Art by Tyler Landry
The Sun burnt the city streets without compromise, covering the world in a thick orange haze and dreadfully uncomfortable stickiness. People bedecked with various suits of makeshift armour trudged through the crowds of gawking bystanders, carrying placards, banderoles and streamers while shouting proclamations from the top of their lungs and clapping their hands with all the ferocity of an oncoming stampede. Soon the uproarious vibrations cracked the cheaper storefront windows while the others were simply and unceremoniously smashed with garbage cans. A shout in the distance snowballed into coarse chanting: ‘Ah! Ah! Down with the Prime Minister!’
Armoured police began constructing barricades within a two block radius.
One of the many people watching from the sidelines was David Rutherford, who thankfully had no direct part in the topsy-turvy event he was witnessing – he was simply a tourist visiting the country for a short period of time. He had also taken ill a day before the riots, which made him somewhat delirious and caused him to hallucinate a few select details of the proceedings, such as the wandering brontosaurus and hovering lithograph of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
He watched as the police marched in unison towards the parade of anarchists, quickly striking them down without discriminating age, sex, race or creed, and then watched as the protestors countered with buckets of bodily fluids splashing down from the buildings above, covering the police and some of the crowd. A stray bucket landed on David’s head with all the force of an iron brick.
He awoke trampled and molested in a hospital bed several hours later, feeling like an unswept chimney.
Within his brain, flash cut images of the downtown outbreak intermingled with periods of blackness and absolute silence, like stars caught in sudden bursts of hyperspace. Every so often small thought clusters broke through these moving images, inflicting severe, jack-hammering pain upon David that was quite unlike any of the headaches he had previously experienced, understandably making him wish he wasn’t there; he had, in fact, a very specific place he’d rather be in mind – as distant lovers ache for one another across great expanses of time and space, so too did David ache for a digital outlet to network into. Wiring into a secondary reality composed of simple number sequences had a cathartic effect on him, as it generally felt like an overall safer and cleaner place to be than that of the Earth’s physical realm.
The razor-thin television screen situated on the sterilised wall in front of David projected newsreel footage from a helicopter’s perspective of the protest. Peering closely at a familiar shape, he was quite suddenly and unexpectedly confronted with the close-up of his own body face down in yellowish liquids; he brought his fractured hand to his face in embarrassment, sneaking glances through the blurred outlines of his fingers at the pathetically crumpled form presented before him.
The complimentary phone on the bed’s armrest lit up discreetly before the camera shifted away from the humiliating scene. David managed to nestle it awkwardly between his bruised chin and shoulder, and without hearing a single word spoken by the caller, he knew it was his sister simply from the cigarette-clogged breaths that billowed out of the receiver like harsh black smoke.
‘I’m guessing you caught the news,’ he said through a popping jaw; the relatives of the dying old man in the bed beside him turned to shush David, burning holes through his pupils and singing his soul with their reddened, tear-filled eyes. They then solemnly returned their gazes to the quivering lips of their loved one in the hopes that he’d let out one last morsel of wisdom before giving up the ghost. ‘I mean, I just saw the news myself, so I know what you might be thinking – but really, everything is going okay. I’m doing fine.’
‘Ah, well, okay,’ said his sister, although he couldn’t tell if she was affecting a sarcastic or generally insincere tone, ‘I suppose if you say you’re all right, then you’re all right. I mean, you would know how you’re doing better than anyone else, right? It’s not like a doctor would know if you’re doing terrible and will be spending most of your vacation in bed, right?’ She placed emphasis on the words “doctor” and “terrible”; by now David could tell that his sister was indeed being sarcastic, so he made a face and slumped down in the bed, holding his forehead between thumb and forefinger. ‘Dave, David, Davy. Come on, now – this is your sister talking. You have to be honest with me, you know? I’m the one who takes care of you, and when I’m not there to take care of you . . . well, look what happened. I checked the plane schedule and I can be there within the night. Okay?’
‘No, it’s not “okay”. I don’t need your help, sis. I honestly, truly don’t need your help, and frankly I’d prefer it if you didn’t try so hard. And well, to put it bluntly, that was the singular point of my vacation. I need to get away from my life for a little while, even though I’ll be sore and eating plastic food for a few days; at least those are the only things I have to worry about. Doesn’t that sound good to you? I’ll be back soon in any event, and when I’m back you can take care of things again if you like, although I’m really quite capable of taking care of myself. You just like taking on a . . . motherly approach to things. Mom. Sis. I’m okay. Okay? Just stay home and do something. Go out and do something, I mean.
‘The nurse is coming with my dinner. As a clam, okay? Good night, my darling sister.’
‘Good night, David.’
The line between them severed, leaving an almost unbearable silence.
The nurse attached the dining tray to David’s bed. He gazed wearily at the set of plastic toys served before him: the carrots – if they were indeed carrots – were too bright, too orange; the potatoes took the exact shape of the cylindrical can they came from; and the meat, oh . . . oh! the meat; it was terrible, terrible, terrible. Was it chicken? Was it duck? Could it actually be beef? He took a bite and the texture reminded him of a baby’s pacifier. Chewing and swallowing hurt his jaw, throat and chest. He took a few more bites before deciding to focus his attention on the television instead.
The Prime Minister’s face appeared. David always considered the P.M. to be reptilian in his overall facial structure and features: he always appeared to be in a continual state of relaxation due to his heavy eyelids; a general, predatory calmness exuded from those eyes, sheltered by eyebrows protruding from his skull; his nose was flat with large nostrils, like twin burrows in the middle of a desert; and his wormy lips were curled at the sides, giving him a permanent smile and hint of mental arrhythmia. His skin had a slightly greasy sheen to it like that of the food on David’s lap.
When the P.M. spoke, his beet-red tongue became visible through thinly parted lips and David found himself losing what little appetite he had left.
‘I don’t care what the free media says,’ the P.M. said, calmly but firmly. ‘We’re not at civil war. And we never will be.’
The camera pulled away, turning on a dime and blurring the surrounding press like ghosts in a storm.
David pushed the dining tray aside in a sudden rush of motion sickness and tried to steady himself, dejectedly looking over the spotless white bed sheet that covered his temporarily crippled form. His senses were gradually returning and he found himself pensively working over the events of his so-called vacation, wondering how he could’ve timed it so badly. Suddenly the entire world seemed to be going out of focus.
He set his eyes weakly upon the television screen: first seeing through it, then past it, until he could clearly see the world outside the hospital. The walls around him were melting, revealing layers of white static and orange, bubbly flesh. David felt as though his head was being pulled from his body and in a sudden burst of nausea began vomiting over the side of the bed; vomiting out his dinner, guts, heart and soul. A nurse was already mopping up by the second retch.
He closed his eyes and slammed on the brakes, forcing an abrupt return to reality. David wondered if his sister was bluffing about the plane. His sister was dear to him – she was a kind and loving friend; they managed and worked together on a business involving the manufacture and maintenance of printing presses for major publishing houses, despite copyright infringement being one of the single most rampant crimes in the world. They lived in the same house together; they were each other’s arms and legs; their money was their own money – they fed each other with the food they filled their plates with; and so on and so forth. While David’s head spun in the fumes of his own innards, he caught glimpses of kind and caring eyes – nurse’s eyes; his sister’s eyes.
He peered hopefully through the slits of his eyelids but caught only the bright fluorescent lights of the hospital room between them.
First there was only light, blinding him. Then David looked away from the ceiling and rubbed his eyes, opening them wide at the snow-white sheet being pulled over the old man’s head as his relatives sobbed and wept openly around him, drowning the body in hot, heavy tears. Twin black streams of mascara ran down a middle-aged woman’s face like polluted rivers caught in a rainstorm. The family could only speak in moans and sighs, causing David to superimpose Neanderthals over them in his mild delirium.
In this state he pondered the molecular remains of the old man’s body: how they would continue to permeate throughout nature, rendering the old man essentially immortal. In his quiet wonder, David continued to watch the body intently through the heart-shaped rift between an embracing husband and wife. He was utterly absorbed in the final episode of a stranger. He considered that strange.
A sickly green curtain was then pulled alongside the family by an overweight nurse, completely obscuring David’s curious view of the scene in question. At this point David was struck by the desire to call back Tanya. That was his sister’s name – she used to write it on her shoes with a pink marker when she was twelve.
She also used to take care of David’s scraped knees after his misadventures in bicycling; she would wash off the dirt and blood for him, set bandages on the tattered bits of pink flesh and hand him a banana-flavoured popsicle to take his mind off the pain. He remembered her kind eyes looking back at his, letting him know that everything was okay.
David wondered why these nostalgic memories were choosing this particular moment to arrive at the forefront of his conscious mind, superseding any authority previously maintained by his typically forward-thinking nature. Was it something as laughably profound as the realisation of his own mortality, set off by the old man’s corpse? No, it was far more probable that the realisation simply was that Tanya Rutherford truly was a kind and loving sister whom David missed far more than he publicly let on. He reached for the phone and dialed their home number. A polite click answered.
‘Hullo, sis,’ David spoke quietly as though confiding a secret.
‘Well, hello again,’ Tanya responded flatly.
‘I thought I’d call you back since things ended a tad sourly five or ten minutes ago,’ David said. ‘I forget when exactly. Basically, I’m calling you back since I’m wondering how you’re doing without me.’
‘Fine enough, Davy. Don’t worry about the last call – maybe it was just worry; maybe it was something more, but . . . I don’t know. I’m worried about you, you know?’
‘I know.’ He leaned against his pillow and watched the television screen. The P.M. covered a camera lens with his gloved hand while a building shot flames through a broken window, leaving temporary globs of white across the screen like puddles of spilled milk. David wanted to turn it off or at least turn down the already modest volume, but the remote was nowhere in sight. He tried to wave over the fat nurse but she was busy with a red phone, undoubtedly making arrangements for the body. He slumped back down in his bed and stared at the ceiling. ‘Are you doing fine?’ he asked his sister distractedly. ‘Are you doing okay?’
‘I’m doing fine; I’m doing okay. You’ve asked me that already. Are you feeling okay?’
‘Well, I just threw up some neon carrots. I feel a tad lightheaded. And I think I hear the sound of you double-checking the plane schedule.’
His sister gave a light chuckle.
‘You have very good ears, Davy – you could hear a penny dropping three blocks away.’
‘Every cent counts, Tanya.’ He continued to watch the news as he talked, peering down the blur of his nose as far as he could. He was suddenly struck by another burst of pain centred directly in his skull, similar to the pain he felt while reading a book in a moving car. ‘Ow!’ he cried out weakly. ‘Outstanding! I mean. Ow for outstanding health care!’
‘Davy . . .’
A quiet pause in the conversation thickened the hospital room air and nearly choked him.
‘Tanya . . .’ he said, letting out both a diminutive laugh and sigh within the same stricken breath. ‘I don’t think I’m doing very well over here.’
‘I’m on my way, Davy,’ Tanya said earnestly, trying to mask the sympathy in her faltering voice and failing.
‘I know, sis,’ David said resignedly, draping the weight being lifted off his shoulders. The screen in front of him displayed the P.M. being flown out of the street by a black helicopter. ‘Much love.’
‘You too,’ his sister said, and the line suddenly went dead as the news cameras surveyed the downtown wreckage, lingering on the ambulances and bodies like curious children stumbling upon dead animals in a forest.
‘Everything is going to be all right,’ said a weary medic, gazing into the camera lens while two microphones were pushed towards him. ‘We’re all doing our best out here and that’s our job, to do our best. We’ve saved many lives today and we’re going to save many more.’
A doctor with incredibly dark skin sidled up to David and quickly scratched notes onto a clipboard. He spoke with a meticulous, calm and unnaturally deep voice as he summarised all of David’s injuries: ‘Patient’s name is David O. Rutherford . . . Broken sternum . . . Broken arm . . . Unsteady heart rate . . . Mild delirium caused by an unidentified illness . . .’
David’s eyes widened and shot towards the clipboard.
‘Pardon?’ He wondered how the doctor could be aware of his delirium.
The doctor set his heavy eyes on David as if noticing him for the first time.
‘Well, we think it could be caused by a combination of any number of things, namely stress and allergies . . .’ The Doctor trailed off and flipped through the papers. ‘Now, Mister Rutherford – it says here you’ve broken your arm before. Do you remember how, exactly?’
‘Yes, I’ve broken my arm before,’ David remembered: His father was still alive and he was fourteen years old. They had gone out fishing together, just the two of them as his mother had already passed away and his sister had never particularly enjoyed it. He was never all too fond of fishing either, but knew it made the old man happy and was glad because of it; for when his father enjoyed life, life seemed to enjoy his father, and it was in those few moments that his old man found unadulterated peace.
After dealing with constant swarms of rushing traffic, crowds of rude pedestrians, backstabbing co-workers, and soaring retail prices and general economic decline, taking a quiet Sunday morning to go out fishing in the deep wilderness was enough for his father to achieve an almost Zen-like experience; a personal heaven that lingered throughout the day, following his father from the lake to their home. But that was his father and David was himself.
As he had been growing weary of Waiting for the Big One to Strike, he had set his rod between two sturdy rocks and decided to climb the gnarled tree behind them. David had then decided to walk along the lengthy and seemingly supportive branch with his arms outstretched on either side of him like awkward wings, and with every advancing step he took the more it felt like he could fly.
He fell, of course. He ruined his father’s peaceful morning with piercing cries and needless worry – and now managed to ruin even the memory of the morning with aching regret. But he was a child then. Well, what was he now? David still missed his father like a lost and lonely child – he was lost and lonely in the hospital room, waiting for his sister to arrive and comfort him like when they were children.
‘I fell out of a tree when I was a kid. It was during a fishing trip with my father.’
The doctor gave a friendly, albeit artificial, laugh.
‘Well, I doubt you’ll be fishing again anytime soon,’ he said through a slim smile, then pretended to look over some information on his clipboard. ‘Now, this is a bit preliminary here, Mister Rutherford, but I can safely say that you won’t be here for long – even if you don’t get better, I mean. I can tell you’re a smart enough guy to know that this is a busy time for us. And busy is always good for business, eh? So we’ll fix you up with a cast now, some medicine, and then we’ll just have to wait and see.’
The doctor then leaned in close to David and said to him in an even lower voice: ‘But first, here’s a little word of advice for you. Man to man. The police will want to speak with you soon. You know – because of where you were scraped up. Now, I’m not saying you had some part in it, but the cleaner you are, the quicker you’re out of here. You know what I mean, eh?’ The doctor patted his shoulder and gave his fake laugh again, like a robot programmed to mimic human emotion but never quite getting it down.
He pulled away and jotted a few more notes onto the clipboard. ‘Take care, Mister Rutherford,’ he mumbled lightly in closing, more to himself than to David.
The old man’s body and family had been quietly vacated from the room during the doctor’s one-sided conversation. Soon the few souls remaining comprised solely of the overweight nurse and David himself, discounting the security cameras with their spying obsidian eyes and the talkative machines with their coded blips and bleeps.
Anxiety slowly welled up inside of David as he gradually felt a strong and altogether queer sense of being meticulously inspected by the room itself: by both the cameras and the men behind them; the machines and their continuous, increasingly annoying data collecting; the television displaying countless eyes, all of them fixed confidently on David as though accusing him for all of their problems; the jiggling nurse who disinterestedly set his cast like a washerwoman folding laundry on autopilot, fixing her eyes on him from time to time as though confirming he was actually there; even himself as he gazed over his own body like a disconnected soul.
In this situation he found himself becoming increasingly aware of his current state of helplessness and isolation. The awareness suddenly dawned on him that something might go terribly wrong.
He peered suspiciously at the nurse in an attempt to extract some insight from her grey, mask-like face. The wrinkles around her mouth formed unique patterns whenever she parted her dry lips to speak: ‘This isn’t so bad, now,’ she said to him as though practicing in front of a mirror, ‘Is it? No, this isn’t so bad. You’re doing fine. Almost done. Going to be over before you know it.’
The woman slapped him playfully on the white plaster cast like an old aunt slapping the buttocks of a stripper, causing her blubber to ripple down her wrists and shake her entire body. David watched as her goose-bumped skin oozed over her meat and bones like kneaded oatmeal cookie dough. He watched as her fat, wrinkled flesh danced with every minuscule movement like dust motes caught in the morning Sun. He watched this voluminous travesty of the human body and nearly fainted.
From his birth in a cold, clinical hospital room to his current state in a cold, clinical hospital room many Christmases had passed him by, following a direct line from the plastic tracks of his first toy train to an almost paper-thin laptop with nigh unlimited space. This caused him to ponder over the fact that everything had the fat sucked out of it these days. Technology had to be whittled down until it was rendered essentially invisible or else people would lose interest, but once it did become invisible then people no longer took notice of it. On the human side of the same coin, eight year-old girls starved themselves and regurgitated their candy to look like Lilliputian parodies of heroin-addicted supermodels.
Thankfully, his sister was never like that – she had always maintained just enough substance that you couldn’t see through her. But what else had retained such a level of desirable ambiguity? David could not find many other examples to clutch onto: even Christmas, the celebration of a lord’s birth and death, had become thin as well. However, referring to it as a time of materialistic stress was quintessentially cliché.
The gravamen was weighing heavily indeed, but against whom?
He turned his head and found her standing in the doorway, exuding the aura of une femme mariée. Her short, light and bouncy hair had been cut to reveal her perfect forehead and heart-shaped face; her pale blue eyes radiated extraordinarily beneath the absence-of-colour hospital room lights, temporarily trapping his gaze before he pulled away and noted her peach-coloured lips – a new lipstick, he thought – and the unlit cigarette dangling between them; her skin was naturally eggshell-coloured with hints of warm blood in her pinched cheeks; he couldn’t be bothered to ascertain the designer of her clothes – a simple form-fitting ocean blue sweater with a long skirt that teased her ankles – displaying her fine childbearing hips and fertile breasts. She should be a mother, he thought admiringly.
‘Hello, Davy,’ Tanya said to him in a formal tone, albeit one tinted by shades of orange concern. ‘I took the express jet. You owe me.’
‘What’s mine is yours.’
She opened her mouth to speak but closed it instead, as though the words were already lingering in the air like the scent of an expensive perfume. Quick strides brought the side of her face to his crushed chest and she wrapped her arms around his torso in a sisterly embrace. The cigarette fell from between her fingers and rolled under the bed.