Strange Man

Agony broils, but anguish simmers K had known them both well and in equal measure. In the early days, his brain felt blurry and disjointed; he had the sense of being deep underwater, all undulating shadows and echoing whale songs. The darkness was expansive, and the staticky, dull sense of confusion he felt was sometimes intercut with crippling panic. BP is spiking, and the whales moan. Slowly, slowly, he floated to the surface, leaving the deep water below him. Still darkness, but the birdsong of faraway waterfowl sharpened, morphing into beeps and pings and buzzes. K's POV: Then came the Then came the boredom, the days of nothingness that stretch out endlessly. Anguish. There is a bell tower not far outside my window; for some time I tried tracking the days by the tolling of the bells, scratching white chalk tally marks onto the dark walls of my psyche. When I lost count, I decided it didn’t matter. How many days had turned to weeks, to months, while I was in the deep? I know Lovie by the sharp antiseptic smell of hand sanitizer mingling with shea butter. Her hands are soft and warm, and I sink into her oversized bosom when she lifts me and runs the cool soft sponge across my back. There’s a pulling, a prickling need to inhale her deeply, and sometimes I can almost feel the needling of hot frustrated tears wash across the backs of my eyelids for the fact that I can’t; when she’s talking to me in her honeyed dulcimer voice, I feel amber skin baking under sunshine, the tingle of anticipation as the clock ticks toward midnight on New Years, the thrill of pulling on perfectly worn sweatpants fresh from the dryer. We’ve eased up on the sedatives, but we’re still not getting any pupillary reflex. On other days, Bailey comes. I can tell she’s a smoker, and I imagine my body curdling as her nicotine-laced fingers fiddle with my lines and tubes. She’s supposed to wash her hands, but I never hear the thwump thwump of the hand sanitizer foam when she breezes in, always in a hurry, with heavy, agitated footfalls. She lays her clipboard (I imagine it’s hot pink) and her jangling lanyard across my legs; their weight on my shins feels reassuring somehow. I am a table now. She’s rough and rushed and her voice rasps and grates and I urge my shoulders up towards my ears as a kind of shield, but of course, they do not obey. It’s in those small moments the tiny stitches of reality pull taut and the futility of wanting for anything at all the futility of everything!- becomes so overwhelming I want to crawl out of my skin. (But of course I can’t.) I remember a long-form article I read, years ago. It was supposed to be sensational: a survival guide for a wildly improbable situation. A series of interviews with prisoners of war who had been kept in solitary confinement for years and years; felt exploitative, peeking into their brains, reading about the ways they had kept afloat amid unending years with only their minds for companionship. A GI who had been imprisoned in Vietnam implored the reader, should they find themselves in a similar situation (because it could happen to anybody, right?), to relive every memory they could retrieve from the recesses of their brain in the most intricate detail possible. You could stretch the memory of a single conversation on the beach to occupy your consciousness for days if you acknowledged every singular grain of sand that had worked its way into your sandals, each slight shift in wind direction, all the individual strands of hair that blew like curtains across your wife’s eyes and named the dimensional shades of brown of each of them. What are the odds, I muse, and so I do: I tiptoe my way through my life, picking up memories like shells on the beach, examining them from every angle. When we were children, Dale and I used to trudge up the mountain toward my Granny’s every Wednesday evening so we could give living room concerts for her Bible study group. The gravel crunched under our shoes; a hole was worn into the sole of my sneakers, right under my big toe. One day he noticed a daddy with long legs ambling over the jagged rock, and for no reason at all, plucked each of its legs off, one by one, until all that was left was a gray-brown oval with grasping, useless pincers. He tossed it back down, just another rock on the road, and I cried. It’s just a spider, he admonished. No, not anymore, I sobbed. Now it was just another rock. Now I am just another table. Sometimes Dale comes, but he never talks to me. I recognize him by the way he clears his throat each time he changes position, an unconscious habit that drove me mad when we were younger before the children and the house were silent but for his intermittent shrunk. As the years melted by (as they tend to do), it became a sort of homing beacon, like a bell on a cat. Now, as I struggle against the tides trying to pull me back toward the deep, it’s a lighthouse. I hear the air whoosh out of my vinyl bedside chair as he sinks into it (shrunk), the intermittent tapping of his fingertips on the delicate, thin glass of his phone screen. When Lovie comes in, he asks questions, and they talk about me as if I’m not here. Agony. We’ll be sedating her more fully for the CT and MRI tomorrow morning. There are some risks, but we should have a better idea of the extent of the damage after we have those results. The tide roared in unexpectedly, swept my feet out from under me, and sent me cartwheeling under the surface, sucking me under. There is nothing here but the deadening pressure, every breath leaden, demanding, and the garbled echoes of the surf. The deep is just as endless as ever, but I am calmer, unmoored here in the infinite shadows, my body twisting and turning in the current, not still and frozen. Not a table. Vitals are tanking, and the whales sing. The husband signed a DNR yesterday. I always wanted to spend more time in the ocean. For a time I peppered Dale with real estate listings of beach cottages nestled among the dunes. Then I’d wait with bated breath for him to fall in love with one of them and for our lives to begin. The insurance on these places would be ridiculous, Janine. He waved me away and dismissed the idea, and for a moment I felt like the spider from my childhood: discarded, stuck, just another rock among the gravel. Can you even see me? The deep water presses in on you, and makes your heartbeat roar in your ears. Every sound reverberates against itself in an infinite echo, pixelated, like a lagging video. It’s just a spider, the whales moan. I dive deeper. No, not anymore.