They sat me up on the stretcher. I couldn’t do it on my own. I eyed the machine, feeling like a prey animal sizing up a sleeping predator. It wasn’t too far from the truth. Soon the machine would wake, and they would feed me to it head first.
There were two technicians present, along with an orderly and a nurse. I couldn’t recall the nurse’s name, even though it had been on the whiteboard of my hospital room. Of the four of them, none were as imposing (nor quite as big) as she was, yet she allowed the men to do the heavy lifting.
Now that I was upright, she raised my left hand and put two pills into it. She gave me a plastic cup of water to chase them. “Ativan,” she said. “For your anxiety.”
I swallowed the pills. Then my left arm flopped back to my side, tired and sore. It was half dead, along with my shoulder. The only parts of it I could feel burned with a constant, dull agony. The Ativan wouldn’t help with that. Nor would it help much with the anxiety, I couldn’t help but think.
The machine was easily ten feet tall and just as wide, but the tube at its center couldn’t have been more than twenty-four inches in diameter. It was deep enough to accommodate a human body, though. I’m going in there, I thought. God, help me not to panic. Help me not to make a jackass of myself.
The nurse watched as the men transferred me onto the bright white gurney that would slide me into the mouth of the machine. She leaned over me. “This should take half an hour,” she said. “But remember, if you move, they’ll have to stop the test and restart.”
Then she left, and the others got to work in earnest.
They eased me flat on my back. They asked if I wanted headphones. They said they could play my favorite radio station. I could listen to music, count the passage of time by the number of songs I heard. “Yeah,” I said. “That’d be good. Thanks.”
They raised my head high enough to wrap it in some kind of hard plastic open-faced helmet. One of the technicians looked at the orderly, considering, and shook his head. The orderly laughed. “Never mind,” he said to me. “Your head’s too big for headphones, pal. Sorry.”
I told him it was okay, even as they pressed my legs and feet together. They crossed my hands over my heart like a dead man. I exerted pressure from my right hand over the left, making sure it wouldn’t slip. What’s wrong with me? I wondered. Did I have a stroke?
It was possible. My father had died from a stroke. It was in the family.
A day ago I had been fine. I had been sitting on the floor of my bedroom, back against the bed, reliving old memories before calling it a night. I had my senior yearbook open in front of me. It had been the first time I had looked in it for—how long? Twenty years? More? Had I bought the yearbook and never looked at it at all?
I was scanning the black and white pictures of the juniors from that year, ignoring the color photographs of those friends who had been in the twelfth grade with me. I sought one in particular. I didn’t know why. It seemed an impulse, totally random. I hardly ever thought about her anymore.
It didn’t take me long to find her, her sweet face haloed by a detonation of late ‘80s blonde hair. The name caption read “Gloria Watson,” and I could have laughed at that. The girl I had known went by “Lori.” I’d never known that was short for “Gloria.”
But it was definitely her, with her full lips and her Motley Crue tee shirt, her face suggesting the barest minimum of makeup, meticulously applied. Lori, with the half-smile that seemed to say she was in on a secret joke, and the searching blue eyes that promised a bit of mischief but never malice. She’d always been nice to me.
I ran my finger over her picture, remembering how kind she’d always been, how funny, how popular—how unattainable. Did she even know how I felt about her? I’d never asked her out. I’d wanted to, but I never did.
When I pulled my finger back, just as I was about to shut the yearbook and crawl into bed, those searching eyes in the picture moved. They found me. They blinked —and then the pain hit.
It started at the shoulder. Even as my brain struggled to process what I had just seen, I felt the rupturing, shearing explosion of agony spread like napalm straight down my arm and then through the entire left side of my body. I cried out. My left leg shot out in front of me, missing the yearbook but still twitching over the carpet like a cut power cable.
I gripped my shoulder in my right hand, torn between wondering what had just happened to me and the need to deny what I had seen in the yearbook picture. I was still looking at it—at her. In life, Lori’s eyes were blue. In the picture, they were gray. And they were still alive, still moving in their sockets. Agony pulsed in time with the beating of my heart.
The face in the picture opened its lips and spoke, as though from far away:
“I’m dead, Benny.”
No one called me Benny anymore, but Lori had. In 1988, everyone had.
I struggled to my knees. I let go of my shoulder and reached for the yearbook, flipping it shut but leaving it on the floor. I screamed without making words.
My phone was on the nightstand. The clock showed 11 P.M. My little brother would still be awake. I needed a ride to the emergency room—or an ambulance. I tried to stand but my left leg wouldn’t let me. And Lori wasn’t done. Her voice came from inside my head, fainter than ever but still inescapable:
“I’m taking you with me, Benny.”
I screamed again, lurching across the floor, using only my right hand and leg. This time, I put words into it. I shouted, “What for?” loudly enough for my neighbors to hear. And then, gathering up my phone, collapsing with my back against the wall, “What did I ever do to you?”
As if this were real, and I was really hearing her. As if she were really in the apartment with me. It was impossible, I knew, and yet I waited for her to respond. Before long, while I was thumbing through my contacts in search of my brother, she did:
“You … hurt me.”
My brother picked up on the third ring.
The clock showed 11 p.m., too, in the hospital basement as the gurney slid toward the opening of the machine. Exactly that time, right on the hour. Easy to remember.
The machine began to make swishing noises, electric and wheezing, as I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see myself go in, nor to see the roof of the monster’s mouth. But nothing could block out the noise, which was akin to an old laundry washer trying to run at full spin and not quite making it.
The gurney moved, and I moved with it, into the tunnel of the MRI.
I can do this, I said to myself. I’ve done it before. And I suddenly realized that was true. I’d been put through it right after being admitted to the emergency room at Sentara Hospital, right before the ambulance ride to Inova Fairfax.
No one had told me why they wanted a second test—or, if they had, I didn’t remember it.
An hour later, I was back on the eighth floor, lying on my surprisingly relaxing adjustable bed and accepting more pills from my nurse. “Oxycodone,” she said, “for your discomfort.”
The television was on in the background. Thursday night football. I hardly noticed.
Discomfort. Yeah, that was the word. My “discomfort” felt a lot like my arm was hanging out of its socket, a nasty conglomeration of muscle spasms, sleep needles, and dead weight that spelled out the word “broken” in my mind’s eye. But it wasn’t a broken bone. It was broken life.
“I’m seeing things,” I told the nurse. “And I’m—I’m not sure, but I think I’m forgetting things.”
She regarded me with upturned, skeptical eyes. “Let the doctor know, next time he sees you.”
Next time? Had I seen the doctor already? But the oxycodone was swift in beginning its work. I’d never had painkillers like this before, and I found my hold on the waking world fast becoming unsustainable. The last thing I recall before sleep closed in on me and claimed me completely was the sound of the nurse switching off the television.
The dream was almost like waking. In it, I could walk—was walking, in fact, into the lecture hall that doubled as the stage when I was part of the 11th Hour Players at Mayfield Senior High School. But I stopped in the open doorway. I touched the pinky finger of my left hand to the thumb, relieved to find I could do so easily. Weird, I thought, somehow knowing this should be very difficult for me and yet not wholly realizing I was dreaming.
I could hear them from the other end of the hall—voices I hadn’t heard in decades. I looked up, and there they were: Brandon and Lexi, who had the leads in the play we’d be putting on in a few weeks; “Eddie Metal,” working on props; “Sparks” twiddling the stage lights, Cherie Lewis, Meri Lowell … most of whom would be reported missing—or found dead—in the first weeks of June, mere days after the carnival accidents that would destroy so many lives.
You should warn them, I said to myself, approaching them, still not making the connection that this wasn’t happening, that I was reliving an old memory in a dream. You can save their lives, be a hero.
But I was distracted, because Lori was there, too, chatting away with Cherie and Meri, waiting for the rest of the troupe to arrive. Classes must have just ended, and it was time for afternoon rehearsals. “Hey, everyone,” I called out to the group, but I only had eyes for Lori when they answered—a chorus of “Ben-ny,” that was rather drawn out, just like the greeting Norm always got on Cheers.
Lori waved, then got right back into the conversation she was having with her girlfriends. Her lack of enthusiasm stung, but only for a moment—because then the dream fast-forwarded, and I was standing right in front of her, reading my lines to her. My character was quoting Longfellow, and she was looking up at me, as though hopelessly in love with me …
“Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”
Her right hand was on my left arm, stroking it as though consoling me. She had never touched me before. We had never really spoken together before—if line-reading even counted as talking—and I wanted to stretch out this moment, live in it forever.
She didn’t die in the carnival accidents, I remembered. She didn’t go missing, either. She made it through, just like you did. She would have graduated the year after you left …
We finished our lines, made way for the other players. Mrs. Cahill, our drama teacher and director, called after us, and as one we turned to her. She was smiling.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d have guessed you two were together,” she said. “Good job.”
And Lori beamed—at her, though, not at me. I said her name, drawing her attention.
That, evidently, was against the rules, because I’d never have done that in real life. Only in a dream would I have dared it.
I woke up.
They transferred me from the bed to a stretcher again. I was hardly awake, my brains good and scrambled with the oxycodone. The nurse was there, and the orderly—and the doctor. I remembered him, now. Sort of.
He was speaking in a low voice, clearly frustrated. “None of this makes any sense. There’s no outer trauma, no bruising, no superficial damage at all. It’s all on the inside—and it’s like a car accident in there. We have to do it again. With contrast, this time.”
I opened my mouth but no words came out. I tried to lift my left arm. It moved a little. It was still mostly dead. It tingled where Lori’s fingers had touched it in the dream.
By the time we were back in the hospital basement, I could sit up again with help. I could take the Ativan, even help out when one of the techs and the orderly got me onto the slide gurney. And I could ask, “How many times? What’s going on?”
My voice was weak, but I knew they could hear me. Their eyes said so. Yet I got no answer. They simply fed me, head-first, back into the machine.
Being in the mouth of the monster was like living in an alien echo chamber. The swishing laundry machine noises—generated by the charging of coiled wires, thus creating a superconducting magnet—was maddening enough, and never-ending. But once it was up and running, the real sound effects started.
Something like a car horn, held down for long seconds, right against my eardrums …
Scraping, metal against metal …
Banging, hammers on plywood …
The voice of the tech broke through, as though through a cheap walkie-talkie: “You okay, Ben? Doing great so far. Five minutes in. Stay still, all right?”
I forced my hands to stay still. I made my neck rigid. I didn’t want the test to restart.
The tech again. “Answer me, Ben. You okay?”
And I answered, “Yeah, I’m good. Never better.”
Another car horn—this one higher, staccato, probably some small European piece of crap with an inferiority complex …
Laser beams, now. Freakin’ laser beams …
Swish, swish, swish …
Eventually, in spite of it all and with my eyes perpetually clamped shut, my mind began to wander off. I slipped half-in and half-out of sleep, periodically shaken back to the present by a fresh blast of piercing sound: trumpets blaring, typewriters clacking, stock sound effects from any number of science fiction movies, long fingernails on chalkboards …
And the tech guy: “Holdin’ up, Ben? How you doing, Ben? Ten minutes in. Working it like a champ …”
Until it wasn’t him, anymore. Until I heard her again, her voice quieter than his had been, nearly drowned under the electronic thunderstorm that was the inside of the monster’s mouth:
“Can you hear me, Benny?”
I almost nodded reflexively. I caught myself only just in time. No movement, I reminded myself. Don’t move—not even a fraction of an inch.
“I can hear you, Lori. I saw you in my dreams tonight.”
“Why didn’t you do it, Benny?”
“Lori, do what? What didn’t I do? I don’t know—”
“I waited for you, Benny.”
You should have said something, then, I thought. How was I supposed to know? What the hell did you want from me?
I didn’t answer her.
“I waited for you a long, long time.”
I waited, too. I waited for the session, this nightmare, to end. I was disoriented, confused, in pain, stoned out of my mind—a mind which had turned against me, apparently, and was now trying to destroy me from the inside-out.
Breathing noises, huffing, a bull getting ready to charge …
“I won’t be here long, Benny. I have to go soon. Come with me, Benny. Come with me …”
The breathing stopped.
Swish, swish, swish …
A car horn blaring. Laser beams, hammers …
“All you have to do is call. Before I’m gone. I’m here, Benny. Waiting behind the curtain, one last time. Call me.”
The swishing stopped. The monster went silent. And the gurney slid me back to the world.
“Wow, dude,” the tech said, helping me sit up again. “Glad you made it.”
“How long was that one?” I asked.
“Two and a half hours,” he said. “And you were saying some pretty fucked up shit in there. But you didn’t move a muscle, and we got some really good images this time.”
The Mayfield carnival accidents of 1988 shut down school for the remainder of that year. We never did put on our last play. On a Friday night, right around 10 P.M., a Ferris wheel had literally come unhinged from its moorings and rolled straight into the octopus ride. There had been fires, too. At first, the word “sabotage” had only been a whisper, muttered in close quarters at the diner and the barber shop. But then the murders had followed, and the disappearances. By then, everyone knew there had been no “accidents” that weekend—but no one was ever caught or punished for the crimes. And the missing stayed missing.
Still, a day before my official graduation was to have taken place, one week before everyone was to have been let loose for the summer, yearbooks arrived. And everyone wanted one. It was like a last unsullied glimpse of our town before some lunatic’s hatred and madness had scarred it forever.
And it was the last time I saw Lori Watson, too. She’d volunteered at the sales counter they’d set up in the bus tunnel, which doubled as our smoking court. She was having a cigarette when my turn came up in line, but nobody bothered her about it. Her eyes were bloodshot, raw from a fresh cry. I wanted to come around the table and hug her. I probably should have.
I wish I had. Instead, I’d blocked the whole thing from my memory, and was only seeing it now from behind the curtain of sleep. I’d wake up from the vision back in the hospital. This time, I would play it out. I would let the event unfold as it really had, not how I wanted it to unfold now, with the questionable wisdom of age.
I gave her my money. She gave me the yearbook. And then I did something I never would have expected myself to do.
I slid it back to her, open to the inside cover, and offered her my pen.
Is this real? I wondered in the dream. Did I really, really do this?
She smiled at me. She turned her back on me to sign it. She took very little time to do so, I could not help but notice. She’d taken much longer with Cherie’s yearbook, who had been one step ahead of me in line.
She gave it back to me, closed. I thanked her in a perfunctory way. She hadn’t taken enough time to write me so much as a note in there. She hadn’t given me her yearbook to sign. To her, I was nobody—or, worse, everybody. Just another guy. I wasn’t worth the time.
I took the yearbook home and shelved it. And I forget about it. I made myself forget.
God help me—I really, really did.
“Spinal cord infarction,” the doctor told me three days later, the morning of my release from Inova Fairfax Hospital. “We’ll want to schedule a lumbar puncture and a cervical biopsy for the second week after you’re home. In the meantime, it’ll be in-home physical therapy, occupational therapy—and a walker for a little while. Probably a cane after that. The cane might be permanent.”
I nodded. I was already used to the hospital walker. I was used to the MRIs as well. We’d done eleven of those by now. My brother joked that if they did one more, I’d stick to my own refrigerator.
My memory problems disappeared after that last session when I’d imagined Lori speaking to me through the imaging effects. My doctor’s name was Joseph Benson and my nurse was Janice Clegg. I’d been screened and imaged twice at Sentara, along with getting a couple X-rays. They’d sent me here because the Woodbridge hospital hadn’t had any neurosurgeons on staff.
My case was interesting, they said.
After Doctor Benson left, I tried touching the pinky of my left hand to my thumb, and found it now took minimal effort. Still a long way from normal, I thought, frowning. This is going to take some work.
“Don’t look so damned glum,” my brother said, gathering up the release paperwork and slinging the bag of my things over his shoulder. “You ready to blow this joint or not?”
I smiled at him. “You bet,” I said. Then it occurred to me. “Hey, you ever find out if Lori Watson still lives in Mayfield like I asked you to?”
Now it was his face that went dark, and even a little troubled. “Well, yeah,” he said. “It wasn’t hard. She’s still a Watson—not a hyphenated Watson, either. Which means she never got married, or she got divorced and took her name back.”
I waited for more.
“That doesn’t mean she was talking to you through the MRI and in your dreams, Ben.”
Still, I waited.
My little brother sighed, then finally gave it up. “She’s dead, Ben.”
“Since when?”
“Look, man, why does it matter? You haven’t seen her in almost thirty years. Right now, you need to focus on—”
“Just answer the fucking question!”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “Since the day you were admitted,” he said. “Cancer. She was in a hospital full time. She passed in her sleep, somewhere between ten-thirty and midnight. Services were yesterday.”
I let go of the walker, allowed myself to slump back to sitting on the bed. I ran my right hand over my left arm. There were still traces of her there, but they were fading fast.
Call me, she’d said. But I couldn’t call her now. I could not even have called her the night she’d spoken to me through the MRI. She’d already been gone by then.
What did you mean, Lori?
But I knew now. All I had to do was go home to confirm it. I’d even left the yearbook out on my open bedroom floor.
It was a long drive, made worse by traffic. I was okay with that. Once I was safe within my own four walls, little brother stayed much longer than he had to. I was okay with that as well.
Then, all too soon as it seemed, I was alone. I thumped on my walker back into my bedroom. Found the yearbook lying face down on the floor, just as I’d left it. I sat down, turned it upright.
I opened it to the inside front cover, found Lori’s signature there, and the words “Call me,” underneath.
Between the name and those words, she’d written just one other thing:
Her phone number.
MD
Submitted October 30, 2017 at 09:04PM by MarcusDamanda http://ift.tt/2gPaCAu nosleep
