Mark!” Sarah yelled. The family in the corner continued to stare, whispering to each other. Mark finally snapped back and stood out of the chair. His violent jerk hit a nerve from the accident and made his scream louder than he’d believed he would.
“Mary!” he yelled in shock.
“Mark, what’s wrong with you?” Sarah yelled again, asking the first time while he stood absentminded. Mark turned to her, and it hit him. He’d solved a puzzle he never even thought was there. He walked toward Sarah and got on one knee to match her height in the chair. She backed away as if he were about to be thrown into a violent craze, already hypothesizing what he may have.
“A nurse told me your son had no immune system,” Mark said, spitting out, atrabilious. “Does he or does he not?”
Sarah stood out of the chair and screamed. “Don’t ever look, talk, or breathe my son’s way ever again!”
“Woman!” yelled Mark. “This is serious. I haven’t seen my wife because her father and my friend told me she was too weak to have visitors. I need to know, so tell me, does he or does he not have an immune system?” His outcry was so loud that most of the family in the corner stood up and watched with caution, and nurses and doctors ran out of the bolted door to see what might blow out of proportion, Kennedy among them, hiding in the back. Her movements were well executed, as she pretended to be in as much shock as the rest. Tom went up, apologizing to visitors and nurses as he passed through the crowd to Mark and demanded that he walk away from Sarah and follow him back to the bench.
“You are making a scene, Mark,” Tom said with partial embarrassment, then whispered in his ear. “You cannot talk to Sarah like that, and do not ask such questions. Think about your job, your friendships, everything you hold dear. You can’t do this, Mark.” Tom stared at Mark, who ignored him and continued to stare at Sarah. As she glared back into his eyes, watching the crowd gather around like bees around a hive, she finally caved, wanting to conclude the fiasco and any danger Mark’s change in tone would also bring.
“He has no immune system,” Sarah said sharply, with a look just as dangerous as her voice. “Now get out of my and my child’s life.”
Mark stared at Sarah with enlightenment. Time paused for him as this newly discovered knowledge circled through the different chambers in his mind. Lightning struck outside the hospital window, a major storm hit, and the trees danced with fear. The rain was violent and chaotic. There were no wind or rain patterns. The animals hid, and Mark ran off furious while Kennedy ran off as if she were to check on a patient and cried in the bathroom from her own shame. Aaron heard the lightning in the process of leaving the cafeteria, and Dr. Kenny was preparing for the arrival of the victims from the car accident in the surgical room. Another bolt of tremendous power flew from the horrid sky, and then Mark began to cry, pushing through a circle of nurses and doctors, constantly ignoring the pain from his own car accident the night before.
“Mark!” yelled Tom, following close to his side. “Don’t do it, she’s more than immune deficient.”
Mark grabbed and threw a woman into the wall. She screamed and split her head open.
“You’re right. She’s also a bilious lie from Aaron, from Kenny. He thought it would be fun to steal out precious time left for his own cruel enjoyment.” He shoved open two seven-foot doors that led down to the fifth floor.
“Mark!” yelled Tom. “Don’t run out of here without any thought of how it’ll affect others. Whatever you do tonight will forever be imprinted on you and your friends,” Tom aggressively said while two very dense security guards from behind came and tackled Mark, but he punched one’s jaw out of line and stretched the other’s arm out of socket before standing up and launching them away. Mark continued to run on, with a noticeable broken nose. Tom was untouched. Mark would never touch him. Lightning struck again and he continued on.
“What made you so insane, Mark?” whispered Tom. “Why won’t you listen to me? I had a rough path same as you. I understand.”
Mark turned and yelled, blood running from his nostrils, and as he spoke the passing stream of red sprayed off his lips. “You weren’t there, Tom!” He began to cry with anger. “I thought you died. They told me you went missing. Then Mary got sick. And I got sick. You don’t know my pain!”
◆◆◆
“Wow,” said his first nurse. “You have very nice and pumped veins! It’s like picking fruit. I have so many options!”
Mark laughed loudly to muster Mary’s attention. “Don’t tell Mary, but I use the food in our pantry as weights,” Mark said while curling with an empty hand and winking.
“I don’t buy that much food,” Mary said proudly, still with raw tears in her eyes. Then Mark smirked and pointed to a vein.
“That’s true. Everyone owns five bottles of Progresso.”
Mary giggled. Then a few minutes later she admitted that there might be a problem, as the entire pantry usually had no space to spare, and the refrigerator (although organized) was overflowing with condiments, cheeses, meats, and sometimes frozen rye bread. But in the hospital, time left like the flow of cooling lava on the coast, slower and slower. Although the days felt frozen in time, time itself never changed. Weeks continued to pass and Mark lost his hair. One day he woke up and shredded strands were scattered on his plastic-coated white pillow, and every time he scratched, or lightly tugged his head, the hair would come out in a frenzy, as if wanting to be released from the poisoned body. His weight fell from 280 to 110, every muscle was absorbed until there was only bones, and his muscular figure achieved from constant military training dissipated to the point that he couldn’t even complete a stroll to the restroom without the help of a walker. The hospital placed an absorbent mat under the blankets to the rubber bed he slept on every night, in case an accident ever came about. “You cannot hold in your bowel movements sometimes because a combination of your morphine and chemotherapy has numbed your body’s senses to detect when you have to go, and your muscles are also very weak—same goes with your bladder,” the nurse told Mark as she slid the mat onto his bed. “So I recommend that you try to go to the restroom every two hours, just in case you have to go.”
“Can I get an adult-size diaper?” Mark joked to the nurse, his voice slow and weak, his movements the same.
“No!” blurted Mary. “Because I’m not going to change those diapers. And you’d need adult powder, not baby powder. And frankly, I don’t think that exists.”
When Mary came into the room, Mark stepped up his game and stood up in the bed, even when he was thrown in constant fits of upchucking, rejecting the food settling in his stomach, or having a fever of 118 degrees running rapid in his head. He would fight to show any energy he had so she wouldn’t fear as much as she should have for the severity of his illness. Mary would feed him with a spoon, anything Mark wanted, until sores erupted in his mouth and he could no longer eat or speak. Then she would read him novels, but his mind would wander from the chemicals flooding his thoughts, and they never a finished book.
“I only liked the beginning of the book anyways.”
“Oh yeah? What’s the title of the book?”
“The…the rumble? Something to do with monkeys,” Mark said, half jokingly, half perplexed, while staring in Mary’s eyes full of irritation and humor, which said, I can’t believe you don’t remember.
“The Jungle Book,” she declared with her arms in the air like a misunderstood teen. Mark scratched his bald head with nervousness.
“Mary, that title is so complex, there’s no way I could possibly remember such complexity.”
“Yeah, the complexity of complexness is very complex.”
“Very complicated.”
Now when I say Mark’s mind wandered, I mean he would have short-term memory loss, and he wouldn’t comprehend ideas. The doctors called him “chemo brain” and laughed when seconds later he asked what his determined nickname was. “The memory loss is a reaction from the chemo,” Mark’s doctor told Mary with a thin, friendly smile. “These effects will not last once the chemo is out of his system.” Some days Mary would bring in a boom box and quietly play albums from Aerosmith, the Beatles, and other classic artists that he enjoyed. Mark, weaker and weaker by the day, would move his fingers up and down to the beat, and Mary would laugh hysterically. His faith in God was unparalleled; Mark was truly a man of hope. However, on one particular late night, some of his hope was lost as a defining moment in is his life occurred, a moment for both Mary and Mark, which occurred on March 11, 1991, at 2:23 a.m. when Mary received a call from the military base in California.
“Okay, Mark, are you hungry?” Mary asked as she barged into their room and reached for the black hospital phone, her nose running with ruby red, puffy eyes. Her words sprayed out her mouth in frantic panic.
“Mary,” Mark’s weak, sore-covered voice called, “what’s wrong?”
“We can order room service, or order some pizza. You thirsty, hun? Any pain?” Her loose green-striped pajamas and brown hair flew from side to side as she rushed around the room and out. She came back with water a few minutes later.
“Here, sweetie, you need to drink water. I know it burns your sores but it is so good for you.”
“Mary, I don’t want water.” He sat up in his bed while she bent the tip of the bendy straw and placed it close to his mouth.
“No, you can’t say no, you need to drink so you will get better, you need to get stronger.” She began to cry with terror in her eyes. “You need to drink, drink the water.”
“No, Mary, I don’t want any water!” Mark hollered, with a little break in his voice from his bloody, enflamed throat. She began to jab the straw into his mouth, gripping the foam white cup.
“Please drink!” she hollered as her eyes ran like faucets. “You need to get better!” Mark pushed her body away with his thin arm with great, burning frustration.
“No, I said I don’t want any water!”
“But you need it!” Mary screamed as her fingers folded through the delicate cup, water spraying all over the bed and ground, expanding through the crack and into the bathroom. She looked around in horror as the lifesaving water slid farther and farther away. She leaned onto a wall and slid down to her knees, crying in the corner as the foam cup still stuck to her arm. Mark grabbed his walker.
“Go away,” she cried under her arm, “please leave me alone.”
“What’s wrong?” Mark asked. “What happened?”
“No, go back to your bed,” her emotional voice said as Mark waddled closer, his legs shaking and her anxiety rising. “Get away!”
“You need to tell me now. I need to know.”
“No!”
“What happened?”
“It’s Tom!” she yelled, crying even more. “Something happened to Tom.”
Mark sat in his bed, tearless, as she whispered to him from the corner, while sitting in a puddle mixed with the hospital water and her own salty tears. Tom was one of the few who died in the coalition against Iraq. They said he was one of the first yet least recognizable bodies. Mark and Mary spoke for a while, and he soon sent her off to buy mashed potatoes at the Walmart in the neighborhood, promising that he would have a few bites and knowing clearly that his stomach wouldn’t be able to bear even basic, plain mashed potatoes. When she left him, she cried some more on the road, feeling backed into a corner, unable to flee from the death in the air. Soon after she left, Mary’s father came and pushed Mark’s walker out to signal his time for a walk. Mark struggled and fought his tight bedridden muscles into a standing position and cradled every step. Mary’s father rolled his metal IV pump pole around next to Mark. The tubes connected to his central line in his chest were like a leash. They walked to a nearby window, where they watched a bunch of men in the dark move boxes into a huge green metal recycling container the size of half a semi. Mark’s back curled and made him only half a foot taller than Kenny’s height of five foot nine. He had black rings and a white bandage on his face.
Mark continued to squint at the outside sun. He hadn’t felt the winter breeze since admission and was beginning to adopt a strengthening unease from the isolation, the constriction to the single hospital floor. The same cool temperature covering his bony body, the same scent of bleach and basic walls. The taste of saline in his mouth, saltier every time it was injected to clean his central line. He rushed so fast that there wasn’t any time to absorb the surroundings. To feel a chill from the air, the texture from the rough, sharp desert dirt, and the smell of a rainstorm from a creosote’s fragrance. But Mark remembered last season, where the wind blew as if spring were present, while it rained as if winter were still an occupant. He wished for a shower without cords that led to his central line. They were always in the way, and the bandages on his central line needed to be pampered so they wouldn’t peel off from the moisture. Then he had immense terror against a bacterial infection called C. diff, where only a few days ago the doctors had asked the nurses to pump his stomach with a tube that entered through the nose, since his stomach was layered with the infection, which caused bile and bowel movements to run rapid, soupy clumps of old blood and a sweet smell of the infection running from both ends. The doctors told him that the chances of the infection returning increased every time he received this bowel bug, which made the infection seem all the worse. The frequent beeping in the middle of the night was another hassle that he hated, signaling the end of a bag’s cycle into the body from the IV bag, or if his heart rate or blood pressure increased higher than a certain limit. Then, when he didn’t get enough rest, hallucinations occurred. One hallucination happened on that same night on March 11, 1991, where at 12:48 a.m., Mark woke up, and the walls closed in, beginning in a whisper and ending in a demonic screech, yelling, “Cancer, cancer!” He then slowly walked into the bathroom, connected to the IV pump, heart monitor, and stomach pump, feeling controlled from something else, something bigger than him, the fingers of satin luring him away from his bed. Mark stopped in the bathroom, which was when Mary woke and saw all the wires stretched from the bedside behind the sliding door.
“Mary,” Mark yelled while half awake, “I love you!” He then fell toward the ground and smashed his head on the metal drain. Everything from the machines tugged and fell along with Mark. Mary ran over, found a red string next to the toilet, and pulled it out the wall, triggering a screeching alarm different from the others. There were two of those triggers; the other was connected to the TV remote, connected to the wall. Four nurses rushed in, checked his pulse, picked up the machines, then asked for him to speak and answer simple questions while one nurse shined a light in one eye and another felt his pulse with her thumb jammed into his wrist. He slowly woke up and said quietly, quieter and calmer than anyone else, “I’m alive?”
The nurses checked his central line, and luckily it was undamaged because he had landed on his side, but the nurses changed the needle. They also checked his nose tube, and for brain damage, his doctor sent Mark down to the second floor for a CAT scan. Mary waited with him in his portable plastic bed, sitting on a chair in her nightgown with almost all of her sleep drained away; then she asked why he said what he did. Mark stopped his jokes that she felt no entertainment toward and patted his blankets.
“I thought I died.”
Mary hurt deeply, but the back of her hand on her cheek and her exhausted expression were unchanged. She thought so as well; for a second she thought that a little after the two weeks they spent, the war from the gates of Hell ended, that she lost yet another to the afterlife.
After the CAT scan, they were informed that no problems were occurring in his head. He was as normal as before, only sleep-deprived. Then, at 2:15 a.m., Mary got a call from Iraq, and the rest is history. Now Mark and her father sat at the window. He squinted at the thick darkness outside as Mr. Kenny stood there silent, until Mark spoke.
“You know, a while before Operation Desert Storm, Mary, Tom, and I sat around the table.” Mark laughed while continuing to speak, feeling pride from Tom’s name. “And, and it was a special day. He was about to be a corporal. Man, he worked hard for that title. I watched him fight, I watched him cry, and he always said, ‘Maybe tomorrow, Mark, maybe tomorrow.’ He said this whenever he failed, whenever he was yelled at. ‘Tomorrow will be better, maybe tomorrow.’ But now he has no tomorrow.” Mark froze to catch his breath from the exhaustion of speaking, his enflamed throat, and continued. “Well, at the table, Tom told me that he was afraid. Afraid that one day he would be sent to war and either die or become a drunk like his old man, that he would never be better.” Mark’s lip began to roll out and shake. “I told him I’d prevent it, that I would never allow such a thing to occur.”
Silence among the men. They continued to stare into the moonless night, at the two men throwing the last stray boxes into the bin while they laughed. One middle-aged short white man was talking about how drunk he’d been the night before, while swaying from side to side, portraying the severity of his drunkenness twenty-four hours ago. The other, a tall, young Hispanic man, fell onto the ground in uncontrollable laughter. Mark and Kenny watched the two men, as if they were inexperienced children who did not yet understand what life could entail, although the Hispanic boy (the youngest of the two) was three years older than Mark. They were so close, the two hospital maintenance men, Mark and Kenny, from the sixth floor to the hospital ground below, yet both their worlds were so far apart.
“Then he called me Dad!” Mark broke down, and Kenny quickly grabbed his light body and gave him a rough, clasped hug. Mark squeezed with his growing heartache, his uncontrollable gasps for breath filling the tragic floor, yet not an unreasonable noise for a place like this. “He called me Dad,” Mark cried. “Anything else would have been less painful.”
“It’s okay, Mark,” said Kenny, “he’s with his real dad now. He’s with God.”
He continued to cry for a while in Kenny’s arms as Kenny ran his fingers though his son-in-law’s hair, watching the two men outside hop into the hospital-branded pickup and leave without any afterthought. Less than two hundred died in the coalition against Iraq. Tom was one of the first to go and the last generation of the Freemans. This was Mark’s breaking point.