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Pacing back and forth across the impossibly shiny floor, aware I’m diminishing, shrinking in height and stature while Time is bending. I’m fading, blending into the scenery, trying to lose my thinking-self to the-feeling me. Shuffling beneath sicklybuzzingphosphourescenttubelighting.
Numbing elevator muzak pouring down like acid rain, melting me. I see a fan turn its head towards me. Pink strips of paper tied to the fans grill stream and wiggle like pointing tongues screaming silently. I look the other way and see Dad sneaking a cigarette, half hidden by the phone booth in the corner.
.
My body seems to have dropped away. Only eyes and ears are here. Now. In this part. I hear violins. I see a nurse, appears out of nowhere, unreal in the bluey-whiteness of her uniform, angelic-like and spooky in a glow-in-the-dark sort of way. Floating towards Dad.
.
She is beside him, whispering in his ear. I see her lips move but can’t make out words.
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Dad doesn’t know I smoke (or maybe I don’t know he does), but I’m wondering what the chances are of him giving me a cigarette. A smoke would be just the thing in this part. So I go in search of my body (where is it? gotta be around here somewhere), find it hiding under a table, re-enter it, and ask him. He doesn’t dignify the request with a verbal answer, just an effectively unsettling are-you-out-of-your-mind look. Instead, he presses a bill into my hand, tells me to get a Coke or something, he’ll be back in a few minutes.
.
Dad drifting down the hall, going towards the light, the Heavenly fluorescent glow trailing behind Florence Nightingale.
.
.
Coke? I’m not thirsty. This doesn’t seem like a ‘caffeine’ moment anyhow. Valium? Yes. Prozac? Maybe. Caffeine? Are you kidding? I’m as wired and useless as an empty hanger..
The atmospherics in here are all jacked up. Gravity, palpable and fuzzy as fog, pushes me down by the shoulders, causing my knees to bend (so, like the trees, they won’t be broken) until my buttocks kiss the moulded plastic seat - in front of a plastic table: a plastic bottle of flavored water stands in the middle half empty. It used to be half full. The non-stop nightmarish-music colors thoughts black. Paralyzed by Panic, I try to drown out the darkness by making up a prayer: Dear God, if you’re listening, I have a favor to ask. Please let Judy be all right. Please, God, let her make it through… this part… her darkest hour. My darkest hour. Please, oh Jesus, free her from fear and deliver her from the shadow of Evil to skip and run and jump and dance and sing again in the Light. I beg you. I will never ask you for anything again. Just this one thing, okay? Let her be okay so she can come home and play her radio and watch movies with me and make more of her tapes, so she can tease me again and call me ‘little brother’ and tousle my hair.
.
Remembering the rubber-band around my wrist, I snap it: delicate tendrils of pain shooting up arm wringing tears from eyes.
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Why is there a rubber-band around your wrist anyhow?
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I put it there a few days ago if memory serves, to remind me of… something. Can’t now for the life of me remember what it was. Like a string around your finger, only it doesn’t look as stupid. Snapping it helps me from falling deeper into the Dark Place. A kind of diversion therapy tactic or something. Works for me.
.
Mother. The thought of her…
.
no longer alive…
.
this idea (just a half hour old) not yet taken root –
.
impossible to deal with such a notion –
.
and that my one and only beautiful baby sister might be dead, too…
.
totally unacceptable.
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Abandoning body again, unplugging from thought, let eyes wander, observing other late night cafeteria dwellers. If I can get some kind of insight into their stories, it occurs to me, maybe I’ll see that their troubles are worse than mine, and that their Hell is hotter. And that, perhaps, will make me feel better. Hell, it might even make me feel like THANKING GOD FOR MY BLESSINGS. I want to scream but refrain, afraid it might shock somebody to death. That old dude over there, for instance, currently dissolving under unnatural light melting into his wheelchair.
.
.
I sense that there’s something else, here with us, among us, hovering in the sickly fish coloured hue washing over the half dozen patients and visitors, seeping as insiduously as the Muzak, lighting up the wax-like faces of someone’s father or mother (or sister). I see it hear it touch it and now fancy I can smell it. It’s everywhere..
I know what it is. And who.
.
Death.
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Here with us now, slinking along the disinfected tiles, filling my nose with the cloying stink of musty clothes and mothballs, dust and urine. Old dusty newspapers.
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You know she’s not going to make it, don’t you?
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The part of me that doesn’t yet know she won’t make it returns to pleading for Judy’s life. Another part of me knows she won’t. In the back of my mind a looped message repeats the news over and over: Your Mother is Dead. Your Mother is Dead. Your Mother is Dead.
.
I look at my watch. Mickey’s small hand is near the 9, big hand points at the 3 -
.
Time turns to trickery.
.
Only an hour ago we were at home, an ordinary family on a Saturday evening, enjoying the football and anticipating a ‘mighty’ dinner. That’s what Dad called Mom’s dinners – mighty. An hour ago we were all together, not stopping for a moment to suspect how good it everything was, right there right then. And how it would never get better than that. That moment. Not even an hour: 55 minutes to be exact. How can so much happen so fast? Huge, far reaching changes in a finger snap?
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I don't get it.
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Two square words:
.
Mo de
.
ms ad
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Don’t fit round holes in head.
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Pull rubber band tight. Snap.
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Snap snap.
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The driver of the truck that ploughed into them is dead, too. I’m glad. Don’t know why exactly, just seems easier somehow. Seems fair this way. Why should he get to live when they didn’t and it was his fault? He was to blame.
.
Dad returns. I’ve been waiting only 4-minutes, but it’s felt like a cold slice of forever. His wan face comes into focus. He’s pushing a cup of coffee under my hanging head, saying my name.
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Through tears I search his bloodshot eyes, and fancying I see a glimmer of hope in them, my heart grows light with the hint that everything’s turned out okay in the end. Happilyeverafter. Just like a children’s story. There really is a God, and He has answered my prayers. Judy will live to dance and sing and laugh like a loon again! In my rejoicing heart, I dance and sing and laugh like a loon too. I want this moment to go on and on, like a loop of film.
.
,
The jittery motion of Dad’s hands arrests my attention. Coffee’s close to overflowing even though he’s doing his damnedest to keep the cup steady.
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‘She’s going to be okay, Dad, right?’
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The shaking of his hands intensifies sending hot liquid spilling over the edge scalding skin. Not feeling it, or simply ignoring it, he places the cup on the table, wipes his hand on his jacket, produces a cigarette from his pocket with the other and lights it awkwardly, forgetting he’s not allowed, or more likely, not giving a damn.
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I’m thinking: When Dad’s holding a poker in his hand, his face always betrays him. Now, cigarette dangling from pursed lips, he’s wearing the most enigmatic poker face I’ve ever seen. It’s his unsteady hand that gives him away.
.
A finger snap: daydream is over.
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Laid balled up at the head of Judy’s bed for indeterminable time that night. Left later in a daze stumbling into my own bed entreating good dreams (or no dreams at all) to visit me in the dark.
.
If I’ve learned anything from that episode with Dad, it’s this: Close you’re eyes when you’re crying because tears distort your vision.
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