Spores

by Ike Hamill

  “Listen,” Leonard said. “I’m sorry I raised my voice. I promise you that I killed Andrew and Patrice with my own hands, but that’s it. I killed them and then I slit my wrists and expected to die out there in the snow. You don’t have to keep my hands strapped down under this blanket. I’m not going to try to do it again.”

  The woman reached out and put her hand on top of the blanket that covered Leonard’s hand. He should have felt pressure from her touch. He didn’t feel a thing.

  “You didn’t kill anyone. The fire was an accident. It’s common in these types of traumatic events for people to want to take the blame on themselves. It’s a way for a victim to assume control. There’s nothing worse than the feeling that things could go wrong at any second and we’re going to end up a helpless victim of circumstance. By taking responsibility for what went wrong, people are trying to make themselves believe that it wasn’t bad luck, but their own mistake that led to the pain. Mistakes can be controlled, but bad luck cannot.”

  “Sure,” Leonard said. He had nothing to learn from this woman. All he could do was agree and hope that it would make her go away.

  * * * * * * *

  (Exception)

  “How are you doing, Len?” she asked.

  This nurse was his favorite. She didn’t tell him things, she asked him questions and then genuinely seemed to listen. The other nurses all wanted to describe to him how everything was going to get better slowly, or why his own effort would control the rate of his recovery. Leonard simply wanted someone to listen. This nurse—the one with the big, serious eyes—was the only one who did.

  “How are those hands feeling today?”

  “Damned if I know,” Leonard said. “They won’t let me get at them.”

  “They won’t?”

  “Nope,” Leonard said. “My hands are trapped under this blanket and strapped down. I’m guessing they think that I will try to cut myself again. I keep saying that I’m done with all that.”

  “Should we take a look at them?” she asked.

  “That would be good. Curiosity is ruining me.”

  When she reached over him to start folding down the blanket, déjà vu swept over him. They had danced to this song before. He wanted to scream for her to stop, but his mouth wouldn’t work. With another inch revealed, he saw that his arms were bandaged up to his elbows. That made perfect sense—they must have stitched up his wrists and then gotten a little overzealous with the gauze. Maybe everything was going to be okay after all. Leonard held his breath as she folded the blanket down to his wrists. He had expected to see straps restraining his hands. That would explain why they were always under the blanket and why he always had to lean over to take a sip of water. It would explain why all of his bathroom business was done with the help of an orderly who came when Leonard pressed his chin to the call button.

  “Should we keep going?” she asked.

  “You’re the expert. Why wouldn’t we?”

  She took his question as permission and she folded down the blanket beyond his fingers. They were stubby stumps poking out from the white bandages. At first, he thought that his fingers had been amputated past the first digit. He quickly realized that the only reason they looked so short was because his hands had been bandaged so aggressively.

  “Why are they blue?” he asked. His throat clicked when he swallowed.

  “Do they look blue to you?”

  “Yeah. They look blue because they are blue. Why are they blue?”

  “Do you think that your fingers look blue compared to mine?” she asked. She laid her pretty, tapered fingers next to Leonard’s. He had to admit to himself that his fingers looked pretty much the same hue as hers. Maybe the blue was an artifact of the hospital lighting reflecting off the white cotton spread. Maybe it was the ambient tone of the gray walls picked up by his skin.

  “Why aren’t they strapped down?” he asked.

  “Should they be?”

  “I guess so, if you guys want to stop me from…”

  He didn’t finish the idea. He had the thought to lift up his hand and turn it over to see if any blood had leaked through the bandage from the slit on his wrist. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than his hand did just that. It raised up off the sheet, turned over, and exposed the underside of the bandage to his curious eyes. Leonard’s mouth fell open in wonder as he commanded his hand to sweep gently through the air and it did his bidding. It felt like he was having a dream and he suddenly realized that reality was subject to his control.

  “Do you want to watch while I change your bandage?” she asked.

  “No!” Leonard practically shouted. Each of her questions seemed to lead through a dark doorway and ended in some uncomfortable new room. It was enough for today. “No, please.”

  She smiled at him and left him alone with his hands. Leonard looked at them for several minutes and then pressed the call button with his chin to get the nurse back. When she arrived, he asked her cover his hands again. He knew he wouldn’t be able to rest with them out. Once she tucked him in, he was falling asleep as soon as his eyes drifted shut. The ordeal had exhausted him.

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Working

  (Resumption)

  USING A KNIFE, DRIVING the car, and falling asleep were the three hardest things for Leonard to do.

  Every time his fingers closed around a blade, he imagined all the terrible things that steel could do. It was amazing to him that more people weren’t terrified of knives. They were build to dismantle flesh—it was practically the only thing they were good at. Having a whole collection of such things in one’s house seemed like a disastrous idea.

  Driving was even worse. Piloting an enormous hunk of steel through streets lined with pedestrians and other motorists was the height of unearned trust. How could those people blindly believe that Leonard didn’t intend to crash into them? Leonard was terrified every time he sat behind a wheel. He didn’t have much choice. Where he lived, driving was a mandatory part of survival.

  Worst of all, was trying to fall asleep. For weeks after returning home, he had tried to park his hands under the blanket, just like he had done in the hospital. At home, his hands were completely unwilling to withstand being restricted like that. Under the covers, they would itch and burn. He would throw back the comforter just to witness the horrible state of his own flesh and then realize that there was nothing wrong with his hands at all. It was always just an illusion.

  The scars weren’t an illusion though. After the bandages came off, the scars were a part of Leonard’s daily reality. They weren’t jagged lines, traced up the inside of his wrists. They weren’t the telltale signs betraying a failed suicide attempt. Those scars would have made perfect sense to Leonard. He would be able to understand and, eventually, accept those scars. Instead of wrist-cutter scars, Leonard had big slashes on the outside of his forearms. They were scars from the type of wounds a person might get if they raised up their arms to protect their face from a broken winch cable slashing through the air. They were Patrice’s scars, somehow grafted onto his skin.

  Leonard had not only taken Patrice’s life, he had somehow taken his friend’s history.

  The therapist in the hospital had told him what happened—a winch cable had broken and he had raised his arms to protect his face. The cable had torn muscle and tendons from his arm and left his fingers paralyzed for a time. Now, with most everything healed, he was encouraged to get back to his pre-accident life. It would have been much easier to do if any of their details matched the images in his own head. He had seen Patrice get injured. It didn’t make any sense for him to wear scars from those wounds.

  As instructed, Leonard took several slow deep breaths until the confusion untangled itself in his head. It didn’t matter how he had arrived at this point in his life. Everyone stumbled. Everyone fell down, now and then. Survivors were defined by how they got back up, not how they fell. He looked down at his hands that were wrapped around the steering wheel.

  Af
ter all those counseling sessions, they had declared that he was ready to return to work.

  It seemed much too early for him to go back to work. At his job, they usually demanded extensive time off for people to heal. Hell, because of a messy divorce, his supervisor had been suspended for six months. Leonard had known another co-worker who was suspended indefinitely when a video surfaced of the man marching with radical racists.

  Leonard nearly lost his mind, nearly died in a fire, and had a complete break from reality. Still, he was only off work for six weeks.

  He pulled into his parking spot and shut down the car. The horror of piloting a weapon through public streets was over for the moment. He got out of the car and waved to the young woman behind the glass. After he showed his badge and scanned his fingerprints, she hit the buzzer to let him in. It was all just a formality. Trisha had always liked him. She probably would have let him in even if he had forgotten his badge. Their security wasn’t all that well enforced, when it came right down to it.

  It was nice and warm inside the building.

  Leonard took off his coat and made sure that the cuffs of his shirt were buttoned. They would be curious to see his scars—everyone was. With any luck, they would keep their curiosity to themselves. He wasn’t eager to show them.

  “Hi, Leonard! Welcome back.”

  There was something about how her eyebrows were raised. There was a question that she wanted to ask, but she had been raised in northern New England. Women like her were gossip vampires. They would suck you dry of information, but only if you invited them in.

  “Thanks, Trisha. And thanks for the card.”

  “We would have come to visit you, but they said you were off limits.”

  “Probably because of the smell. They didn’t let me bathe for weeks.”

  He gave her a nod and pushed through the door to the hall, cutting off further questions. He had all day to fend off his nosey co-workers. It would be best to get good at deflecting questions as soon as possible. The locker room was empty. Leonard put away his lunch and carefully slipped on his jacket. The shirt was bad enough. The weight of his work jacket made his arms burn. He wanted to strip it off, run from the building, and never return.

  Leonard did his breathing exercises and reminded himself that each day would be easier. Each hour, and even each minute would be more bearable than the last if he just kept his cool and breathed. Only when taken as a whole would life seem unendurable. If he could simply move through one minute at a time, he would be able to survive.

  “Leonard!” a voice said, startling his eyes back open.

  “Hi, Bob.”

  “You ready? We have a priority inspection in eight minutes.”

  Bob wore a big smile. He was the type of guy who actually enjoyed the stress of a priority inspection. When he was on duty, the most stressful tasks never escaped him. If they had worked in the Everglades, Bob would have volunteered to wrestle every alligator. Leonard knew precisely why Bob was always on hand for the high-stress tasks. It was the same reason that Leonard had always been right alongside Bob. They both enjoyed doing anything that would fully occupy their brains. Being absorbed in work made it go by a million times faster. Leonard and Bob were all about getting to quitting time as fast as they could.

  He wanted to tell Bob to go ahead without him. For his first day back, Leonard wanted to stick to sorting tasks. Desk work would suit him fine and be an easy way to get back on his working feet, so to speak.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said, surprising himself. “I’ll be right there.”

  * * * * * * *

  (Expectation)

  Leonard raised his arms and submitted to the pat down. They didn’t have fancy machines, like at the civilian airport. Their installation relied on good, old fashioned contempt for every employee. Stone faced men in black uniforms stood near the entrance and exit, and on either side of the hangar door. In all the years that he had worked in the facility, he had never heard one of these men make a sound. Not even a cough had crossed their lips.

  “You ready?” Bob asked.

  “Sure,” Leonard said.

  Bob took the far side. They would be responsible for moving every crate by hand from one end of the hangar to the other. The work was rarely difficult, at least physically. None of the crates were exceptionally heavy. But every single box had stickers on every corner. If they were jolted, bashed, jostled, or dropped, the stickers would change color from white to black.

  Dropping a box and having a sticker change color was called “red labelling” a crate. As long as Leonard had worked there, the colors had been white and black, but it was still called red labelling.

  One black sticker would ruin Leonard’s entire month. It would be nothing but debriefings, reports, and all-night interviews about what had gone wrong. To make things worse, they were limited on how much time they could be in contact with each crate. To make things really worse, they weren’t allowed to use any tools or machinery to move the crates. “By Hand,” meant that nothing with wheels or electricity could be employed while moving the crates.

  Leonard had heard of a guy who was dismissed after having a pacemaker installed for a heart condition.

  Bob’s brother-in-law had been turned down for employment because he had an artificial hip.

  “One. Two. Three,” Bob counted.

  They lifted together.

  The crate was light. Sometimes it felt like there was nothing inside the crate at all. In those cases, it was easy to get complacent. Statistically, crews were way more likely to red label the lighter boxes. The heavy boxes never got red labelled. Leonard figured it was because they always looked so damn heavy. His instinct was to brace himself for a significant weight. When it rose easily, he nearly lost his grip.

  Bob laughed at him.

  “First one is always light. You know that,” Bob said.

  “Guess I forgot,” Leonard said.

  “Don’t screw us over, Leonard. I have big weekend planned. The last thing I want to do is be locked in that damn admin building for four days because of you.”

  Leonard shook his head and looked away from Bob. They were on either side of the crate, walking it sideways to the far end of the loading area. Some guys liked to walk the crates on the front and back. He and Bob never worked that way. They walked sideways, and usually held a conversation over the top of the box. Today, Leonard didn’t feel like he could carry on a conversation. He should have thought of that before he agreed to carry with Bob.

  “Hey, man, I didn’t mean anything by it,” Bob said. “I know you’ve been cleared to carry, so that must mean that you’re good, you know?”

  “I have to sneeze,” Leonard said. The funny thing was, he had meant it as a joke. There was nothing scarier than a partner who had to sneeze. When someone sneezed, most of the time all of the labels went black. There was no worse sin than red labelling a crate with a sneeze.

  “Double,” Bob said.

  Leonard shuffled faster, trying to keep up. If they had been walking it front and back, it would have been much easier to shuffle twice as fast. Being on either side, each quick step meant another opportunity to tangle their own legs.

  Leonard’s lips moved as they shuffled. He whispered, “Get control. Stay calm,” to himself.

  “Near side. Near side,” Bob said.

  They usually kept the crates in the same relative locations to make sure that they could fit all the boxes on the loading area. Only in an emergency would they reshuffle the order. For Bob, with his big weekend plans, this was an emergency.

  They were barely across the line when Bob stopped and said, “One. Two. Three.”

  The box settled to the floor gently and they released it. All the stickers were still white. Bob checked them all before he exhaled a big sigh.

  “You okay?” he asked, patting Leonard on the back.

  “Fine,” Leonard started to say. His response was cut off by a sneeze. It had been a joke, but then it turned into an actual sneeze.
He tried to cover his mouth, but his hand wasn’t fast enough. He ended up showering Bob in a mist of snot.

  “Sorry,” Leonard said.

  Bob backed up a step and wiped his hands on his jacket. A moment later, he turned, nervous, back to the crate. It was still okay—the stickers were white.

  “Let’s get back to it,” Bob said. “You sneeze again and they’re going to red label you.”

  Leonard tried to laugh at the joke.

  * * * * * * *

  (Consumption)

  The last three crates to move were the heaviest. Because of Leonard’s emergency sneeze, they had to navigate the crates all the way around the entire load and put them on the far end of the loading area. Bob never complained, but Leonard could see the weariness in his eyes. This was a particularly difficult load. Because of Leonard, it had been even more difficult.

  Leonard had no idea how much time had elapsed. Aside from the timer that kept track of the deadline, there were no types of clock allowed in the loading area.

  “Last one,” Bob said.

  Leonard didn’t know why he said it.

  It wasn’t like Bob to state the obvious. A lot of guys considered it bad luck to remark on the last crate. To do so was to invite disaster.

  Based on how heavy the last two had been, Leonard and Bob crouched low before grabbing the crate’s handles. Leonard’s eye was inches away from one of the white stickers. He saw something that he had never seen before. The corner of the white sticker had been peeled back. When he blinked, for a fraction of a second it looked like the sticker was black. Leonard blinked again and the illusion didn’t repeat.

  “One. Two. Three,” Bob counted.