Trembling With Fear 12-8-24

Blood Ocean, by Cameron Walker

Ten hours post-surgery and I’m static. Lying upright in a hospital bed, I wonder how I can think my way out of this. But that’s the irony, isn’t it? A brain tumour. Corruption in the very place where logic and reason reside. 

A nurse appeared, smiling. 

“Morphine?”

“Sure.”

I opened my mouth like a baby bird and she fed me, then she fluttered around the room, attending to other patients. One protested, as he had done all week. He was old, overweight and slumped, with a dark scar caterpillaring its way around his ear. 

“Not having that. Don’t know what’s in it. I just want to go home. Do you hear me? H-O-M-E. You’re trying to poison me, you pack of liars. I know you are!”

“Don’t be like that, John. We need that infection to clear up before we can discharge you. Now, can I get you a cuppa?”

There was no reply, and the nurse left him sulking. She moved to a dreadfully pale man opposite me, too weak to raise his voice above a whisper. Around his neck was a collar of lacerations. The unit is highly specialised, yet doesn’t solely cover brain issues. Patients with abnormalities of the spine or neck are also cared for here. I presumed the feeble man opposite had a spinal tumour, but I’d not had the energy to talk to him. The nurse listened courteously to his repeated protests. The same shapes formed on his cracked lips over and over.

Biting me. Biting me. Biting. Biting. He seemed to say, in the slow, agonal way of someone who isn’t long for this world.

“OK, my love. I’ve heard you. What do you think has bitten you?”

Now his mouth repeated a different shape I couldn’t quite decipher. Liars, or lice, maybe? The nurse looked at him with pity. 

“There’s nothing in here that could’ve bitten you, Frank. Those marks are from numbing injections, as the doctor has explained multiple times. That scar down your neck is one heck of a thing, so just go easy on yourself. You’re bound to be getting a tad muddled up.”

She patted his shoulder once and left the ward. Frank looked blankly at the ceiling, moisture gathering at the corners of his eyes. I reached up to touch the line of my own scar, which carved a deep ridge, high and central on my skull. 

“You can barely see it,” Fran had said, holding my hand while a tear rolled down her cheek. I’d tried to own it, joking. But in the companionable solitude of the ward? Under the flickering strip lights? Amongst the lunatic beeping of medical machines? No. There’s nowhere to hide. This place is a prison where the chief crime is the betrayal of inmates by their own bodies. The smell of bleach used to clean my vomit from the floor still lingered. Thankfully, the morphine was beginning to take the edge off my senses. I settled back further into the pillow. 

More powerful than the nurses are the doctors. How mysterious they are. I can discern no pattern in them whatsoever. They turn up at my bedside randomly, looming and omnipotent. Well-dressed or dishevelled, sympathetic or curt. Deep down, I’m grateful for their attention, but nevertheless, I fear them. 

I clicked the lock button on my phone. A photo of Fran and I posing in front of an Italian castle appeared. She was beautiful, inside and out. I looked good too. Tanned. Lean. I was no longer that person, and yet I was. 

“Poison.” John muttered from the next bed.

I lolled my head to the side and saw him curled up, facing away, and rolled my head back again. My left arm and leg didn’t work anymore. I’d even tried to get Fran laughing about that, but things are really fucked, aren’t they? How do you even begin to comprehend something like this?

“Home! Discharge me!” John growled.

“They won’t. They told you why.” I said.

I closed my eyes and images from a terrible semi-consciousness returned. Seizures on the operating table. Masked faces above me, like approaching meteors in an apocalyptic night sky. I saw my pulse quicken on the heartbeat monitor as the flashback played out. No escape. No way to reverse things. 

A flashing orange light drew me back to the present. It was above Frank’s bed. Now a siren started and a flurry of nurses rushed over. They attached wires and pads and messed around with bags of blood and plasma. An attendant drew the U-shaped curtain around my bed. All I could see were pairs of black nylon shoes pacing urgently. Raised voices demanded answers to questions in as professional a manner as could be hoped for in a life and death situation. Through the scurrying nurses strode someone wearing scuffed, brown, pointed shoes. Their stride was deliberate and slow. The newcomer stopped at the end of Frank’s bed for a moment, then walked back out of the ward. Gone as quickly as they’d appeared. A team of nurses followed them, flanking the wheels of Frank’s bed as they pushed. The curtains were pulled back to reveal that three patients had become two. Only John and I remained.

My dreams took me to the beach with Fran. She sits in the lee of a dune, laughing as I run towards the sea with a surfboard under my arm.

“Keep watching! Don’t look away!” I shout. 

The water is chilly, but I know better than to prolong the discomfort. I dunk myself backwards under the waves, bounce to my feet and prowl the waters, chest-to-board. I see an approaching swell and paddle to meet it. Both arms and legs (fully functional) foam the water as I try to get the timing right. I pop up and the wave curls over me, so I crouch lower to pick up momentum. Fran springs to her feet, cheering me on.

“Keep watching, Fran!” I yell, my voice echoing off the watery walls.

A curious glow appears beneath my board as the water changes. Purple tendrils, then red. 

“Blood. It’s blood.” I mutter. 

My knees knock together and my stomach lurches. Fran is motionless on the shoreline, clutching her sun hat beneath her chin. She isn’t clapping anymore. The wave darkens to an opaque merlot, and I’m bucked from the board. The current buffets my body, and I’m scared to open my eyes. I have to, though, to orient myself. Lungs beginning to protest, I scour the darkness for the surface, but all I can see are two lighter patches in the red. I kick towards them while black circles strobe in my peripheral vision. The patches grow and grow until I see them clearly. On the verge of unconsciousness, I burst through the blood ocean’s surface and see eyes. Bloodshot eyes, not six inches away. They belong to a pale man wearing a white shirt. His hair is black and oily, styled to frame a narrow, serious face. A badge on his chest reads, ‘Dr Anselmo Elias’.

“What happened? Where-” I said.

The man cleared his throat, wiped at the corner of his mouth, and backed away. “I’m just doing your observations. You were sleeping.”

His voice was soft, but not gentle by any means. He consulted his clipboard. 

“Any pain?” He asked.

I touched the fleshy part of my neck, due south of my right ear, and the tips of my fingers came away bloody.

“My neck…”

“Pardon?”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Your doctor. Your surgeon, to be exact. Dr Elias. Given that question, I assume you don’t remember the operation?”

“No, it’s all hazy.”

“Good. That means the anaesthetist did their job correctly because you were quite engaged and cooperative during the procedure. Of that, I can assure you.”

“Was I?”

The man, still ticking boxes on his clipboard, chuckled. His laugh sounded like the rattle of a spider-bitten insect caught in a web. He ran his tongue over both sets of teeth. 

“Yes.” He said.

I prodded my neck again and found the flesh swelling into a pronounced bump. 

“My neck hurts. I think I’ve been bitten.”

The doctor’s eyes flicked up at me. “Strange. Your neck wasn’t involved in the procedure, and I can say with confidence that this is a sterile environment. Regardless, I can have the nurse bring you additional painkillers. Good night.”

He ghosted out of the gloomy ward, silhouette tall and imposing. On his freakishly large feet were a pair of scuffed brown shoes. His stride was deliberate and slow, and from his heels no shadow was cast. This was who I’d seen before, leading the corpse of poor old Frank away. 

Dr Elias. I thought back to Frank’s complaint about being bitten. The nurse asked what had been biting him. And Frank had not said lice, or liars. He’d said Elias. 

John is groaning again. “Poison and lies. Lies!”