Read by Adam Diggle
The last movie I saw, prior to an air conditioner falling on my head, was Good Will Hunting. It’s the first thing I think about as I wake from my coma. How ‘bout them apples?
I’m in a familiar place, my childhood bedroom. There are three machines to my left: a ventilator, a heart monitor and a drip-feed machine. I lift a hand and study my wispy skin, bulging veins and wimpy forearms. Make a fist, hurts. Try to snap, silence. I yell but only a whisper escapes and I collapse back into sleep. When I wake again mom is beside me, singing “Unbreak My Heart,” by Toni Braxton, a top ten hit in 1997. She sees me stir, stops, gasps for dad to come look and starts to cry. Dad comes in and gives mom a hug, pats my head, kisses me hard on the lips and says, “You have a good nap?”
Dad now combs his hair front to back instead of left to right. He moves deliberately, with concentration. Mom is using every button available to her and accessorizes herself with ornamental tigers and butterflies assembled from rhinestones and set in gold-flavoured metal.
When I wake again mom and dad are still just as happy as before. They tell me what year it is, who the president is.
“Still?”
“No,” dad answers, “his son.”
Mom brings soup, dad spoons it in. He reads from a pamphlet and takes me through what I should expect in the next couple of months. Apparently, I’ll have trouble walking because I haven’t used anything except for my lungs and I may be suicidal after trying and failing to do simple things that I used to do, like writing my name or shaving.
They ask me who they are, to name them, to recall my childhood cat’s name, the year I went to state in tennis. I can tell from their reaction I’m getting the answers correct but I’m not sure myself. It’s reflex, a good sign.
Word spreads to friends, family, neighbours and a woman from the local newspaper. They all ask, “How do you feel?” I tell them, “Rested.” It’s my only answer. I can’t describe for them the thawed movements and latent emotions. I’m forgiven for not being myself, whoever that used to be. Everything I’ve ever done or said to people is forgiven. I’m appreciated as life is after it’s almost taken, as life is by people who’ve done everything to preserve it, protect it, will it back from the brink.
After three weeks walking the stairs and hallways inside the house, a house my parents would’ve sold five years ago if it hadn’t been for my accident, I venture outside. I take a walk with my dad and ask him how they afforded to care for me for so long.
“I just kept working,” he says as if it’s no big deal.
“But you hated your job.”
“Every day I got to go to work and keep you alive for another day.”
I’m not sure how to repay or even accept a gift like that. So I don’t, I resent it instead.
I’m a time traveler whose DeLorean didn’t make it very far into the future. The cars look updated but not completely new. Houses now stand on once empty lots. And buildings stand where the houses once sat. But it’s all very manageable. Small towns don’t change much in a decade. I tell him I’m angry for being thirty-nine and he says he thought I would be. I ask him if he’s angry at anything.
“I was angry right until you woke up. It’s like when you would stay out past curfew. I’d be angry for letting it happen, letting you get away with it, letting you hurt yourself. But I’d be flooded with relief when you walked through the door intact. Drunk, but intact.”
I was drunk when the air conditioner hit me too, a widely assumed fact that goes unmentioned now. In fact, it’s been wilfully ignored to make the miracle more pure. We were having a party, Anna and I, to welcome others to our co-owned apartment. I wasn’t positive I wanted to live with her but it seemed easier to act out the next expected step than disrupt anticipations. Someone leaned against the air conditioner and I was downstairs putting trash in the recycling bin. I didn’t fasten it into the window properly because I was rushed. A five-minute job that cost me eight years. It compressed three of my vertebrae, shrinking my height by an inch and a centimetre.
Anna is flying in to see me today. She’s been living in our place since the accident, waiting there in her own coma, slowing life to a sequence of repetitious movements.
We recognize each other, hesitate, then tentatively approach, like dogs sniffing one another before deciding whether or not to fight. I’ve tried to sit out in the sun and eat fruit so I don’t look sickly. She gives me a weak hug, afraid she’ll crack something. She’s grown her hair out, changed its colour and gained weight. We look like Laurel and Hardy now. A fear of mine, before we moved in together, was what she’d be like, look like, in a few years. She had a problem with motivation and she’s done nothing besides exist since then. I also worried she’d gain weight after a child and here she is, fat and childless.
There are people I could go eight years without seeing and not have a problem picking up right where we left off. Of course, that assumes you talk to them every now and again, hear things about them, see a picture of them, get a Christmas card from them. A coma is eight years of nothing, followed by an awkward conversation that usually begins, “Sooooo, this is awkward?” It’s quickly retracted and stomped upon. Then I listen to everything they’ve been up to. All try to downplay it, as though nothing has happened that’s really worth recapping. I have nothing to contribute besides blank stares and expired questions.
“You still have the cat,” I ask Anna, briefly forgetting his name, “Whopper?”
“No, she died.”
“When?”
“Last week.”
“Oh,” I say, taken aback by the recentness and Anna’s casualness.
Dad drives us back from the airport in a Chevy Aztec, the most futuristic six-year old car I’ve ever ridden in. Anna and dad have become good friends over the years and she spends half her time talking loudly to him from the back seat. I interject now and again with silly questions, their answers give too much background. Mostly I stare out the back window and make a fist in frustration. In the coma I wasn’t in control of my body but my mind must’ve been free. Now my body is weak but free and my head is in the past, reliving a confused mixture of infancy, adolescence and old age. I’m expected to go back with Anna to Chicago. I should’ve faked memory loss when mom and dad were first asking me questions. A coma patient with amnesia, that’s where you want to be.
We pull up to the house and there are fifty cars parked on the street. I look over and Anna is smiling, hopeful of its infectiousness.
“Don’t sweat it Bons,” dad says. Bons is his nickname for me. “It’s more for us than you. We just wanted to get all the story telling and gossip and rumours out of the way. Small town and all. No one expects you to act a certain way. Just say hi and then sneak off with Anna if you want.”
They don’t shout “surprise” when I walk in, afraid my lightly used heart couldn’t take the shock. It gets quiet then slowly cranks back up to lame. They welcome me as if welcoming home a baby who had complications in the hospital. The parents are congratulated, not me. Eyes examine me for signs of permanent damage. I make myself a drink and get drunk in three gulps. After one lap around the party I find Anna and take her upstairs. The sexiness has left her. She undresses me, kisses me, puts me into bed and crawls in beside me with her clothes on. I manage, with little help from her, to get her pants down to her knees and shirt unbuttoned and pulled to the sides. I lift the bra over her breasts and leave it there. I’ve undressed her exactly three quarters of the way. I’m surprised I’m hard. I kiss her, starting at the mouth, ending at her inner thigh. I come back up, look into her frightened expression.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
Instead of telling me she says, “I’m afraid someone’s going to walk in.”
*
In the morning I talk to mom and dad about my options. Is there any insurance money or extra cash lying around? They laugh. Is there anyone I could stay with and learn a new trade from? Not really. My previous career, as a public relations account executive isn’t one I’d want to resume. Graduate school is a possibility full of loans I’d be paying off till my fifties. Anna chimes in with her two cents every time we speak of a new direction for my life. One cent for moving back to Chicago, the other for living with her. It’s not what she wants any more, it’s what she expects, what she’s planned.
I let Anna go back to Chicago by herself. I tell her I need some time before I jump back into life. I want to get reacquainted with the world. For me that means crashing on a friend’s couch in Kansas City, another in Reno, a futon in Tampa and a spare bed in Pittsburgh until I’ve seen enough or my friends have seen enough of me. I work a variety of jobs: political campaign envelope stuffer, fancy restaurant parking valet, pool cleaner and assembly-line quality-control checker, inspector number thirty-five, in the same order of towns I lived in. I make enough to survive on and send home some for dad’s drained retirement fund. After Pittsburgh I drive around the country, visiting places I’ve never wanted to go, drinking at bars at night, meeting people who don’t know anything about me, sleeping in my car. After the money runs out I call Anna and tell her I’m ready to move to Chicago. She seems as satisfied as a kid who saved up her money for a certain thing, maybe a bike, only to have outgrown its allure by the time she had enough to actually buy one. But she gets it anyway, just to keep everyone proud of her fortitude.
I move back and it’s as if I never left, minus the gap in the photo album. And much like my childhood room, the place hasn’t changed. I summon my last thoughts before the coma: I wanted to get a glimpse of our future together. Now here I am enshrined inside of it. The only problem is it came too fast and I’m having a sudden realization, one I wouldn’t have made if this crept up slowly over eight years: She’s made her apartment, her life, a museum to me, to us, for us. But, just as before, it was devoid of a contribution from me. These are her memories of us.
If I were on the outside of me I’d think a coma would make me happy just to be alive but I’m ashamed of it, this gift of life I constantly have to write a thank-you note to. But I settle in Chicago. And I live the life I promised and wait for the next awakening.
(c) Will Adam, 2015
Will Adam (left)has lived in London for the past four years. He's been published in small literary journals before but this is the first time his work has been read by an actor, hopefully by an actor who has acted like a writer reading a story before.
Adam Diggle (left) graduated from the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts in 2009. Since then he has mainly worked in theatre and voice-over. Credits include Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Launcelot in The Merchant of Venice, Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men and Happy Loman in Death of a Salesman.
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