The Nature of Knowing

20. Anna

She closed the door behind her. She couldn't stand those people who all hoped for his death. They didn't know anything. They were drones. Mutes.

Keith was the only other one who knew the whole story here.

After her initial shock, she advanced immediately to Raymond, in the middle of the room.

She didn't recognize this man. He was foreign to her.

His skin was bare except for a pair of boxers. He was dirty all over. He was still as tan as she remembered, though he looked paler now.

His legs were still as toned as they had always been: he had always been a runner.

His arms and chest and stomach were heavily muscled like his legs, as they had been since his years in the service. His skin was lathered in blood, though there were no visible sources of it anymore, other than a few minor cuts. She saw the four large patches of fine stitching on his torso. She wondered which one of them had been the one to defeat him.

His fingers curled upward. Both his palms were up. An IV delivering blood into the veins of his right arm was taped down.

He looked relaxed, like he was meditating, as he did sometimes on the short visits for which he brought her and their sons to him.

She had stayed faithful to this man for as long as they had been together. She was forty, and she had always stayed faithful to this man since falling for him. She had never desired another man. She didn't think a lot of people understood it, not even him. She didn't think he thought he deserved her. But she could not have anyone else after she had fallen.

She had been seventeen when their first child had been born. They had two.

She pressed a small mocha hand to the side of his face, rough from the red and mud. His lips did not move, they remained open slightly, as if relaxed. His eyes did not focus on her as she turned him to her; they just stared, blank. She put her lips to his forehead and kissed him. She kissed the top of his head. His expression never moved; his lips never closed; his eyes never flickered.

She looked at him. "Ray?" she realized the sound wasn't audible, her lips just formed the word. "Ray?" she asked.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and looked back, lost in drowning.

"He's in a coma, Anna." It was Jeffrey.

She looked back at him. Her eyes seared into him.

"But, but the good news is that he has a 50% chance. A 50% chance of waking up, Anna."

"The good news is?" she asked. "That is the good news?"

He fumbled again for words and then seemed to decide on not saying anything.

Blackness. He didn't think he could feel anything anymore. He was incapable of feeling. Not anything. Just blackness. He was disoriented in the blackness. He couldn't get up. He couldn't make out anything from anything else, because it was always drowned out by the black. It was odd. It was angering.

He began to resist again, as he had been doing almost his whole life. He began to long for things again. Like his family. Like his friend. He began to resist again.

He resisted fiercely.