When the van began to swerve, James did not look at the indicator light, which had been telling him for ten minutes that his tire pressure was low. He was busy cursing the wind that always seemed to push the car like a sail when they took the long bridge over the lake. He was also listening to his wife buffet him with her own complaints, “Can’t you stay on the road? Can’t you pick a lane?”
James pulled over onto the scant shoulder. “Do I need to drive?” his wife asked.
“I need you back up out of my ass,” he tried to keep from yelling. The kids slept in the back seats undisturbed.
Outside, he stared at the flat tire for too long to suit his wife, who climbed to the driver’s side and restarted the vehicle.
He smacked his palm on the window and hollered “Hey!” as she pulled away. Then he watched her gain speed and listened as the tire slapped the asphalt. The back of the van listed a couple of times, but she did not stop until she was completely across and the shoulder had widened.
The children had awakened by then but said nothing to her. By the time she realized she would have to change the tire herself, they had fallen back to sleep.
James put his hands on the guardrail and leaned against it as he stared out toward the water. Nearly a quarter-mile away, a sandy island in the middle of the lake served as a rest stop for what James thought must have been a hundred gulls. He watched birds land, and then others take off. He could hear the water lapping against the bridge.
The island, over the next few minutes, appeared closer, and at some point, James put a leg over the guardrail, estimating he could just step away from the bridge and onto an open spot on land.
It took great effort for him to turn his neck, and as he sat up he wondered if a disease had befallen him. “Is this how the Rona starts?” he thought.
His eyes adjusted to the dim room at the same moment he tried turning his head to see what he hoped would be his phone on the nightstand. However, his leg banged against the rails of the hospital bed, and it suddenly did not matter what time it was.
His head felt as if all his blood had rushed to the top and was attempting to escape through his eyes. He lay back against the thin pillow and groaned as someone came in and turned on a light behind the bed.
“You’re awake,” the vaguely cheerful nurse said. “How are you feeling, Mr. Dram? Do you know where you are?”
He started to answer, but all the words sounded like loud mumbling to him. The look on the nurse’s face seemed to say they seemed that way to her as well. He closed his eyes tight and managed, “Happened?”
The nurse said, “Seems like you took a bad blow. Maybe you fell down and hit your head?”
He tried to shake his head. Though he had no clear memory, he was convinced whatever happened had taken place outside his home.
“Wife,” he uttered. The nurse took it as a question.
“I’m sure someone has contacted her,” the nurse said, though she knew from his chart that he was not married.
He frowned, wondering why he’d said that. Marie had left him years ago, and not happily, so Carl hoped no one would call her.
He pointed to his head.
“You hurting, Mr. Dram?” the nurse asked. He winced as he nodded. “I can get you something for that.” But before she got to the end of the sentence, he was unconscious.
When he woke nearly an hour later, a different nurse was inserting something into the IV he only then realized he had. “How ya doing?” she asked.
This one was more chipper, and her voice made him feel his head needed to shrink inside itself. He tried to say, “I feel fine. What am I doing here?” but the sounds again came out as grumbling mismatched syllables.
“Well, you get some rest, Mr. Dram,” the new nurse said. “I’ll be back to check on ya in a little bit.”
Carl sighed and closed his eyes, beginning to think sighing and closing his eyes might be all he ever would want to do until — until when? Death? Until someone came to tell him why he was here? Until he could have a drink?
The pain in his head and neck seemed to ebb just enough for sleep to dance on the surface of the room. He seemed to ride a wave of consciousness. At the peaks, he was in the room, hearing the sounds of monitors and people chatting in the halls as they passed his door. At the valleys, he saw fragments of he last remembered he could put together coherent sentences.
He was in a bar. Like the hospital, it was unfamiliar. That meant on a business trip. There was a game on the TV, but he wasn’t that interested. He must have had too much. He saw a woman. She wasn’t a knockout, but was pretty enough, and he must have said something to her because she turned and gave him a look that made him hold up his hands in the posture of the innocent and say, “Can’t a guy say when he thinks a chick is fuckable?” before turning back to his drink.
“What a dumb ass thing to say,” he thought at another crest in the wave, but when the wave fell he saw that a big man, the woman’s husband, was asking, “What did you say to my wife, dumb ass?”
Carl’s eyes tightened in pain as he said, “She’s your wife? Well, she’s fuckable, that’s all.”
Carl would eventually remember being punched. He would have a hazy memory of putting up his hands to defend himself, but nothing after that. He would not remember being kicked in the back of the head several times until the enraged husband was pulled off his unconscious body on the floor, the aggrieved wife hurling curses at him.
“Don’t talk like that to me,” Carl heard. He opened his eyes slowly and saw yet a different woman in his room. She was holding the bag she'd just removed from the trash can in one hand and pressing the other against her hip. “I know you is sick and all, but I ain’t gotta take that talk from nobody.”
“Sorry,” he tried to say, but the sound came out “slurry.”
The woman set the can down with a ringing thud, and left without putting in a fresh bag. Moments later, Carl could hear talking outside the room between her and the second nurse. Then there was a long silence.
He felt the pulse in his forehead and tried to will it to slow, hoping to calm the fire in his neck and pounding against his eyes. He saw himself in another life, one before a drink to unwind turned into long rivers he needed to get to sleep, but the details were fuzzy, like the retelling of a dream when all that can be recalled is the feeling.
The first nurse came in muttering something about people who don’t understand head trauma, and it was not clear if she was talking to Carl or herself. She had a hypodermic that was, in his mind, twice as long as necessary. With a forced smile, she susurrated, “This outta help.”
The effect of the morphine was nearly immediate. Soon the pulse became a soft drum tapping the rhythm of his breath. Then he was asleep, untroubled by dreams.
Michael Neal Morris’ most recent books are Based on Imaginary Events (Faerie Treehouse Press) and The Way of Weakness, both available through Amazon. He has published several stories, poems, and essays in print and online He lives with his family just outside the Dallas area, and teaches Composition and Creative Writing at Dallas College’s Eastfield campus.
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