Dream of the Serpent

by Alan Ryker

  I let go of the ground and rammed my pincer into its enormous bulk, slipping between scales and then ribs. A shriek of rage froze me, carried not by the dead air which couldn’t transmit sound more than a few feet, but through the creature’s flesh. I had not yet seen its head, only the immense body it had encircled its home with, but I could sense its head approaching. It dropped me in a spasm, and I stood and ran, feeling the creature behind me near as I jumped and dodged and stabbed its coils.

  I didn’t know what I was running toward, but I knew what I ran from, and I ran a long time. Away from the Burnout, the creature’s coils were fewer, but it still pursued me.

  Sprinting through buildings in an attempt to escape, I didn’t realize where I’d arrived until I smashed through those double doors and froze.

  The fryer drew me to it. I forgot the hunter. I didn’t want or not want to stare down into the fryer. I simply knew it was what I was about to do.

  Every footstep I took hit the world like a drop of water into a calm pool. In the rippling of the ashy ground I saw other realities shimmer and spread and diminish, not yet able to challenge the primacy of that burnt reality.

  I gripped the sides of the fryer and leaned down into it. It was nothing more than a cold steel cylinder wrapped in heating elements. Nothing evil. No malevolent consciousness behind it. No master plan to destroy me, to destroy the world. The tiniest mistake had done this. The proverbial flap of butterfly wings.

  My thoughts about the fragile nature of reality made the already flexible world around me bend and twist. I looked up, and the piles of ash that had been the kitchen staff now lived. The lights were on. The ash that coated everything had been sucked back into the living world, full again with potential energy.

  The moment hung heavy with that potential. It throbbed, and—as my mind probed at it—stretched.

  I reached for the paint scraper where it hung on the wall, and the phone in my pocket rang.

  I didn’t answer it.

  Instead, I flipped the power switch on the fryer to off. The elements went cold.

  That’s when the elastic nature of time revealed itself to me in full. I felt the pull as I marched forward, second by second, scraping out a safe fryer, a fryer that wouldn’t erupt into flames. That single, tiny movement changed everything. I marched forward in time. I went to the party. I palled around with Mr. Barrington, schmoozed with his friends, turned down all the joking job offers.

  Madison and I were married, and the Barringtons gifted us a house. We’d have no mortgage hanging over us. I went into work every day and hustled in the world of corporate finance and came out ahead. It was hard. Long hours. High stress. But it was also easy, because I loved it.

  Madison and I had children, little quadroons with the most exotic beauty, her big eyes and fine bones and my curls and big lips. In public people stopped, awestruck by their beauty.

  Like everyone, I felt it all slipping. It was too good to last. Each success made the world more likely to collapse on us, a giant rock trap propped feebly over tempting bait. Each step forward became more of a struggle.

  Then, as time slowed to a crawl and finally stopped, I realized this wasn’t the same fear everyone else faced. This wasn’t an irrational waiting for the other shoe to drop. This wasn’t a metaphorical time catching up with me. It literally had. Madison turned the page of a library book slower and slower, until if she was moving any longer I couldn’t perceive it. The kids played a video game, both holding their controllers high and to the side as if yanking them about had an effect on the screen. The images on the television stuttered, froze. The peppy little song deepened, turned into an industrial dirge, the waveforms spreading farther and farther until they flatlined.

  The pull of time had matched my maximum efforts. Like running with a giant exercise band attached to a wall and my waist, I’d gone as far as I could. I tried to snap the band. I scrabbled at the ground, but I’d lost my pincer, had only two useless flesh hands, and I felt the world begin to slide around me. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the pillar of flame erupting from the fryer. There was a gap in the flame. A hollow. My place.

  3

  Waking up was a slow thing. I would open my eyes to a blurry reality, then shut them and once again struggle against the inevitable past.

  It took days before I resided permanently again in the real world, the world of pain. I didn’t want it.

  My parents sat watching a television high up on the wall. I tried to talk to them, but nothing came out. It felt like running in a dream, and I thought that perhaps it was just another dream, except that this dream hurt. And this dream didn’t fade. My hands felt as if they were strapped to fifty pound dumbbells, but I lifted my left and dropped it on the bed rail.

  “Carl, he’s awake again.”

  They both came to my bedside and looked down at me. The scene was too blurry to be a dream. My dreams had been so clear. This was real. I moved my mouth, but still couldn’t speak.

  “Cody,” my dad said, “they’ve got tubes in your neck, below your vocal chords. Don’t try to talk.” He patted my hand as he said these horrible things.

  “Do you think he’s back for real this time?” my mother asked.

  “I see him in there.”

  She cried.

  I left them. It was so easy to slide back into the warmth of sleep.

  Eventually, I could no longer escape.

  * * *

  I’d been kept in a medically-induced coma for three weeks, and each moment was like a fever dream, similar to those nights of flu when every moment ticks by but without lucidity there to calm the mind. To call what I’d had dreams or nightmares doesn’t even begin to touch this other reality I’d existed in. Whether or not it was real when viewed from the conscious perspective didn’t matter; it changed me.

  The hospital staff had done a lot of work on me during my unconsciousness. I imagined myself then as something like a car brought in for repairs. Driven onto a lift and cranked up when necessary, parked quietly out back when not.

  That’s not fair to the nurses, though. They were with me constantly during that time, vacuuming out the fluid collecting in my throat because I couldn’t swallow, changing my wraps, just talking to me. Sometimes I think their words slipped into my dreams, influencing them, making that burned-up world a little less dead and sterile.

  While I was unconscious the doctors performed the escharotomy. Eschar is the dead, cooked flesh that the body transforms into an armor to coat a burn wound. My actual wound, the place where the living tissue bled and attempted to heal, was encased within an eschar resembling boot leather.

  I asked how they cut it away. The nurses wouldn’t tell me. The doctor would.

  Because a patient could only be kept on the operating table for so long, especially one with as compromised a system as a burn patient, they used a machine called a dermatome to remove the majority of the cooked tissue. It was explained to me as an enormous vibrating cheese slicer that you push forward instead of drag back, taking away great peels of dead flesh until it hit blood. When tiny red droplets blossomed on the surface, they knew they’d hit living tissue, and the rest was done by hand with a knife.

  I was very glad this happened while I was in my coma.

  This didn’t take care of all the dead tissue, only the largest parts. My wounds, which covered slightly more than forty percent of my body, exuded a soup of lifeless protein goo every day, and my wraps were removed and this was rubbed away. When I was unconscious, they said I’d moaned during the process. After I’d awakened, I screamed and begged for them to stop. It took hours, and I swear that those gauze pads felt like steel wool being raked across raw nerves.

  But the goo and crust had to go. My body had become an enormous petri dish, and the exudate mixed with the dead cells and the flecks of remaining eschar to create the most lush bacterial paradise imaginable.

  Looking at myself during those times, seeing the incredible damage that had been done to my bo
dy, seeing the way I’d wasted away, so that not only was I injured, but frail, so frail…I nearly gave up hope of surviving. I didn’t know if I wanted to survive, anyway.

  My metabolism had skyrocketed. While in the coma, I’d gone hypermetabolic. My temperature never dropped from the low hundreds. My heart rate sat at 130, what it should have taken a brisk jog to elevate to. There was an all out war being fought inside my body, except that the enemy was my body.

  They put as much protein as they could down my feeding tube, but the hypermetabolism combined with complete lack of movement had me wasting away at a rate of pounds per day. I’d entered my coma muscular from regular weight lifting. I left it a skeleton. A charred skeleton.

  * * *

  Due to nausea, I couldn’t have eaten enough to prevent starvation, so even after I awoke the tracheostomy hole stayed, filled with a feeding tube and a breathing tube that helped ensure I got enough oxygen for the ten-round, heavyweight main event my body was fighting, despite the fact that liquid rattled around in my lungs.

  They told me how lucky I was to have not breathed in the flame. The bronchial system is fantastic at dissipating temperature. A person can breathe super-heated air or even steam and it will be cool by the time it reaches the lungs. But flames are another thing. They count lungs damaged by flames or smoke as an extra percentage of burned body when calculating a patient’s chances of survival. Trying to heal a bad burn without the ability to draw oxygen properly is like trying to run a marathon with a gas mask on.

  When I wanted to talk, I did it with my phone, tapping out my sentences with my left thumb. Because my left hand had been pressed to the side of my face turned away from the initial explosion, it hadn’t been burned at all. Thank goodness my fucking head had been there to protect it. The left side of my face had burned as my polyester shirt caught fire, but my left hand was fine, as it had still been clutching the damn phone. My right hand, though, was bandaged to nearly the size of a volleyball. And no one talked about it.

  Have you been here every day? I asked my parents.

  “Every day,” my mother said, tearing up the way she did almost every time she spoke, as if her face were a wet rag and the twisting of her mouth muscles wrung out tears.

  What about work?

  “We’re both on extended leave.”

  Has Madison been here?

  My mother couldn’t speak anymore, so my father took over. “Yes, she’s been here almost the entire time. Her parents have been here with us a lot, too. But Madison didn’t leave your side.”

  Then where is she?

  He sighed. “When they started to bring you out of the coma, after you first opened your eyes, she said she couldn’t take it. Said she felt too guilty, that you wouldn’t want to see her anyway.”

  Guilty? You don’t pop out of a coma tack-sharp. The dream haze still hugged me, wrapped my brain in the same cotton gauze that wrapped my burnt skull. And though they were no longer giving me enough narcotics to put me out completely, they were still switching me back and forth between morphine and fentanyl, because if I’d had to deal with the pain of a forty percent burn un-drugged I would have gone mad. An hour of it had driven me out of my mind before they had me out of shock and put me under. So I didn’t understand why Madison felt guilty.

  My father stood waiting for a response, looking at my phone instead of at me, and the thought hit me that while the face seems so important, you mostly look at it because it’s where the words come from. Now that my words came from my thumb, that was people’s point of interest.

  I looked at my phone too.

  I’d been talking to Madison when the fryer ignited.

  What does she think happened?

  “She thinks that she distracted you while you were working. Your coworkers said that you had forgotten to flip the fryer off because you were talking on your phone, and that the element had ignited the oil coating the fryer.”

  In my coma, I hadn’t answered my phone. Instead, I flipped the switch on the fryer and cleaned it without incident. Incident. Gaping straight into an inferno like some slack-jawed imbecile at the circus until my face burned off, that was an incident.

  That one little moment of distraction had cost me the life I’d dreamed of in my coma, the life I’d dreamed of forever.

  I’m tired. Done talking.

  “Okay, Cody.” Tears appeared in the corners of his eyes. “I didn’t know if I’d ever get the chance to talk to you again. I know you’re strong, but…it was a close thing. I just want you to know that I love you.”

  He touched my left hand. I nodded my wrapped head. Hoped that was enough. Closed my eye. It was too much.

  * * *

  My right eye was gone. Why had I stared into the flame? I don’t know that I did. It felt like I did, but time had gone so slowly in that instant. It’s possible that my brain just recorded every nanosecond of the flame blossoming out toward my face in the time it took instinct to shut my eyes.

  Whatever happened, I didn’t shut them fast enough. They’d had to take my right eye.

  I didn’t notice, at first, that it was wrapped in the dressings. That sounds strange, but laying there in that bed, cataloging my injuries took days, days of numb fumbling as I came out of my coma.

  When counting my losses, I’m not even sure it ranked that high. The pinkie, ring and middle fingers of my right hand sustained fourth degree burns, all the way down to the muscle and tendon. Even if they could have survived, they would have been twisted into useless claws by the relentless pull of scar tissue. My pinkie and ring finger were amputated completely away. I still had the first joint of my index and middle fingers, and my entire thumb.

  “Enough to hold a fork,” a nurse had said while changing my dressings one day when the issue of my hugely wrapped hand could no longer be ignored.

  If I could choose my fingers or my right eye, I would have wanted my fingers back. My face. My life. I could do without my eye.

  Because I could only use my left hand, the symmetry of only having my left eye made the fact less noticeable. I could text. I could still participate in the modern age of disembodied communication. Hell, with my diminished body and my lack of a face, the sterile, faceless connections were the easiest for me.

  Why aren’t you here? I texted Madison.

  It took her a long time to reply. Everything took a long time. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, finding that I had drifted off only twenty minutes before, trying to settle through the torment back into sleep. I remember before the burn, being a hundred percent unable to sleep if my fan wasn’t on and pointed in just the right direction, or if I hadn’t lotioned properly and a spot between my shoulder blades that I had trouble reaching itched, or if my pillows weren’t just the right height.

  Now I was trying to find sleep while every nerve ending on my upper body that hadn’t been burned away still burned relentlessly. And my lower body…that was another hell. In my coma they’d begun harvesting my uninjured skin, the skin on my thighs and ass that had been protected by the thick cotton of my pants. Take a shaving razor, push it just into your skin, and then slide it along until you peel off a ten inch strip. How does that feel? Do it until your entire lower body is peeled, then try to sleep lying on it as your juices seep into gauze.

  When I managed to sleep, it was because I’d complained enough to get more opiates, though they said I was building too much of a tolerance. So I spent most nights laying on my flayed back, feeling the screaming pain of my cooked front and waiting for some reason I couldn’t explain for the light of day to shine into my one good eye, because the daytime was just as much of a wait as the night.

  I couldn’t take seeing you so hurt, she said.

  My parents said you were here the whole time.

  Another long pause. Another wait. Texts could make it through, but I had terrible data signal in the hospital, so I couldn’t distract myself with the internet. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care what was going on in the outside world.
I’d been happiest when I’d thought it had burned as I had.

  Do you blame me?

  It was my turn to pause, her turn to wait. I’d avoided answering that question to myself. I knew guilt was keeping Madison away, so the question had been circling since I’d regained awareness, but somehow I’d managed to keep it circling, never letting it land, never examining it closely.

  Rationally, who do you blame? Madison, for interrupting me continuously though she knew I was working? But she didn’t know I was doing anything dangerous. Me, for not flipping the machine off? That seems obvious, but the consequences are so disproportionate…How can my being set on fire, losing my fingers, my eye, my entire future be an appropriate effect from such a tiny cause? It couldn’t possibly be. There had to be something bigger.

  There’s the manufacturer, of course. How do you get away with making a product that turns into a raging inferno at exactly the moment someone would be leaning into it?

  But it was the universe, all of reality, that was to blame. Because if something like that could happen, then planning for anything was meaningless. Trying was meaningless. Decades of hard work, of study and struggle and late nights in menial jobs, it could all be lost by the smallest mistake. Years of doing everything right, of facing the big choices and making the right decision, could be undone by doing the tiniest thing wrong. I had spent so long denying myself the momentary pleasures in anticipation of a good future, and there was no future.

  This was not a universe for me. It was not a reality I wanted, where this small act, no, small non-act, could be swollen with so much blame that there seemed to be enough for the whole world.

  So did I blame Madison?

  A little.

  That’s why I’m not there. Because I blame me too.

  I shouldn’t have said it. I should have told her that it wasn’t her fault at all. But I didn’t want to take care of anyone else right then. Her emotional fragility actually pissed me off. I was struggling to stay alive. My body had been operating at marathon level for weeks trying to heal me before infection could kill me. I had no energy left to be delicate with Madison.