~*~
The razor was never discussed that night, and never was until it was too late. We patched up our marriage and fell in love all over again during our days away at our cabin hideaway.
It turned out the cable company had wanted to hire her full time anyway, and not just doing customer service. They had liked her work ethic, and had an opening in their Accounts Payable Department. Our first day back from our mountain getaway, she started as a full-time accountant.
Life was good. We were in love and making it work. We had good jobs and were happy.
Until Felicia’s kidneys stopped working.
Here’s the thing about kidneys—you pretty much need them to live. Pretty much because you can go on dialysis. Day after day of getting your blood funneled through an external machine, doing the job your kidneys should be doing. It isn’t ideal, but it does the job. The tediousness, the constant draining and refilling of your lifesource, the drudgery of it all is enough for some people to want to call it quits.
That wasn’t Felicia, but then again, she wasn’t really given a lot of choices.
I’ve learned a lot about kidneys and kidney failure since she was diagnosed, but most people go through the process over the course of years from when the kidneys begin to decline up until the organs eventually just can’t go on any longer. From what other people have told me, the journey takes a long time and by the time you reach the end, it is an inevitability—one that has been accepted by everyone involved long before it actually happens.
Felicia went from being a healthy young woman to having two non-functioning kidneys within just a matter of weeks. The decline was so sudden, we had dozens of doctors, nurses, and specialists stumped as they tried to figure out what was happening to her. What was happening to us.
She couldn’t be placed on the donor list—not for months. I thought we might be able to wait that long, but the look I caught when the doctors were talking to each other was worrying. I’d seen that look before and it wasn’t good. They wanted to keep her at the hospital, but I was starting to wonder if that was best. If Felicia’s days were numbered, I wanted her to be at home. Not in some cold, sterile hospital. The doctors wouldn’t budge, telling me that she needed daily dialysis. Even then, her blood was just not keeping up with the daily dialysis.
“We’d rather she stayed here,” Dr. Anderson told me a few days after the diagnosis came down.
“What about going home?”
“You don’t have the proper equipment at home. She needs to stay here.”
I knew the main reason they wanted her to stay close was the strangeness of her case. Like I said, the kidneys usually lasted a lot longer than weeks when they started dying. Felicia’s were literally dead weight already.
Felicia’s case was so bizarre that the local television station heard about it and ran a feature on her and her abnormal kidneys. A friend ran a crowd-funding campaign on our behalf and within a week enough had been raised to bring Felicia home and to have a dialysis machine full-time at the house. Normally this wouldn’t have been an option, but our situation was far from normal.
As we prepared to leave the hospital, Dr. Anderson pulled me aside.
“Greg, I want to prepare you for the inevitable. Felicia is not going to get better. There is something wrong with her that we still can’t identify.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He looked away for a moment, and then refocused on me. “I’m saying her time is limited. Medical science has progressed a long way, but I think we’re still going to be figuring out Felicia’s case long after she’s gone,” he said, then added, “which probably won’t be very long.”
I was stunned. We were in our late 20’s. We were supposed to be invincible. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen to you when you weren’t even 30 yet.
“I’m so sorry. If I were you, I’d come to grips with it and start making the final preparations. Say what needs to be said. Your wife is going to die.”
~*~
I didn’t believe Dr. Anderson. Not completely. When you haven’t even broken a bone in your whole life, it’s hard to understand your wife is going to die when she was at the pinnacle of health just weeks earlier. I guess part of me wanted to just wake up from this nightmare, Felicia by my side and have her tell me it was all going to be okay.
But it wasn’t.
For the final few weeks of her life, I had a routine. I’d get up and clean the house, make breakfast, and get Felicia’s dialysis machine ready. After she woke up, we’d hook her up. It was draining, but within a few hours, it was the high point of the day. After that, I just did everything I could.
After a few days, Felicia knew.
“Greg?”
“Mmm?” I replied, still half asleep. I pulled my cell phone out and saw the time. 3:12 a.m. “What do you need, honey?”
“I’m going to die.”
If I wasn’t awake yet, that cleared my head quickly. I hadn’t talked to her about what Dr. Anderson had shared with me before we left the hospital. I didn’t want to worry her, but she knew. It was her body after all.
I turned over and found her gaze boring into me. Already I felt tears beginning to pool in my eyes. I couldn’t help it; I nodded.
“You knew.”
Not a question. Not an accusation. No anger. Just a statement.
“I did. Dr. Anderson said he didn’t know what was wrong. They knew about the kidneys, but they really couldn’t figure out why it was happening. What is really going on,” I said. I reached out and pulled her close to me. “I’m so sorry. I wish…”
“It’s okay. I’ve laid awake the last few nights thinking about it. I guess I’ve gone through most of the stages of grief as this point. I’ve had a good life. My childhood wasn’t bad, my parents were pretty great, and I’ve been to Disney World,” she said, pulling back to show me a small smile. I squeezed her shoulders, and she added, “…and of course I had a freaking awesome husband.”
“And you were an amazing wife,” I said. “I can’t believe I was lucky enough to find you. All this time, and you still take care of me. Even this morning, I walked into the bathroom to find you unplugged my razor. Every time I use it, I leave it plugged in, and when I go back in later, you’ve unplugged it. It was such a small thing, but all this time, I’ve known you loved me just by that little gesture.”
Felicia pulled back from me again and gave me a strange look.
“Greg, what are you talking about?”
~*~
Felicia passed away three days later. It was quiet; she went in her sleep. The dialysis just couldn’t keep up with her blood. When the end finally came, she was at peace.
But I wasn’t.
I wanted to believe she was somehow delirious when she didn’t’ know about the razor. I hoped beyond reason she was just tired and her brain wasn’t firing right because her body was in the process of shutting down. I wished…
But ultimately, the truth was staring me in the face. For seven years we’d lived in this apartment and for seven years I’d allowed someone else to unplug my razor in the bathroom. I thought someone was Felicia, but ultimately it wasn’t.
The day after Felicia’s funeral I walked into the bathroom. It was remarkably clean; Felicia’s mother had stopped by a few days earlier and made it sparkle. I didn’t touch anything except for the cord to my electric razor. I looked at it – there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about it, so I slowly pushed it into the wall outlet.
I couldn’t bear to stay in the apartment, so I walked out, locking the door behind me. I just walked around the city. I just put one foot in front of the other for hours. I didn’t really know how far I walked; all I know is that the sky was threatening complete darkness by the time I returned.
The bathroom wasn’t right by the front door, but I was frozen in my tracks right at the threshold to the apartment.
I wasn’t ready. I wanted to run away, but if I was living in this apartment for seven
years, then I could bear with it for another few minutes.
Just like I did when I tried to wear a groove into the city’s sidewalks, I simply put one foot in front of another as I walked to the bathroom. Reaching around the door frame, I flipped on the light switch. As soon as the light filled the room, I saw two things that made my heart stop.
The electric razor was unplugged.
And on the mirror was written in my dead wife’s lipstick: “Now we can be together.”
~*~
THE PARK
Daniel Arthur Smith
~*~
One of the great things about bartending is that you don’t have to wait for the weekend to play ball—and Tank enjoyed a good game of ball. Any kind of ball really—football, basketball, baseball—he even had a set of golf clubs, not a full set, but a set just the same. The game today was baseball, with a few friends from his theater group—all actors like him—and he was jazzed. The Red Sox were in town and he’d scored tickets from Mick Santone, one of the O’Malley’s regulars—impossible tickets, but when you’ve been tendin’ bar long enough, you know guys.
Everything had been looking good, the weather, the game—up three runs—and Tank was powerhousing his swing. They were playing at the Hecksher Ballfields, down in the south end of Central Park below the Shep Meadow, and every time he was at the plate he put his eye to the top of the Time Warner building and BAM! Nailed it! Every time. Well… Two times. But he was going for a third.
That was when the sky went dark.
The day was already gray, but so what? Not too sunny, all the better. Chet, over on first, he was the one to see it coming. The huge cloud, a monster of a thing, straight off the weather channel.
“Look at those swirling lightning cables,” Chet said. “Like that Ghostbusters movie. Are they filming another Ghostbusters?”
Tank slowly lowered his bat as he drew his attention to the lightning show.
Devon said, “It’s right over the Empire State Building.” He stepped off the mound. “Was that the building in the first one?”
“No,” Tank said. He raised the bat up to his right, and without turning from the spectacle said, “The Ghostbusters building is right over there at the edge of the park… on 66th.”
Who you gonna call? Tank thought. As if to answer his question, a news chopper soared overhead toward the center of the cloud.
Alligator tear raindrops began to spew down. The game was definitely on hold.
“I thought they did all of that with digital effects,” Devon said.
“Apparently not,” Tank said.
They, along with everyone else in Central Park, watched the skyline show. The other ball players, the joggers, the nannies in the large playground, even some of the older children, all were seduced by the show, all visible to the grand acreage. In a city where anyone can see most anything on any given day, this was special, was spectacular.
“How much you suppose it costs to make a movie like that?” Chet asked.
“A lot,” Tank said. “Must be a new Avengers movie.”
“You think we’ll see Iron Man?”
Tank swung his head toward Chet. He was about to tell him that was ridiculous, but then looked back up at the two news choppers and the huge blue ball hovering above the building, and all of the electrical arcs. “Maybe,” he said.
He’d stumbled across a ton of television and movie sets since he lived in the city. You practically tripped over them on the Upper West Side. He’d even been on a few, small parts, very small… But you got to start somewhere. Of all of those sets, though, he’d never seen a production like this. Chet was right. This had to be costing a fortune. Had to be huge. And if it was so huge, how come he hadn’t heard anything about it? He really had to get a new agent. Agatha wasn’t cutting it. A movie this big? They were going to have a ton of roles for regular actors and that’s all it would take for him to be discovered. And only a big name would have a budget this huge. If it was an Avengers movie, it could be Joss Whedon again. That would be excellent. Or maybe Jon Favreau was back in. Tank thought he heard that at the bar. A movie this big, man, James Cameron, Ridley Scott. Tank was going to call Agatha right after the game.
And the—all of a sudden like—one of the news choppers fell from the sky, slammed down, below the skyline, out of sight.
“Did you see that?” Devon yelled.
Tank was agape. He nodded. “Yeah.”
“You can remote control a whole chopper?” Chet asked.
“Apparently,” Tank said.
He was so going to get a spot in this movie.
Then came an effect like none he’d ever seen before. From the center of the action, the peak of the Empire State Building, a translucent bubble inflated and then rapidly expanded outward—toward the park, toward him. The trees in front of Tank ruffled loudly against the speeding wall of the bubble and the ground beneath dully roared.
The glimmering wall traveled so fast that Tank and the others had no time to dive or shield themselves so that when the near invisible surface of the large sphere slammed against him, it slapped him down to the tarmac of the ball field like a toy.
Flat on his back, Tank stared up at the gray sky bewildered for a second and the hoisted himself up on his elbows. His friends were down too.
He smiled and began to chuckle.
His reached for the bat—cast to his side as he fell—and began to stand.
Tank dusted himself off and looked back out across the diamond. He was about to say something, but then everything went black.
~*~
Tank’s eyes opened gritty to the park bench’s thin, green lacquered planks. It took a second to register that he’d slept there. He didn’t sit up. Rather, he kept his head on the warm painted wood, stared into the wall of misty gray, and listened. The screams that woke him came from deep in the surrounding fog.
Something horrible was happening out in that hell.
There was fine gravel beneath and around the bench. He pieced together where he was. The only walkway manicured like that was the Mall—Poets’ Walk. He rolled onto his back. Rather than the canopy of giant elms he expected to see, he saw only more of the gray vapor.
He was surrounded by vapor and screams, a cacophony of men and women, some hollers, some moans, meshed and blended.
The mist above began to play games with his eyes, become elastic, pull away, return. He thought he make out the long thin branches of the elms. The apparition began to move, wriggle. He squinted to focus, blinked, and then they were gone.
He sat up.
He came here in the dark. No, not dark. It was more than that. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see in the dark, it was dark because he couldn’t see. There had been that huge show over the Empire State Building, that huge blue orb. He was knocked on his ass, and things went black. No. That’s not how it went. It was after he stood up. He was standing up and everything went inky black. Someone shut the lights out, his lights, and everyone else around him. His friends were nearby, Chet, the others. And then they weren’t. He heard them complaining, yelling, and then he didn’t hear them at all. Then he heard screaming.
Yes.
That was when the screaming began. He’d moved away from the screams, for hours, what must have been the whole night. Swinging his bat to find his way, he’d felt the hollow thud of the trees and the thick thud of people too. “Sorry,” he’d said, and then kept walking.
When he heard the wails of the animals from the zoo, that’s when he’d stopped. Somehow, their screams were too much to bear. He stumbled upon the bench, held his bat tight, and he waited.
There was some relief. He remembered that he wanted to sleep, that things were going to be okay when he woke up. An eternity passed before his eyes closed.
But Tank slept.
Though he wasn’t sure for how long. He may have slept well into the next day. It could be six in the morning or six in the afternoon.
He couldn’t sit there all day on the bench, in t
he warm moist of the fog.
It could be dark again… soon.
He wasn’t about to find out.
Tank tapped the tip of his bat on the fine gravel, and then hoisted himself up from the bench.
Which way to go?
The left, right, every direction was exactly the same, a thick gray fog on all sides. With his head on the bench, he was able to see five, maybe seven feet out into the gravel walkway, but standing, he couldn’t see the ground at all. He knew the bench ran pretty much north to south but apart from that there was no other sense of direction. So using the bench as a guide, he decided to go left.
If he was on the Poets’ Walk, he could make his way out easy enough. South would lead him to East Drive, north to Terrace Drive, both of those to the East Side. He lived on the West Side, but if he was where he thought, the East Side would be a lot closer, and he could navigate the fog a lot easier from there than the middle of the park. He could walk the grid.
The screams and howls from deep in the fog were distant, but constant. He was becoming accustomed to the park’s macabre soundtrack. So much that he caught himself holding his breath during the brief silences in between.
As he walked he swung his bat in front of him to dissipate the fog, wide arcs to the left and to the right.
He tried to think about something else, the game, the Yankees and the Red Sox, but then, there was no game. How could there’ve been a game after what happened?
And then he reeled back to that.
What did happen? That wasn’t a movie, those weren’t special effects, all of that darkness, blackness, screaming—that was real, the screaming.
The mist eerily thinned to reveal a huge blue and yellow umbrella, and below it, a large metal cart with a huge hot dog decaled across the side.
“Hells yes,” Tank said aloud as he rushed around the side, flipped up the lid to the cooler, and pulled out an oversized bottle of red berry Vitamin Water. There was a nasty odor coming from the back of the cart, he figured it was the hot dog water, heinous stuff. That didn’t stop his thirst. He cracked the plastic twist top of the Vitamin Water and chugged down half the bottle. Red streamed down the sides of his mouth onto his chin. He grabbed a handful of cheap paper napkins and wiped the seepage away. He flipped the next cart lid open. The rancid water slapped his face, he slammed the lid down and bent over, away from the cart, ready to hurl.
Tales from the Canyons of the Damned: Omnibus Page 15