AIQ

Part 5

Later that night, when the questions came to a definite halt, Eugene was exhausted. He felt like had had just run a triathlon, although it had been one specifically for your brain. He entered sleep quickly, and the next day came fast and dramatic into view. The day went something like this: food, tests, food, more tests, food, tests, sleep. No interruptions, just constant analyzing and examining how bad Eugene was at everything. And every night, Eugene went to bed, more exhausted and with lower self esteem than he thought was ever possible for a human to endure – until the very next day, when he would awake and soon go to sleep feeling even more humiliated and tired.

       Finally, the great day came. The day the AIQ was going to be installed. It was Frasier and Rubin that were going to do it – scheduled for a few hours after lunch. There never was a time when spaghetti and meatballs were more intense; Eugene’s nerves twitched and his heart pumped blood into his long dormant adrenaline gland. Things were finally going to be different. Life was going to be good from now on.

       Meanwhile, above ground, a worried Dr. Frasier was pacing. Today was the penultimate day before the general would force him to move on from Eugene. Today he would have to rush a delicate procedure for his “country.” Today he could discover the cure to a terrible disease, and then have to forget about it for a year. Today he wouldn’t be able to save Mother.

       Mother. He remembered the point when the trip through the hospital finally ended and they arrived in Mother’s room. The walls of the small place were painted yellow and peeling. She was lying on a green, mechanical bed. Her face was ghostly grey; a spidery, iron machine that held her straight up, choking her neck. She was asleep, or unconscious, or perhaps even dead – but she couldn’t be, because the wire, which was shanked into her arm, whispered to the heart monitor that her heart was still beating. The heart monitor, obnoxious invention it was, repeated this news to the rest of the room, beeping with loud, slow monotones. Beep. Still alive. Beep. Still alive.

       Frasier rushed to her side, and gripped her hand. It was cold. Clammy. It was not an effective tissue, but Frasier cried into it anyway. “Why…?” He asked, sobbing to himself. “...Why did you have to… why…when….”

       He dropped her hand, which fell limply onto the bed, and cried into his own two palms instead. He could have been there. He could have answered her calls more often, he could have told her how thankful he was for her, how much he loved her. But now it was too late. He cried and cried and cried, until he became very, very tired. He crawled to a chair in the corner of the room, and with tear stained eyes he fell asleep.

       He woke up to a terrible commotion. Doctors were huddled around her, transferring her limp body to a gurney, as the heart monitor beeped, faster, then slower, then faster. “What’s happening?” Frasier screamed. “What are you doing to her?”

       But nobody answered him. Quickly, robotically, they pushed the gurney out the door and into a room marked surgery. Frasier followed them with stomping, determined steps. “What are you doing to her?” He asked again, but his words were lost in their quick orders to each other. He caught the door to surgery just as it was about to close behind them. He looked inside and watched as the doctors speedily set up the room, one of them grabbing a defibrillator in each hand. “Get him out of here!” One of them said, pointing at him directly.

       “But I’m… I’m her son! I’m her son!” It was too late, however. A pair of orderlies grabbed him by the arms and dragged him out of surgery, as he kicked and screamed and asked them to get off of him. They held him back as the door to surgery swung, back and forth, and as he watched the doctors ill fatedly try to save his mother’s life. And with every full swing the door made, he realized that family, to the real world, mattered less and less; and as his mother slipped away through the slowly closing door, nothing seemed to matter at all.