This is in Totally Bound's 50's Mixed Tape Anthology
EXCERPT
Lee
Brazil
By
reading any further, you are stating that you are 18 years of age, or over. If
you are under the age of 18, it is necessary to exit this site.
Copyright
© Lee Brazil 2014. All Rights Reserved, Total-E-Ntwined Limited, T/A Totally
Bound Publishing.
“It’s
my half day today.” As though having time off means you’ll be away from the
hospital. Dr Oliver Gideon perched on the edge of the uncomfortable chair
beside the bed in room 32B at Beachport Memorial Hospital and searched the pale
face on the pillow for any sign that his words had been heard.
The
night nurse had turned the patient’s face so he looked into the room. If he
could see, that was. The comatose man’s eyelids remained obstinately closed
after six months of long sleep. There wasn’t even a flicker of eye movement
that Oliver could latch onto and pretend the patient dreamed, or merely slept.
Those lids lay stubbornly still, immobile as the rest of the man.
Coma.
It was supposed to have been a short-term state induced to enhance the body’s
natural healing processes following Joseph Caldwell’s surgery. Instead, hours
had stretched into days, and days into weeks, and still the man slumbered on,
if sleep it could be called.
It
didn’t matter that the patient’s eyes refused to open of their own accord.
Oliver knew they were slate grey, almond-shaped and, when he was conscious,
they telegraphed every emotion the man felt. Oliver knew that, because he’d
stared down into those eyes on an operating table six months before, seen the
interest in the grey depths turn to fear when he’d caught sight of the gas
mask. Fear wasn’t unusual in his patients—he had a practiced litany of words
designed to ease the uncertainties of patients who were scared of losing consciousness.
Some
people feared spiders, some feared the unknown. Joseph Caldwell, he sensed,
feared losing control. He was a man who was accustomed to being careful. His
whole being screamed caution and reserve, from the precisely trimmed hair to
the neatly plucked eyebrows. If he peeked into the plastic carrier that held
the man’s belongings he would surely find a pair of highly polished dress
shoes, neat slacks, a button-down shirt and a tie. Even his build was a perfect
balance of casual fitness, muscled but not buff, lean but not thin.
The
patient had lost muscle and fat though over the ensuing weeks. Allowing his
gaze to wander down the thin frame, skipping guiltily over the IV needles and
catheter tubes, Oliver counted the man’s breaths for a minute. Each breath
raised the thin sheet reassuringly, establishing Caldwell’s claim to life.
Persistent, tenacious, clinging to life. He might look waxen and pale, but
Joseph Caldwell lived, and that was something.
It
wasn’t much consolation, and Oliver felt at times that if the man had died on
the operating table he might have been better able to get over the whole mess.
This lingering sleep-death tugged at his heart and head, made a mess of his
entire reason for being. His mother clucked at him and told him he was
obsessed. He might well be. He just couldn’t forget the way trust had replaced
fear in that grey gaze, the way the man had held his gaze until sleep claimed
him, had clutched Oliver’s hand until his body went limp.
“I
could chuck it all,” he spoke. He sipped his coffee idly and grimaced at the
bitter flavour. He’d forgotten the sugar again. “And go off to become a
bohemian artist. Make splashes of colour on grey landscapes and tell the world
I’m just misunderstood.” The idea had come to him more and more often of late.
He had come to despise his job and the science behind it. Science he felt had
betrayed him. All his life he’d loved the quantifiable, the predictable. When
science screwed you over what else was there but art? Draining the cup to the
dregs, he swallowed the strange lump in his throat that seemed to have been a
near-constant problem for the last six months.
