusing oneself” was a sin in God’s eyes but not as bad as doing “it”—which was “mortal” and punishable by eternal damnation, which meant something like those old paintings of demons carving people with long, evil knives.
In truth, Rodney had played with himself but only experienced pre-orgasmic sensations, which still scared him even though they felt good. It happened in bed one night while he was dozing off and his hand started diddling on it own. But it wasn’t a real one because he stopped himself short when he felt something big was about to happen, something he only vaguely knew about—a barrier he just wasn’t supposed to cross. Except some fluid rose up, probably what the kids called “jizz”—a sticky stuff like egg white that dried on his fingers and sent him to the bathroom to scrub away with soap.
“Sure.”
“Then you’re not ascared of going blind, which is what Jerry says will happen, but I think is bulltticky, because every boy I know’s got eyes like a damn hawk.”
Rodney didn’t know how to respond, but it didn’t make any difference because the next thing he knew, Nora had rolled up to his side. And before he could say anything, her hand slid down his front and came to rest on his privates.
“Wha-wha-what’re you doin’?” In spite of himself, he felt himself harden.
“Shhh.”
And she began to rhythmically move her hand up and down across his erection that she had flattened against his belly. Then she slipped her hand into his pants as if she’d done this a dozen times before. Which shocked him. She was only fourteen but so advanced—probably what happened to girls from Pennsylvania where they know about animal husbandry and stuff.
But pecking at his conscience was what Father Cardarelli had said about sex with family members—and what the devil does to those who do that.
Rodney gasped for air as Nora pulled him out of his pants and began stroking him oh so gently. He tried to stop her but he couldn’t, and he groaned and moaned with devilish pleasure until he thought he’d explode. But she knew what she was doing and stopped just in time.
Then he felt her take his hand and place it on her crotch. He had never touched a girl. He didn’t even know what girls looked like down there. Some of the kids had made crude pencil drawings of huge holes with dark scribbly
wreaths of hair, but that did nothing for him. And all the art books in the library showed big fat women with puffy blanks. And medical textbooks only had disgusting diagrams of the insides.
Nora unzipped her bottoms and made him slip his hand inside.
Rodney nearly passed out. My God! All the hair, and she’s wet, and slippery and deep, like a gash—just like Buddy Peterson said.
She rubbed up against him, and before he knew it he was pulling her pants down. And she let him. But when he tried to roll on top of her, she pushed him off. “Uh-uh. Just this,” she whispered. And she continued stroking him.
Maybe it was some deep animal instinct that powered him or all the things that Buddy and Wade and the older boys had told him, but he pushed Nora’s hands back and rolled on top of her, poking her privates with himself, keeping his knees spread so her legs would stay open. Magically he felt himself slip inside her as if guided by all the forces of evolution—and something broke in his mind.
This was it. THIS WAS IT. The epicenter of all adult secrets, all the snickers, the crude pencil drawings, the movies, the jokes, the dirty words. In a stupendous moment of epiphany Rodney connected himself to every other human being on the planet and human being who ever lived, right back to Adam and Eve.
While his cousin Nora struggled to stop him in time, to get him off her, to muffle her protests before their parents heard, Rodney exploded inside her.
When it was over, she was gathering her clothes and swearing at him under her breath as she tried to wipe away his jizz, saying how oh-my-God she could get pregnant.
The next several minutes passed in a blur. Nora disappeared into her tent and he lay there, feeling the chilled air, his sperm crusting on his skin.
Then he was walking across the lawn toward the house, guided by the light and the radio station that played old-time tunes:
Way down by the stream … How sweet it will seem …
