Yet another memory.
I’m fifteen. It’s a car filled with rage. You can almost feel it; a hostility that is so powerful it’s maddening. There’s a CD in the player, and the volume is a little too loud, but somehow we still talk over it every once in awhile. The windows are down because it’s summer and the heat is strong enough that you can see the waves of it off of the pavement.
We park. Get out. It’s a very slow, measured thing. We aren’t hurried. We aren’t happy or sad. I’m looking around because it is all new to me. I never trail my father; I always walk right beside him. I don’t know if he trained me that way or if it was something I picked up myself. I’ve learned over the years that many of my behaviors are ones that were conditioned. For instance, I never knew why it was that I always shake hands with new people I meet, regardless of age or anything else. Apparently it was something I was taught. Even if I am a child, I show respect and deserve respect. Things like that still puzzle me.
We’re through the doors where we go to the front desk, and ask which room we should head to. She’s been moved, they say, and we’ll have to go to one of the higher floors. We’re both silent, and I’m just taking in the scenery. It’s that aniseptic smell of a hospital, one that I quite like. The scent is a clean one, and it covers that other smell. Or maybe it’s an aura. Depression and death. Maybe I’m imagining it.
Finally we get to our floor. There’s a long winding hallway, then the room we are standing in front of, which is nearly at the center of it. The sign above reads ‘ICU’. We wait awhile, I don’t remember why. Maybe it’s because over the speaker someone says ‘Code Blue’.
“Means someone is about to die,” my father says to me.
“Do they have a code word for when someone has actually died?”
He nodds. We’re cleaning our hands with some kind of foaming hand sanitizer, waiting to be let through the doors. The man who came to greet us lets us inside, through the strange glass doors, and we walk in, none too quickly. It’s almost as if we don’t want to see. I know I don’t.
There’s a angry way about him, and it seems to have intensified from the walk. My heart is, for lack of any more suitable a description, pounding. I’m fear and anger and confusion, and it’s making a coldness creep over my face and prickle at my temples. I always get that feeling when I am dreading something. It becomes so powerful it is physical. Funny thing is, I get the same sensation when I have to walk up to a cash register to buy something.
There are rooms all around, with a desk at the center. To the left there is a room, dark, barely lit. I can see the outline of tubes, like some kind of monsterous tumor of umbilical cords, all leading to a man’s mouth. I frown a little, wondering what will be in the room I am going to. For some reason there is no pang of pity, no feelings of being upset or sad. I am more nervous about being in a stange place than anything else. I’m sticking much closer to my dad than is necessary.
It was the first time I was completely emotionless. I was so confused by it. I couldn’t understand. And in these passing years it has never faded, only grown more powerful, until it left me feeling like something only partially human. But the burning of fury was all too alive in me. It was like the sun of my universe, the one thing that kept me going, the one tool I was left to defend myself with.
She’s in a tall white bed. Her face is marred by bruises and cuts, and covered in a sheen of perspiration. She looks barely alive. And then it begins.
It’s like a dam exploding…without the sound. His voice is always mellow when his is angry, to the point that as a child I would cringe when he took up those tones. It was worse than yelling, it was worse than being punished. It was a sound that always made me want to crawl into a corner and die because it was so frightening. It makes people scared of him. I’ve seen men just back away from him when he goes into that voice, like they know something very terrible is about to happen. It’s like god coming down to scorn you personally, voice almost a whisper yet nothing but vitriol. I think for a time as a child I saw him as something akin to a god. Even now, I still find myself hesitating to stand up to him. And to this day, I am the only person I know that will.
This time I am not the one that has to bear that voice. I feel something reminiscent of glee. And at the time I am not ashamed of it. I am not the one who did wrong. I am so angry that I would give anything to have her feel as terrible as I felt, anything to have some kind of revenge. And I feel justified in my rage, because my dad mirrors it.
I’m almost certain that is what most of the visit consisted of: a threat. A very evil, very horrible threat. Do this or be left behind, he says. Somehow the last few days have shifted my feeling so much that the thought of never seeing her again, or even her death does not even slightly pain me. In fact, many of nights I wished for it, if only to soothe my own wounds. I’ve always been the most selfish of people.
She cries, if I recall. She cannot speak, so the tears are silent ones. I’m standing in the corner. I’m sure I probably joined in at one point, but much of it has been swiped from my memory. I only remember the window, looking down at the cleared patch of orange-red dirt where they were prepping for yet another towering building for the hospital. I watch the Caterpillars crawl over the mounds of freshly-tilled earth, not even sure why I came. To see? To make sure it was real?
But it feels so unreal, standing there at that window looking down. I must not be real. This existence is not a real one. I am not loved and I am not cared for. My father will fade into insanity and my mother will die in that bed. I am doomed. I will never finish school and I will never have a life, because I can’t do it.
For the longest time I could not cry. It must have taken a year for the ability to return. At that window I am nothing but a reflection glaring back. Something monsterous and disgusting, something that wishes death on anything and everything. I know that something is terribly wrong with me then. I know that I have crossed some barrier I wasn’t meant to. But I leaped, I ran. I wanted it. I never stopped to contemplate that I would never be the same and that I ruined what little chance I had at a normal life with normal feelings and normal relationships with others.
I want to be this thing, in that moment I wanted it as much as I wanted revenge. I reveled in not hurting for once, in feeling nothing. It was like a beautiful gift, even if I barely understood it.
I left feeling almost giddy. Was it to be a life free of pain? I was too stupid to realize I had only traded one evil for something much, much worse. The temporary relief was in fact beautiful, it’s what came afterward that was so ugly.
