Sketches in the Night

"When's he scheduled?" the driver asked.

"Seven, I think."

"So, my guess is they'll sedate him at six thirty," he said, looking at the clock on the dash. "We'll be there about six, six-ten."

"With all this mess?"

"Don't worry, Captain. I'll get you there in time."

She smiled, leaned forward and touched his shoulder: "Thanks."

"Want me to call the OR? See what's going on?"

"Could you?"

"Sure, my wife works there. What's his name?"

"Gene Parker. He's a neurosurgeon on-staff there."

The driver turned slightly and looked at her. "You kidding? Doctor Gene's your brother?"

"Yes. Why? You know him?"

The driver chuckled: "Our kid had a cyst, something called an arachnoid cyst, and Doctor Gene took it out. Mary, my wife, is a scrub nurse there, and she think's he's the best doc at UC." He turned to his phone controls on the Suburban's central display and touched a number, then began talking through a headset while he exited the highway for surface streets. Once he was off the highway he took off at breakneck speeds, heading east towards the lake.

"You say your brother is a doctor?" the daffy woman asked. "A neurosurgeon?"

"Yes, that's right."

"My mother's there right now, in oncology. They called me a few days ago. Told me to come if I wanted to see her again, before she..., well, you know."

"I'm sorry," she replied. "It's a difficult time, I know." Parker almost wanted to laugh at her understatement, but she held herself in check, tried to get hold of her own anxieties. "What were you doing in Beijing?"

"Oh, my husband works there," the daffy woman twittered, "for a semi-conductor company. I've been teaching at a school there, and I do love the people so."

"Oh? What do you teach?"

"English for the most part," she giggled, "but piano, also."

"Sounds interesting," Parker said -- turning away.

"It's a very different culture," the woman said. "A fascinating place."

"You can say that again," the brooding man said, overwhelming bitterness in his voice.

"You work there too," the daffy woman said.

"State Department. I work in the embassy."

"Oh, I see. Do you have someone in the hospital?"

"I think so."

"You think so?"

"Yes. I'm not sure what's going on, but I had an email from my mother's landlord when we landed. Said the paramedics had taken her to the hospital."

"You don't know what's wrong?"

He turned away from the question, turned away from memories of his mother, then he sighed. "She's fragile, I think. She has been since my father left."

"Are you all she has?"

He nodded in the gathering silence. "Yes."

"It's nice she has you then, has someone who cares."

He wanted to vomit at the irony in the woman's words but shook away the feeling, turned and looked out the window again. As the SUV passed amber pools of light he caught brief snippets of his own reflection in the glass, little glimpses into the eyes of a stranger.

'Is that me in there,' he asked when they stopped at the next traffic light.

'But who the hell is 'me'? Just an echo -- of her?' He stared into his reflection -- and he saw her eyes waiting for him in the shadows. Her eyes, her lips, her hand -- wrapped around his penis. Her mouth, coaxing, teasing, devouring him -- and he wanted to run as more waves of conflicting emotion broke over his soul. Betrayal, always betrayal, yet he always felt sorry for his father at times like this. Sorry, for his father's apathy, for the way his father turned a blind eye to them both and, in the end, left him alone -- to grow up with her. Of course he'd never know all the answers, not now, just as he was sure his father never really knew what was going on when they were all together. Now he was dead and gone, and the only person he had left, his only link to that most unusable past, was his mother.

Frantic calls from her co-workers over the past few weeks had alerted him that something had finally snapped, that she was losing contact with reality. He thought of that dingy little apartment, that horrid room he'd lived in during high school, her nightly visits never far from his mind's eye, and he felt himself tensing again and again as he swayed between needing to see her, and wanting to never see her again.

But now he wondered what had happened to her -- when she'd been a kid. Who'd abused her? How long did it go on for? What secrets had she carried along the way, tried to bury -- with no success? Who haunted her days, and nights, and why had she always been silent about the demons chasing her through the night? Why -- and what -- had happened to her?

Because, he realized, whatever happened hadn't just happened to him. Something -- no --someone must have abused her, and he'd been thinking about that all the way from Beijing. He wasn't 'the' victim; no, he was just one in an long, perhaps endless, series of victims -- yet even that realization hadn't make his ambivalence for her any less searing. No, she'd had the opportunity to end the cycle, and had chosen not to. He had the opportunity now, and he would. He had chosen to never marry, to never have kids, and that was all the result of her choices, and yet he accepted his own choice was the price he'd have to pay to end this cycle of repeating Hell. Only now, the closer he got to the hospital the more acute his anxiety grew, the less sure he felt about all their choices.

'I really don't want to see her,' his inner demon said. 'Not ever again.'

"But you have to," he whispered, almost as if he was praying. "If you don't, you'll lose your humanity -- and her's, too."

He remembered the last time he'd seen her. Sitting trancelike in the shower, curled up in a fetal ball, staring into the darkness of her waking life, watching the demon-dance -- her eyes focused on things now far away and long ago. This was her own secret Hell, and he had watched her choices push-in from all around, push-in until nothing was left but the demons, and then her tears came. He remembered turning off the water, trying to help her stand, only then she'd reached out, tried to grasp his pants, to take them off -- and he'd let her fall, then run from that accursed place. He hadn't seen her in over a year now...and all he saw when he thought of her were those grasping hands, clawing for their release.

'And I hate her. I'll always hate her,' he said as the memory washed away on the flood.

"You can't give in to hatred. It will consume you, blind you to everything there is about life that's good and beautiful. It will blind you to her pain, and your need."

Then he heard the driver talking to the pilot...

"They're already running about a half hour behind," the old man said, "and I let 'em know we're inbound. They won't take him in before you have a chance to talk with him."

"Thank you so much," Parker said as she looked at her watch, now clearly relieved. They were on 51^st Street now, and they turned right on Cottage Grove and she saw a couple of cops walking in the snow off to her left, and wondered what they were up to, what could be so important in an empty, snowy field, then she saw the hospital looming through the snow, behind the first tendrils of dawn -- the sky all swirling snow streaked yellowy-gray. Then she saw his red Tesla parked near the ER entrance and wanted to smile -- but it still hurt too much inside for all that.

Why had it all fallen apart, she wondered? They'd always been close, the three of them, together. Gene and Sara, as far back as middle school, yet a few years before Sara got sick they had drifted apart. Why? Was it inertia? Are people, even close friends, simply destined to drift apart, like stars adrift in an ever expanding -- and always dying -- universe? Or was our gravity too weak, she wondered, to overcome the spinning inertia of all our broken dreams.

She missed Sara, and had loved her at least as much as Gene ever had, even if differently. They'd been in the same grade, a year behind Gene, and Sara had lived just a few doors down so had always been there, had always been a part of their lives. The awkward Jewish kid, the total brain. The ugly duckling who'd blossomed into something truly rare and gorgeous, and Gene had loved her from the start.

But so too had she.

'God, I loved her,' she sighed, quickly wiping a sudden, secret tear from her eye. Sara had been the only girl who had ever truly understood her -- even the deepest depths of her heart's most obscure desires. Sara knew just how she felt, knew what she'd wanted, and Sara had never rejected her. They'd become friends, best friends, and once she even thought Gene understood the contours of their need -- but there'd always been the wall, never once breached, keeping all their most precious secrets intact. So she'd had her other lovers over the years, but never the one that mattered most. Gene had been Sara's one true love -- and maybe that was why the tides had finally pulled them apart -- but as much as she'd always loved her brother she had to admit that now, especially now, her brother was all she had left of Sara. He was the only person left in the world that she could talk to -- about the one person she had ever really loved. But she knew even with him there were limits -- there was that wall to maintain. Still, maybe it was time...?

Because while both of them had been so gifted, so utterly brilliant, Gene would always be the pure 'innocent abroad' -- so he might understand her need. He was the little boy who had always accepted love without question, and who gave as freely of his own. And he always would, she knew, because that was his nature -- and she thought of his words on the phone. "Four hours," she said to herself, the name Susan rolling over and over in her mind, then: "What has he gone and done now?"

The Suburban pulled up to the main entrance, and three people paid up and danced out into the swirling snow -- lost in wonder of the day ahead.

*

(C) 2017 Adrian Leverkühn | abw | this story, such as it is, is fiction. No persons living or dead yada yada yada. I know this appears to be a fragment, appears there's no real "ending" -- but that was by choice, not omission. Refer to the title...these are just impressions, sketches, if you will, and nothing more. Hope you enjoyed looking...