Before I Wake (2 page)

***

Michael’s roommate was named Randy, and he let me come over to see where he and Michael lived.

It was a dinky place in a bad part of town. There was one bedroom, which was where Randy slept. He said Michael had slept on the couch. I forget sometimes that people have to live in places like that. I’m so lucky to have the old pile, and that was just because Aunt Dee left it to me.

“Michael’s parents kicked him out because he’s gay,” Randy told me. He picked at the hem of his shirt, like he didn’t want to look me in the eye. “He was hanging around outside a club when I met him. At first I thought he was competition and I tried scaring him off. Then I realized he had no place to go. I let him sleep on my couch for the night. He ended up staying here for six months.”

“That was nice of you,” I said, because it was, even if it wasn’t a great place.

“He bused tables at a restaurant. Earned jack shit though.”

“Did he go to school?”

“Nah. He’d finished high school but didn’t have the money for college. He wanted to, wanted to be an architect or work in construction or something like that. He loved houses.”

He pointed out a few cardboard boxes. “That’s his stuff. He paid a little rent and I got used to it. ‘Spose I’ll look for someone else to take the couch.”

He sounded like Michael was never coming back, and that he was already used to the idea. And when I asked him a lot more questions, like about Michael’s favorite foods and what TV shows he liked and stuff, Randy didn’t know. I didn’t think he was a very good friend.

“How did Michael get hurt?” I asked him.

Randy looked down where he was grinding the toe of his sneaker into the floor. “It was just bad luck. I hook all the time, and I never had anything like that happen. I talked Michael into doing it, for the money. He didn’t want to. So the second time he tries it, some crazy dude almost kills him.”

I tried to figure out what he’d just said. “You talked Michael into having sex for money?”

Randy looked at the wall. “
Really
shitty ass luck.”

For the first time in my life, I wanted to kill someone. I wasn’t sure if it was Randy I wanted to hurt or the guy who’d done that to Michael or both. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, hard.

“Maybe you could take his stuff with you,” Randy said.

All Michael had in the world fit in three cardboard boxes. There were some clothes and two big, old books on houses that maybe Michael got from a library sale. He had a DVD of
Lord of the Rings
and some books with dragons and men with swords on the covers. There was an iPod and headphones.

I took them with me and I put everything neatly in Michael’s hospital room. I thought it might make him feel better, having his stuff.

I brought in a small TV with a DVD player that had been in Aunt Dee’s room. I played
Lord of the Rings
for Michael and talked about all the characters. But Michael still didn’t wake up.

~5~

One day in January, I was washing Michael’s back. His hand, which was laying on his hip, twitched. I got so excited; I probably scared him with my squawk.

“Michael! Can you do it again?”

He didn’t at first, so I kept moving the washcloth over his back. A few minutes later he twitched again.

It felt like the best thing that ever happened in the history of the world, as Aunt Dee used to say. I was so happy as I turned him over so I could do the front. Then I noticed that his dick was not as soft as usual. As I washed his legs and thighs, it got bigger.

Of course, I’d seen this happen before. Sometimes men got it up when you bathed them, even old men, but it’d never affected me. I just ignored it. But this was Michael.

I looked down at him and lost my breath. With his gown off and the sheet at his thighs he was so beautiful. He looked like a statue, all milky skin, thin but still muscular from before the accident. His nipples were dark brown. His face was healed and his cheeks were so pale next to his pink lips and black hair. His penis was long with a pretty little cap on it, and it was sticking up against his belly.

I got hard.

That had never happened with a patient before. My face burned with shame. I continued to wash him, not paying any more attention to that area than I had to. I put him in a fresh diaper and gown.

I sat beside his bed afterwards, trying to stop shaking.

***

I’d been with men before. Right after high school, a friend of mine started taking me to this bar where you could meet men who liked other men. I could always find someone to have sex with there. I guess they liked how big and tough I looked. At first it was great, because it felt real good, and I liked being touched. But the men didn’t want anything more to do with me after sex, and that made me feel sick inside.

I talked to Aunt Dee about it. She said I needed to find someone who cared about me. She said being in love made sex worthwhile. I didn’t think I’d find that person at the bar so I stopped going. The thing is - more men like women than like men. Add the fact that I don’t go out much, and I figured I had little chance of ever finding someone.

It’s okay. I try not to think about it. But I do wish I had a companion to live in the house with me, like Aunt Dee did, maybe a friend. And sometimes I wished I had more than that, someone to hold and kiss and touch, someone who would do those things to me too.

But it wasn’t fair to feel like that about Michael. He was asleep. And it was wrong to think about doing something with someone when they’re sleeping, even if their body asks you to.

It was a bad idea to start thinking about Michael like that anyway. He was young and beautiful. His chart said he was twenty-one, five years younger than me. Even if he did wake up, he wouldn’t want me that way.

I was like a goblin warrior and he was an elven prince.

~6~

Michael

I was in a dungeon. It reminded me of the inside of Dwarf Mountain in
The Hobbit
. The walls were stone and there were torches and precipices and endless rooms. It smelled bad -- like mold and dirt and a little like antiseptic. And it was cold, always so damn cold. There were dark shadows at the edges of the light that shifted and always made me feel like they were about to eat me.

I was scared. And I was alone. I didn’t understand how I’d gotten there. I kept trying to find my way out. But time was strange. I kept losing myself, as if in sleep, then I’d find myself in the dungeon again. Sometimes it felt like I wandered for hours.

I tried leaving marks on the dirt floor, ‘X’s to mark where I’d been, but they faded away as soon as I marked them. I thought I might be trapped there forever. What had I done to deserve this? Was this hell?

But there was a room with a hole in the ceiling and a bright white light shining down. Every time I found that room I thought about going up there, but something held me back. The voice. The hole was a way out, but I knew if I went up there I could never come back. And I was curious about the voice. Every time I decided not to climb up to the light, I told myself I could always come back to this room anytime I wanted to, if I got too scared. But if I could stand the dungeon a little longer, maybe I could find that voice.

***

The voice has a name -- Jonesy.

~7~

Jonesy

After that day when Michael twitched his hand, I’d hold his fingers in mine and ask him to squeeze. One day he did. I was excited, but I wanted to be sure before I told Sharon. We worked out a system, Michael and me. One squeeze meant ‘yes’ and two quick squeezes meant ‘no’.

Michael would only respond sometimes. Even though he never opened his eyes, I could sense when he was deep asleep, and he wouldn’t squeeze my hand. Other times he seemed closer to the surface, and he could respond. At first, those times were very short, maybe only ten to twenty seconds. It was as if squeezing my hand was hard work, and he would soon slip back down again, like disappearing under black water.

I repeated myself a lot. “Hi, Michael. My name is Jonesy, and I’m your friend.”

Squeeze.

“You’re in St. Mercy Hospital. Do you remember I told you that before?”

Squeeze.

“That’s real good! I bet you’d like to eat something. They have a tube in your stomach now, but that’s boring, isn’t it? You can eat some real food if you open your mouth. Can you open it for me?”

Squeeze squeeze.

“No? Your mouth is stuck, huh? That’s okay. We’ll try again tomorrow. Would you like to hear some music? I have your iPod. I bet it has all your favorites on it, huh?”

Sharon brought in this dock thing she had, and when I put Michael’s iPod in there, he and I could listen together.

***

Michael got stronger and started to respond for longer periods. I told myself when he got to five minutes it would be what Sharon called a milestone. The first time he did, I went and got her.

“How you doing, sweetheart?” Sharon asked him when she came in. She took his hand just like I told her. “Can you squeeze my hand for me, pumpkin?”

He did. Sharon smiled at me real big.

“That’s good! You’re practically ready to run for president! Jonesy here told me you were feeling better. He’s not giving you a hard time, is he?”

Squeeze squeeze.

“Two squeezes means no,” I told her hurriedly.

“You two have a system, huh? Think you can open those pretty eyes for me, pumpkin?”

Michael didn’t open his eyes. Sharon moved back the covers to show his foot. She put her palm against his sole.

“Can you feel my hand on your foot? Wanna push against it?”

He pushed just a little.

“Excellent! Look at you with your bad self! I’m going to talk to your doctor and tell him the good news, and we’ll see what he says, all right?”

She wrote on his chart and was smiling when she left.

***

The doctor wasn’t as impressed. I heard him talking to some interns in the hall. He didn’t like the fact that Michael wouldn’t open his eyes, said there might be some ‘primitive responsiveness’ but that was no guarantee there wasn’t significant brain damage.

I wanted to tell him that Michael could understand things fine, and his answers made sense. He just wasn’t ready to wake up all the way yet.

Maybe the fact that he seemed better was a bad thing, because the administrator told Sharon they’d found a place for him. They were going to move Michael to a charity institution for the permanently disabled in two weeks. When Sharon told me, she was angry and blinking back tears. That told me everything I needed to know about what kind of place it was, a place for someone with no insurance and no family and no hope. I wouldn’t be there to take care of Michael; no one who cared about him would.

~8~

My Aunt Dee used to say there’s all kinds of intelligence. I think she was trying to make me feel better. I’m not as smart as some, but I graduated from high school and I got my certificate as a CNA, a Certified Nursing Assistant. I wanted to become an RN, but the classes were too hard. Aunt Dee said that if what I wanted was to help people, being a little cheese was even better than being a big cheese, because big cheeses got too full of themselves and stank.

I don’t like tests, see. Some people are good at stuffing a lot of facts in their head and spitting them back out on a test and then forgetting them, but that’s not me. When I learn something, I learn it for keeps. It takes me longer than most people, but once it’s in there, it’s stuck. And when I have a test, I get all nervous and worried and my mind goes blank. So I pretty much sucked at school.

What I like most is fixing things. Aunt Dee got me a set of home repair books when I was twelve, and I’ve done nearly everything in those books at least once. I’ve done a lot to the old pile, as Aunt Dee called it. It’s a really big house with seven bedrooms and two round turrets on either end. Aunt Dee’s parents bought it when she was a little girl. I stripped out and redid most of the plumbing and electrical in the main part of the house and I redid a couple of bathrooms real nice. I’ve painted most everything at least once. I put in new storm windows and insulation and refinished the original wooden floors, which had been covered up by ugly carpet. Most of the house is done now, so I spend my time out in the garden. I like to be outside.

No one lives here but me, so I guess it’s a waste to keep it nice, but it gives me something to do.

Mr. Locklear was supposed to help me with the place, but something about the way he talked about numbers reminded me of taking tests, so I ignored his calls. But now, it was really important that I go see him.

***

“How are you, Jonesy? I’m so glad you finally came by,” Mr. Locklear said.

“I’m sorry I haven’t come to see you, but I really don’t like to talk about money.”

“Yes, I got that feeling.” Mr. Locklear frowned at me. “You know, you’re lucky that I’m an old friend of your aunt’s, and that I’ve been managing her estate for so long. You shouldn’t trust someone to run your finances without a monthly look over. A less honorable man could rob you blind.”

“But Aunt Dee trusted you, so I do too.”

He sighed. “Sit down, Jonesy.”

So then I had to sit there and sweat while Mr. Locklear told me all the things he’d been wanting to tell me, about stock this and mutual that and rates and things. I hated it so much; I wished I could take his letter opener and stick it in my eye just to distract myself.

“You’re been very frugal, Jonesy. Your aunt didn’t leave you a great fortune, but you have a sizable nest egg in the bank and you never touch it.”

“Aunt Dee told me I should be careful with the money. Because I don’t earn that much, and if I spend it all, I might have to sell the old pile. I don’t want to sell it. It’s my home.”

“Well, I can’t see a need for that. You’re doing very well. But you might--”

“Except now I need money, so I wanted to ask if I could have some, and if I’d need to sell the house if I took it.”

“What is it that you want, Jonesy? A new car? A vacation?”

“I need a lawyer. Right away. And a hospital bed and some other stuff for the house. Oh, and I need to hire an in-home nurse for when I go to work.”

Mr. Locklear stared at me. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning and let me advise you.”

So I did.

***

Mr. Locklear advised me not to take Michael home, but I didn’t listen. One good thing he said, though, was that it would cost more to pay an in-home nurse than I make going to work. I didn’t want to give up my job at St. Mercy’s, because I liked it. But I remembered some of the other nurses had taken a leave of absence to have a baby or go back to school and such. So I figured I could ask for a leave of absence to take care of Michael for at least a few months. Maybe he would wake up by then. Mr. Locklear said I had enough money for that, and for the lawyer and the other things too, and I wouldn’t have to sell the house. I am so lucky.