How Lucky: A Novel Page 19
A vague, unsettling pocket of air begins to settle in my chest. I know this feeling. All this jostling has dislodged some junk in my lungs, and once I get up, it’s going to keep rattling around in there. I have no idea how it’s going to get out.
This is not a good situation.
I hear rustling from the kitchen. I have a brief moment where I think maybe I made all this up. One of the orderlies tucked me in poorly last night. I’ve just fallen out of bed. Marjani’s about to come in. She’s going to yell so loud when she sees me. She’s going to clean me off. Then she’ll laugh. We’ll eat breakfast. I’ll ask her why she made bacon. She knows I can’t eat bacon. She’ll just say, “It felt like a bacon day!” I will laugh, even though I don’t understand. It’s another beautiful day in Athens.
I shut my eyes. Then WHOMP, my stomach explodes as Jonathan—holding a plate of bacon, apparently—kicks me. Hard. I scream, then roll over to my side, where my ribs make a sound that’s vaguely similar to crunching a bunch of croutons with your fist. It hurts beyond words.
“Wake up, Daniel!” Jonathan yells. “We’re finally getting to know each other.” Air is slowly expelling out of all parts of my body, all of which are slightly obstructed in one way or another, for one reason or another, which means I’m currently a symphony of balloons slowly being deflated. I feel like I’m being propelled, gliding from the air slightly across the floor.
This is definitely the worst pain I’ve ever felt, and that’s saying something. Jonathan bends down on one knee, seriously, still holding that stupid plate of bacon, and leans close to my face. “You must get up, Daniel,” he says. “It’s extremely difficult to have any sort of conversation with you in this condition.”
He finally sets the plate down in the living room and tries to pick me up again. He is not good at it. He jams his left arm into my already broken rib cage and absentmindedly bashes my face with his right elbow. Just about all the air I have left escapes my throat and mouth with a sad wail.
“Shit, what’s the best way do to this?” he says. “This is harder than I had realized. You must need a lot of help around here, Daniel!” He lies flat on the floor and puts his nose up to mine. He has a pasty, flabby face, with stupid round rosy cheeks and that soft chin. He also has the breath of a cadaver. “How do you usually get yourself up, man?”
He stares at me for a good ten seconds. What’s most disturbing about him is how he looks like just like every postgrad dope I see around campus every day. He doesn’t look deranged. He’s not frothing at the mouth. He doesn’t have a swastika tattoo on his eyeball. He’s not scary at all. If anything, he looks a little bewildered to find himself here, even afraid.
“You don’t talk either? Come on.” He stands back up. “Well, let’s try this again,” and he leans over, and I prepare myself to scream again.
And then I hear rapid footsteps from the kitchen, and I see a blur above my head, and then I hear another scream, and then grunts and gasps and growls, and then a crash into the bookshelf just to the left of me. It falls. Down come the books and an old EIU Panthers novelty coffee mug my mom bought so I’d remember home, on top of me and Jonathan and whoever the hell this is, and here we go again, I’m out—
52.
Terry! That’s the other night orderly’s name! I knew it would come to me eventually.
Terry is right above me. And he knows how to pick me up.
“Who the fuck was that guy?” says Terry, who has a tattoo on his neck and a pack of smokes in his shirt pocket, as he straightens up my chair, which was knocked over in the melee, and takes a rag to wipe off my forehead. I look at the rag: yep, it’s blood up there. “I come in for my rounds, and . . . shit. Do you know that guy?” I think Terry has forgotten I can’t speak, and he hasn’t worked here long enough for us to be able to talk with our eyes yet. He looks at me, sighs, grunts, and says, “Let’s get you back in your chair.”
I start to pant, and panic. “It’ll be all right, man, I know he banged you up pretty good,” he says. “I’ll be gentle. But you gotta get up off the floor.”
He is very gentle. He caresses the top of my head, massages his left hand behind my neck and cradles his right hand under my knees. It’s excruciating, but it at least gets my body straightened out: I am at least in the shape that I was in the first place. I feel the croutons crumbling in my chest as he lifts me, and more air is leaving my body at every orifice and crevice, but: I am not on the floor. He puts me in my chair, and I moan as he straps me in. He pushes me into the kitchen.
“So, Daniel, what the hell happened?” he says, a wild look in his eye. Tonight is a lot more than he signed up for. “How’d that guy get in here?” He stands up and begins to pace around, working through what just happened.
“I come in here, a few minutes late, and all the lights are on, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s a little weird, but whatever,’ and then there’s some dude cooking? And then he walks in here, and you’re on the floor, and he’s trying to pick you up? We scuffled around a bit, and then I punched him and then he ran off. Who is that guy? Like, what the fuck?”
I try to make eye contact from my chair.
Call the police.
Call the police.
The phone is right there on the wall.
Call the police.
Call 911.
Call 911.
I try to move my eyes back and forth between him and the phone, but I’m moving slowly because everything hurts so, so much.
We need help.
Call 911.
He’s not getting the hint.
“That’s not your friend, is it? I met that guy once, he wasn’t anything like that. Why is there some dude in here in the middle of the night? And he’s knocked you over? What the hell?” He has stopped pacing and is now looking up at the ceiling in bafflement. I sympathize.
And then I see Jonathan. He must have come in the front door while Terry was putting me back in my chair. He is creeping up behind Terry, holding something in his right hand. I attempt to scream, to warn Terry, but I can make no sound other than a faint wisp of sad, saggy air dribbling out of my nose. I am even more useless than usual.
“Man, we gotta call the cops,” Terry says, catching on a bit too late to help me or himself. I can do nothing as he turns to his right, toward the phone, and he is met with Jonathan hitting him square in the face with an aluminum baseball bat. He falls, banging his head on the kitchen table. Jonathan stands above him, and hits him again, and again. After the third hit, Terry is no longer making any noise. But Jonathan hits him one more time. His face is a lot less slack now. He looks a lot less normal now. He looks . . . at peace.
53.
I floor it. Seeing Jonathan’s trance, the narrowing of his eyes, the blaring of his nostrils, the way his forehead seemed to find all sorts of new veins with every swing, seeing all that while he was beating in the brains of Terry with a baseball bat—it was horrifying, but it was also clarifying: this situation is incredibly real, and I have to get out of here, right now. The last thing Terry may have ever done was put me in my chair, and it’s my responsibility to make sure that act saves my life.
So in between his third and fourth swing, when Jonathan is looking away from me, I jam the accelerator on my chair forward and make a beeline through the kitchen and toward the front door. The mere act of moving makes every one of my nerves burst into flames. But it’s that or the bat.
I run into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, causing a loud screech across the linoleum that breaks Jonathan out of his trance. He turns around. He is not calm. “Where do you think you’re going?” he roars. I have roughly one second for this to work.
But: my chair gets caught on the thick refrigerator cord, and suddenly, I’m not moving. I sit there for a millisecond or five hundred, spinning my wheels, caught on the refrigerator cord as Jonathan sprints around the table toward me.
I push the accelerator with every tiny bit of strength I have.
Come on. Co
me on.
Then another screech. The refrigerator yanks loose from its moorings on the wall and pushes right in between Jonathan and my chair. My wheels get free of the cord, and he’s stuck behind the refrigerator. I hear him yell behind me, not in a murderous rage but in frustration, woe-is-me self-pity. But I am out the door, and down the ramp, and onto Agriculture Drive.
It is still dark. No one is on the road, and no lights are on. I would have thought the ruckus at my place would have woken someone up, but apparently not. It’s just me in my pajamas, with blood all over me, and my chair, wheeling me away from my home, where there is possibly a dead man, a maniac the whole state’s looking for, and a refrigerator sitting in the middle of the kitchen.
I check to make sure the phone hookup on my chair is working. I Skype Travis.
“Mmmmmmphhhhhhhhh,” I say when I get his voice mail.
And then I hear what sounds like my front door opening, and I turn right onto Agriculture, and I go as fast as I can, away, away from all of it. I hear a brief scream, and then it fades, and the farther away I get, the less I can hear. Which only makes me want to go faster.
54.
I’ve never crashed. Pretty proud of that. My chair’s industrial, a tank: Its wheels are wider than my waist. If you see me on the street, you should be more worried for yourself than you are for me. I’ll run your ass over.
I have no idea where to go. Travis could be anywhere, Marjani’s house is way out in Winterville, twenty miles away, and it’s not like any school buildings are open at three on a Monday morning. I could go knock on one of my neighbors’ doors, but none of their porches are wheelchair accessible, and also there is the problem of the actual physical knocking. I’ve gotten out of my house and away from Jonathan, and that’s a victory. That situation was not going to turn out well. But now what am I supposed to do?
I come to the end of Agriculture, on Carlton Street. I stop to think. Stegeman Coliseum is just a couple of blocks to my left. Maybe there’s security in there or something? The police? The closest police station is all the way downtown, which isn’t that far, but particularly perilous when it’s pitch-dark outside. The closest hospital is even farther away from the police station. I dial Travis again. Nothing.
I sit there for another second. Slowing down for the first time since I woke up has allowed me to take stock of the current physical situation. My breaths are short and rattling, the croutons in my chest have broken into even smaller pieces and are floating around loose and dangerous in there, and it’s a good thing it’s dark, because I’m pretty sure what’s left of my pajamas is drenched in blood.
Look at me. Look at me, Mr. Tough Guy, Mr. I Can Do This on My Own, Mr. Don’t Worry, Mom, I Want You to Go Live Your Life without Having to Care for Me, Mr. Travis and I Will Be Fine. Look at me now. It’s the dead of night, Terry might be murdered in my home, I’m by myself in the middle of the street, liable to stop breathing at any moment, which might not matter because I’m pretty certain my rib cage is shattered and my skull is cracked. If I even make it out of this, none of these wounds are ever going to heal.
This is serious. I was hanging by a thread before a madman barged into my house and kicked the shit out of me. You prepare yourself for what might be coming, what is coming. You’re taught to appreciate every moment, from a very young age, because life is short, but it is unusually short for you. You have to drink it in, lap it up, embrace all of it, because it’s going to be taken away from you quicker than it’s going to be taken away from the rest of them. So you have to be ready. You have to accept it.
But I realize now, at the moment of truth, at the last, worst possible second, that I’m not ready. I don’t know if this is it or not. I don’t know how much is left. But now that it is staring me straight in the face, I won’t kid myself: I’m not ready. I want to keep going. I want to live a long time. I want to see if Travis and that girl get together or if he fucks it up. I want to see if Marjani can ever get out of this endless cycle of constant labor, and maybe help her do it somehow. I want to beat Todd in that game someday. I want to see a picture of Kim’s kids, if she ever has them, they’ll be so cute. I want to see who wins the next election (I think). I want to see if Georgia football ever wins a national championship. I want to find out where D. B. Cooper ended up. I want to see if Glenn Close is ever going to get an Oscar.
I want to see my mom. I want to see my mom. I want to keep going. I want to stay here.
I’ve never wanted any of that more than I want it right now. You’re never ready. How could you be?
I am alive. Just barely. But: I am.
The hospital. That’s where I have to go. Everything that’s going to happen has to start there. I can’t do anything else until I take care of myself. You gotta give yourself oxygen before you can give it to anyone else. I have to put my own mask on first.
I turn left on Carlton. If I can make it to Lumpkin, I can turn left on Baxter and make it to the St. Mary’s emergency room. I was just there a few days ago. If I can make it there, we’ll figure out the rest.
It is a plan.
I’m coming up on Stegeman, booking pretty good up the sidewalk, when I hear a horn.
55.
Of course it’s Jonathan. He’s in the Camaro. I am fast, but I am not faster than a Camaro. He slows down to drive alongside me. The morning is chilly and windless. He is smiling. He looks happy. He has a glow to him. He looks like he has, at last, figured out who he is.
“Hey, buddy,” he says. “Need a ride?”
He then speeds up the Camaro and pulls in front of me on the sidewalk. How is there nobody up at this hour? I pull back on my controller to slam on the brakes, and shift into reverse. Jonathan leaps out of the car and begins sprinting toward me. I floor it backward, my cheeks flapping and chattering, my heart pushing little pieces of ribs all around my chest.
And then I plow straight into a street sign, and hard. This thing really needs a backup camera.
My chair flips on its side, and I land on the Carlton Street asphalt. There is a crunch, and when I open my eyes, two of my teeth are lying on the concrete in front of me. A little part of me that had been with me my whole life, now gone, out there in the world, just two more bits of trash on the ground. I look at them. They’re larger than I realized. We had a good run, boys.
Jonathan’s boots approach. Lit from behind by his headlights, he looks like an alien, distorted in shadow and massive, infinite. He has come to take E.T. home.
“You are a persistent fellow, Daniel, I will give you that,” Jonathan says as he bends down again, right there on Carlton Street, to look me in the eye. His face has a halo of blood around it, somebody’s, maybe his, maybe Terry’s, maybe mine, like he tried to wipe a coat of it off but did it in a hurry and mostly just pushed it out of his eyes.
“You know what’s wild, man?” His eyebrows are at the top of his forehead. He looks like he’s going to bite the head off a bat. He hisses directly into my ear. “I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got over here. You know I’ve never punched someone in my life until now? I didn’t know it would feel so . . . good. It feels so good! It makes you understand why people are always hitting people.” He pauses. “I’m sorry it had to be you. I really am. But it turns out you don’t understand any more than the rest of them do. I’m not sure you ever did.”
He rests his elbow on the turned-over wheel in front of my face.
“This chair of yours is rather formidable. I am impressed.”
He takes my left hand in his.
“It is remarkable how much this chair can do, I have to say,” he says, his face contorting into a smirk. “And it’s all controlled by this little lever, yes?”
He places his right hand on my controller and jiggles it around like a video game joystick. He chuckles. “Vroom, vroom.”
He then looks me in the eye.
“And all it takes is these little fingers to move so fast,” he says. “What can’t technology do anymore?”
And then he squeezes, and I scream again. It is my loudest scream yet. Maybe I’ve got a little bit more left in me than I thought.
“Probably a lot harder to drive now, though,” he says.
56.
If I’d been born ten years later, I’d have had a real chance. You would never believe the advancements they’ve made with SMA just over the last ten years alone. The death sentence my mother had to deal with, learning that your smiling, bouncing toddler probably isn’t going to make it to his twenties, parents don’t have to deal with that today. Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge? We talked about the Ice Bucket Challenge. When millions of people all across the world dumped ice water on their heads and posted the video to social media? Even the president did it!
I know memes are silly and a waste of time, but it is worth noting that this silly meme did some real good. The Ice Bucket Challenge was in support of fighting ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. As we’ve established, SMA is, kind of, ALS for kids; they found back in 2012 there’s even a genetic link at a molecular level. Which means a lot of that money and attention ALS got because of the Ice Bucket Challenge back in 2014, $115 million over the span of eight weeks, ended up helping fight SMA too. Since 2014, thusly, there have been dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of SMA, specifically among babies. In the last few years they’ve developed a drug called Spinraza, and it has changed the whole game. You know back when my parents discovered I couldn’t roll over, or hold weight on my legs, and when they took me to the doctor, and the doctor said, “Yeah, he has this disease you’ve never heard of, and he’ll never be able to walk and it’ll kill him when he’s a teenager. Now, please sign here.” Yeah, I told you about that.
Well, now you can give them Spinraza, simply by injecting it right into their cerebrospinal fluid. (Simply.) In some clinical trials, it has actually halted the disease entirely, and a majority of kids have experienced improved motor function within months. There are side effects, many involving respiration issues (it’s always that with us), and nobody knows for sure what the long-term ramifications of the drug are. But it’s tough to come up with a worse long-term ramification than “death by your early twenties.” Kids have hope now. Their parents aren’t told that it’s twenty-one or bust, and that’s only if you catch a break. They get the bare minimum: they get a chance.