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The clock pulsed, beat, ticked. It slipped into her skull and it detonated. Hammering her sleeping patterns, it throbbed like an additional heart behind her eyes. Shecouldn't concentrate on thinking about sleeping, much less actually sleep. On top of that, she lay next to him; their bodies barely touching. Involuntarily shivering, she buried herself under the blankets piled on top of her like casualties of war. The window was wide open, stretching its jaw, unhinging and preparing to devour its prey. The cold air rushed in and filled the room, expanding; choking the warmth that was only a memory. Closing her eyes, she tried to picture the sun, exploding, filling her with light. But it failed, and the memory never came. She opened her eyes, and shifted closer to him. He radiated heat; his skin blistering in the frozen winter air. Suddenly something next to her screamed. It shattered the air around her, she could feel the pieces raining down like hail. It crashed: rattling in its cradle. The ashen skin gave the phone a bone-like quality, seen only by her. But still, she sat there. Pressed against him. Everything touching. A small grain of happiness was there, and, although buried under the snow, it still fed the fire inside her. But this. Next to her. Dying. It was an object of irregularity, the opposite of perfection in every conceivable way. It was death. Next to it, they were so alive. And she was afraid. Afraid of this thing, this object that seemed newborn to her eyes. It was unexplainable. She had never felt such fear before. Not even of the silence that sometimes swallowed her in the darkness of the night. She didn't understand. He woke beside her. Woke to the sound of whispering. To him, it breathed in his ear, it told him secrets. The phone was like a porcelain doll; immaculate and untouchable. It murmured until he reached over and lifted it from its drowning form. He grasped it tightly as he groggily listened over the ocean of the endless line.
In the corner of his mind, he registered that she had looked claustrophobic. He muttered something unintelligible and dropped the phone on the floor, too tired tohang up. His body slumped into the mattress, it curved around him, and hugged him to its chest. Then he remembered what he had seen. He turned to her, his eyes dazed and confused.
She just lay there. Looking lost. Empty eyes staring into space. Staring at the cracks in the ceiling. He realized, with a distant part of his brain, that, recently, she hadlooked like that more often than not. His eyes held hers and questions fell and twisted through the airwaves. But they were unspoken. So she pretended they didn't exist. And he paid for not asking.
A few weeks later, she was sitting in a little café, and the realization hit her like a brick wall. She shakily lifted her cell phone out of her bag, and tried to dial his number. But her fingers were quivering to such and extent that, if anyone had looked, they would have thought she was having a seizure. It took her a few tries, but she finally typed the number correctly. The wait for him to pick up was unbearable. The rings were like the drum roll before an execution, and she didn't want to be the one to die. So she walked to her car, gripping her phone so tightly that her knuckles were the as pale as unadulterated clouds. She shuddered, as if it was cold, but it was hot and sticky, and she closed the door of her car. She drove and drove. And when she couldn't drive anymore, she pulled over.
The side of the highway is not necessarily the greatest place to pull over for a heart-to-heart, but she didn't care. She flipped off the ignition, and the keys slipped under her foot. She reached under the seat, feeling around for the keys. Just as she moved under the wheel to get a better view, a car smashed into hers, with all the force of a freight train. It plowed into her, shattering the car, slamming her against the steering wheel. Her body flapped like a rag doll, limp and discarded. Dark red blood trickled over her eyelids, warm and thick against her clammy skin. Her eyes fluttered closed as she let the last thought scroll across her consciousness in disarray.
LATER
He was notified. This time the phone screamed from the torture. The albino grim reaper. It resonated around the thin walls, and shattered his eardrums. He reached for it, his hand quivering. As he picked it up, his grip slackened. His hand, slick with sweat and panic, loosened its grip and the phone tumbled endlessly, seeming to fall for eternity; everything spinning in slow motion. Echoing hollowly, the phone clattered to the tile, cord twisting, mouthpiece grating. Mouth to tile; his face pressed up against the phone, listening to the vibrations. And then the breathing began. It was like a symphony. But not the symphony you pay to see. It was a melancholy, awful thing. It reminded him of a death march. A song to match the funeral pyre, just another outfit to color-coordinate. He held it tightly, and sat against the cabinets on the kitchen floor, chest crumpled and shaking.
The longer he listened, the more he recognized that the kitchen was comically small. He felt cramped, sweaty, and confined. The room felt a thousand degrees, and, as he heard why the hospital was calling him so urgently at three in the afternoon, it was set ablaze. A billion matches, raining down. Fiery wands twisting like a grotesque ritual. Everything was devoured hungrily. He wouldn't survive.
He drove to the hospital in a frenzy. Driving off roads, cutting cars off, speeding, running lights, skipping signs. He was the poster boy for reckless driving. The sun blinded him, his eyes glazed over the faster he drove. A bizarre form of depersonalization was eating him alive. Peeling, squealing, burning the asphalt. He ran inside. It was cold as death. Stark, whitewashed walls greeted him. His expectant face glowing amongst all the burned out expressions that surrounded him. Everyone here was dying. There are never any survivors in waiting rooms, only fatalities. Just people who quit too early. It was like a war. He donned his helmet. Slipped into his combat boots. Smothered himself in camouflage. And, yet, it wouldn't bring her to him. He had to go to her.
She lay in the bed. Hooked up in every direction. Tubes, tubes, so many tubes. Like giant snakes, wrapping around her, choking her with their artificial air and foreign blood. She was bare; exposed, and he was trapped behind a glass case. He was frozen, his eyes blistered with what he had to see, and his ears bled from the constant heartbeat. The heartbeat that seemed to him to be borderlining flatline. every time it was steady, his heart exploded out of his chest. It lay there now, bloody and destroyed. It would be easier without one. It would be easier not to feel.
At that moment, face pressed against the glass, panic eating him, he wished he could fly. Lift himself against the human bonds that equaled suffering. He wished he could take her with him, they could float into eternity. But the monitor still pulsed, waved, spiked, dropped, echoed, broke. And the loudest sound he had heard in his existence suddenly drilled into his brain. His skull rattled and exploded. The pieces spun on the floor, and he stood there, in silence. Because this noise had destroyed him. She lay in the bed, not moving, not breathing. Commotion surrounded her, but she would never know. The sheets strapped her in, nailed her to her deathbed. The hair fanned around her face, her beautiful face. She was surrounded by white, by walls, by people. He was surrounded by no one. Everyone had left him, he was the only survivor. The one who no one thought could exist.. He lay, shaking, against the ice-block walls, listening for the flatline to pick up, to return to a normal rhythm.
But he would never hear that sound. All he could hear was the controlled yelling by doctors, shouting to each other to clear something, and then all audible sound faded away with the onset of the chest shocking machine. The fragments of his soul were still too fragile, still too broken. Too many pieces, they would never all be found. Instead they lay in crevices and corners, kicked into the sides by invisible footprints and nonexistent breathing. And as the flatline overtook him, the girl, the woman in the bed failed to awaken.
Their lives had been intertwined by tragedy, and tragedy would be their demise. A white coated man slid from the depths of the killing room, over to the small, lost man, the man who looked so much like a boy in that hallway. The hallway where dreams and lives were murdered. Sliced open and broken apart. Peeled away and thrown into endlessness.
The man spoke to the boy, his voice echoing off the walls. The walls that held nothing in, absorbed nothing, radiated nothing. They were alone in a universe of suffering. The boy avoided the man's glance, his eyes closed, his face buried in his thin, frail shoulders. The lights were spotlights, shining on sickness so evident in the faces of everyone there. What a contrast to the paleness of the lives decaying throughout the halls.
Finally, the man sailed away, the ship had passed, the storm had faded, but the aftermath continued to be evident in the dull irises of the boy's eyes. The only intact thought that remained was a line from a song he once knew. It reflected and sparkled in front of his vision. He pulled a piece of change from his pocket, and, with shaking hands, etched in small print near the base of the doorway. When he finished, he slowly rose, staring at the white, white bed. His bleached vision blinded him, and his head was filled with silence and confusion. Finally, he managed to pull his eyes away from the destruction, and he turned and floated down the hall, as if in a trance. The only sounds were the echoes of his footprints, falling down the corridor in slow motion.
But the graffiti remained in the wall, no one saw it, no one knew it was there. But he knew. It was his tribute to her. The only memorial he could give her, his last achievement, the only remaining manifestation of his love for her. It was his reason for staying among the living, while she continued into the land of the dead.
We have no obligation to stay alive.