Me & Death Read online

  He shook his head.

  “Please, Tadeusz! Please. One minute with Marcie. That’s not much to ask? Do it for a fellow Roncesvaller. A guy from the old neighborhood!”

  “Jim,” he said gently, “everyone here is from the old neighborhood.”

  Morgan tossed his empty glass in the bar sink, where it rattled around.

  “Come on, kid.” He got to his feet. “Let’s go.”

  “You?” I said. “You’re going with me?”

  “Hellfire! Of course I’m going with you. I wouldn’t miss it.”

  He belched.

  “I need to be there,” he said.

  I remembered how Denise was drawn to her son by her own regret. How Wolfgang was drawn to Lloyd’s fear by his own.

  Morgan was tied to Earth too.

  I waved to Tadeusz from the doorway.

  “Good-bye, Jim.”

  Morgan pushed me into the hall. His hand on my back felt like a blow. “Good-bye, huh?” he said. “More like Au revoir!”

  In the elevator on the way down, I thought, I’m dying. I thought, I’m dying. I thought, I’m actually dying. I thought, Crap crap crap.

  Orlanda was still at the front desk. She took my day pass and pursed her lips at me. “Not so very colorful as you were, Jim,” she said.

  I felt anger sloshing around inside me. She leaned closer, so that I felt the cool self-satisfaction coming off her skin.

  “Not so snooty, are you? You remind me of a whipped puppy.”

  “Yeah, well, you remind me of SHUT UP!”

  The words popped out before I could stop them. An instinctive reaction. Too bad, because this would have been a perfect opportunity for me to apologize for being sort of mean to her about the mailbox.

  Orlanda’s mouth had dropped open like an oven door. I tried to smooth things over and show how I had changed.

  “Nice, uh, tonsils,” I said. “So clean and shiny. You must be very proud.”

  Idiot!

  Morgan dragged me to the door, kicked it open.

  “You told her,” he said. “Reminds me of shut up. Ha! That was the beatenest thing.”

  I sighed.

  After the horrid drab gray of the hotel, the sky looked like it had just been washed. So bright it hurt my eyes.

  “Ready to die, kid?”

  “It just seems so unfair to me, you know?”

  “Well, it seems SHUT UP to me.” A wide grin. “Did you smoke that? Like what you said to Orlanda? You’d make a cat laugh.”

  He stepped into space, dragging me after him.

  CHAPTER 16

  We dropped like stones. So much faster than the way I had gone up with Denise. Looking down was like one of those satellite projection shots that start with Earth from space and end up with a view of the inside of your mouth where gingivitis germs are giving you bad breath. In our case, the shot steadied and slowed when we were approaching street level. A traffic jam stretching up and down Roncesvalles. Two police cars blocked the intersection at Wright Avenue. Between them stood an ambulance with open rear doors. Morgan and I dropped onto street level, joining the crowd of gapers, chatters, yawners, and tsk-tskers.

  The paramedics were rolling a stretcher toward the ambulance. Morgan and I moved closer. No one could see us, and yet people got out of our way. Maybe they felt Morgan’s heat. One woman took out a handkerchief and mopped her face as we passed.

  It was my body on the stretcher, all right. My shirt, my blood-stained face.

  I wanted to shake my unconscious self awake. I wanted to fight someone. I wanted to cry.

  I could hear people in the crowd asking one another what happened. They weren’t all speaking English, but I knew what they were saying anyway. It was like I was watching a dubbed film. (Seriously cool. Too bad there were no ninjas. I love those films.)

  I saw Cap and Sparks standing on the edge of the crowd, sipping coffee from paper cups, laughing together. Not very nice guys.

  Mr. K from the fruit store stood near me, gabbling away to an old Korean lady from a corner store a few blocks away.

  I KNOW THAT BOY, he said. I SEE HIM EVERY DAY, HE IS A NO GOOD ONE. HE ROBS MY PLACE OF BUSINESS. I HATE HIM. He talked in the strange formal way of dubbed films. It was funny to see his lips moving out of sequence with what I heard him say.

  The old lady nodded her gray head. I KNOW AND HATE HIM ALSO, she said. HE IS A SON OF UNMARRIED PARENTS.

  The two paramedics wore dark blue uniforms. Short sleeves showed off their meaty arms. They lifted the stretcher into the back of the ambulance and transferred the body over to a bench that took up most of one side. The clean-shaven one climbed through to the driver’s seat.

  “Come on,” said Morgan.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What the hellfire do you think I mean? Come on.” And he picked me up in one hand and carried me into the ambulance.

  I saw Mr. K through the open doors. He stood at the front of the crowd. His face was a mask, expressionless, all his life hidden behind his eyes.

  DO YOU THINK THE BOY IS BADLY HURT? he said.

  MAYBE HE IS DEAD, said the lady with him.

  They nodded solemnly at each other. Mr. K’s apron flapped around his bony figure like a flag around a pole.

  GOOD! he said, though his lips kept moving for a while after the word came out.

  The paramedic with the luxuriant mustache closed the doors. The ambulance inched past the cop cars, turned down Wright Avenue, and picked up speed.

  I thought back to all the times I’d stolen fruit and laughed at Mr. K.

  Mustache was on the phone.

  “Yeah, darlin’, this is Bill. And how are you this fine afternoon? Excellent. Listen, we have a road accident here. Unconscious teen with head trauma and some respiratory distress. Pulse weak. Yeah, serious. We’ll be on your doorstep in about ten minutes. Right? Thanks, darlin’. You’re a princess. No, I’m not kidding, you really are. Yes you are. How do I know? Because your mama is the Queen. That’s her on the twenty, isn’t it? Sure it is.”

  We were flying along Wright, the siren loud enough to rattle the garbage can lids.

  Morgan couldn’t get enough of Jim. He watched him intently, nudging me whenever Jim twitched or choked. “He’s dying,” I said. “Leave him alone.” “Yes, dying.” Morgan clenched both fists. “And he doesn’t want to. He’s fighting! His whole body is going crazy to stay alive. Heart, liver, lights, tripe, blood and boiling, roly-poly, gammon, and spinach – everything in him is working double tides, sweating and straining. I’ve seen thousands die, and it’s always the same. No one goes easy, kid. No one. Look!”

  He pointed at Jim’s throat.

  “There’s the battle. He’s fighting with every nerve and sinew, each breath a victory! It’s a shambles in there, kid. And all that struggle is in vain. The enemy is stronger. The enemy is always stronger. The boy is fighting, but he’s going to lose. You’re going to lose.”

  Morgan’s nostrils flared. He inhaled deeply.

  I couldn’t help noticing how pale my skin looked. I was definitely washed out. My clothes too – I could hardly tell what color my shirt was anymore, it was so faded.

  Crap crap crap.

  CHAPTER 17

  For a few minutes, nothing much happened. You ever feel sick to your stomach, run to the toilet to throw up, lean over, and … nothing? It was like that. The horror didn’t go away – it just got put on hold for a bit. Jim lay on the bench trying to breathe. Morgan watched him closely. Bill the paramedic called forward to ask if Bucky felt as hot as he did. I tried not to hope. It was hard. Yes, everyone had told me I was dying. The evidence lay in front of me – my body in an ambulance, in a coma. But I couldn’t help thinking, What if I lived after all? What if Jim’s insides somehow turned the battle around? Miracles sometimes happened. Also, and I am not proud of this, I found myself getting distracted. Dying did not concentrate my mind. I wanted to know things.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked Morga
n. “Did you live around Roncy, like Tadeusz and Denise?”

  “No.”

  The siren whooped. We slowed to a crawl to pass through a busy intersection and took off again. Bill wiped his forehead on his short sleeve.

  “I called nowhere home when I was alive,” said Morgan. “I sailed the seven seas, Halifax to the Mauritius, China to Peru, with only the width of a plank between me and eternity. And I have been drifting ever since, inn to inn, hotel to hotel, wherever I can find what I … need.” His jaw went rigid for a moment. I waited for more, but he didn’t go on.

  “How long ago was that?” I asked. “When did you die?”

  He bared his saw teeth in an animal grimace. “Seventeen twenty. And I didn’t die – I was murdered by my own captain, the foulest, most treacherous pirate who ever flew the flag of blood.”

  Morgan had large hands. When he clenched them into fists, the knuckles bulged like walnuts.

  “You were a pirate?” I gaped. “You kind of dress like one, I guess, but I never … I mean, I thought it was just that…. You mean you really were a pirate? Like Jack Sparrow, or Captain Hook? They are so cool.”

  “I was no captain,” he said bitterly. “Edward Low captured my fishing boat off the Carolinas. I joined his crew and did what I was told.”

  “I never heard of Edward Low,” I said.

  “Name him not!”

  Morgan’s jaws snapped together. He grabbed me by the throat. “That devil stole my life. And not mine alone. He cut off Thomas Cocklyn’s lips and ears. He flogged Sam Bellamy for an hour after he was dead. He shot me in the back for no reason. ‘If I didn’t shoot one of you now and then, you’d forget me,’ he said.”

  It wasn’t regret or fear that had tied him to Earth for three hundred years. And it sure wasn’t love of battle. It was rage. He craved the violence of death. He needed to be here. His hands on my neck felt like a collar of fire.

  I struggled to pull them away. “You’re choking me,” I whispered.

  He stared at me hungrily.

  “I can’t breathe,” I said. “You’re killing me.”

  He spoke then. “I’m a Slayer,” he said. “It’s what I do.”

  I panicked, kicking and twisting, but still couldn’t get air into my lungs. My head flopped sideways, and I saw Jim thrashing around on the bench. He couldn’t breathe either. Darkness gathered around me and rose to cover me. I sank into it with a silent scream. Anyone who says dying is easy has never tried it.

  Bill the paramedic was talking. His voice echoed strangely in my head, like an announcement at a train station.

  “What’s our ETA at St. Mike’s, Bucky?” he called out.

  “Five minutes. Maybe six.”

  “Damn.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Patient’s asphyxiating. Looks like another DOA.”

  The siren whooped in the background.

  I lay on my back, on the bench. I was Jim now, the body. I saw Bill take a sterile package from a drawer and peel it open. On the other side of the ambulance I saw Morgan with his hands round the neck of my ghost, that pathetic struggling piece of crap.

  I did not want to die and spend a gray eternity between Roncy and the Jordan Arms. I wanted another chance.

  Seconds left to live. Seconds. I couldn’t breathe in, but there was enough air left in my lungs for one word. I forced a word out.

  “Help!” I cried from the bench.

  Seconds.

  I don’t know if Bill heard my cry, but Morgan did. He looked over at me, the body. My ghost took this opportunity to thumb him hard in the eye.

  “Hellfire!”

  Morgan let go. Bill swabbed my throat with alcohol and cut deep with the X-Acto knife he’d taken from the sterile package. A thin stream of air reached my lungs. Morgan swore again. Bill was still working, feeding a length of narrow tubing into my throat. Another breath, easier this time. And another.

  Morgan floated near me, scowling deeply, tearing from one eye. My ghost had disappeared. I was going to live.

  I smiled and closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was in a hospital bed with a headache the size of Lake Erie.

  ME DOING A LITTLE BETTER

  CHAPTER 18

  I tried to speak. Couldn’t. My throat felt like sandpaper. I tried to say, Where am I? and it came out like, Wahmmaaaam. No one answered.

  The light in my eyes made my headache worse. I tried to say, Put out the light, and it came out like, Pahlaaaaa. No one did anything.

  I turned away. No I didn’t. Red hot spikes in the back of my head stopped me from moving.

  I fell asleep.

  Next time I woke up things started coming into focus. I was in a hospital bed, surrounded by bloops and gurgles and whooshing noises. A nurse stood by my bed. “Good morning, Jim,” she said loudly.

  Light in my eyes again. My nurse moved it around. I followed it with my eyes. “Very good,” she said.

  My hands were tied to my sides. I started to wonder why and then fell asleep.

  Next time I woke up, an old lady was sitting next to me, squeezing my tied hand.

  “Jim,” she said. “Oh, Jim.”

  “Ma,” I said. My lips felt like balloons. My throat burned.

  My tied left hand hurt when she squeezed it.

  “Ouch. Let go,” I said.

  “Oh, Jim,” she said again. She couldn’t understand me. It was her, all right. Smoke-gruff voice, face like a crumpled fender. Ma. I was happy to see her.

  “What happened?” I asked. “How’d I get here?”

  “Oh, Jim,” she said.

  I went back to sleep.

  A doctor shook me awake and asked me questions. Name, address, how many fingers. I told her.

  “Good,” she said.

  Her name was Dr. Driver. She untied me.

  My throat still hurt. I reached up, but the doc grabbed my arm in midair.

  “No, Jim,” she said. “Let your throat alone. You had a tube sticking out of there, but it’s gone. Now you have to let the wound heal.”

  She asked me to make a fist, touch my fingers together. I did them easy enough, except that there was a needle and a tube coming out of my right wrist and they got in the way.

  “Good,” she said again.

  There was another bag below the bed, with a tube attached to my dick. Pretty gross.

  The doc was real old, maybe like fifty. She had a white coat, glasses, and her gray hair in a ponytail. Her lips were a thin line. She took a microphone from her pocket and started asking me about the last thing I remembered before waking up in the hospital.

  “What about the accident?” she asked. “Do you remember that?”

  “I remember a car,” I said.

  “Go on.”

  “Big white car. A Lincoln.”

  “I don’t know about the car that hit you.”

  “Raf was with me. It was dark.”

  She frowned. I shut up. Just in time I remembered that we were inside the Lincoln, boosting it. I wasn’t going to talk into a microphone about that.

  “What do you remember after the Lincoln?”

  “I went home.” The doc nodded encouragement. “I was wearing a new shirt.”

  “New shirt. Good. Go on, Jim.”

  But I couldn’t. I tried, but my memory was a pocket with a hole in it. There was nothing there after the Lincoln.

  I caught myself trying to touch my throat. “Did I really have a tube sticking out here?” I asked. You know, that would look kind of cool, walking down the street with a tube out your throat. Hold a cigarette up to it, take a drag, let the smoke out.

  All right, maybe not too cool. But interesting.

  “You started to choke in the ambulance, and the paramedic stuck a tube in so you could breathe,” said Dr. Driver. “Do you remember that?”

  It hurt to shake my head.

  “You’re a lucky guy, Jim. You could have died in the ambulance, or later on the operating table. Blood clots near the brain are tricky
. But you came through. It’s incredible, really. There’s a lot we don’t understand.”

  “How long have I been here?” I asked.

  She checked my chart. “Admitted Tuesday afternoon, and it’s Friday now. That’s three days.”

  “Was I in a coma?”

  “Yes.”

  “Comas are cool.”

  She shook her head.

  “You’ll be leaving the Intensive Care Unit soon. We’ll keep you in the hospital a while longer, make sure you can move on your own before we let you go home. Your mother says you’re twelve years old – is that right?”

  “I’m fourteen.”

  “I thought you looked bigger than twelve. I’ve got a twelve-year-old at home. In fact, you look pretty big for fourteen.”

  She waited a sec, then said casually, “Your mother doesn’t visit very often, Jim. You two get on okay?”

  I shrugged. “Not bad.”

  “It’s just that most moms practically live here when their kids are sick. What about the rest of your family – dad, grandparents, brothers and sisters. Are they in the picture?”

  I told her I had a sister. “But I don’t think she’s anywhere near the picture,” I said.

  “Oh,” said the doc.

  Next time I woke up I was in a regular room, with a mean nurse and a geezer roommate named Chester who wheezed.

  The nurse showed me how to walk, pushing around a clear plastic bag on a pole. First trip was to the bathroom down the hall. (I didn’t have a tube attached to my dick anymore.) She left me alone but came busting in when I screamed.

  I was staring into the mirror. First time I’d seen myself since the accident. “I’m bald!” I cried.

  “They shaved you for the operation,” the nurse told me. “Stop whining, you baby. It’ll grow back.”

  Ma came to visit once but didn’t stay. I was on the fifth floor. That was a lot of up and down for her. I told her I was glad to see her.

  “Are you?”