Segment 12

         A. It. Tap. Over. White. Echoes. Sterile.
         I don’t go anywhere and the world builds itself around me. Dripping molecule by molecule, falling into perspective, squeezed out of a tube, it forms from the ground up, and the ground down. I know how this works. I can’t explain. Not in words. It’s an instinct, something built into you, a muscle you don’t know you have and they teach you how to use it and flex it and a door opens up in the fabric that you never knew existed. Except my muscle has gone numb and I’m trapped in a elevator that keeps going to random floors and the doors are stuck open and I keep getting exposed to different levels. And I can’t stop the sensation of constantly rising and falling. And I could close my eyes but I don’t know what I’ll see when I open them.
         The floor forms, elegant tiles etched out of time. I know what’s happening, it’s the slow motion settling of a zone. I’ve rotated into it and my senses are shifting to match it. I can explain it, but it’s still all nonsense. Time is filling in the cracks, the spaces within me, the things I’m leaving behind. I’m so thin now, and so heavy, I’m accumulating time, all the things I’m seeing, they weigh on me and I’m becoming stationary, I’ll start to sink through if I’m not careful. All the way down. To the zero point, to be consumed again. Subsumed. Pale light passes through me, not even bothering to change its path. My mass bends nothing, I have no affect on anything. Walls erect themselves, rain falling into a series of cylinders. I’m propped against it, a change of pace. I want to move but I feel encrusted, covered in so many things that don’t belong to me. Are these memories yours? I don’t want them. You can have them, take them with you wherever you go. I only wanted to mourn you, by accident, before you were gone. I’ve got a sense that they’re walking through me, polished heels and hurried footsteps, going to places that I can’t see. In a hallway, I remain in a corridor and there’s light on both ends, obscuring all figures, drowning everything. It’s a glare. It’s nothing. I go to shield my eyes and watch light turn into a physical thing, pierce me like cannon needles. Someone’s carved an entryway into the whiteness. I’m so tired. You don’t understand, I’m not strong enough. I’m not here to save anyone, I can’t even save myself. You’re gone but it’s a joke I already know the punchline to and for some reason they keep repeating it to me, over and over.
         Dammit. Focus. At least try, you whimpering bastard. The anger seems to give me substance for just a fraction of a moment and in that second I feel sharp, like crystal, and I might cut myself out of this, tear into the gossamer projection screen that’s settled around me, layers and layers of time, slice through and fall into something else, another time, not as smooth, with ridges I can grasp. Maybe I’d meet myself, with the solution on how to escape. Maybe there is no escape and it’s like life, you just have to ride it until you reach the end. But sometimes we can make our own exit.
         Sound comes to me, sand grains blown from the ocean. We went to the beach, you and I, more than once, alone and with friends and we walked the boardwalk and sat on the sand everything about it felt eternal. But the water eats the land and one day it will all fall away. A machine keeps rhythm to the rattle of someone’s breath. Distantly someone is moaning for their family. I can see inside and the bed holds a doll, a baby. No. Something more. They beep and they beep and they beep but that’s what they do, placidly, obediently, and when it comes down to it if we all perished they would still sit there and chime in unison until the motor of the world ran out. I prefer chaos, the clash of cacophony. The boardwalk at night, walking on wooden streets, your body pressed against mine, listening to the waves trying to find some kind of rhythm, crashing against the shore. They tried but they couldn’t find the beat. I walked and you tried to skip out of step to make me trip. To get back at me for having a longer stride. Everything’s so close. Ah. Oh God. It’s pressed against me, eating into my pores. I hear a cough, all wan and wasted. I know it. In the tight spaces between me and the world it echoes, the vibrations striking a place I can’t reach anymore. A man walks past me, reaches and misses but I’ve already gone forward, diving into the room, sifting through seconds like soup. I’m standing, but I don’t remember how to do it. I go to steady myself but hand just passes through the scenery. I’m not here, I’m just the afterimage of a flash, a thing you see after the picture is developed and wonder how the hell a piece of dirt got into the lens.
         But, oh hell, it’s you. The room has the ringing frequency of a time too close to my own, my body senses it and tries to bring itself in phase. I gasp and nearly fall over. My internal organs are attempting to travel somewhere else and want to go through my skin to get there. You’re in the bed, I see that even when my eyes close. You’re alone in the room and you’re in the bed and nothing about you looks right. They’ve surgically removed parts of you when we weren’t looking, exaggerated everything that could ever go wrong with you. You’re too thin, I can tell by the contours of you under the sheets, all muscle’s been removed and you’re just bones, barely able to sustain your own weight. The bedsheets must be there to hold you down because a brush of air itself seems enough to break you. Even your skin looks different, more taut, a noticable tinge of a color that skin shouldn’t have. There’s an IV going into your arm, at least that I can see, a bag attached to that, dripping something clear into your body.
         You’re lying on your back, head propped up a bit on the pillow. Your eyes are closed but it’s not relaxed, it’s the kind of thing where you close your eyes and hope that sleep will follow but in reality all you see is darkness and the odd shapes the brain makes when you give it nothing else to amuse itself with. Still, I can see your eyes are sunken, your whole face is trying to disappear into itself, there’s still enough mass to make it you. There’s an oxygen tube running out of your nose, into some cannister behind your bed. Monitors are hooked up to you, confirming that you’re still alive, even though they can’t measure the thing that really tell the difference. It matters though, that they know this much. I’ve gotten closer to you, somehow, drawn by some insistent gravity, because you’re forever fixed in this place, caught on the platform of this time, while I’m adrift, without any anchor in sight.
         I watch your chest rise and fall, each breath seeming to come from under the weight of something massive. It’s all the time you won’t have, bearing down on you, doing its best to make you stronger in the time that you do have. It can’t be long. I realize that now. Everything in this place looks too familiar. My stomach sinks and twists and if I could tear a hole in the air and find the exit, I would. I hate seeing you like this, even the thought that you suffered this for even a moment grinds at me. But it happened and it’s here and I have to watch, because looking away isn’t an option. You can’t seem to find a cadence that suits you, I can see the strain carved into your face, wearing away at you, a friction you can’t avoid. No wonder why you can’t sleep, struggling to breathe like this. I’d be afraid too, to falter for even a second. I wouldn’t trust my body, after all it had done to me. One of your hands is clenched in a loose fist but it’s more a gesture than anything else. I could hold it but you might try to strangle all the energy out of me, in order to hold something for yourself.
         I don’t know how long I watch you for. Outside the windows are covered in dusk. Inside the day I can’t tell the time. The city is painted with golden shadows. I can’t go out there but I know what it’s like to be immersed in it, when everything felt new. I could comfort myself with that, when my mind starts to wander.
         I could, but then you cough and I’m focused again. It starts out softly at first, a break in your arrhythmic respiration, coming from somewhere deep in your chest. But when it seems to explode, a dull roar ripped out of your body. You jerk up, your upper body convulsing, bending impossibly, your eyes flying open to see nothing, closing again with the effort, the sound a primitive drumbeat, your hands going to your mouth, as if to try and keep your life from escaping. It’s like mortar shells going off inside you, you’re falling on the grenade for all of us. I see you try to catch your breath in between each spasm, your face turning dark red, air going out but not coming back in. Somewhere a monitor is beeping crazily but no one is coming. It’s all in my head.
         “Ah . . .” you gasp, when you’re finally able to force out something coherent. Your face contorts, another cough barges its way through. “Ah,” you say again, drawing in deep breaths, trying not to agitate your body. Your eyes are half closed, conserving as much energy as you can. “Guh,” you mutter, wiping at the wetness there, drawn there from the effort. “Gah.” You sniffle a bit, wipe weakly at your mouth. Grabbing a wadded up tissue that sits on a table next to the bed, you spit something into it, a practiced manuever that just barely disguises how much it disgusts you. “D-dammit . . .” you finally say, grimacing. You wipe at your eyes again, your hands shaking. “God dammit,” I hear you say, in a harsher voice than I’ve ever heard you use. Bending forward, deeper into yourself, you clutch at your stomach, making a small noise that might be crying, if you had the energy. “I’m going to be okay,” you say, not looking at anything. “I want to be okay ,” you add, like a wish that refuses to come true. The genie has reneged on the deal. “I’m . . . dammit . . .” and nothing else comes, your fingers are pressed into your face. You flop backwards, hit the bed sideways, the side of your face sinking into the pillow, your body shaking silently for at least a minute. You look so alone, I can’t stand it. But I can’t be here. I don’t know where I was, but it wasn’t here. Part of me wonders how much longer you have, if you even know.
         Another minutes passes. Your body heaves quietly, your breathing regulates. “I don’t want to be like this,” you say, maybe, your face pinched. There’s a war going on in there, and you’re the frontline and the homefront and everything is suffering. The infrastructure can’t handle the strain anymore, it’s all falling apart. “I want to get out of here.” You shift onto your back again, eyes still closed, one hand shielding your face, as if you don’t want to witness the doom bearing down on you. Sometimes knowing what direction it’s coming from is worse because even when you brace yourself, it makes no difference. “I just want to go home,” comes the whisper, your lips barely moving. “That’s all.”
         All of a sudden, a shadow falls through me.
         “Sounds like someone isn’t having a good day,” a man says, with soft humor.
         Your eyes snap open. Who? I ask the question for you. I try to spin around, as best I can without weight. He’s there, but I can’t see him. I know who it is. But I don’t understand. Why is he here?
         You appear to have the same questions. Forcing yourself up to one elbow, the motion clearly an effort, you say, “What are you doing here?”
         I still can’t see him. I can’t complete the action. What I can see is obscured, he’s leaning in the doorway, hands in his pockets. There’s a casual tension to him, it radiates like a radio transmission.
         “What am I doing?” he asks, with quiet surprise. “Visiting you, I hope.”
         “I thought visiting hours were over,” you say, sitting up a little more.
         He shrugs. “I have no idea. If you just walk in, I guess they don’t say anything.” Even sideways I can see his smile. “Or maybe it’s not the time you think it is.”
         Without any reference, the moment seems lost, attached to nothing. You blink, tell him, “No, they told my parents to go a little while ago or else they’d still be . . .” You trail off, stop, smile a little at him. “You know, I’m sick here. You have to go easy on me.” When you smile I want to look away, it makes you look even worse, like you’re being stretched in the wrong direction. It’s not right. None of this is right. Why is he here? He’s not himself. He’s not who he’s supposed to be.
         “I really didn’t say anything,” he tells you, scuffing his foot on the floor. “I let you draw your own conclusion.”
         “Whatever,” you respond. A moment of silence follows. “You know,” you say, “you can come in, if you want.” There’s something tugging at your words when you say that, some kind of silent pleading wish that you can’t express. There’s a line in the room and he’s on the other side of it.
         I’ve turned around finally and I can see him. It’s who I know it is. Him. He hasn’t changed at all and the ignorance is still present. Unless it’s an act. But I know. He’s watching you, seemingly poised on the edge of something. I don’t get why he’s here. I don’t know him at all, only by reputation and it’s a manufactured one, something that he’s going to inherit. I don’t know the man at all. Just what lies beyond, and ahead.
         “Unless,” you add a second later, when he hasn’t moved, “you’re just more comfortable over there.”
         He shrugs again, as if his desires don’t actually matter, and steps into the room, crossing the short distance from the door to the bed. “Either way,” he says, “it’s just the same.”
         “Whatever,” you whisper, but seem inwardly pleased that he stayed. For a moment you’ve forgotten yourself, detached from where you are and what it means. In a stronger voice, you tell him, “But dammit don’t expect to stand over me. On top of everything else that’s wrong with me, I don’t need a stiff neck.”
         “As you say, miss,” he states formally, with a wry smile, dragging over a chair that I’m just noticing, sitting down with a smooth, simple motion. “Is this better?” he asks and even in the chair he’s still taller than you.
         “Much,” you confirm, rearranging your position in the bed so that you’re facing him. There’s confusion in your face still, latent and buried, so that you may not even know that it’s there. I know I have it. I never knew about this. How could I? “It’s definitely easier talking to you like this, than staring at the back of your head.” It hits me then how much your voice has changed, always soft, it’s become frayed, grey at the edges. Maybe it’s the oxygen, making you hoarse, or the constant coughing. Or your body saving all the energy it can, for a certain day.
         “Well, there you go, then,” he says, calmly. “That makes it worth it, right there.”
         “Yeah, well,” you say, casting your gaze downward, rearranging the sheets so that it hides more of your body, and what the body has done to itself. “I take it where I can get it, these days.” You cough, glancing worriedly at the man, something in your eyes hoping it stops there, but it doesn’t, it increases, rampaging faster, until you’re doubled over again.
         A flicker of concern comes over him then, pinpoints in his eyes like stars. He goes to lean forward but something in your stance, maybe the way you shake your head, stops him and he settles back, watching you intently. You cough for almost a full minute and he stares, never taking his eyes off of you. His posture seems balanced, ready to move at any second. What he think he’ll do I have no idea. But something about him makes me feel even more fragmented, he’s exerting a force on me, by being here, that I can’t control. Maybe it’s not who it is. I can’t get his attention. Madly, I want him to help. But he can’t. We’re not travelling in the same plane. He looks at me but I’m just the door, the place outside where help might come. Don’t you understand? I don’t want to be here. Not out of step. I want to be like you, in the thick of it. I want to go down .
         He waits, patiently, until you stop. When you’ve finally regained air you just sit for a minute taking deep breaths, before settling back carefully, wincing briefly at some vague internal pain.
         “You know,” you say, while staring up at the ceiling, “it always strikes me, whenever I have one of those coughing fits, how people they . . . they always make a move like they’re going to do something .” You laugh without doing it openly. “But I really don’t know what they think they can do.” The smile fades. “There’s nothing, really.” A residual cough tugs at you, makes your body jerk.
         “It’s human nature,” he says quietly, looking a little embarrassed. For a second I think he had some kind of plan but held back on it because he didn’t want to make everyone else look bad. I can’t imagine him moving without some kind of goal in mind, he’s not one for futile manuevers. “We can’t help ourselves.”
         “I know,” you say. “And I don’t know what I would do if you guys didn’t at least try.” You look toward him, but he’s not meeting your gaze, staring off into other spacious zones. “Just because it is pointless doesn’t mean I think it’s pointless.”
         “That’s more like it,” he says, but there’s a distance in him now. I get the impression that he had only planned out as far as actually visiting and now that he’s here, he doesn’t know what kind of purpose he’s supposed to serve. He’s torn by instincts he can’t yet acknowledge. In places that he doesn’t have names for, they fear the idea of what he is. “That’s what’s going to get you out of here.”
         “Now you sound like my mom,” you tell him, with a smirk. Your lips seem almost bloodless, all the coughing has drained the fluid from your face.
         “We swapped places,” he answers back quickly, with an ease I don’t really expect from him. But then, we didn’t know each other that well, just rumors, shadows passing in the hallways. All the times I saw him, he wasn’t facing my direction. “We decided it’s easier to work in shifts, that way you don’t get tired of staring at all the same faces.”
         “Good idea,” you say, but now you’re the one acting distant. Your face is pensive and there’s lines of worry carved in there. In the dimming light, it’s hard to tell, only by examining it for the longest time can you actuallly see them. It’s lines finely wrought, rivers gone dry, the borders of a fragmenting country, held together only by the sense that if they have to go, it might as well be with some dignity. When you speak again the alterations in your voice make you sound flat, almost emotionless. But that’s not true. I see your eyes. “Can I . . . can I ask you something?”
         His eyes dart to you instantly. He’s on guard but I can’t say as to what. “Sure,” he says, carefully. He doesn’t want to reveal too much here. Maybe she’s going to ask him why he came. How did you know each other? Class? Maybe. In towns like ours, connections come from strange places. You’re never surprised at who you know.
         “How . . .” you swallow, stare at him for another second, as if waiting for some kind of reaction. “Can you tell me how I look?”
         If he’s taken aback by the question, he gives no sign other than the slight raising of the eyebrows. “You look . . . all right, I guess,” he says, watching you again, his body poised.
         “I look terrible,” you snap back, with an astonishing amount of venom. “You can say it. I look sick.”
         “I could,” he agrees, “but that’s not really asking the important question.”
         “No?” you say. “What question is that?”
         “How are you feeling?” he asks, shifting slightly in his chair. He leans forward, pressing his palms together. “That means more to me than anything else.”
         “How do you think I feel?” you ask sharply. For a second you seem offended at his question but I think it’s more because he thought of it before you did. He doesn’t respond, just looks at you, knowing you have more to say. You do. “I feel awful, I’ve been here for longer than I want to be and everyone keeps telling me that I’m going to get better but they don’t say when.” You hold up one arm. In the meager light of the room it almost seems translucent, you’re almost someone I can see right through. I’ve lost track of myself. A shadow screaming on the wall has more substance than I do. “Every morning I wake up hoping to feel a little better than the day before but it’s not happening.” Your hands clench into fists. “And people keep telling me not to worry about it, that it takes time. But I don’t have time, dammit, I don’t want to waste all my time getting better and find that I have nothing left.” Under the sheets, what’s left of you twitches, trying to find a place to go. But even if you found a way out of these walls, all the paths lead back here. “I’ve been here too long already. I want to be out, I want to be doing things, I . . .” you rub your face, obviously tired. “I’m ranting, I’m sorry. You came to visit me and I’m just yelling at you.”
         “It’s fine,” he says, with unwavering calm. “Say what you want. “I think you’ve earned that right.”
         “No,” you say, insistently. “No, I haven’t. I don’t want that right because . . . you know why?” He doesn’t answer but doesn’t bother to stop you either. “My grandmother, she was really sick, that’s all I remember her as, just being old and sick and . . . she was really mean a lot of times, just . . . she would say whatever she wanted and be rude and . . . nobody said anything, I’d say, that’s not right, she can’t talk to people like that and my parents, they’d tell me . . . that’s just how she is, she’s really sick. Like it gave her some kind of excuse, to treat people like crap. Just because her body was treating her like crap and she could take it out on everyone else.” You cross your arms, stubbornly, taking a deep breath after the exertion of the speech. “That’s not me. I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to be one of those sick and bitter people.” You turn your face away, look at the wall. “I don’t want to be one of those people who you wish were dead so you wouldn’t have to hear their moaning and crying anymore.”
         “Nobody wishes you dead,” he points out, somewhat aimlessly.
         “Nobody does, but it’s going to happen anyway, isn’t it . . .” you turn back to him, throwing the words out like darts.
         “Of course it is,” he says, and his tone is totally different now. I’m drawn, it does something to the edge of me. He says it matter of factly, there’s a coldness there that I can’t place. Without moving, he’s everywhere, crowding me out. I can’t leave the room but I’m compressed, there’s no place for me here.
         “What?” you say, quickly. There’s shock in your eyes.
         “You heard me,” he answers, still with that distant calm. “And you know it.”
         “Don’t,” you stammer, thrown off. “That’s not something you say . . .”
         “It’s not,” he admits. “But that doesn’t make it less true. You’re going to die,” he continues, like some kind of boulder, rolling over everything in its path. Like the sea, eating away a little bit at the land, every year, until there’s nothing left. “Not tonight, I imagine. But eventually.”
         You’ve squeezed your eyes shut again, and you’re sitting up in the bed. One hand is close to your chest, fist toward your heart. “Get out of here,” you whisper, suddenly, in a strangled voice. “Get the hell out of here.”
         “The thing is, it’s just stating the obvious,” he says, ignoring the sentiment.
         “Stop talking. Dammit. Just get out.”
         “And once you have that out of the way, you have to decide . . .” he’s been staring straight ahead the entire time and now he finally looks at you. You might be his only audience. I think he’s talking to me. That’s not right. “You have to ask yourself, where do you go from there?”
         “Dammit, is this why you came here?” you ask him, your eyes liquid, everything about you ready to dissolve. There’s too many things insulating you that you forget what it feels like when something from the outside penetrates. There’s no visible emotion in his eyes but I catch a flicker of something there. “To tell me this, is this what you do? Come here and . . . and say these things . . . to just say.” You take a shuddering breath, trying to compose yourself. But he’s hit something, he’s drawn blood. In the old days it was a good thing, to expose yourself so freely to the air. It marked a man and made him whole. “Go away,” you say and I don’t think you’re talking to him anymore.
         “I’m so frightened,” you say a short time later. “I just don’t know, I . . .” you rub your finger under your nose, make a small noise I can’t uncover. “You don’t know what it’s like.” Your face looks distorted by some future grief, you’re mourning yourself before the time has even come. “I’m used to, I’ve been a certain way all my life, I’ve been sick and so I’m used to being at a certain level of . . . of wellness, I guess. That’s stupid, that word is stupid. I don’t know how else to put it.” You’re hiccuping your sentences, if you’re not crying, you’re on the verge of it. I hate it. I don’t want to see you like this anymore. But I can’t look away. And neither can he. “And all my life I . . . I get sick and I slip down from that and eventually I climb back up. It’s not the same as, as you being well but I can live with it. And lately it’s just . . . oh God.” You wipe something off of your face, like you’re about to sneeze. “I keep slipping down, coming down from that level and I can’t, I can’t get myself back up to where I’m supposed to be, to my normal. Each time I don’t get back all the way, I’m a little further down and every time I’m getting sicker and sicker, I’m just . . .” your next words are totally muffled, “I’m sinking. I’m sliding down and I don’t know where the bottom is. I know what the bottom is. I want somebody to help me and there’s nothing anybody can do.” You look over at him, perhaps hoping for some kind of reaction. He’s got nothing. “There,” you sniff wetly, partially covering your face. “Are you happy now? Are you?”
         “That was never the point,” he says, placidly, although the fire is there. Sometimes when I look at him I see more than one image. I can’t explain that. He’s just as absent as I am. “And I certainly didn’t come here for myself.” They’re in the room, too, standing where you’re not looking.
         “They all tell me I’m going to get better,” you say, in a different conversation. You want him to react and he won’t. He doesn’t have it in him. “And it doesn’t feel that way, no matter how many times I try to pretend otherwise I . . .” you twist in the bed, putting what weight you have on your forearm, turning toward him. If there was a wind in here it might dissipate you completely. “I don’t feel it. I don’t see it happening. Sometimes I . . .” you bite your lip, look away. “I don’t see myself leaving here alive.”
         “You’ve known that for a long time,” he says, fiddling with his fingernails. I see now behind him there’s a table filled with greeting cards, a few stuffed animals. It may not have been there before. The details are assaulting me.
         “What does that mean?” you ask him, not as sharply as before. Something in you seems resigned.
         “How many times have you been here?” he asks suddenly, questions within questions.
         “Too many,” you answer carefully. A memory strikes you and you break into a smile again, trying to wring something good out of all of this. His question still hovers in the air, just hiding the thing that’s lurking behind it. “Too often.” You look around, examining the room. “When I was a kid, I used to think that every time I was here . . . it was the same damn room. I used to tell myself that I was here so often that they just reserved a place for me.” You expression weakens, you lean back on the bed with a heavy expulsion of air. “All these places look the same,” you say. “At night, I can convince myself that it’s years ago, that it’s a different time completely.” On your back, you sigh heavily. “I don’t feel right anymore,” and the voice that says that is quavering, it barely sounds like you, all the strength is gone. “I’m just scared all the time now. Like there’s less of me and I’m going to wake up and there’ll be nothing left.” You sigh again, a frustrated and ragged noise. “This is ridiculous,” you say thickly. “I’m getting worked up, all worked up . . .” even with your anger it all sounds muted. I can see the bones in your hands. The machine keeps rhythmic time. It counts down the beat left in your chest. “I never wanted to be that kind of person, all mopey and maudlin, just lying around feeling sorry for themselves.” Your gaze shifts and he’s still there. “I’m going to die,” you tell him, in a near whisper. “You said it, and I think it’s true.”
         “I didn’t mean to upset you,” he says, with just a tiny measure of regret. “That wasn’t what I wanted to do.” He looks down at his feet, his hands folded together. “I don’t want you to die. Nobody does.”
         “No, but it’s going to happen,” you say, covering your face briefly, wiping away invisible sweat. “It is, and there’s nothing . . .” you voice fades, fails. “And you’re right, you are, I’ve known it for a long time, I . . .” you swallow painfully, the effort evident on your face. Your skin is pulled too tight, I can’t bear to look at you like this. He’s watching you, without hesitation. You’re his audience and you have him captured. “I used to . . . I used to imagine myself having kids, sitting around with my husband, when I was old, watching the grandkids run around. I thought about growing old, and what it would be like.” I watch a tear run out of one corner of your eye, unnoticed, sliding down the side of your face, toward the bed, leaving a glistening track in its wake. “But it’s not going to happen. It never will.” You sniffle harshly. “There’s so much I’m going to miss,” you say, “and, ah, I just . . . you were right, dammit. Everything you said was right.”
         “There’s nothing wrong with hope,” he says, placing one arm on the bed. He doesn’t touch you. I can’t imagine him doing it. “Nobody can deny you that.”
         “There’s hope and there’s delusion, and . . .” your breathing is shallow now, barely present, whatever you’re seeing, it’s nothing that we can conceive. I’ve seen it maybe, in the moments before the dark shutters come down. I can’t see it here though, in this inbetween place. All I can feel is the suffocating passage of its wings as it passes by. The man notices it but he doesn’t react. “And it doesn’t matter, in the end.” Your face twitches. “I don’t know. I don’t like not knowing, I’m . . . I’m turning into the person that I hate.” You don’t look at him, but you address him anyway. “Why did you come here?”
         He doesn’t answer. Not out loud.
         You press him, weakly. “We don’t know each other that well, we . . . we had some classes together and we . . . we worked on that one project but I . . .” you laugh, a choppy abuse of sound. This isn’t you. I want to shake the sickness out of you, and take it into myself. But that won’t matter. And some things I can’t change. “I don’t even know where you live,” you say, as if that makes all the difference in the world. Location means nothing, it’s where you think you are that matters the most.
         “Down by the playground, a few houses in,” is all he says. He shrugs. He doesn’t specify which one. It certainly wasn’t mind. Perhaps he structured the answer that ways, by design. To give you something to remind you. “So there, now you know.” He presses his lips together, considers something I can’t regard.
         “Hell, I can die happy now,” you say, with bleak humor.
         “I’d rather you didn’t,” he replies mildly.
         “You didn’t my question yet,” you tell him, with a crooked smile. “That seems to be a habit with you.”
         “Well, it’s not just you,” he says, with quiet humor. He’s such an opaque person, I can’t get a sense of him. Everything he says in covered in swirling misdirection. It might be his real thoughts, it might be just a ploy. He doesn’t want you to know what he’s thinking. “And if you want to know, I really didn’t have a reason why. I heard you were in the hospital and it . . . I just wanted to visit. It seemed like the right thing to do.”
         “Thank you,” you say suddenly, emphatically. With a rigid, trembling motion you reach out and grasp his hand, squeezing it as tight as your weakening grip can.
         “Don’t,” he says, warningly. I almost expect him to yank the hand away, frantic. “It was the right thing. That’s the only reason.” He seems afraid of something. I can’t be sure.
         “But you still came,” you say, looking at him without moving your head. “Out of all of them you were the only one who came.”
         “No, I wasn’t,” he insists. “That’s not true.”
         “It is,” you tell him, stubbornly. I always loved arguing with you. You always turned the small into the epic. And you never backed down, no matter how futile your position. It hurts so much now, to see you so cornered, to realize how dire things are and understand that there’s nothing you can do about it. “I mean, they came but they . . . they weren’t here.” One arm gestures toward the outside, to other places. “They’d stand in the doorway and not come any further. Or they’d sit, right where you are, and not look directly at me. They’d say hello and tell me that they hoped I got better soon and then they’d leave, right after they got here. They couldn’t stay.” You grimace, show your teeth. It’s bearing down now, the final train. He hears it, too but can’t bring himself to face it directly. He’s still letting you touch his hand. “They don’t want to see me like this, they don’t want to see when everything in you fails. It reminds them and they don’t want to be reminded. My friends.” You gasp and wet your lips. “God, I love them all. It’s going to hurt them so much, when I . . .” you can’t finish the thought, it’s too sharp. Coughing a little, you say, “I want them here. But they can’t bear it. I couldn’t do it, if I were them and they were me, wasting away in some hospital room.” You remove your hand, perhaps sensing his discomfort. He takes it back, keeps it as far from you as he can while letting it still remain attached to his body. “You haven’t flinched. Not for a second. You won’t look away.” I watch your face scrunch up, contort into something painful. It must hurt. To have everything stop working. One at a time. Or all at once. Either way. I bled to death once and it took me hours. But it’s not the same, when you know that you’re going to come back. “You hardly know me and you came to watch me die.” Your eyes half close and for a second I think you’ve found yourself in some other place. “Look away,” you say, to a different person, to one who’s not here. “Please. I can’t take it anymore. How do you stand it?”
         “I have dreams, sometimes,” he mutters and maybe I don’t catch it right. The wave fragments of a future life, bearing down on him. He won’t be smothered, but he can’t keep his head above water. “And I think I’ve seen terrible things, when I’m not looking.” I don’t hear him right. He has no clue, I think. What he’s really saying. A smile, improbably, crosses his face. “But I can always look at a friend.”
         “Even when there’s nothing left of her?” you ask him, sadly. You were pretty once. I can’t even say it’s there anymore. I want to die, for what this does to me.
         “Even then,” he tells you, simply. I think he might say something more but then he stops. There are other mouths in him. He’s got a bare wire buried inside that might burn us all, if we trip the connection.
         “Thank you,” you say again, drifting, drowsy. “Thank you for coming.” You try to yawn but don’t have the energy anymore. “God, I’m so tired.”
         “Rest, then,” he says, standing up smoothly. “Don’t let me wear you out. Throw me out, if you have to.”
         But your eyes are already closed. Maybe you say something again about how tired you are. It hardly matters. You’ll have plenty of time, eventually. I want your dreams. I do. I want them to come true, even without you here. But they’re locked inside your head and none of our surgery can evict them and give us something to remember you by. Instead all we have is you, the one that exists as a figment, the kind of person we try to remember. But it’s not you, it’s barely a copy. It’s not the real thing. Everything that was real passed from you when you stopped breathing.
         He stands then and watches you try to sleep. For a minute. Maybe longer. Your face twists in some invisible battle. He turns, looks at the table full of cards. Picking one up, he flips it open, reads what’s written inside. There’s nothing on his face to indicate his thoughts. He puts it down suddenly, balancing it carefully so it doesn’t look like he touched it. He grabs one of the stuffed animals then, holds it in both hands, stares it right in the eyes, as if daring it to do something. Then he places it gently in the cradle your arm makes, in front of your pained face. It doesn’t relax at all. Your hand makes an empty gesture, tries to grab for it but can’t muster up the will. He tucks it there, steps back to see what he’s wrought.
         Then, making a small clucking noise with his tongue he turns smartly on his heel and walks out of the room. I follow him, I’m drawn along. I don’t want to leave you but I can’t stare at you like this any longer, knowing that you still had that much further to fall. Was it a mercy, when it finally came? Did you have anything left to give to this life? Was it even worth it, to hang on, if all you had was misery. I can’t answer that. I don’t dare.
         Outside of your room he stops. He leans against the wall, crosses his arms over his chest. One hand goes to the bridge of his nose, presses his two fingers against it, stands there for what feels like a long time. Inside I hear you cough in your troubled sleep. Not too long. A week or two maybe. Do they send you home, thinking it might be better and then bring you back here, for the last act. I hate these questions. Because they’re not important.
         Eventually he opens his eyes. He looks at me and not at me.
         He says, “There was nothing you could have done.” He’s saying it quietly, calmly.
         He says, “You can’t save everyone, no matter how much you want to.”
         I don’t want to think he’s talking to me. But he might be. That’s not possible.
         And, “That’s fine. It’s okay. I’ll look after them, I can promise you that.” I don’t know what he means. “You’ve done enough.” What?
         With that, he pushes away from the wall, slips his hands into his pockets and stalks away, bringing with him a sort of mist that catches him, that entangles me and sends me away. I try to catch one last glimpse of you, through the doorway, a view of your body, slumbering and ruined, tiny and fading, but I don’t see you at all and I don’t know if that’s because my vision has been taken away or just because there’s nothing more to see. I leave you behind, but I’m not sure where we’ve gone, down separate paths.