Bria
It starts with shaky hands and progresses quickly to confused speech and general confusion. Bria has known what to look for all her life, just like she knew to never eat too much protein or become dehydrated. Like a doe that intrinsically knew to fear the hunter, who shies even when drinking delicately from a forest stream, she’s always had in the back of her mind a checklist of warning signs and what-no-to-dos along with a list of what-to-dos-if-things went wrong. Do I have enough potassium? Should I eat a banana? Is this drowsiness or just being tired?
Recall the instance of your greatest fear. Was it nearly being hit by a speeding car, at the hands of some drunken idiot, while walking across a crosswalk? Was it walking in on a burglary and the subsequent degradation you faced at the hands of the thieves? Was it getting that call from your child’s school telling you of a fatal accident?
Now, sit in that. Right in it. Wallow in it like it’s your bed on a day off, on that first day of vacation when you have nothing but time and the blankets feel so warm and they engulf you in indulgence. You there? Wallowing in terror? Now imagine doing that for your entire life and you would be close to understanding the heightened state of urgency she’s lived in since she was three and she’d first been diagnosed with Reye’s syndrome.
Only, she was the thief in the night, the stupid drunk, the asshole that shot your kid and she can’t escape herself. Honestly, it’s almost a relief when she slips into a coma brought on by hepatic encephalopathy.
Being comatose had its advantages. Oh, yes, she understands that is so horribly morbid and just sits wrong on most people. She would have never, when she was among the conscious, dared to even whisper of such thoughts around her family.
To please them and alleviate their fear she’s been the doe at the stream with one ear perked, the kid who entered rooms with a baseball bat and swung at shadows, the person who doesn’t look twice before crossing the street – she just doesn’t cross streets at all, and she is the one that never considers having a child so she’ll never get that phone call. Add together all the precautions she’s taken and all the restrictions she’s placed upon herself to keep from dying and she really hasn’t lived.
So, yes, the coma was a gift – one she’s secretly asked for every birthday, one she both hopes and fears as she unwraps each present, one that no one was ever going to give her so she buys it herself.
She’s tired and she just wants to sleep.
*
She was a happy child. She knew she was loved. So loved. Never was a child so loved, she sometimes thinks as she drifts in the state between life and death where time stretches like a elastic jump rope twisted in a cat’s cradle between your hands, pulling and pulling and never losing its elasticity and twisting and twisting in such configurations they defy description and you become lost in the rhythm of the pulling and the twisting and the turning until time becomes a fancy to capture your mind and not a truth.
That was the thing with this suspension within the confines of unreality that was the coma, you had nothing but time to play with the illusions of normalcy, the things that define. You could become lost for hours, days, weeks in the twisting and turning of the cat’s cradle or you could zero in on a single moment and live there, indefinitely, your breath suspended like the hands of a broken clock, telling the right time twice a day. Those moments were like these beautiful crystalline orbs, trapped within the twists of the cat’s cradle. Bria stumbles on them from time to time and like soap bubbles their surfaces give and pull her in.
Into a room and a memory of a warm, sunny day where she lies with her head in her mother’s lap and points at clouds going by. “Look it’s a rabbit!” she proclaims and her mother cocks her head towards the sky and says, “What rabbit? I don’t see a rabbit!” and Bria giggles and points and says, “There, see its tail? It is hiding in that lump of meatloaf!”. Her mother tickles her belly. “Meatloaf? In the sky? How silly!”
Bria has never eaten meatloaf. Too much protein.
The things she has missed. The things she has not. Most children didn’t spend as much time with their parents as Bria has. She supposes now, drifting in her no-time time, that they had been storing up memories for the inevitable day Bria would drift away from them.
Storing them up like soap bubbles trapped in a cat’s cradle.
*
“There is no change, Mrs. Rubiginosa. That can be seen as a blessing for that means she does not worsen. She floats in a state of grace within our Lord’s arms.”
A muffled sob, a deep breath. “I take comfort in that, but I would have her in mine instead.”
Oh… mom!
Bria feels tears well in her eyes and a single one slips free. Theories abounded as to whether the comatose can sense those around them. They can. By God’s Grace or some twist of fate, they can.
Bria is not sure if it is a blessing of a God or a curse of something else.
*
“It is through the sustaining of her flesh, the natural passage of air into her lungs and blood through her veins, that God shows us that they want this woman to live. How can we question this truth?”
“That is a specious argument. I could as easily argue that we are going against God’s Plan by maintaining her health. If we stopped feeding her would she not die and then could you not argue that is God’s will? Unless, somehow by some act of divine intervention she managed to survive without us feeding her. Now that I’d see as an actual miracle of faith.”
“I find your faith troubling, Nurse Cody. Do you not see that we are God’s hands that do their will?”
Are you? Is it God’s will that Bria lives in this perpetual state of nothingness – neither dead nor alive, neither waking nor truly sleeping?
If so, she’s a real bitch.
*
Hands turn her. She can feel them and she wonders is that Nurse Cody? Is Nurse Cody, that sensible one, still here?
It’s so hard to feel but in a disconnected way that is part a lack of sight and part the way that the world outside the coma and the world inside it seem to fold together, like a fudge ripple in a vanilla ice cream base. Folding. Folding. Folding her into the curves so that she rolls into them and under them and the ribbon of reality gets thinner and thinner in the white behind her eyes. Worse, to hear but to have most of it drowned out by the static in her mind.
The funny thing is she can’t smell. Maybe that’s for the best. She’s tired of the antiseptic scent of hospitals and day wards with their metallic stink of sickness clinging on all the surfaces and even the air.
Hello?
Sometimes she calls out but she has no voice in that world and in hers the words just fold into the static and the whiteness and she’s tumbling until the words become her and she thinks they may be tattooed on her skin or her mind so she’s a billboard for confusion.
Hello?
*
Recurrent hepatic encephalopathy. Wasn’t that a mouthful? Break it down and it came out to slow death by poison with a long trip through ca-ca-crazy before you took the long dirt nap. Or, in Bria’s case, the long feather-mattress nap.
The liver is a beautiful, wonderful thing, an organ that heals itself (whether you cotton to the notion that it is at the hands of God or just some wild woo-woo). When it’s working right. It clears out toxins metabolized when proteins are eaten, shooting them along their way into the kidneys where they are secreted in urine. When it’s working right. When it isn’t… well, that’s where the ‘fun’ comes in.
Bria is no gastroenterologist but she sometimes jokes she could play one in a melodrama, that’s how much she knows about how her liver functions or, rather, doesn’t. She was armed. She knew her stuff. She knew her liver like most people know the face of their one love. She was that close to the wonderful, horrible, broken thing.
Some people didn’t understand. The comments started out sympathetic. All “how well you are handling this, dear’ and ‘what a positive attitude you have’ but they quickly became ‘How CAN you handle this so well?” and “Why are you so OKAY with this?” and eventually bottomed out in “How Can You Laugh?”
How could she not laugh? She had been cast in the most darkly comedic role ever – the tragic, long-suffering heroine destined to die with as little fanfare as possible because hadn’t she had fanfare her Entire Damned Life.
Oops, there went those severe mood swings – yet another gift of the hepatic encephalopathy. Guess they hadn’t left her when her sense did.
Wasn’t God – if that entity existed and the jury was seriously out for Bria on that front – a damned hoot?
*
“We wish we could give you a better prognosis, Mrs. Rubiginosa, but her condition is a mystery left in God’s hands. She breaths on her own and that’s a gift beyond measure.”
“Her father and I are moving closer to the Lady Mary’s to make the travel easier.”
No, Mom, don’t. Let me go. Don’t be trapped with me. This is my curse; it doesn’t have to be yours or Dad’s.
*
The first time she had a seizure was during dinner and it was a horribly dramatic affair, or so the stories went. There is no soap bubble of memory for this. For Bria it was as if she slept, as if God or the Gods or whatever thing had spun the cosmic roulette and stopped it on her black section decided to give her a precursor of what was to come. She supposes, in that way, the seizures she experienced most of her life were conditioning, like an athlete pushing their boundaries to reach their highest state of perfection.
She understands that when she went all herky jerky in the turkey (and wasn’t that a sweet turn of phrase? She’s had time to perfect it) it was quite a moment, full of pathos and tears.
Once she was old enough to get a feeling for triggers, and an understanding of the length of time before trigger and seizure, she learned how to either avoid them completely or to make damned sure that she was alone when it happened. There was nothing worse – nothing – than knowing that you were putting that look of vulnerability and fear into your parents’ eyes.
The sense of responsibility, to protect her parents as they sought to protect her, was the central theme of her youth. That and persistent fear.
How long can anyone live in that state? How long should someone have to?
*
Imagine a life lived as that doe at the stream, aware death could be here at any point, that it will find you at the water, but you are so thirsty. And the water is so cool.
There were so many things she couldn’t have. Peanut butter. Cheese. A juicy, succulent steak.
Couldn’t?
Shouldn’t.
Did.
And the water was so cool.
*
Hello? Is there someone there?
I’m so alone. Just say something.
I’m alone in the dark and this baseball bat isn’t working any longer.
Hello?
Enter The Woods 