--I'm just throwing this up here for people outside of Fiction Writing to read. An early, unrevised and incorrect version of chapter one can be found here.
A lanky gray-haired man entered the room wearing a grin decked with gray and black bristles. “Mr. Gorman?”
“What?” Jack answered with a definite tone of resentment.
“Hello, I’m your doctor.” Dr. Plaust’s grin widened to show a set of shiny metal-grayed teeth as he drew forth a bulbous, weathered hand. Jack remained as still as a pile of rocks and stared at the palm of his hand, noting every crack where the skin had broken apart and formed what he decided would be a spectacular setting for a tiny, melodramatic desert scene in an awful, histrionic farce.
“John– May I call you John? Well, I hope that your stay here has been as comfortable as possible. I trust Sarah has filled you in on the details of this situation. The surgeon sh–”
No, you may not call me John. No one calls me John, you asshole. “Fuck you.”
“I’m sorry?” The light bounced off Dr. Plaust’s balding head and formed a glowing ring around the room as he lowered his head and his smile faded along with the compassionate glint in his eyes.
“No, I’m not comfortable. I have better things to do right now. What kind of jackass feels comfortable with a broken neck and a purple face?”
Dr. Plaust’s voice transformed into a monotonous lull. “Ah, I can see why you would be upset. I don’t know how much you know right now, but we’re going to have to keep you here a little longer, so I advise that you make yourself comfortable. A very skilled surgeon, Dr. Cypers, will be with you shortly to disc–”
“No, I’m getting out of here.” The muscles in Jack’s face tightened and his jaw snapped shut while he readied himself for an altercation.
“–the operation with you. You will be transferred to a different wing of the hospital after your surgery. Although I can’t say for certain how long you’ll be staying here, you needn’t worry about a thing. If there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate to notify Casey or Sarah. If you need to speak with me, just let them know.” With that, the doctor turned on his immaculately shiny heel to leave.
“Hey! I said I’m going to get out of here soon. So I don’t want to talk to your surgeon. Send him back. I’m not fucking staying here forever.” Jack glared at the doctor through his bulging, purpled eye sockets.
Dr. Plaust stopped in the doorway and turned to face Jack with a look of worriment across his face. “Mr. Gorman…”
He’s a terrible fucking doctor. They always put me with the most God-awful sons of bitches in the whole place, Jack thought, clenching his fists and chewing on the insides of his cheeks. “GET OUT.”
Dr. Plaust sighed heavily and stepped out of the room. Jack laid still, fists trembling, and listened to the doctor’s footsteps leading away from him. The footsteps grew too distant to be audible and Jack became aware of the beeping and lulled mumbling of the hospital. He frowned and sunk his fists into the bed. This Goddamned place! Why here? Fuck!
His temper subsided momentarily as Anna’s soft, smiling face appeared in Jack’s mind. He imagined her there, shoving him playfully and gazing at him with her soft rosy skin shining in the fluorescent lights. His eyes sank and wandered around the room as he dropped his fists. “You always have to have the last word, don’t you? You’re such a selfish ass,” she would have said.
She’s not gonna fucking visit me, he thought, gnawing at his cheeks with more vigor. She hates me. With a furrowed brow and a spinning head, Jack fell back into his bed and closed his eyes.
3
It was warm.
Anna turned and trotted backwards for a minute. “Hey, what are you doing back there? I thought you wanted to go for a run, not a crawl!”
“I never agreed to this!” said Jack, hanging his head and pushing his body forward.
“I’m lonely up here!”
“Jesus, could you just slow down? …I need a cigarette.”
Jack looked up as Anna flung her head back in a fit of laughter and turned to face forward once more. He quietly sighed and gazed at her from his distance. He admired the flecks of copper in her hair as they glowed in the sunlight. The wind grasped her chocolate hair and pulled it behind her in a long, wavy shadow, as fleeting and as delicate as a trail of smoke rising up from a shallow creek in a foggy forest’s morning air. He knew he would never be as happy, as beautiful or as quick as she was in that moment.
“We’ve only got ten more minutes. Don’t puss out on me now.” Jack recognized genuine resentment in Anna’s voice now, and he attempted to push himself forward one last time, his entire body rebelling and weighing him down.
“You know…you can hurt yourself if–…if you keep going like that!”
“Only if you’re not in shape!” Anna seemed only to grow farther away from Jack with each of his pleads.
Oh God, why do I try? Jack wondered as he gave in to his body and threw it against a browning, grassy hill. Jack gasped and the sand and salty ocean air filled his lungs again. He drew a collapsed paper package from his khaki cargo pants and his trembling fingers lunged for a cigarette. He heard the delicate sound of Anna’s voice again as he shakily lit it and took a drag. His thoughts slowed and his mind began functioning properly.
“HEY, where’d you go?! We’re not done yet!” Jack could hear Anna turn in the sand and begin to jog back.
Jack dropped his arms to his sides. Ugh. He doubted that his muscles would allow him to run another inch. “Not now, I’m tired. You go ah–” Jack’s voice exploded into a long, raspy cough. His eyes watered and his face turned a vibrant magenta. The cough continued on while he listened to Anna’s footsteps slow as she approached the hill.
“Jack? Are you okay?”
With that, Jack snuffed his coughing, mashed out his cigarette and steadied himself on all fours, slowly crawling to the opposite side of the knoll like a huge red spider preparing for assault.
“Jack? Jack?! God damnit, I keep telling you you’re going to kill yourself with all those fucking cigarettes… Jack, come on, what the hell!”
Not now, wait, wait a minute…
“Jack!” Anna began to panic as she paced around the hill. In his mind, Jack could see her lowering her brow and forming a cute little frown.
“BAAAH.” Jack emerged from above and blew a puff of ashy smoke into Anna’s worried, glistening face. He immediately erupted with laughter.
“You son of a bitch!” Anna pushed him down onto the grass and left him there writhing on the sand-coated grass, alternating smoky coughs with unceasing laughter.
4
A tightening feeling took hold of Jack’s chest. Pressure, pressure, pressure was everywhere. Jack’s breathing quickened. His head spun. He felt tiny pinpricks pulse up and down his spine. He felt fluid rushing from his skull. Pressure, pressure. Horrified, his eyes snapped open. He examined the room. It was glossy, gray and empty. He lifted his fingers and ran them against the sheets, hoping desperately that they didn’t exist.
Here. Still here. Another Goddamned failure. Jack watched the white lab coats drape down across his body as they poked and prodded with their little lights and needles. He watched the nurse’s floral yellow scrubs brush against his cheek. Damnit. Anywhere but here. It’s supposed to be fucking over right now.
“Mr. Gorman, we need you to stay awake. Just keep your eyes open – it’s going to be okay.” Jack recognized a look of feigned compassion as one of the lab coats peered into his eyes, prodding his own skull with cold blue eyes.
Jack felt wires pinch at his skin. He had failed himself. His eyes moved across every corner of the room, searching. For sharp objects; knives, pins, anything. Jack needed to know that this was not reality – he needed to test it. He imagined the feeling of the pain, the aching. He required it. Every cell in his body burned for it. His eyes widened. His breathing slowed. Everything continued in slow motion. He continued searching. Nothing. Nothing.
“Mr. Gorman…?”
“Mr. Gorman, can you hear us…?”
They were gone. His body ached for the adrenaline and the endorphin rush he craved so strongly at that moment. Desire pulsed through his veins like sap. His mouth dropped open. His body sank deeper and deeper into the starchy white sheets. His mind sank deeper and deeper into his body. He absorbed himself. Deeper and deeper. He wished all of it away. Deeper and deeper. He wished himself out of his drained body. Deeper and deeper. He closed his eyes and hoped.
5
“Did you ever write that research paper?” Paul’s voice was muffled and distant in the phone.
“Yeah…Why?” It was unusual for Jack’s father to be concerned about his class work. Jack tilted his head and squinted into a distant corner of the room with the phone pressed tightly against his ear. The sunset pierced into the room and grasped Jack’s face, shading it a brilliant orange and further agitating him. He sensed something was awry.
“I just want to know. Can’t I ask questions like that?”
“No, Dad, you can’t. What do you want?”
Paul sighed on the other end and the phone cracked. There was a long and uncomfortable pause.
“Did Mom have you call me?” Jack’s face grew hot and red at the thought of his mother. He felt his skin tighten. He wanted to leave the room, leave his body. He hated his father in that moment.
Jack could tell that Paul was trying to sound calm. Instead, his words came out anxious and uncertain. “No, just listen, Jack… Alana called us the other day…She’s worried about you. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. Your mother didn’t put me up to this. She’s not even here right n–”
“Alana? You talked to Alana? Why? Why, Dad? You know we’re through. Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Jack, just wait. Calm down. We barely talked. She just told me you were acting a little funny lately, and I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help you.” “Oh, yeah, yeah I’m sure. How are you gonna help me? All you and Mom ever say about me is how much I’ve ruined this Goddamn family. When will you just leave me alone? How the fuck would she know if I’m–”
“That is not all what we say about you, John, and I’ll hear nothing of the sort.” Jack could hear his dad’s voice assume the authoritative tone he always took up when beginning one of his long-winded history lectures. His bitter son froze in rage as he remembered why he had chosen to move so far away in the first place.
“Oh, bullshit. Don’t fucking talk to old girlfriends of mine. And next time you think I fucked something up, maybe you could ask yourself why fucking I hate you so much before you call me up like this. Just leave me the fuck alone.”
“Come on, Ja–”
Click. Jack slammed the phone down onto the receiver and whirled around to face the kitchen door as footsteps approached the kitchen. Anna casually stepped in with a smile hidden behind her feigned look of concern.
“Woah, what was that about?” Her eyes smiled at Jack and his fierce scowl began to fade in the reddening sunlight.
Jack collapsed forward and released a sigh, grabbing her in a firm embrace and sniffling, eyes watering, fingers trembling. “I’m just so sick of them. I don’t wanna have to deal with them anymore.”
Anna returned the embrace and looked into the sunset over Jack’s back from their rotting wooden windows. “I know…” She held Jack for a moment and Jack could feel her soft, warm breath against his shoulders. “Look, you’re gonna be okay though, alright?” She nudged him forward enough to look into Jack’s face. “We’ve got finals coming up, so you’ve gotta focus. Don’t let them win and slack because of their bullshit. You can get through this. I fucking know you can.”
Jack slumped against Anna’s rigid but comfortable body. “I can’t.”
Anna pulled him up, staring deep into his eyes once more with a stern but understanding expression. “You will.”
6
“Jack, get up.”
Anna?
“Jack.”
No.
“Jack!”
No.
“JACK.”
The woman at the side of Jack’s stale white bed grabbed Jack and shook his frail, bruised shoulders.
“Ma’am, I don’t think that’s a good idea right now,” a timid voice warned from a distant corner of the room.
The woman paid no attention and continued shaking Jack’s skeletal frame. “JOHN DAVID GORMAN, get up right this instant.”
No, it wasn’t Anna. It wasn’t her at all. Jack reluctantly forced his exhausted, wet eyes open and gazed at the ceiling. The ceiling spun and swooned as the woman continued shaking him. She peered over him and Jack caught a glimpse of her thin, pale face. Her thick black hair hung in spirals from her face, consuming it, cloaking it in darkness.
“Jack, you’re scaring your mother. Come on now, get up.” The shaking persisted.
Tears welled in the corner of Jack’s eyes and formed straight little streams down his face. He laid still and stared at the ceiling, waiting for her incessant shaking to come to an end.
“Mrs. Gorman! I’d like to have a word with you out in the hallway.” This time, it wasn’t the timid voice that beckoned Jack’s mother away; it was the happy, gray voice of Dr. Plaust.
Jack heard the woman burst into hysterical tears as she slid out of the doorway and into the hall. Tears streamed down his face and flattened the unruly blonde hair at the sides of his face as he forced back a slew of memories. He strained his body into rigid stillness and attempted to become invisible; attempted to leave the shiny gray hospital; tried to get out of his own brain. He felt like a child toying with existence on a lazy summer day. He was weightless, powerless. He was destructible.
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