Dream of the Serpent

by Alan Ryker

  4

  Visitors had to wear full-body suits. I was one big open wound, the skin of my upper body cooked away by flame, the skin of my lower body flayed away by the surgeon’s knife.

  I had the strangest sense of power, watching Mr. David Barrington and his thin-blooded wife Susan as they prepped themselves right outside my door, washing, sanitizing, suiting up from head to toe. When they opened the door, a gust of wind pressed into them. My room always had positive pressure, so that only the sterile air the hospital pumped in ever entered.

  From what my parents said, the Barrington’s had been in to see me a number of times while I was unconscious, seemingly already part of the family except for that one pesky detail of their daughter’s abandoning me.

  Despite having seen me a number of times, Mrs. Barrington teared up immediately, and put her gloved hand to her masked lips.

  “I can’t tell you how happy I am to have you back with us. How are you doing, Cody?” Mr. Barrington said, pulling a chair closer to my bed and falling into it.

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that. I was as simultaneously crispy and succulent as a rotisserie chicken, with parts of my body literally flaking away while I marinated in the juices I leaked into my bandages. When my dressings had been changed that morning, the blackened tip of my nose had pulled away and fallen onto my pillow. Jake, one of my favorite nurses, and I had laughed. Well, he laughed, and I shook around my breathing and feeding tubes like a fish on a line. He’d decided to interpret it as laughter rather than sobbing. I wasn’t sure myself which it had been, but went with his opinion.

  I’m surviving.

  “You bet you are. You’re the toughest SOB I’ve ever met in my life. I’m dead serious, Cody. And I can’t wait to get you into Sanders & Stevens. I need a pit bull like you on my team.”

  Thank you, sir. It’ll probably be awhile.

  “Whenever you’re ready. I’m surrounded by yes men. I can use somebody with some spine.”

  I nodded, not knowing what to say. Over the course of my successful academic career, I’d always disarmed flattery with a “Thank you” and a self-deprecating joke or two. Unfortunately, I’d lost most of my ability to joke. The closest my mind came anymore was irony so acidic I dared not let it out, instead keeping it flowing through my brain, burning. Burning. It was the fuel of anger, and I feared the engine that would roar to life if I let it flow.

  By this time, Mrs. Barrington had managed to unstick herself from her frozen position of abject sorrow and horror and pull a seat over. She sat and touched me lightly on the leg, so lightly I couldn’t feel it through the bandage wrapped over a wound created by taking the healthy skin there to place somewhere else on my body, either covering an open wound that seemed ready to heal or replacing a slab of pale white cadaver skin, which helped prevent infection but which would never take hold, thank God.

  If I’d said “Boo,” Susan Barrington would have fallen over dead of a heart attack. Mr. Barrington picked up the slack, filling the room with his booming personality, telling me about all the mergers he had in the works, telling me about the intricacies of international tax law with the new countries Sanders & Stevens was moving into.

  “I’ll be glad to have you there. Nothing like having family watching your back when you’re swimming with the sharks.”

  Mrs. Barrington gave him a look, and he actually heeded it for once, the patch of flesh visible between the light blue mask covering his nose and mouth and the cap covering his hair going bright red, and him stumbling for words, an avalanche of gaffs that finally ground to a halt, the abrupt lack of cacophany deafening.

  Family.

  I had to ask.

  How is Madison?

  “You know Maddy, flighty and aimless as a butterfly. I think she’s been meaning to come, she just…”

  I nodded. I had the urge to press the issue. I wanted to ask why she wouldn’t answer my texts. I wanted to ask when she’d come to visit me. I wanted to ask a million questions with obvious answers, questions that weren’t just elephants in the room, but which were elephants sitting directly on my chest, crushing me down even as a machine pumped cold air into my lungs for me.

  Jake saved us. “David! Susan! So good to see you again!” he exclaimed as he came into the room.

  The man was a goddamn saint, a relentless engine of positive energy and good will. I don’t know if I would have liked him if I’d met him before, but then again I didn’t know how he was in the outside world. Maybe he saved all his energy for the burn unit. Maybe he sat silently for his few other waking hours, plugged into a wall, charging. I didn’t think a person could operate at that level all the time, especially when his audience wasn’t rowdy and receptive, but a bunch of people hovering in that wide space between life and death, a space I’d never even noticed, having the healthy, young person’s concept of the two states of being as perfectly delineated and separate. It didn’t matter if he were working with a comatose vegetable, a tubed-up mute like me, or a person who could actually respond, Jake brought the same vigor, compassion and humor into the room with him. That zone I talked about, that wide, habitable space between life and death, he was a magnet pulling his patients toward life.

  “Jake!” Mr. Barrington exclaimed, his motor starting again. “I was just telling Cody how happy I’ll be to have him working for me.”

  “I’m betting Cody would rather be anywhere than here. Even work. Don’t worry, Cody. I don’t take it personally. So how are things at Sanders & Stevens? Didn’t you say you were trying to expand into Africa?”

  “Yes. We’re talking with one of the biggest petroleum infrastructure engineering firms over there. We can take them from one of the biggest to the biggest if we can get it worked out.”

  “Isn’t it risky doing business over there?” Jake asked as he began to work at my dressings.

  He couldn’t have known the nature of what he’d just unleashed by inquiring into this. Mr. Barrington got started on a lecture about risk that could have been delivered at a podium in front of an auditorium. But maybe Jake had known, because before David got too far into his opinions on economic theory, he said, “You can stay for this if Cody doesn’t mind, but I don’t know if you’ll want to. We need to get his dressings changed.”

  Mrs. Barrington gripped her husband’s arm. He might have tried to tough it out. He’d want to show me that I wasn’t in such a bad state as to be unbearably repulsive, and he’d also want to test his own nerve. But Susan already looked pale enough to fall over.

  “I think we’ll step out. How long will you be?”

  “It’s been taking more than an hour.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to come back another time.” David Barrington put his gloved hand gingerly on my left forearm. “We’ll be seeing you really soon, Cody. Keep gutting it out.”

  I nodded.

  They left, and while I’d been glad to see them, it was good to be able to relax, to not have to pretend to be brave, which seemed difficult even when laying immobile and silent.

  You did that on purpose. I held the phone up so Jake could read it.

  “Did what?” he asked, batting his eyelashes innocently.

  Got him started right before telling them to go.

  “What? I find that stuff very interesting. Didn’t you know that as a student I was torn between nursing and huge mega conglomo coporate finance?” he rolled his eyes and laughed.

  It surprised me, how close my family had become with my nurses. I awoke and intruded upon an entire relationship structure with my previously comatose carcass at the center.

  I smiled at Jake, but then tapped out, Meds?

  His smile left his eyes, only turning up the corners of his mouth. “If you need them, buddy, but let’s see how far we can get first. Your tolerance is getting too high.”

  I nodded, but knew I’d be weeping and mewling soon.

  * * *

  My physical therapy began when I was still unconscious. Inside my dressings, my j
oints were fitted into splints that bent them or straightened them as necessary to maintain flexibility. If they hadn’t, while I’d slept my tendons would have twisted me into knots. Besides occasionally replacing my splints with splints set at different angles, the physical therapists also stretched me. Thomas said that even when I was unconscious he knew I was going to be trouble, that I fought him even in my sleep, trying to pull away from him.

  It hurt. It hurt incredibly. And as my body healed, it actually began to hurt more. Because then I wasn’t just fighting tendon that had grown stronger than my wasted muscle (my heart rate still hadn’t settled below 120, even a month after my burn, and it was a constant struggle to prevent the loss of the small bit of muscle I still had), but against the newly forming scar tissue.

  The scar tissue was thick and red and itched like you wouldn’t believe. Joining forces with all the things conspiring to keep me from sleep, the itching of my scars was the worst. It never stopped. It never slacked. Even the pain came in waves. The itching never relented.

  “See, though,” Thomas said as he forced me to tilt my head from side to side, “this scar tissue looks bad, but it’s still soft. This is nothing compared to the torture you’ll feel in a year when it’s gone hard if you haven’t stretched it enough to get some slack. It can literally rip your joints apart. This, where your neck burned so badly, the graft has taken really well. But the scar tissue there is so thick it will twist your spine until something ruptures if you don’t fight it.”

  They argued with me like this, my nurses and physical therapists and occupational therapists, and I couldn’t even speak. They could tell from my nonverbal communication and the few texts I typed them before the agony became so great that my hand shook beyond control, which didn’t matter because I lost my mind to that sea of pain soon after and couldn’t have thought of anything to say anyway.

  When Thomas worked, my lips moved in soundless, mindless pleading. The bastard was relentless. They all were. They all wanted the best for me, better than I wanted for myself.

  My arms tried to settle against my chest, bent like baby bird wings as soon as my elbows and right wrist came out of my splints. He folded my chest open, rolled my shoulders back. He worked my arms slowly, so damn slowly through their range of motion. The entire time the red, puffy scar tissue felt like it was going to snap like taffy. With each flex he pulled it a bit farther.

  My entire body flexed with the pain. At its worst, though I was a feeble skeleton, I swear that only my heels and the back of my head touched the bed, my body forming an arch to match the arc of electric torment shooting through me.

  The occupational therapy started later, the stretching of my right hand, because it took a long time to close.

  It’s hard to explain how I felt when I finally saw the remains of my right hand. We protect our fingers. We clutch our hands to our bodies so quickly when they’re endangered. To see them chopped down to angry red nubs, my thumb seemingly free-floating, nothing much to press against…I hadn’t thought I could get lower until I saw that. The strangest part was the feeling of déjà vu, until I realized that I’d felt this all in my dream, when I’d peeled my fingers away to reveal a pincer. That’s what my thumb and the remaining joints of my first and second fingers resembled: the crude, fleshy pincer of a soft shell crab. I could have vomited if I hadn’t been on powerful anti-nausea medication to help me keep down the high-protein goop they pumped me full of and prevent me from gagging on the thick tubes going down my throat.

  If they thought I was difficult before I saw my hand…

  “They want us to talk to you. They say you’re not cooperating. You’re fighting the therapy,” my dad said.

  I stared. I just stared. I found that my lack of a voice had given me strange power. I’d always been verbally gifted, always been an arguer, had killed at debate, but to not speak, to not let the other person settle in the fortress of their own opinions but to have to search out mine was more effective than I could have imagined.

  “Don’t you want to get better?” my mother asked.

  I didn’t look at her. She was too fragile for me to smash beneath the weight of my gaze. I simply tapped out, I won’t be getting better.

  She teared up. Even without looking at her, I could feel it. I hated hurting her, but it was the fucking truth. All of this pain would come to nothing, because I would never get better. I’d lost everything.

  Her silent tears became sobs. I turned away. What right did she have to cry as I sat there dry-eyed?

  My dad led her out of the room, whispered something to her, probably about getting something from the cafeteria or going to the burn unit’s private waiting room, where apparently they’d developed great friendships with the families of other survivors. I was ecstatic my horrific injury had brought so many people together.

  My dad sat back down, but I stared at the opposite wall.

  “Son, look at me. We need to talk.”

  I turned my head so slowly that the beam of my gaze ripped through drywall, reduced studs to splinters, would pulp any person it fell upon. I gave him time to move, and yet there he sat, waiting for my deadly eyes to land on his own.

  There was a moment of strange father/son tension, where neither of us would look away, but this is what I did all day, every day. I could stare at him for weeks without feeling the slightest discomfort. What could he do to me? Spank me? The surgeons had already literally flayed my backside to bloody ribbons.

  He looked down. I don’t know if I felt good about it as I stared at the curly gray hairs on the top of his head.

  “You’re fighting the wrong battle, son. You’re fighting for the side that’s trying to kill you. You’re fighting against your allies. This is a war, and everyone is trying to win it for you, but we can’t win it against you.”

  I jutted my phone out, showing him the screen that still said, I won’t be getting better.

  “You’re going to live, Cody. Some part of you must want to, because we almost lost you a few times, but you fought through it. You did that. Now you need to finish what you started, because according to the doctors what your life will be is going to be determined by what you do over the next year.”

  The tension had built until silence couldn’t express what I felt, and my left thumb flew across my phone. Kill myself so I can hold a fork? No fiance. No job. No future.

  “I understand you’re in a dark place right now.”

  You do not understand!

  “Okay, I don’t understand, but you are in a dark place. Things will only get better from here. David still wants to give you a job, and I haven’t heard that Madison is gone. She’s just torn up with guilt. Do you know that she heard you burn?”

  What?

  “She was still on the phone. She heard everything until the paramedics took you away.”

  I wanted to hurl the phone so badly that I sat it on the side table and slid it away with my fingertips so that I couldn’t reach it. That also signaled the end of my willingness to communicate.

  “I love you, son. Your mother loves you. Even your nurses seem to love you. We all wish we could give you the time you need to recover from this tragedy. But your body won’t wait. What you do now, when your head is so mixed up, will determine the rest of your life. I might not understand what you’re going through, but you don’t understand that you do have a life ahead of you. Please trust in the people who love you and do what the therapists, nurses and doctors ask of you.” He stood. “That’s it. I’m going to stop harping at you now and let you rest and think about it.”

  My dad left the room, left me to my thoughts. With no one to rage against, they all turned back on me. As if I wasn’t already facing enough from my body. And there was no escape. I tried to sleep, but I was too agitated to even relax my muscles. I wanted back in my dream world. I wanted to go back to the place where everything else had burned, too, to the place where I could go into the past and fight the future, flip that tiny little switch and take back
the life that should have been mine, even for a little while.

  I got my chance soon enough.

  * * *

  The morning they removed the bandages from my face was…I don’t know exactly how to describe it. It was bad, but in a low key way. The hurt wasn’t sharp. I was somewhat prepared for the worst. With all the surgeries I’d gone through, all the grafting, there was no way to imagine I’d come out looking okay.

  And there’s something about hitting the bottom. Something comforting. Resignation gets a bad rap, but it’s the end of not just hope, but struggle.

  They had covered my entire face and most of my scalp with grafts, and it took a long time for my body to completely accept them. Once they were closed, they needed to breathe, and Nurse Jake removed my bandages for cleaning, and then didn’t wrap up my head. I looked at him questioningly.

  “I told you it was almost time. Today’s a big day. Your face and head are healing very well. No more bandages.”

  I want to see, I tapped out on my phone.

  He nodded. There were mirrors in the room. In all the talking he’d done over the month, he told me a lot about the unit’s philosophies. A big part was not hiding things from the patients. There was no benefit, and it was better to face reality as soon as possible so that internal healing could take place along with external healing.

  “You’re sure? We could wait until the swelling goes down.”

  I’m sure.

  He brought me a mirror. Before he showed it to me, he said, “Your scar tissue is still very angry. It will shrink and grow less red over the next year.”