Dream of the Serpent

by Alan Ryker

  “He knows you’re there. The way you’ve stuck by him shows a lot of maturity. It’s helping to bring him back.”

  I went upstairs and sat in the dark. My brain wouldn’t stop working. I saw your eye, cloudy, opening onto your new hell. I saw your fingers twitching. The fingers that had held the phone.

  I thought to myself that if you hadn’t been talking to me, you might have burnt your left hand badly, too. Then I punched myself in the head as hard as I could. It hurt my hand a lot more than it did my head. I did it again. I slammed my head backward into the wall, but only once, because the boom resonated through the house. My mom would come if I did it again.

  To be so happy about your barely opened eye. It literally made me sick to my stomach. You always dwarfed me. You, so tall and gregarious and alive. Me, your little remora. What is safe if you aren’t? I’m standing on nothing. Being tucked under your arm was like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and peering safely over. Now I’ve found myself standing in the air, looking back at solid ground, waiting for the fall to start.

  If I had known, I wouldn’t have kept bothering you.

  What a stupid thing to say. Of course if I had known. Of course. Of fucking course.

  Now it’s morning. My parents left, went to the hospital. I told them I hadn’t slept. My father was very disappointed in me. He tried to guilt me.

  I didn’t laugh, but I could have if I were someone else. No one can ever guilt me again anymore than you can murder someone twice. Dead is dead. Guilty is guilty.

  My mom told him to leave me alone. I really hadn’t slept. I look like the walking dead. I actually managed to bruise my cheekbone with one of those sad little punches.

  I can’t go see you. I’m sorry. I don’t know if it’s for me or you or both of us, but I can’t do it.

  But I can’t stop talking to you, either.

  You didn’t know me before. Do you know how little I spoke? I watched people when I spoke, watched how their eyes turned inward, scanning their vast repertoires of anecdotes. Which would they reply with when I finally stopped talking?

  You listened, though. I don’t know why. Maybe you found the silly, rich little philosophy student amusing. Different from your fratty friends.

  And now I can’t stop talking to you. I need to tell you these things.

  Did you hear me whispering in your ear? I sat for hours leaned into you. When the blackened top of your ear fell off, Nurse Jake said, “Look at this. You finally talked his ear off.”

  I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair. I started hyperventilating.

  Did you hear me? Did you follow my voice back?

  And now that you’re back, I’m gone.

  But there’s always tomorrow.

  Maddy

  I backed out to my mailbox. She’d written me every day, sometimes more than once. Seeing all those letters felt like uncovering a treasure trove. She had replied to my texts, but I’d thought out of a sense of obligation. Rightful obligation. We were still engaged, I supposed. But these letters weren’t written out of obligation. She still thought of me.

  I’d decided that nothing waits. My classes had moved on. My career was receding into the distance. The world had forgotten me. I took too long to recover. I hadn’t emerged until the world was over whatever amount of interest my story sparked. Even my friends weren’t commenting on my social network pages as much, except to each other. But I looked at Madison’s emails, written right up until yesterday. She hadn’t forgotten.

  But the misery she described…She didn’t deserve it.

  Don’t punish yourself for me, I texted.

  You must have read my email.

  The first.

  Delete them. Self-indulgent blathering.

  I sat my phone aside. I wouldn’t delete them, and so there was no point in continuing the conversation. Especially because the texts she was sending just then were self-conscious, infected with the horrible, endless prism of awareness of self and other that could trap and paralyze until finally you resisted expressing anything personal because having your motives questioned about those things hurt too much.

  The letters—if the first was any indication—were raw. They were pure Madison, exactly what she was thinking when she wrote them, because she only half-expected me to survive.

  I read a few more emails. They ripped me in every direction. She felt so bad, and I felt bad for her, but I felt incredibly happy that she felt bad for me. That sounds horrible, but like I said, I figured she’d moved on. Everything else seemed to have.

  She felt guilty, and I knew that she shouldn’t feel that way, and I didn’t want her to, either, exactly, except that part of me did. A big part. The part that kept trying to solve the problem of my immolated existence, and saw impossible obstacles in trying to find answers in the future: a face like a pink, shiny death’s head, one hand burned away, a body wrapped scar tissue constricting tighter and tighter as it matured. So my brain, if I wasn’t watching, tried to turn to the past for a solution. After all, there the fix was so much easier. I just had to flip that little switch, and everything would be better. For some reason, my unconscious mind did not differentiate between the past and the future, and it kept returning to that moment again, whenever I wasn’t actively preventing it from doing so, and it kept triggering this little sensation of joy. That feeling I used to get when I solved a math problem or a difficult chess puzzle, a mate in five or something. And then my conscious mind would quickly turn to examine what my subconscious had worked out and found this idiocy, over and over and over. So it made no sense, but what I thought a million times a day is that all I had to do was not answer Madison’s call. And so, it was all her fault, and I couldn’t understand why I was the only one suffering for her mistake.

  It was this bitter, petty part of myself that enjoyed seeing her enduring mental anguish as I endured anguish of every possible sort, mental, physical and existential.

  Her emails continued to describe her guilt, inescapable guilt that smothered her however she turned and struggled against it. She couldn’t escape it, day or night. She dropped her classes for the semester. She said they wouldn’t hold it against her, despite being after the usual cutoff for appearing on her transcript, because of the extenuating circumstances. But she didn’t see her self going back.

  It’s over. The future is over. That sounds funny, but it’s not. It’s terrible. The future is dead. There is nothing to move towards. There is only this same place forever, and I don’t know if I can take it, she wrote, and I couldn’t believe that someone else understood.

  She told me about getting drunk, about the warm burst at the base of her skull, the meaningless good feeling, which was all she could hope for, and so why not reach for the attainable? I remembered texting her, and her mentioning her drunkenness at strange times. She’d never been a teetotaler, but even on the weekend it took a bit of convincing to get her to drink in the middle of the day.

  You’re still reading them, aren’t you?

  I closed the computer before truthfully replying, No.

  Did you delete them?

  No, and I won’t.

  I’m sorry I sent them. You have enough to worry about. Selfish of me.

  You don’t deserve this.

  You don’t get to decide what I deserve.

  What? I’m the burnt one.

  The injured party can forgive, but that doesn’t change the status of guilt or innocence.

  You’re not guilty.

  Maybe.

  Maybe was how Madison ended arguments she didn’t feel like continuing, at least not externally. I could often see in her face that her brain still worked over a situation long after she’d tossed out her decoy “maybe.”

  Will you come see me now? I typed out. My thumb hovered over “send,” but settled on “delete,” where it sat until the input box was wiped clean.

  She’d say no, and I couldn’t handle it just then.

  Instead I stood slowly. Slouching
over the computer had let my scar tissue tighten into its preferred fist-like grip around my neck, chest and shoulders. I hobbled over to the bed and settled onto it, laying on my back and trying to let gravity straighten everything out.

  8

  “I need you to lift your arm a little higher,” Ed, my physical therapist said, as I sweated and strained to lift my right arm in the same way I used to struggle to shoulder press two hundred pounds.

  “No,” Ed said. “Don’t tilt at your waist. That doesn’t count. Lift your arm away from your side.”

  Gasping, I let the arm drop and fell to my bed. “I can’t.”

  “You have to—”

  “No, I don’t have to, because I fucking can’t.” I hugged my right arm to my body with my left, kneading the tissue beneath my arm pit.

  “I’m going to advise that they cut that scar, but you have to fight anyway. If you don’t, no amount of surgery will save you. You’ve got maybe a year before that tissue sets up, and whatever mobility you have at the end of that is the mobility you’ll have for life. I’ve seen people with burns just as bad regain full mobility.”

  I wiggled my finger nubs at him. “Full mobility?”

  “Well, obviously your fingers won’t grow back.”

  “Then who fucking cares if the arm fucking works? I can’t fucking do anything with it anyway.” These people, they wanted heroic effort for heroic effort’s sake. They wanted super-human determination not because it would do any good, but because as a super human I’d become magically happier. For some reason, the adversity of being burnt to a crisp had brought out the best in a lot of people, and everyone seemed to expect the same of me. They wanted some made-for-TV movie Cody, and they weren’t going to get it.

  Ed sat back and looked at me with a look of infinite professional patience that I wanted to slap off his face. “It’s your choice, but you need to really consider how you’re going to feel in the future, because this is your only shot.” He waved through the air, erasing the conversation. “Enough of that. Have they discussed the possibility of putting a bladder beneath that arm?”

  “Yeah. Sounds delightful.” Because the scar tissue beneath my arm pit was locking my right arm against the side of my body and growing tighter all the time, the doctors talked about inserting a bladder under the tissue, then slowly inflating it over days and weeks, forcing the scar tissue to stretch. It sounded horrendous, like a huge blister in my armpit that would torment me for weeks, inflating bigger just as the ache of straining scar tissue began to fade, my arm levitating out from my body. All to get mobility in a useless limb. “I’m not sure I’m going to sign off on that. I’m getting tired of surgery.” I’d been through dozens, each one resulting in pain I had to work through in physical therapy and a tiny positive result. And as far as my face went, it seemed they could carve me up all they wanted, but a carved cooked ham doesn’t look much more like a face than an uncarved one. Anyway, I had my mask.

  Ed shook his head and opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He turned my computer chair from my desk and sat in it, leaning forward so that we sat face-to-mask only a couple of feet apart, a couple of men talking mano-a-mano. “You need to really think. You’re depressed, and you have every right to be, but you have to think about your future self. Eventually, you’re going to want more out of life than lying in bed in your parents’ house.”

  “And what if I don’t ever get more? Should I keep fighting against my reality? Is that really the path to happiness? A couple of billion Christians, Jews, Hindis and Buddhists would argue that point with you.”

  Ed tossed his head back and let loose an exasperated laugh as he stood. “You’re smart, Cody. You’re too damn smart. Just make sure you don’t end up outsmarting yourself while you outsmart all us dopes. Okay?”

  Hidden behind my mask, I didn’t feel the need to reply to rhetorical questions. I just followed him with my eye as he left the room. But I listened, too, and I knew he didn’t leave the house immediately. A low rumble of voices meant he and my dad were talking. My dad had switched to second shift so that someone could always be home with me, which was goddamn ridiculous. I could take care of myself. Sure, I hurt all the time, but he couldn’t help with that. It’s not like I needed to be monitored in case I wandered out into the street. Maybe they thought I’d proved that I couldn’t be trusted with a hot stove.

  I sat in front of my laptop and opened it. It powered up to display my email, the only thing that really interested me anymore, because I still had letters from Madison to dole out to myself. Reading them was all I looked forward to doing, though they hurt, because they reminded me of what I had and couldn’t get back. My mind worked endlessly over my physical pain and disfigurement, and the emails gave me something else of equal intensity to obsess over. I couldn’t pay attention to the news. Movies no longer held my interest. I’d once been obsessed with sports stats, but now nothing could seem more stupid than trying to memorize a bunch of numbers that abstractly represented guys performing actions that seemed stupid even in the concrete. After months of chewing on the same few terrible seconds not only every waking moment, but even in my dreams, the attraction of something else that could grip my attention was powerful, even if the thing itself was horrible. The feelings of sorrow, anger and jealousy were preferable only for not being the same thoughts that had burned trench-deep neural pathways through my brain.

  Madison was slipping. No, she’d already slipped, because I was reading emails she’d written weeks ago.

  She’d moved on from alcohol, gotten back in touch with the Dorset brothers, her drug hookup from high school when she’d had a pill problem that had gotten her sent to rehab for two months. She’d started doing Oxy again, and she’d started doing it wherever she’d scored it, not even able to make herself wait until she got home. If she took too much—and she was tiny without a tolerance anymore—she would pass out wherever she was. Not in crackhouses. The homes of the affluent overflowed with pills. But honestly, I didn’t know which was more dangerous.

  But why was she telling me about this? Why would she tell me about waking up sprawled on a leather couch, the rising sun falling directly across her face, and feeling at her panties to find them definitely askew, pulled aside?

  I thought she was tormenting me, but then I realized that she saw every bit of degradation as recompense. She was working off her sins, and by telling me, she was letting me know that the scales of justice were being balanced. She was letting me see that she wouldn’t allow herself to escape unburned by the fire she felt she’d set. She’d stood outside it, watching the building go up with me inside until she couldn’t take it anymore, and then she’d thrown herself on the pyre so that we could burn together.

  But unlike mine, her wounds weren’t visible, so she described them to me.

  Some part of her hoped it would make me feel better, but I felt terrible. I felt angry with her for ruining her life. I felt rage at the thought of the people taking advantage of her desperate sadness. But something kept me reading. I had her permission to stop. I’d received numerous commands that I delete the emails, that she hadn’t been in the right frame of mind when she’d sent them. But I kept reading them. Why? Consciously, I didn’t think she deserved this, but somewhere down deep…All I can say is that I kept reading, and that I parceled them out sparingly, counting and recounting like a junkie checks his stash.

  Sitting there, looking over my inbox so intently, I jumped at the knock at my door, and clapped the lid shut so clumsily that I almost knocked my laptop off my desk.

  “Yeah?” I said, trying to force my heart to slow.

  My dad opened the door as if I’d given him permission to enter.

  “Ed says that you could be doing better. I explained to him that you’d never half-assed anything in your whole life, that you’d always worked harder than anyone at everything that you did. He didn’t buy it.”

  “I’m trying,” I said, not looking up at him. The scar tissue on my chest an
d the front of my neck was thick from my polyester shirt burning against the tender skin there before Brandon dumped the bin of flour on me. It hurt to try to look up, and that was a convenient excuse.

  My dad sat on the bed. “I know you are. You’ve been fighting like hell for months now, harder than any of us could. But the thing is, you might be getting tired and not even know it. But right now, you need to work as hard as you can. Harder than you can.”

  “I am.”

  He sighed. He wouldn’t snap at me. He’d never had a problem doing so when I was a kid, but he wouldn’t do it now. But he was getting closer. I’d gotten my temper from him. At first, he’d had nothing but sympathy. But the temper was starting to smolder beneath. I didn’t care. I welcomed it. I wanted to cut loose, too. The sullen child act didn’t feel right anymore. I was a decade past that. They thought that they were getting fed up? They felt ready to explode? I was waiting, just waiting for them to slip up so that I could share just a bit of what was clawing its way through my brains and guts every day.

  Instead, he patted a stack of books I hadn’t noticed he’d brought in.

  “I ordered these. They’re autobiographies. I guess they’re calling them memoirs these days. Of people who were burned and recovered. I thought it might help to see what’s possible.” He stood up, leaving the books on my bed. He didn’t try to hand them to me. I don’t know what would have happened if he had. A bit stunned, I stared at the small stack as he left the room.

  My dad wasn’t one for self-help nonsense. He was a bootstrapper. You didn’t get anywhere by moaning and bellyaching. You put your head down and pushed forward, and you kept doing that until you either keeled over dead or retired and had a few years to look up and see how far you’d gotten.

  The door closed. My dad had left. I stared at the books, my right arm clenched tightly to my side.

  * * *

  They put forth more effort than they thought possible. They found new depths of strength and heights of hope and faith. They found their inner beauty, and challenged anyone to say it was of less value than their outer beauty had been. They fought and never relented, because they knew it was God himself who had a plan for them and they weren’t going to buckle under his gaze.