…The More Things Stay the Same - Part II

Stephen Atherton’s gripping serial drama continues with a white-knuckle second installment

An excerpt from this serial was featured in the Late Winter 2020 Monadnock Underground print quarterly.

The hum and sigh of the life-support machinery fills the room; so does the equipment responsible for it. The noise is punctuated with metronomic regularity by the beeping of some monitor or other. That beeping makes me think of the noise the school bus used to make when it was backing up. That was a long time ago. The frequency of the beeping, so like the frequency of the pulsing blood I can feel in my ears and my eyes, makes me think it may be Daddy’s heartbeat monitor. There are wires, tubes, buttons, and screens all over the place.

These things I understand none of.

I’ve been here before — what feels like thousands of times but is probably only dozens — and I still cannot shake the sensation I get every time I walk in this room: like I’m walking into a womb. A womb belonging to some dreadful, electronic monstrosity, possessed of no more humanity than what one might find on the surface of Neptune. In the center of the room, surrounded, like a Sheik by his Harem, with all those screens and wires and tubes and such, is a bed. Lying in it is a large, hairless (and, despite its size, terribly weak-looking) figure. An array — a very large array — of bandages and needles and tubes cover its arms, its legs, its chest, even most of its face.

These things I understand none of.

The thing on the bed makes a pathetic attempt at a wink and a smile when it sees me. As I begin crossing the room to it, the sensation of being in a hideous, inhuman womb does not, much to my dismay, dissipate in the least. Perhaps that’s what this hellish place really is, when you get right down to the short and curlies — the exit of one place is always the entrance to another, right?

I pull a chair away from its place against the wall, the same chair I always grab, and place it alongside the bed. As I sit down, the thing with all the shit stuck into what appears to be every available inch of its skin raises one of its arms and tries to take my hand. Key word, gang: tries. And, try though it did, it failed. The arm slumps, defeated, back down onto the sheet it was lying on before.

Instead, I take its hand.

I kiss it. It feels both feverishly hot and colder than the other side of the pillow. “I’m here, Daddy. It’s me, Calvin. I love you Daddy, and I’m here. Right here.” My eyes start to sting. But I won’t cry. I won’t.

It’s a struggle, one I can hardly bear to watch, but Daddy finally manages to get it out. “H-h-hi…Cal…Calvie. H-hello, s-s-son.” A long pause full of tortured breathing, then, as the life-support equipment hums and beeps and ticks and tocks and sighs around us, “D-d-did y-you…b-bring…”

“Sshhh, Daddy,” I tell the thing on the bed. I squeeze its hand. The sweat on my palms has cooled and dried by now. I put my finger to my lips in a be quiet gesture out of habit, but it’s unnecessary. Daddy’s days of talking at all, never mind being loud, are almost over. I take my finger from my lips and, using the opposite hand, produce from my jacket pocket the object I had brought with me.

Daddy’s eyes are red, tortured, wracked with pain I can’t begin to fathom…but did they brighten then, just a little? Just for a second? I think they did.

I know they did.

I look at him and I try to be strong for him, for both of us. Really I did. But I can’t. I’m weak. My eyes begin to overflow. I cry silently, trying, figuratively if not literally, to let the warm, salty wetness of my tears purge the hurt and anger and helplessness from my insides. After a minute or so, I wipe the tears from my face with the heel of the hand I had brought the thing out of my pocket with. Not an easy thing to do, I tell you. Wiping a river of tears off your face with a hand that’s holding one of those jumbo super-sized bottles the pill-pushers give out prescriptions in is no joke, but I manage.

Daddy asks for his water. I hold it for him while he sips it through a straw. He’s too weak to lift the glass to his lips these days.

I ask him one last time if he’s sure. His skin looks waxy, as pale as moonlight on January snow. Daddy mumbles that he is.

Daddy’s medicine bottle, as I said, is one of the big ones. I brought it from the house with me this morning, knowing I was coming here after work. Daddy’s been getting them for a long time, some three years before the pain finally got so bad that he had to come to this place, this sick-smelling, space-age, high-tech womb. They used to be a lot smaller at first, but, hideously like the clusters of bad cells inside him, they got bigger as time went on. It’s a translucent orange color. The cap is white, about three inches across, with the legal drug-dealer’s (what some might refer to as a “pharmacy”) name on it. I used to pick them up for him, during the time between when he could go get them himself and when he came here, to The Room. This one is from about six months ago, so it’s only about a quarter of an inch of pills left in it. On the label, below his name — Russell Fredericks, Jr. — and our address — 132 Franklin Court, are these words:

OXYMORPHONE HCL 10MG IR

These things I understand some of:

What it means is that when he takes one, ten thousandths of a gram of very potent opiate-based painkiller gets immediately released into Daddy’s system; there it goes to work masking — not fixing, just masking — the pain he feels 24 hours a day as the cancer eats him alive from asshole to appetite, reducing the man who raised me and fed me and taught me and clothed me and kissed the top of my head at night and dried my tears, reducing the man who loved me my whole life to nothing, a living skeleton that can’t even hold its own water glass anymore, right before my eyes.

But I’m all done sitting here and letting that happen.

Daddy looks at me, his eyes shiny with pain and whatever drugs those tubes are shooting into his system (probably more fucking dope, pill-pushers are good like that). He gives me a slight nod, all he can muster. He is ready.

For the next few minutes, the only sounds other than those made by the machinery all around us are my childish sobs — I love my Daddy so much — and the sound a pill bottle makes when one shakes its contents out into one’s hand.