Skin Cage

by Nico Laeser

  Reading Mom on my phone overwhelms me with guilt and shame for having tried to commit suicide, and I begin to wonder again, what kind of person I must have been, to not care about Mom or Aunt Sarah, or Gareth Peters, whoever that is. I tried to kill myself, knowing that I would leave these people behind to mourn my death. Then I remember that I am the kind of person who is not looked for, or visited in the hospital, the kind of person that hasn’t received a call from his mother in years, judging by the list of received calls that mostly occurred almost three years ago.

  Although I tried to kill myself only two months ago, my life seems to have ended almost three years ago. I haven’t updated my profile, published any articles, or kept in touch with anyone for three years. What happened that made everyone stop calling, and that made me stop working. I remember the vodka, the papers thrown everywhere, the launching of the bottle that did not break, and I glance over at the dent at the bottom of the wall. I remember crying in the mirror, and I remember grabbing the pills.

  I retrieve an arm full of the pill bottles from the bathroom cabinet, before returning to my laptop and typing the name of the first bottle into the search bar. I continue to search all of the names one-by-one and read the description of each. Angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, Beta-blockers, long-acting nitrate, calcium channel blocker, and as I figure out what they all have in common, I realize what happened three years ago that had made me cut myself off from everything and everyone. I was diagnosed with terminal heart failure.

  CHAPTER 28

  I am in denial

  I don’t know what I’m going to say. I have been holding the phone for an hour, periodically touching the screen to wake it up but not able to just press the call button, and the screen fades to black again. I spend another couple of minutes with my thumb over the call button, willing myself to call her and realize that I have touched it by accident. The screen reads, calling Mom, and I quickly bring the phone up to my ear.

  “Sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service,” an automated female voice says over and over.

  My only other choice is to call Aunt Sarah and ask her how I can get in touch with Mom. I pull up her number, and with only a slight hesitation, I hit the call button.

  “Hello?” a female voice answers, sounding younger than I expected.

  “Aunt Sarah?”

  “Is that David?” she asks.

  “Yes, is that Sarah?”

  “No, it’s Karen,” she says.

  I try to play it off like an honest mistake, “Oh, you sound just like her on the phone.”

  “That’s what everyone says,” she says through a breathy laugh, “we haven’t heard from you in ages.”

  “I know, sorry. The reason I called, I was trying to call Mom, and it said that the number I dialed is no longer in service, somehow I’ve only got her old number. Do you know what her new number is?” I say, hoping that it hadn’t sounded as ridiculous to her as it had to me.

  “Who is this?” she snaps.

  “It’s David.”

  “Is this a joke?” she says and she sounds mad.

  I’m thinking that maybe there is some kind of bad blood between my mom and my aunt, and I am beginning to wish I hadn’t called.

  “It’s not a joke, Karen, look, I’m sorry if there’s something going on between you and Mom, but,”

  “If you were David, then you would know that Aunt Margret has been dead for years,” she snaps and hangs up.

  I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know how I should feel. I don’t remember my mother, but I just found out she’s dead. My chest tightens, and there are shooting pains down one leg. I try to swallow down the lump and ignore the acid in my throat and chest. Before I realize it is happening, I hear myself crying. I know hardly anything about myself, and what little I do know, I don’t want to believe.

  CHAPTER 29

  I am angry

  The life that I knew almost nothing about is flooding back and falling apart all over again. I am reminded of Dr. Galloway’s comment about preparing myself for when my memories start coming back. How could I prepare for this? My mother is dead; I’m assuming that my father is too, or at least there is no entry for him on my phone, and I am dying.

  I remember getting the call, telling me to come in to discuss the results of the tests. I remember Dr. Hossieni giving me the bad news, and I remember laughing nervously, watching his unchanging expression as he said, “I’m sorry, David.” I remember trying to drown the truth in alcohol, and instead, just trashing my apartment and shutting myself off from the world. I remember waking up on the floor clutching my chest, with the worst hangover, and my jeans soaked with urine, having been too drunk to wake up in the middle of the night. I remember reading up on the life expectancy of someone in the later stages of heart failure and launching the empty bottle at the wall. I remember cutting myself off from everything to make it easier on everybody when I died, and I remember feeling sick to my stomach from sitting around, waiting to die.

  I remember taking the pills with the intention of going to sleep peacefully by the water, but at the last minute, I lost my nerve or changed my mind.

  CHAPTER 30

  I am bargaining

  I feel completely alone. It seems that I spent three years distancing myself from people so that I could die, and now, I am sitting here alone in my apartment wishing that I had a friend to talk to. I called Gareth Peters, hoping that he was a friend, and after a few minutes managed to figure out that he runs a support group for the terminally ill that I had attended for the last time just four months ago. I didn’t tell him about my suicide attempt or the coma. I just told him that I had been busy making preparations for when my time is up. He said that I should come by for the meeting, but I told him that I wasn’t up to it right now, and maybe I would come by next week.

  Last night, I found myself praying to God, a god that I am not sure I believe in, to let it all be a bad dream that I will wake up from. I can’t get my head around what is happening; it’s like I have woken up in someone else’s life, with a stranger’s memories. I beg of God to give me a second chance. I don’t remember most of the life I led before—the life in which I must have done something wrong—something that offended God, or karma, or whatever governs such things. I feel like I am suffering the punishment for someone else’s mistakes or misgivings. Maybe this has nothing to do with karma or God. Maybe there is no God, no heaven, and no hell. I am being spoon-fed the events of my life, one mouthful of déjà vu at a time.

  My head and heart hurt both physically and emotionally. I am not sure which pills I am supposed to take and when. I have refused to pick up the pill bottles that are strewn across my floor, like going back on the pills will somehow make the situation real. I am still waiting for some kind of intervention, someone to call and tell me it was all an elaborate hoax, that there has been some mistake or mix up, that I am not dying.

  CHAPTER 31

  I am depressed

  I have spent the whole morning lying on my couch with my stomach in knots, waiting for something to happen, waiting for someone to come and help me. My body is shaking like I have consumed two pots of coffee, and my mind is locked in a war between depression and anger, between crying and hating myself for it.

  I want to get up, but in my mind, I am asking what the point is. My head is pounding, my mouth is dry, and I can’t tell if it is hunger that I feel or if it is the same sick feeling that I’ve had since finding out about my heart; whichever it is, I know that food won’t fix it. I make the effort to get up, pour a cup of water from the kitchen tap, and pop the cap off the Aspirin before swallowing two with a mouthful of water. I chug back the rest of the water and fill the cup again.

  As I exit the kitchen, I am hit in the chest by an unseen assailant, and I drop to my knees. The invisible attacker stands heavy on my chest, digging a heel in below my collarbone, and I gasp for breath. My arm feels cold and wet, and I am expecting blood as I look and see the empty
glass. I lie still and play dead, hoping that the attacker will accept my surrender and leave me breathing.

  CHAPTER 32

  I am accepting

  “I’m dying,” I say.

  Barb looks at me like she’s waiting for the punch line.

  “It’s not a joke; terminal heart failure,” I say.

  “Is that why you were in a coma?” Her usual service-person smile dissolves into a frown.

  “Kind of. I got sick of waiting to die and tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills, but I didn’t die,” I tell her.

  “Oh my God, I don’t even know what to say,” she says.

  “My memory has started coming back in chunks, and the more I remember, the worse it gets,” I say, “I found out that my mom is dead, I mean she died years ago, but to me, all of this has happened in the last few days.”

  “I can’t imagine what you’re going through, you poor man,” she says.

  “The worst thing is that I cut myself off from everybody, and I have no one to talk to about any of this. I have no friends,” I say.

  “You can talk to me whenever you need to, David,” she says.

  “Thanks, Barb. I’m sorry to dump all this on you but I was going crazy in my apartment,” I say.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asks.

  I shake my head and lift my empty glass. “Drink. What would you do if you only had a couple years left?”

  “I’d like to think that I would go to Paris, or rob a bank, or something crazy, but I would probably just sit and cry,” she says.

  “I don’t think I’m allowed to fly, and there’s no point robbing a bank; what would I do with the money? I don’t need it where I’m going,” I say and summon a wry smile.

  She returns my smile and places another drink on the bar between us. “If I am your only friend, then you can leave it all to me.”

  “I’m really glad I met you, Barb, you are the nicest person I know,” I say.

  “Thanks,” she says smiling, “but you don’t know anyone else.”

  “So you win by default, it’s still a win,” I say and attempt to wink, which morphs into a wince as my chest tightens, forcing me to hold my breath until the pain dissipates.

  “You alright?” she asks.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I only went back on my pills yesterday, and I’m not really sure which ones I’m supposed to be taking,” I reply.

  “Have you called your doctor?” she asks.

  “Not yet. I guess I was just hoping that if I closed my eyes for long enough, then it would all go away,” I say.

  She doesn’t respond, but her expression says sorry a thousand times over.

  “It’s okay Barb, I think that I’m only about six drinks away from the acceptance stage,” I say.

  “Acceptance stage? Can you accept a thing like that?” she says.

  “I think acceptance is what happens when you inevitably run out of options, and have to face the fact that you are going to die, and there’s not a thing you can do to change it,” I say.

  CHAPTER 33

  I am the head vice

  With my eyes closed, I can see her face, the pale-skinned nurse. I don’t know her name, but she is beautiful beyond anything I can describe. It is the kind of beauty that makes me believe that there may be a god, for only the hands of a god could paint something so breathtaking. I don’t know who she is, but I know that I loved her with all my heart and soul. I wish that I could remember who she is and forget everything else that I have learned about my life.

  The headaches are getting progressively worse and seem to have built up a resistance to the Aspirin. I can’t help but notice how rapidly I am aging. I look and feel tired and my eyes ache. The skin of my face seems thinner, almost transparent, and I am afraid to shave off the beard that conceals the dying man within it.

  I am fighting emotional ambivalence and all with an almost constant feeling of nostalgia beneath, to serve as an undercoat-primer, allowing for better and wider coverage. As I hold the razor in my hand, the image of my father shaving enters my thoughts, but his face is blurred. The feeling people describe as, “Being on the tip of the tongue,” when trying to think of the right words to use or when trying to think of the name of the actor from a movie, that is the way I feel about the events of my life, my fragmented past. There is always a face that I am trying to put a name to, or a blurred image that I am trying to put a face to, and the harder I think about it, the worse the pain in my head becomes.

  ***

  As I draw the razor through the coarse hair below my cheek, I am afraid that it will drag away the skin like wet paper. I have to stretch the skin to shave the hair in the slight dip in my dimpled chin and have to go back to catch hair that I have missed a few times. Simple tasks that should be second nature seem foreign and strange. I notice a small cut on my jaw line and dab at it with tissue. As the tissue blots red, there is a memory that lingers just out of reach, like a word on the tip of my tongue. I leave a square of tissue over the cut, scoop all of the hair out of the sink and flush it down the toilet before trying to clean all of the stray hairs from around the tap.

  I return to the kitchen and swallow a cocktail of pills, each with a mouthful of water. I turn one of the pill bottles in my hand as I look through the contacts on my phone for Dr. Hossieni.

  “Hi, this is David Wolfe. I’d like to make an appointment with Dr. Hossieni,” I say.

  “Is tomorrow at 11:30 okay for you, Mr. Wolfe?” she asks.

  “That’s fine, thank you,” I reply.

  “Okay, we’ll see you then,” she says.

  “Oh, wait, where are you located?” I say quickly before she hangs up.

  She hesitates for a second and then gives me the address. I write it down and tell her thanks and I’ll see her tomorrow.

  On my way back into the living room, I am attacked by all of my senses simultaneously, and memories come flooding back like a thousand people shouting at once. My head feels like it is in a vice. The voices become white noise, the pictures blur, and everything is replaced by a searing pain and a high-pitched squeal as the vice tightens turn by turn. My chest joins the melee against me, and I drop to my knees, trying to catch my breath, then there is silence.

  I stand up and the room is black. The furniture and objects in the room are a dark blue, and as I back away from the frozen orange figure on its knees in front of me, I am reminded in an instant of everything before I found David’s lifeless body. I stare down at what looks like liquid fire inside the glass figurine in front of me. I drop to my knees, and the pain grips my head, dragging me to the floor.

  CHAPTER 34

  I am symbiotic

  I am sitting at the laptop. Once again, I am looking up my own name, trying to find out what happened to me, but this time it is not David Wolfe that I am searching for, it is Daniel Stockholm.

  There are hundreds of search results. I open one of the pages, and it is a full-page news article regarding the death of Daniel Stockholm and the resulting investigation into the actions of palliative care aid Marcus Salt.

  “ … The death of Daniel Stockholm has brought forth controversial talks over the issues regarding passive euthanasia, although the nature of the ‘assisted’ death of twenty-four year old ‘Danny,’ the ‘persistent vegetative state’ heir to the Stockholm fortune, was anything but passive … ”

  “ … Marcus Salt, one of Danny’s caregivers, remains in police custody after launching Danny’s ventilator through the window, leaving two other caregivers shocked, devastated, and unable to help Danny who was reliant on supplied air from the machine … ”

  “ … Marcus Salt collapsed almost immediately after the incident and is claiming that he has no recollection of the events before or after. Doctors have confirmed that the cause of collapse was a grand mal seizure … ”

  “ … Over the days previous to the incident, two other members of the staff experienced grand mal seizures like the one Mr. Salt suffered after ‘unpluggin
g’ Danny … ”

  “ … Antonio Romero, the family’s long-time cook and friend was hospitalized after suffering a similar collapse just days prior to the incident and says that he also has no recollection of the events immediately prior to his collapse, right up until he woke up in the hospital. Another member of the cleaning staff also suffered a collapse in the same week due to a grand mal seizure and was hospitalized for three days but has refused to talk with reporters … ”

  “ … Marcus Salt is currently undergoing psychological evaluation, and his lawyer has said that he is willing to take a polygraph test, which he is certain, will show that his client was operating under ‘diminished capacity,’ which some have speculated is a move toward claiming temporary insanity due to medical reasons. So far, a cause for the series of grand mal seizures has not been found … ”

  “ … It is still unclear as to the direction that the prosecution will take, but there are laws governing against the passive euthanasia of persistent vegetative state patients, and there is still talk of a murder or lesser manslaughter charge … ”

  “ … Active or passive euthanasia to a non-consensual patient is considered as intentional homicide, and not assisted suicide, or self-determination. If it is proved that Marcus Salt was unaware of his actions during the incident, then the charge will probably be dropped to the lesser charge of manslaughter in the absence of malice or premeditation. Although, there are reports that claim that Mr. Salt said goodbye to both Cassandra Mathews, the nurse who was in charge of Daniel’s live-in care, and Anna Statham, the aunt and voluntary caregiver of Daniel, prior to the incident. There are also reports that Marcus said goodbye to Daniel before unplugging him … ”