by JT Lawrence
The man remembered the story of an acquaintance who had died in a pool and then was slowly brought back to life. The man got out of the water.
The cardiologist consultation went well. The doctor was about to sign the clean bill of health when it came to the end of the stress test, where the man had to run on a treadmill, his strong-looking heart hooked up to the monitor.
“I didn’t like what I saw at the end of the stress test,” the doctor said on the phone to the woman.
What did he see?
“I just didn’t like the way he looked. I want him to come in for an angiogram.”
What could the woman say? She wasn’t going to argue with one of the best cardiologists in the country. The doctor recommended doing it on that Friday. He had an anaesthetist ready to help, should he go ahead and book the procedure?
The man said no, he felt fine, after all, and he had an important meeting on Friday. The doctor pushed again for Friday, but the man booked it three days later, on the Monday morning.
Friday arrived, and it was time for the man to leave for the important meeting. He put his helmet on, then took it off and sat on the couch, rubbing his chest as had become his habit. He sprayed his new medication under his tongue.
The cardiologist had said if he felt any heart pain, he was to use the spray. If he needed to use it a second time, he must go straight to the ER.
“Don’t wait to phone me,” he had said. “Just get straight to the hospital and call me on the way.”
After the first spray, his chest pains were not abating. He sprayed again. He felt better, and he put his helmet back on. The woman’s nerves were so shot she felt like her hair was on fire. She insisted her husband listened to the cardiologist’s advice. The man tried to call the doctor but the line was busy.
“I’ll call him on the way,” he said. He meant to the meeting, not the ER.
At that moment, if there existed an insta-divorce app, the woman would have used it.
He rode halfway down the block when his doctor called him back and told him to meet him in surgery immediately.
The cardiologist called the woman a few hours later. “It’s called a Widow Maker,” he said. “The most fatal heart attack you get.”
The world is not a safe place.
During the angiogram, they discovered the man had a critical narrowing of his left anterior artery, the most crucial pipeline of the heart. If that gets blocked, your whole heart collapses.
“It wasn’t a matter of IF he would have died,” said the surgeon. “It’s WHEN he would have died.”
Which, the woman thought, you could say about anybody on earth, but she took his point.
She was listening intently, wanting to know every detail. She wanted to know about the stent they had inserted, but she couldn’t escape the noise of the kids who were laughing and playing and shouting.
“The anaesthetist called him a ticking time bomb.”
The man had cheated death, and the woman had narrowly escaped a personal tragedy of unfathomable proportions. The children were two, four and six years old.
When she collected her husband from the hospital, they high-fived each other and hugged. They had been so lucky. They had dodged a fatal bullet. They had wrenched the man away from the precipice.
It would have been healthy to take a week off then, to process the trauma; seek counselling. But just because you almost lose your husband, doesn't mean you can stop to think about it. There was double the work to do while he recovered. Squawking mouths to feed, school meetings, cookie sales, headaches. More hospital bills, more deadlines to meet. More dark nights of thinking about how close they had come. The black water kept rising, and the woman kept treading. She was only just keeping her kids afloat, and now the man had joined them, too.
Some of the stories the woman wrote were disturbing. Sometimes she chose the story, and sometimes the story chose her. One was about a mother who drowns her children. The research was harrowing, and the woman lay awake at night with the sheer heart-rending horror of it. She avoided the story of the lost children for as long as she could, but it demanded to be written.
The work was both the woman's escape and her reason for getting up in the mornings. It was what she was meant to do. Write, publish, repeat. Build an empire that could pay the bills. She needed to keep going, keep reaching. A good writing session energised her and made the world feel right. Her craving to create was deeper than her need to rest. Her phone kept ringing and buzzing; emails pinged; messages vibrated. Everyone wanted to talk, talk, talk. The house maintenance drained her; the kids pecked at her. People said she was such a hard worker, but what they didn't see was the escape it gave her; the energy it afforded her. They didn't see the bedrock inside her that was entirely made up of the words she had written and the words she was yet to write.
But even with the freedom her work gave her, she couldn’t get away from the approaching thundercloud that pulsed with imminent danger. As the darkness swirled in, the static notched up. She didn’t feel like herself. Nightmares of her baby dying in the ambulance—Children can be unpredictable—in the hospital room, in her cot at home. Dreams of her children disappearing or being knocked over by cars. Her husband lying on the bottom of a pool made of glass. Her books turning into small white leech-like worms in her hands.
The eggs were in the paper, the printer in her terror-dream said.
Burn them all, she told him.
He shook his head. It’s too late. Your books are hatching all over the world.
The woman remembered the movie scene where Juliane Moore’s character—a housewife—wants to kill herself. She bakes her son a birthday cake, leaves him with a neighbour, then goes to a hotel room to commit suicide. She lies on the bed and has visions of the room being filled with water. She’s on the island in the middle, lying on her back, looking at the ceiling as the water rises. At the last minute, she decides to live. She wrenches her own body off the precipice and escapes to start a new life.
Running away from her family was not an option for the woman; there’d be no point. Her husband and children WERE the point. They were where the rawness was, the joy and pain and anger and love and the relentless tug of life. But it was too much.
I don’t know how you do it, people said. How do you cope?
I’m not coping, the woman said. I feel completely overwhelmed all the time. But that’s not what people want to hear.
One night, her husband was working and she—trying to meet a deadline and failing—started cooking dinner late. The children were all talking to her at the same time. Her right eye had been twitching for weeks. The four-year-old climbed onto the counter and accidentally knocked down a bottle of plum sauce, which shattered all over the floor. The baby, barefoot, wouldn’t listen when the woman warned her to stay back from the shards of glass. The lump in her throat swelled so much it felt like she couldn’t breathe past it; it was a ball of fire she couldn’t swallow. She went days and days feeling close to tears; blinking them away, telling herself to pull herself together. The tears were puzzling. She wasn’t sad; she had a lucky life. Too lucky.
What is wrong with me? she demanded as she scraped the syrupy sauce off the floor. Am I going mad? It was a legitimate question; there was a history of mental illness in her family. She has always had a bright, resilient mind. She thought she was immune.
The static took over her life when she wasn’t looking. Her eyes were open, but her vision was crowded with sticky hands and urgent appeals for everything but rest.
It’s just a very demanding time of life, she told herself.
It’s not going to get any less demanding, she heard her obstetrician riff.
The woman knew she could run away, but she didn’t want to. She could stop working, but stopping writing would just be a different kind of suicide.
I’m not coping, the woman told her husband. It hurt her to admit it. Their friends joked about her invisible superhero cape. It didn’t make sense to her. The year
before had been the challenging time and she had coped. The six-book contract, the gaping credit card deficit, the late nights, the health scares. The dark water rose and fell and then rose higher than before.
Things were going well. The kids were thriving; the woman's career had notched up.
This year’s easier, she kept telling herself. Except that for some reason it wasn’t.
She battled to write. She couldn't grasp common words, and her thoughts were being choked by the static. She thought it was a phase and kept trying, but day after day, the anxiety shut down her brain. It became harder to get out of bed in the mornings. Her hair began to break when she brushed it and then began to fall out. Nightmares haunted her. She couldn't tread anymore. She commanded her legs to keep kicking, but they were no longer responding. It's not as dramatic as a snapping tendon. It's a gradual slowing down to a stop, and then, helpless, you begin to sink.
She knew she had to get out of her head but she didn't know how. She postponed some publishing deadlines and took some time off. One day while walking home, the hot stone in her throat began to choke her. Standing on the sidewalk in the shade of the Jacaranda trees she hyperventilated and wept. She wasn't sad. She didn't know where the tears had come from, but she knew it was time to get help.
Three weeks after she had refused the idea of medication, she was in her doctor’s office, the number of a cognitive behavioural therapist and a prescription for anti-anxiety drugs clutched in her clammy hands.
You take this one for the anxiety, but it might make you feel more anxious in the beginning. So you take this one, too, just till your body adjusts.
It was a relief to hold the boxes of pills in her hands.
For two nights in a row on the new medication, despite one of them being a sedative, her eyes clicked open at 2 am and her heart and mind raced. During the day, the world looked different. Her hands sweated on the keyboard, her legs swung on their own accord, and she couldn't settle her mind enough to write.
Here’s something to help you sleep, said the doctor.
Uh-oh, the woman thought, taking the third prescription on top of the other two. I know how this story ends. I've seen the movie; I know the tropes. You keep taking more and more till your life implodes.
But that’s not what happened.
As her body adjusted to the drugs, life slowed down and the static faded. The woman began to feel lighter. She began noticing the beautiful trees on their street again; the orange pop of the Autumn leaves swirling around them as they walked to school. She stopped rushing everywhere and felt the breeze on her skin. Her body felt healthier; her hair stopped falling out. She began enjoying her children again, laughing with them and dancing in the kitchen. When she hugged them, the embrace was no longer tinged with fear. The woman started kissing her husband again.
Recent symptoms she hadn't attributed to anxiety began to fade. Her fingers stopped trembling; her memory improved. She could write again. She realised that swallowing the small white pills every morning wasn't about giving in, it was about protecting her body and her brain. The world was burning, and she loved her children too much. They were living in an eroded reality and she needed all the armour she could get.
The dark water started to drain away, and she could finally breathe easily and rest her legs. The thunderclouds that had been crashing towards her retreated. The woman pulled her family closer, and they stood like that, huddled together, as the sun began to burn through the fog. The four-year-old told one of his silly knock-knock jokes and they all laughed, and it felt real and raw and good, and there were no more tears to fight. The hard stone in her throat had melted away.
I’m fine, the woman told herself, and she realised it was no longer a lie.
6
SkyRest
A note from the author:
This story is based in the ‘When Tomorrow Calls’ world and contains minor spoilers.
It’s an excerpt I adapted from the book ‘What Have We Done’ that I believe works as a short story.
If you’re planning on reading the futuristic thriller series and want to avoid the minor spoilers in this story,
please email me at [email protected] and I’ll send you the prequel novella as a gift.
SKYREST
“You ready for your first shift, Girdler?”
Lewis stands at Zack’s sliding door, muscles flexing; his grey beard is neatly clipped. The bell rings.
"I think so." Zack doesn't mind the idea of hard work today. It might help with his nerves. His mentor gestures for him to follow, and they join the rest of the prisoners as they stream out of the residence and into the adjacent factory. Zack calls it a factory, but to be honest, he still doesn't know what products SkyRest makes. He receives a few mildly interested looks from the others, but most of them ignore him. Soldier ants, worker bees: all in the same grey soft-cotton kit.
“What is the actual work?”
“That’s not an easy one to answer,” says Lewis.
Zack laughs without humour. “What do you mean?”
“It’s not like we’re working on an assembly line, right? We’re not manufacturing Fong Kong. This isn’t bloody Bilchen. It’s a crim colony. A penal labour camp.”
“But what do we do?”
“They identify what needs doing and they funnel us accordingly.”
“But what? What work?”
Why is Lewis being so evasive?
“Anything. Anything that requires labour as long as—”
“Yes?”
“As long as we’re not seen.”
“By who?”
“By the clients. By the pretty people in the honeycomb. We’re like … the midnight elves. You know, the little crims who steal inside and do all the work. Like an invisible workforce, you know? The ghost in the machine. No one wants to see the elves. It breaks the spell.”
They keep walking.
“So, give me some examples, so that I know what to expect.”
Lewis sighs. Zack can see him thinking: I’m too old for this shit.
“Okay, so … the day before yesterday we were chopping wood for the incinerator. The day before that, we were creating seed eggs. Before that: chopping bloody onions. Before that: re-potting saplings. Birch, I think they were. Silver birch.”
“What are seed eggs?”
Lewis holds up a hand to stop him from asking more questions.
“You’re going to be in here a long time. If you want to be my assigned initiate you’re gonna need to learn some patience.”
“Sorry,” says Zack.
“I’m not mad. I’m just telling you like it is.”
They trot into an artificial greenhouse. There are no windows because it's deep underground, but the ceiling is covered in thousands of lo-glo bulbs, and the plants—thousands upon thousands of plants—reach up to their fake suns like disciples who don't yet know they've been swindled.
They line up along the rows of aeroponic vegetation. How many are there of them? Zack does a quick headcount. Two hundred? Each row seems to contain a different plant. Theirs has a purple flower.
“Slow and steady,” says Lewis, tapping his lapel. “Slow and steady wins the race.”
Zack looks at Lewis’s lapel. “Hey. You got another stripe.”
Lewis’s eyes twinkle. “Close now,” he says, “real close. I think you had something to do with it.”
“I doubt it,” says Zack.
“You filled in the mentee satisfaction report, right?”
“Well, there was a form. It asked how I would rate my initiation experience.”
“Right,” says Lewis. “I think that’s what tipped the scales. I mean, I knew I was close.”
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do?” asks Zack. “You know, when you’re up there?”
“I’m gonna go for a swim. Did you see that swimming pool?”
“No,” says Zack. “I thought pools were illegal.”
“Not in state institutions. No
t when they service a community like this.”
“You saw it?”
“Oh yeah. Oh man, that pool. As blue as the bloody Atlantic ocean. I haven’t been for a swim since 2009.”
“That does sound pretty good.”
“And then, then … I’m going to have a meal. A proper meal. And a CinnaCola, with ice. Real ice. Not fake ice.”
“I don’t think they make that anymore. CinnaCola, I mean.”
Lewis looks disappointed.
“Listen up, residents,” says a familiar voice from the front of the greenhouse.
A medium close-up of Bernard's toad-skinned face beams into a hexagonal-framed hologram above them. There's a hush.
“We’re going to be spraying the plants today. It’s important that you spray them hard enough to dislodge any insects—”
So they’ve given her a job to do.
“—but not so hard that you damage the leaves or uproot the organism.”
Bernard nods at the creep holding the holocam, and they track down to her hands, where she demonstrates the correct procedure. Zack can't help cringing when there's a close-up of her fingers and her broad, flat fingernails. She was in his room again last night. He heard the door slide open, and something inside him shrivelled up like it would never be the same again. And now she's here to stay.
“What are these plants, anyway?” he whispers to Lewis.
“It’s bloody alfalfa,” says Lewis. “Can’t you tell?”
Once the plants are sprayed and inspected for any malformations or disease, the workers move on to other things. Some go to help in the kitchen, some, the laundry. Zack and Lewis are enlisted to saw and chip wood, along with another ten men. What surprises Zack most is how much space there is down here. The outside building—that white honeycomb shard planted into the earth—is the tip of an iceberg. An anthill that is rooted deeply and widely under the surface.