The Danger of Being Me

by Anthony J Fuchs

  "You probably had a night terror, and it gave you a panic attack, and now you're just out of breath -- "

  "Jesus fuckin Christ," I gasped. Shrill fire burst in my chest as I forced out the words: "I. Can't. Breathe."

  She spoke again. I heard an incoherent babble. I wanted to stand up and kick this chair over, look into her face, tell her that I was choking on my own breath. The energy couldn't match the will. I closed my eyes, enjoying the coolness of the tabletop and the smell of the bleach that Regina had used to wipe down the table. I memorized that smell as the kneading at my back grew impatient.

  You know what probably happened, my mother said in a language I no longer understood. Her incomprehensible phonemes rang with the satisfaction of one who has solved a great mystery. Good for her. You probably pulled a muscle in your back. She rubbed at a particular muscle that I might have been able to name, had I been thinking of anything but the divine scent of Chlorox. Here, she said.

  I nodded. Why not. A pulled muscle. A bruised rib. A malfunctioning alien implant. A congenital twin. A subatomic gateway in my brachial artery to a dimension of pure chaos beyond the known universe. Whatever.

  My mother seemed to take my nod as confirmation, and wandered away. I heard a relentless knocking above me like a hammer on an anvil underwater. The second hand of the analog clock over the kitchen door. The solid piece of maple carved into the shape of a dove that I built in seventh-grade woodshop. In another lifetime.

  I knew, with the divine scent of Chlorox flooding my lungs, that I would die with my face mashed against the faux-wood surface of this dining room table. My last seconds counted down by a piece of my own handiwork. I found the surreal absurdity appealing. To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream. Aye. There's the rub.

  And in the end, isn't all of life but a dream within a dream? Wasn't that what the prophetess Annabel Lee had written, lounging naked and glorious under the silver light of a bleached moon upon the infinite sands of the night's Plutonian shore? Or maybe it had been Emily Dickinson. I could not, after all, be bothered to stop for Death.

  So Death kindly stopped for me. He looked an awful lot like my mother as she returned from the small half-bath off her own bedroom. She carried a dingy glass of water in one hand and set it on the table next to my arm as she offered what lay in the palm of her other hand. A small white tablet engraved with a tiny v. Vicodin.

  She placed it in my hand. I clenched my fist around it. She placed the glass of water in my free hand. Take that, she said, patting the hand clutching the pill. It'll help.

  Sure it would. It had to. There wasn't much further to go if it didn't. I got my lips and my teeth open far enough to wedge the tablet into the corner of my mouth, and lifted my head enough to empty the glass of water and wash the drugs down my throat. Then I laid my head back against the cool tabletop, nestled against my arm.

  My mother rubbed at my back again. Snoring tumbled down the stairs from Regina's second floor bedroom as my sister slept through what must have been a vivid dream. The analgesic crept through my blood, aided surely by my mother's kneading. My short and shallow breaths passed more easily as that avian clock beat out its seconds. I hated that clock. I decided to take it down the next morning, maybe the next afternoon, and burn it in a trashcan.

  Come on, my mother said in that gibberish language of hers. She pulled at my sides, and I got the idea of what she meant. I dredged my last reserves of energy and pushed myself out of the chair. My legs protested, then gave out entirely, but my mother moved beside me, surprising me with her strength. She caught me, and I felt overwhelmed by what an abysmal child I had turned out to be.

  Hopefully Regina would do a better job.

  My feet responded sluggishly. My mother walked me back to my room, holding me up when my body refused to cooperate, keeping me steady when corners jumped out at me. She got me back to my room again, and I wanted nothing more than to curl up on that drooping mattress and dissolve into the warmth of sleeponcemore.

  Maybe I said so, or maybe my mother simply heard my thoughts. Mothers can do that. She got me across the room, and I collapsed onto my bed, flat on my back, staring at the Infinite Regress poster on the far wall.

  Let's see how you are in the morning, my mother said. It sounded perfect to me. Then she kissed my forehead, and walked out of the room. I wanted to cry. Maybe I did. I laid alone in those inviting shadows, suffocating on the thought of what an abysmal child I'd turned out to be.

  But I could make that right.

  I could start tomorrow.

  Absolutely.

  I never pulled the blanket up.

  Darkness slipped over me all by itself.

  I suffocated in my sleep at 5:29 in the morning.

  The hydrocodone ensured that I didn't wake up.

  I suppose it was the best I could have hoped for.

  Of course: none of that happened.

  But it almost did. Instead, I felt shrill fire burst in my chest as I forced out the words: "I. Can't. Breathe."

  I rolled my face over on the tabletop, the edges of my vision filling with flat grey light. The divine scent of Chlorox flooded my lungs. Then my sister came staggering down her bedroom stairs, bleary-eyed and half-awake and shivering. I heard her voice, convinced that Andarta had come to deliver a celestial message.

  Come along now, She might say.

  Or perhaps instead, it is not your time.

  Maybe just Eat at Joe's.

  Regina stopped halfway down the staircase, arms wrapped around herself, sweating and shaking. She looked like she just crawled out of an ice-bath. She stared down at me for one long moment, and said: "take him to the hospital for Christ's sake. He can't breathe."

  7.

  My mother packed me into her Jeep Wagoneer and drove me to Prophecy General Hospital.

  Shortly before two, a nurse wheeled me into an examination room. I changed out of my clothes into an insubstantial paper smock, and a resident conducted the preliminaries before wheeling me into an X-ray station. A rumble of throaty clunking thundered around my head, and then I returned to my examination room.

  Three o'clock came and went, and no one mourned its passing. When the doctor arrived, she carried my X-rays. She showed me and my mother the black spot that covered the entire right half of my chest, and I nodded as if I understood what I saw. The doctor looked to my mother as if she expected her to understand better, then said:

  "Your right lung has collapsed."

  I stared at her stupidly, then asked only, "How?"

  "Can't say for sure," she said to the X-ray. She pointed out what appeared to be the neck: "You've actually got a pair of full-formed cervical ribs here, which is exceedingly rare and completely unrelated to your lungs."

  She glanced to my mother, then looked to me. "Do you ever smoke cigarettes, Michael?"

  I shook my head. "No," I told her, sure that she wouldn't believe me anyway. "Not even once."

  She nodded. "Do you feel safe in your environment?"

  I laughed, and a fresh batch of dark sparkles fluttered across my vision. "If I didn't," I said, nodding toward my mother, "would I really...tell you in front...of her?"

  The doctor nodded again, twitching a small grin.

  "What the hell caused it?" my mother demanded.

  The doctor considered. "It appears to be a primary spontaneous pneumothorax. Somehow, air has gotten into the space between the pleural membranes of the lung and the chest wall. It may have been caused by a bleb, or a rupture in the pleural layer, but it can't get out, and now it's essentially suffocating you from the inside."

  My mother nodded at all the right places. When the doctor finished, I looked up at her and said , "so it's just...a fancy name...for a lung that pops...for no good reason."

  The doctor smirked. I couldn't tell if I amused her or annoyed her. But she patted me on the shoulder. "Don't you worry, Michael. We'll fix you up right."

  She transferred me to a surgery prep room, where I received a
n IV. An analog clock ticked around to 3:48 as another nurse gave me my first injection.

  The dose of Demerol swept me into its warm current, and I hardly noticed when my doctor injected the right half of my chest, behind the pectoral under the armpit, with a local anesthetic. "You're going to feel some pressure," she told me, "and it's going to hurt. You ready?"

  I had to respect her honesty. I nodded.

  She nodded back, and made a quick incision into my abdomen. Then she drove a needle the size of a railroad spike between my ribs, forcing it through the tough tissues of my diaphragm. I started to gasp, but the breath stuck in the middle of my throat, and that one excruciating moment stretched beyond the event horizon of human thought.

  Then the needle punctured the diaphragm, and all of those raging hornets streamed out of my chest at once. One fluttered briefly in front of my face, as if it wanted to apologize for all of my pain and suffering, before buzzing off into the hallway. Or maybe I imagined that.

  The steel strap around my gut snapped. The flames in my lungs went out. I heard a sucking sound under my arm and I inhaled, drawing a full, beautiful breath.

  Then I dozed off into the delirium of a Demerol haze.

  I bobbed briefly back to the surface of consciousness again in the operating room where I laid on a gurney. I gripped a nurse's hand, and turned to tell her that I was scared. She looked at me. I forgot what I meant to say.

  "It's okay, Michael," the disembodied contralto of a seraph told me. "You're going to be just fine."

  I smiled, trusting her. She spoke again. "Try to relax. Just breathe. Count backwards from 100."

  Swampy darkness flooded over me before I finished the syllable, "one—"

  "—derful," I sigh as dawnlight splashes through the blinds.

  I blink. Soft breath warms the side of my neck. Her body curls against my side, her head on my shoulder, her gentle russet curls brushing against my cheek. Her bouquet of spearmint and lime floods my lungs, and makes me feel tipsy. I smile.

  Because I know what it feels like to be her derivative.

  I glide my hand along her side, tracing the gentle curve of her hip, marveling at my staggering fortune. That she should be here, with me, after all this time and all the impossible miles.

  She wakes then as my fingertips trail across her waist. She tilts her head, and the sunlight catches the breathtaking honey-gold of her eyes. I know her, though I do not know her.

  "You had that dream again," she says. Her lips curl into a beauteous smile. She knows me so much better than I will ever know myself. I nod, and smile back at her, and press my mouth to hers. The electric flavor of her lips sets my blood on fire.

  She laughs against my mouth. Then she climbs out of bed and crosses the room to the master bathroom. I lie back into my pillows, and try to remember the dream. Elusive images trickle through the cracks in my mind like freezing seawater through my fingers. Regina, and Ben, and Phil. The soapstone boulders on Prophet's Point. An operating room. Lightning.

  And in a couple of seconds, even that is gone.

  I glance to my bedside table. The framed photograph stands just where I left it last night, between the digital alarm clock and my copy of Doctor Sleep. Right where it belongs.

  I watch the picture, and stare into the past, marveling at this moment captured, preserved, immortalized. Ben flashes rock-horns in his best Gene Simmons impersonation at the right side of the frame. Winnie favors the photographer with a broad, endearing smile, while Helen cocks an eyebrow at the camera in a look somehow both patronizing and curiously alluring. Phil glances sidelong toward the camera, distracted from the card in his palm. And at the left side of the frame, not even looking at the camera, Ethan wears that impossibly knowing grin.

  I do not appear in this photograph.

  I climb out of bed wearing only my boxerbriefs, and cross to the corner desk where my laptop lays closed. I tap my fingertips against the lid and briefly consider opening the computer.

  "How much did it snow?" she calls from the bathroom.

  I glance out the window. Frozen sunlight sparkles off the white sheet stretching away across the lawn toward the cul-de-sac of Likewise Terrace. The sky goes on emptying itself like the whispering of a madman, layers on layers like fresh and unending insanity. Snow heaps up past the front fender of my silver Jeep Liberty. The sun burns too bright, and I turn away.

  "Two feet and counting," I tell her as I look at the laptop's metallic shell. I decide not to turn on the computer.

  "Of course it did," she laughs. "Especially today."

  I turn toward the bathroom. The toilet flushes. I laugh with her as the shower curtain rattles across the rod. Water streams out of the showerhead. I cross the room, passing the foot of the bed and leaning around the door frame. I see her standing under the steaming spray, eyes closed, naked, drenched, glorious.

  We will grow old together, her and I, tidally locked to one another, the strands of a double helix. We will have children, and our children will have children, and their children will have children. The House of Everett will grow large and reshape the world. These things are true. I know them as I look at her.

  And she knows. Of course she does. She always knew.

  She feels me watching, and looks at me with those caramel eyes that take my breath away. She cocks an eyebrow at me, the corner of her lips flickering into an intricate little grin.

  I smile. Then I step into the shower with her.

  We drive to the high school in warm silence.

  We spent half-an-hour digging the Liberty out of the snow, and another twenty minutes crossing town. The plows ran all night, clearing and salting the streets of Prophecy Creek.

  At a little after seven in the morning, I twist the steering wheel to the right. The Liberty rolls around the corner, down the curving two-lane driveway, and into the student parking lot behind the high school. The blacktop glistens under the cold clarity of the glacial light, entirely abandoned. Every school in Wenro County closed down today because of the nor'easter.

  I pull into a space at the sidewalk, overlooking the courtyard at the bottom of the wide stone staircase. We sit in the stillness for nearly a minute, staring out through the windshield, and even behind the veil of that blistering swirl, the lush Scot's Pine stands proudly in the courtyard. She sighs. Then I shut down the car, and we both climb out into the frigid Spring.

  No one cleared the sidewalks and courtyard and staircases. We pick our way carefully across the glittering breadth of snow, trudging down the upper staircase through knee-deep drifts to the concourse and the brick island that stands there.

  We are both panting by the time we make it around to the eastern face of that island, our breaths gushing out in shifting white bursts that mingle into the dancing snow. And we grin madly at ourselves, laughing at all the trouble we've gone to just to come visit a tree, and a rock, and a memory.

  The Scot's Pine once stood just twelve feet tall, and now it towers more than forty. I pull my jacket tighter and crane my neck to look up into its soaring branches. This tree should never have survived here, should never have thrived here. Not here.

  Except that it did. Of course it did.

  I feel her hand on my arm. I don't know if she's offering comfort or seeking it, but I do know that it doesn't matter. I look down at her hand, and I look up at her face, and I know somehow that the universe has bent to my own infinite will. Because she is here, with me, and that is the only truth that matters.

  I laugh. She flashes her beauteous smile at me, not getting the joke but content just to hear me laugh. Especially today.

  I turn back to the Scot's Pine. In the mulch at the base of the conifer, I find the 42-pound chunk of soapstone, engraved with a name and dates. A dusting of snow drifted beneath the lowest branches of the tree, and I reach for the stone to brush it away.

  I cannot make out the letters etched into the pearly surface of that cenotaph. I know the name, though I do not know the name. It blurs, and I know
that for all of my laughter, I am crying.

  All I can read is a date. 22 March 1998. Fifteen years ago.

  I give up trying to decipher the name and stand away. The girl beside me looks up the tree and into the sky. "The sun is too bright," she tells no one in particular, and she's right.

  I look up into a bleached sky and the frozen light that scatters off each twitching flake, and I blink against the unfiltered light of a supernova. A bitter breeze slices across the open grounds.

  Someone to my right says, "I never thought that anything more than weeds would ever grow here."

  When I turn, I find Ethan standing beside me, looking at the Scot's Pine rising up from that brick island. He wears a Campie Primary School windbreaker, his hands buried in the pockets of his jeans. Snowflakes glitter in the greasy curls of his hair. I don't know when he got here, but it's good that he's here.

  Especially today.

  He looks past me, nods, gives a short two-fingered wave. "Hey," he says. The girl at my right smiles and nods back.

  Ethan looks at the tree and the stone, at the name and the dates. He shakes his head. "Has it really been fifteen years?"

  "Yeah," I laugh bitterly, and shove a brackish tear off my cheek with the heel of my hand. "Fifteen fuckin years."

  The girl leans close to my right ear, flooding my lungs with the warmth of her breath. "I'm going to go back to the car," she tells me, and glances to Ethan. Her eyes meet mine again, and she smiles, and the sadness in her face breaks my heart.

  She presses her lips to mine, then starts back up the stairs to the parking lot. I watch her pick her way through the storm, and watch my own streaming breath. The sun burns too bright.

  Ethan squints up into the sky, then digs a green box out of his pocket. He flips the lid open, pulls out what looks like an ordinary cigarette, removes a pack of matches. He sets the cigarette between his lips, strikes the match, touches the flame to the end of the cigarette. He shakes out the match, drags off the cigarette, blows out the smoke, and looks back to that chunk of soapstone set into the mulch at the base of the conifer.