Playtime
Bart Hopkins Jr.
Copyright © 2013 Bart Hopkins Jr.
All rights reserved
Cover Design by Book Beautiful
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Printed by CreateSpace
North Charleston, SC
Published by Bart Hopkins Jr.
Galveston, Texas
ISBN-10: 149487783X
ISBN-13: 978-1494877835
First Printing January 2014
For those who are gone
but not forgotten
Playtime
Chapter 1
Many times things change gradually, almost imperceptibly, shading into each other like the dusk and the night. But sometimes they change in an instant.
Blaine Hadrock died at 1:04 on a Tuesday afternoon in June. It was typical Galveston summer fare: south breeze blowing, sun pale white and fiery, beach full of tourists and traffic, a tapestry of human and animal players enjoying the scenery.
He was cruising on his maroon 1100 Honda Shadow, just down the street from his house, when the green Toyota Corolla backed out of the drive without seeing him, crunched into his rear fender and sent him sailing. He still should have made it. The impact threw him toward the side of the road and the grass. He had his matching maroon helmet on, but his flight path off the bike vectored him into a telephone pole. He careened straight at it, and instinctively, in that frozen flash of time, was trying to pull his head and body away, but there really wasn’t anything to push against, so he sailed on into it.
He had always known the bike was dangerous. He used to say that anything that would fall over if you weren’t holding it up had to be dangerous to ride. A car wouldn’t do that. And he’d been in plenty of tight spots on the Shadow. He’d been run off the side of the road on FM 2004 a couple of times, just barely holding on as the cycle skittered toward the white line and the suicidal slickness of the grass. He'd developed the survivalist skill of reading the intentions of drivers when cruising on it. But he missed the Corolla coming. A parked car blocked his vision till it was too late.
The girl driving the Corolla freaked out. She hadn’t seen him at all. Common enough, the way bikes managed to find that blind spot drivers have, hadn’t even known he was there until she heard the savage crunch of metal on metal, felt the impact and whipped her head around, just caught sight of him smacking into the pole and dropping to earth like a cow after it was zapped for slaughter.
She had screamed and gone a bit crazy for a second, then had whipped out her phone and gotten an ambulance headed their way. Hustled across the street to him lying flat on his back, unmoving, not breathing, and started CPR on him. She wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do in his case, but it was all she knew.
The paramedics had continued working on him, revived him on the way to the hospital and into the emergency room, but then lost him once more and called his death at 1:04.
So they were surprised when he came to life again about 1:11.
Chapter 2
Darkness all around him. Struggling, struggling, then he stops. Floats. Like he is on his back floating in water. Feels the warmth and relaxes. No need to struggle now. Brightness in the distance. A roar like the ocean in a conch shell. He can feel himself seeping out from the spot he is in to all the others that surround him. A great sense of peace fills him, and he relaxes totally, completely, like he has never relaxed before, and he senses a melding occurring: brightness flowing in and the darkness receding. Why had he ever struggled against this? The light shimmers and expands and fills his vision until it is all that there is.
"Hardrock" was what they called him more often than Blaine, but when he wakes up in the hospital bed the next day, he doesn’t care what they call him. He doesn’t know where or who he is. He vaguely remembers the Toyota crashing into him and sailing toward that pole. One second he’d been on the way home, and the next he was a guided missile.
He is lying on his back, and he stares up at the ceiling, trying to remember, but everything after that is a blur. He tests extremities, flexing fingers and toes, then legs and arms, popping elbows and knees. Everything seems to work. His head hurts. His neck too. He touches himself gingerly, probing here and there. Around his neck is one of those flexible, soft collars. He checks down below. All his junk is still there, but he is hooked up to a catheter. Great.
A pretty, blonde nurse about his age, 35 or so, comes briskly into the room carrying a clipboard.
"You’re up," she says.
"I guess," he replies. Blinks.
"How do you feel?"
"Head hurts some. Neck too." He tilts his head, pops his neck.
"You smacked a telephone pole. Not the best thing for your head."
"No? That your expert medical opinion?" he grunts.
"My, my," she says, "might be time to check your temperature." She holds up a thermometer. It doesn't appear to be the type for oral use.
He raises himself up on an elbow. It doesn’t seem to hurt all that bad.
"This has been fun, Nurse… Ratchet," he says, "but I have people to see and things to do." She cocks her head and shakes it. Then puts the thermometer back down, at least.
"Kimmy," she says. "Not today, you don't. The doctor will be by in a few minutes, but they are going to want to run some more tests on you, since it’s a head injury. They ran some scans on that and the neck and spine already."
"Feels okay," he replies. Checks her out. Kimmy is attractive.
"Standard stuff when you hit something as hard as you did," she says, bending over him with one of those tiny lights. "Let’s see those eyes." He squints up into the light. He can see the swell of her breasts. She does one eye then the other.
"They look good."
"Great," he says, though they are talking about different things.
It’s more than a few minutes, more like a few hours, when the door swings open again and a tall, young man wearing a lab coat comes in. He is thin with spectacles, freckled, somewhere in his thirties. He smiles at Blaine, buck teeth flashing.
"Well, so how you doing?" he asks. "I’m Dr. Jenkins."
"Feeling pretty chipper, Doc. Think I can get out of here?"
"We’re going to run a few more tests, make sure everything is doing what it should. Keep you another day or two. You hit that pole like a bomb is what I hear." He grins at Blaine: an amiable, likable sort of guy.
"That’s what they tell me, Doc."
"Did they tell you that they pronounced you dead at 1:04 yesterday afternoon?"
Blaine says, "Dead? Missed that part."
"Yep, dead. You are a lucky man, Blaine. You were gone for a while. They had given up on you, called it, when all of a sudden you took this huge gasp, scared the hell out of everybody and just started breathing again. You do have a slight concussion. So, just let us look you over and make sure that head is all right. No need rushing out of here. You’re a miracle, my man. No hurry now. We don’t want to lose you again."
"Right, Doc. Right," Blaine says. He sighs. No harm trying.
"And it’s a miracle you didn’t suffer more damage to your neck and spine. X-rays and scans look good, though. How do those areas feel?"
"Neck hurts, Doc, but everything feels like it still works."
"You must have hit that pole at an
angle, glanced off it," Jenkins says. "If you’d hit it head-on, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation."
"Thank God for helmets," Blaine says.
"Amen and hallelujah to that," says the doctor. "I really can’t believe so many people don’t wear them. I’d like to have them come see what we do in the ER. I think they’d change their mind. It’s bad enough when you have one on. Without one, your eggs really get scrambled."
The doctor then proceeds to put Blaine through some tests. What day it is, where he is, and what season. Counting down from 100 by 7. Naming some objects: his stethoscope, a pencil, the clipboard. The stethoscope stumps Blaine for a second. Dr. Jenkins reads a sentence from the chart he is carrying and tests Blaine's comprehension. He mentions three objects to Blaine, does a few other tests then checks his recall of the three objects. Finger to the nose and such. Makes him copy a simple drawing.
"I’m not much of an artist," Blaine says, taking the pad and pencil, but manages a not-too-bad replica of some geometric figure. "What does all this stuff really tell you, Doc? Seems fairly simple, most of it."
"You’d be surprised, Blaine. The tests we've just run through cover your sensory perception, motor control, working memory, language, spatial skills, and more."
"Wow," Blaine says. He is familiar with most of the tests, is just yanking his chain a bit, giving him a chance to share some knowledge. You never know when you will learn something.
"You were without oxygen for a few minutes, so that was a concern, but all your functions look good. By the way," he says, "your mother called, and your brother, too, this morning, wanting to know if they should head this way. I told them I thought you were going to be fine, but they may be coming."
The doctor checks his reflexes and shines the light in his eyes again, talking affably all the while, then leaves Blaine to it and continues on his rounds.
Blaine is trying to process the fact that he had been dead and come back. He doesn’t remember much, but the doctor had told him that was normal. Sometimes some memory comes back, he said, but more likely it won’t. Head trauma is a very dangerous, unpredictable thing. Blaine calls his mother and brother and reassures them both that he is fine, not to come down for this. They protest vigorously, but finally agree.
They give him some more function tests the next day, and all seems normal. The test results come back fine; everything is looking good. They had taken the catheter out the day before, and he had been moving around on shaky legs to the bathroom and back. When he pauses to peer out the window, he sees that he is up high in the hospital, the 6th floor, and the gulf is glinting in the sunlight.
The room itself is one of those odd-shaped rooms, rectangular with that pale green paint and strange diagonal corners, the cushioned chair that folds down so visitors can sleep over, with the usual TV set up high in one of the diagonals.
He tries to remember how it was to be dead, and he actually thinks some of that is coming back to him, or at least the ride to the hospital with the paramedics bent over him, working to try and get him going again. He doesn’t have a visual image but seems to remember the sounds of their voices. Or maybe he’s just convinced himself of that, since the doc told him. He can’t be sure.
On the third day, they tell him they are going to cut him loose. They tell him that sometimes these injuries are not all apparent right away, to be sensitive to the possibility of other problems. He should wear the collar for several weeks. He has grown semi-fond of the blonde nurse, Kimmy, and she seems to like him. She walks up to see him off. He certainly doesn’t have many secrets from her, her being all up in his business and everything and with those hospital gowns letting the ass show. He has to take a wheelchair down to the lobby with his cousin Jason, who has come to take him to the house.
He and Jason aren’t very close, but he has no other relatives nearby who are available, and he is grateful to him. Jason is a hulking young guy: long blonde hair in the surfer mode, with a real diamond stuck in one ear.
"Is there a back way out?" Jason asks, as they get ready to roll out of the room.
"Why," Blaine says, "you hiding from somebody?"
"Nope, cuz," Jason says, "you are. You are famous, dude. You're the miracle man who died and came back. All sorts of reporters and people downstairs, waiting on you, man. They found out you're going home, somehow."
"Shit," Blaine says. "I don’t want to talk to any reporters."
"All right then, man. Back way it is."
Kimmy smiles and says, "Sure you guys don’t want your 15 minutes?"
"Those blood-sucking vultures," Blaine says. "You don’t want to know what I wouldn’t even give them."
"All right, then," she says. "Let’s roll."
Chapter 3
So they go flying down the hallway, with Jason enjoying his role and pushing like a fiend, until Kimmy tells him to slow that thing down. Blaine had tried to just walk, but she wasn’t having any.
"Rules are rules," she says.
"You weren’t saying that when you were peeking down my gown," Blaine teases.
"Business, Blaine," she replies, deadpan. "That's why they pay me the big bucks." She grins.
He snorts. She has a wicked little smirk.
Jason turns the chair and maneuvers him into the elevator backwards. They sink towards the lobby in fits and starts as other folks get in and out. It is a full load by the time the light comes on, and the bell dings for the first floor. Jason has to wait for the crowd to leave before he can get the wheelchair angled and moving out. Blaine starts to get up, but Kimmy puts a hand on his shoulder and says, "Stay in till we hit the door. Please."
"All right, all right," Blaine says, "but you owe me. Maybe we could talk about all this sometime, someplace else."
"Maybe …" she says, looking down at him in a not entirely unfavorable way. Blaine knows pretty women don’t mind a little flirting, if it’s done in a nice way. "That's possible."
But they are hard to figure.
They wheel toward the back entrance, Jason taking it a bit easier, but there is a group gathered around it, most of them guys in coats and ties. Blaine hears somebody say, "That’s him," and realizes he hasn’t beaten the crowd after all.
Kimmy says, "Coming through," and to Jason: "Keep rolling." They move around the side of the group and continue toward the entrance. They trip the sensors on the automatic door; it whooshes open, and then they are outside on the sidewalk, the group starting to reform in front of them as Blaine gets up out of the chair. He stretches his legs and contemplates breaking through like a running back. Kimmy has beaten a hasty retreat. A woman directly in front of him has a phone or microphone or some other device in her hand.
"Mr. Hadrock," she says. "Judy Barker, Daily Sun. I understand that you were declared clinically dead on your arrival at the hospital and came back to life. What was that like?"
"I don't remember," he says. "I was dead." He smiles. A ripple of laughter runs through the group.
"And now you aren't," says the woman, smiling back. "Congratulations. The information we have says that your heart had stopped, all vitals ceased, for about 10 minutes."
"Did you have a near-death type experience?" comes from a short, stout, dark-haired fellow with horn-rimmed glasses.
"I actually really don’t remember much of anything at all, though the doctor says I may get more memory back. Or not. These things can go either way."
Silence for a moment after that, and Blaine can tell that they were hoping he’d seen God or the light at the end of the tunnel or something. A disappointed rustle seems to move through the crowd as they sense they are not going to get an exciting revelation. He gazes at them, and they look like they are already moving on in their minds, thinking about the next thing.
"Going to keep riding your motorcycle?" a slender, sandy-haired guy asks.
"I don’t know if I’ll be riding that one," Blaine says. "But I’ll be riding one, yeah. Now if you folks will excuse me, I am gonna head home."
Chapter 4
It is a beautiful Galveston day, much like the day Blaine died. They walk toward the hospital lot a block away. He wonders how the sick folks make it. The bad cases must get picked up at the front door. The sun is shining, the sky is blue. Again. There is a feeling in the air that nothing bad could happen on a day like this. It's the same feeling he had the day he was hit.
They reach Jason’s vehicle, an old beater Dodge truck with primer spots scattered over a cream paint job, and head off to the Kroger drive-through to fill a prescription for pain medication, though Blaine probably won’t take any of it. He removes the collar. He is not wearing that thing one second longer. His neck hurts, but not that much.
He is funny about pain and medicine, believes that the less intervention you can get away with, the better. He is in a bit more pain than he let on in the hospital, but he figures if he had told them that they would keep him there forever.
The law had impounded the bike, had it sent to a storage facility, so he and Jason drive by Bilke’s Yard to pick it up. The guy at the window, a biker-looking type himself, tells them it will be 210 dollars.
"210 bucks," Blaine gripes. "That’s robbery."
"That’s what it is, my brother," says the guy, looking like he could give a rat’s ass about Blaine or his bike or anything else, for that matter. He’s a big guy, got the blue-jean jacket with cut-off sleeves, a pony tail going down his back and a cross stapled to one ear. The building is just a huge shed made of corrugated metal, with a large fenced yard full of old autos in various states of decline.
"What if I leave it?"
"Well," he says, scratching his chin, "the charges keep mounting up, eventually we sell it for little or next to nothing, probably, then we send you a bill for the balance."
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