Reach

Chapter Five- Smoke

Drowning. Jumping, falling, crashing. Swimming, sinking, choking. Lead.

He didn't even try to swim. Or did he? After all, the water was only waist high.

    Roy awoke suddenly, rather disoriented. The curtain around him spun. He heard muffled voices, but his head felt far too heavy to look up and see who was talking behind the curtain. For a split second he forgot where he was again. It wasn't his Los Angeles apartment. He wasn't in his own bed.

    Roy groaned, the sharp pain hitting him once again like a black storm cloud. He couldn't sit up; it hurt too much and his head felt like a brick. His legs were lead, an all too familiar feeling. He started to remember.

    His eyes fluttered closed as he passed back out several more times, barely making out the caucauphony of voices outside the curtain shielding him from reality. He wanted to call out, he wanted to scream. He wanted to run away. But his body just wouldn't listen.

    "Mmm..."

    A figure appeared, peeking through the curtain.

    "Could you be quiet?"

    He loomed over Roy, waiting for a response.

    "Was that a yes? Will you be quiet now?"

    Roy couldn't form words. His eyes were starting to fight the blackness more powerfully, and he saw that the man standing over him was tall and thin with a few days of 5 o'clock shadow around his mouth. He took a drag of a cigarette, blowing the smoke in Roy's face.

    "Hope you don't mind. They're yours, right? I really needed a smoke."

    "You're...you're fine," Roy mumbled.

    "Now I know it ain't nighttime but I'm tryin' to read, and I darn well can't be readin' if you're having sex in your sleep."

    "Sex?" Roy whispered. "S-sorry..."

    "You should get up now anyway. It's near past noon." He stuck out a calloused hand, tanned from years in the sun. "Jeffrey."

    "My name's Roy."

    "Good to know." He lay back down on the bed next to Roy's, letting out a phlegmy cough and putting out his cigarette on the bible he was holding.

    "Who was talking in here earlier?"

    "Sharpie and Chubby."

    Dr. Sharpe and Nurse Beckie.

    "Is that so." Roy could reach the curtain just enough to pull it back completely, letting the California sun in. There weren't as many patients outside. Only a delivery truck from this angle. The orange grove in the distance. Several nurses on a smoke break. "You my, uh, new roomate."

    "That's right," Jeffrey replied. "You've been here awhile."

    "Around a week and a half." But it felt much longer. "How long was I out."

    "A good few hours," Jeffrey turned the page of his bible. "I saw them bring you in. D' they cut you up?"

    Roy nodded.

    "Yeah, that funny gas will make you feel like you're at the bottom of a river."

    Ha. It felt nothing like that.

    "Mr. Walker!" Nurse Beckie poked her head in as she bit into a muffin. "Great. You're awake. I don't have to ask you any silly questions this time, huh."

    Jeffrey chucked, his nose in his bible.

    "You're looking quite chipper, I gotta say." She wiped her hands on her legs and scoured the first page on the chart at the end of Roy's bed. "Just gotta check some things now." She took his vitals that were average, and called for an orderly.

    "Why we moving."

    "Checking the incision site. Dr. Sharpe is busy for now." Great. Chubby's crumby hands all over a fresh laceration. "Now, can you please take the patient's legs, please. He can't..." She was acting like she was his doctor. An undeserved sense of entitlement.

    Roy shot a glare up at the orderly, gingerly taking his legs as if he was petrified of causing him any pain. Roy could've come up with some nasty comments to his behavior but bit his tongue.

    He felt Jeffrey looking at him and his face flushed. Yet again another humiliating moment. Jeffrey probably thought he was a freak. Pain and pressure wracked Roy's spine as they rolled him over nearly pushing him off the bed.

    "Oops. My apologies." Nurse Beckie began to poke and prod at Roy's back with her cold and clammy sausage fingers. "Any tenderness here?"

    "Uh, fuck. Uh fuck yes." He tried not to show how much it hurt, but an uncontrolled whimper escaped from his mouth.

    "Sorry," smiled Nurse Beckie. It's normal, I think. Right, Fred?"

    The orderly shrugged.

    "I'm sure of it. Dr. Sharpe said it last time, right. Okay, put him back. No, not-yeah, there you go." Once again, Roy was property. "Are you cold? Can I get you anything?"

    "No," Roy said, trying not to notice if Jeffrey was staring at him or not.

    "Well," Nurse Beckie acted like she was offended by Roy's response. "You know where the bell is." She shut the door, leaving the orderly named Fred to fumble with putting the chart back. He scrambled back out, giving Roy and Jeffrey a parting glance as he heard his name being called.

    Jeffrey snickered. Roy couldn't bare to look at him.

    "They treat you like a piece of meat."

    "I'm just property to them," Roy mumbled. He realized they hadn't even given him any painkillers. Rude.

    "You're still a person, Roy," Jeffrey said. "Don't matter how incapacitated you are."

    "I'm not incapacitated," Roy shot back angerly. "I just...I just made a mistake."

    "And it's not my place to judge, either. You'll get out of here. Everybody will get outta here."

    "Why are you here."

    "Well, they think it's cancer but they're not sure."

    "I'm sorry to hear that."

    "The good Lord only gives us what we can handle."

    "So they tell me."

    "And sometimes you just gotta ask for help. Let God do his work. And wait."

    "I've heard it," Roy said.

    "Now what have you gotten yourself into." Jeffrey set his bible next to him and his brow furrowed. "You be young. You look healthy."

    "I fell."

    "That was you're mistake?"

    "It could've been prevented."

    "You broke your legs."

    "Fuck no," Roy scoffed. He felt his thigh and shook his head. Jeffrey must've not been paying too much attention when they rolled him over. "I woke up, and my legs wouldn't move. They wouldn't listen to me. They wouldn't respond."

    Jeffrey got up and sat at the edge of Roy's bed.

    "So this. You can't feel any of this?"

    "Really, don't fucking touch me."

    "Well, a good friend of mine had your condition. Even took a fall, too. Workin' on a house and the ladder gave out. The feeling came back eventually. Maybe it's too soon to know, Roy."

    "Yeah, well it's no use getting my hopes up when I can't even sit up by myself."

    "It'll happen eventually." Jeffrey sat back down on his bed. He shut his bible and put it at the foot of the bed.

    "Maybe so," Roy said.

    He still wanted to die.