Pittsburgh, PA
21 days before
Hi,
You don’t know me, but I live down the hall. I see you, though, and sometimes I feel like I know you. I see you walk out of the building and get into your car. The wind picks up strands of your hair, and the whole world moves around you, and you are alive.
I’ve never known how to say hi, though. I guess I still don’t, but I’ll take a crack at it.
So yeah. Hi. I’m Decker. What up?
(Sorry if this is weird. It’s my first semi-creepy letter to a girl that I don’t know, so I’m still figuring things out. Oh, and just to be clear, my name is John Decker, but everyone just calls me Decker. Even my mom.)
Have you lost anyone? I’m sure you have. We all have. Don’t know why I asked. I guess I just didn’t know how else to bring it up, you know?
My mom died early on. I sat with her in the hospital. Plastic shrouded her room, and they made me wear a hazmat suit. Back then, they thought shit like that might make a difference. I’m sure lots of other people didn’t get this opportunity to be with their loved ones – the hospital workers couldn’t be expected to hook up everybody with a suit and supervise them to some degree and all -- but my business lawyer knows people. He had me make a donation to the hospital, and that was that.
Trying to remember, the images get all mixed up in my head like there’s a missing piece that makes it impossible to put it back together properly. Some sense of the way things used to be that got ripped out. I know it should be there, but it’s not, and I can’t quite remember how things used to feel, I guess.
The nurses told me she could go at any time, so I slept in her room for six nights. I didn’t sleep so much as close my eyes and squirm around in a chair in my hazmat suit. But yeah.
I didn’t realize what they meant at the time, but I think the nurses tried to offer me something to help her if she wanted to do the whole assisted suicide thing. I was pretty out of it, though.
But she was sitting up and talking, and she seemed like herself and everything. She kept telling me I didn’t have to stay the night, that she’d still be there in the morning. So on the seventh night I went home, slept in my own bed.
In the morning, I went to Wendy’s before I headed over to the hospital. I got this idea that I should get my mom a Frosty. They were her favorite. I knew I’d have to sneak it in since you can’t take anything like that into the plague ward, and I knew it’d be soupy as hell from being tucked against my body inside of a damn hazmat suit, but I don’t know. I thought she’d like it.
Even through the suit her room felt different. Her face seemed more gaunt, the skin pulled tight around her cheek bones, puckering into pits below them. New wrinkles shriveled around the edges of her mouth. Dry. Crusted. She didn’t look at me at first. She just opened her mouth and kind of arched her tongue against the inside of her lips a few times like a lizard.
“Hey Mom,” I said.
She blinked a few times, eyelashes fluttering, and then she smiled.
“Decker. Good to see you.”
Her voice wavered a little, a rasp grating in her throat that hadn’t been there the day before. She extended her hand, and I held it for a moment, though I couldn’t really feel her touch through the PVC, just the pressure of it. I could tell her arm had a tremor to it, though.
I released her fingers and dropped my voice to a whisper.
“Hang on. I brought you something.”
I closed the door, glancing down the hall and seeing no one. My heartbeat and my breathing seemed to grow louder as my hands fumbled to open the suit. I wasn’t sure what the nurses would say if they caught me in the act. What could they really do? Still, I felt the adrenalin tingling in all of the places where my skin touched the suit, like sweat and excitement manifested in those spots in some electric throb.
The Frosty cup squished as I pulled it out of my hoodie pocket. Way too soft. I knew that meant it was melted as hell, but I hoped it was better than nothing.
Thinking back, it’s hard to even express how this felt at the time. I was excited to be giving her this. It felt important in some way that no longer really makes sense. A Frosty. A dairy and sugar concoction that formed some primal connection to how things used to be, how things used to feel, some way of looking at life that felt a long time gone. I don’t know. In that moment, it felt important, though.
She drank it through a straw, stopping to smack her tongue against the roof of her mouth periodically. She thanked me over and over again, and she seemed to gain some strength as she drank, her eyes clearing and looking more alert, her sentences growing longer, the syntax more complex.
“It’s creamy,” she said. “My tongue and throat have gotten so dry, I think from the medication they’ve got me on. I asked the nurses for something to help, but they just pour me glasses of water which does nothing. But this?”
She wiggled the paper cup in her hand.
“This feels wonderful.”
The cup rose to her face, and her dried out lips cinched around the straw again. I could see the silhouette of the chocolate drink climbing up the inside of the plastic tube.
“Well, I’m glad you like it.”
She smiled as she drank, and white cracks spider webbed out from the corners of her mouth as it widened. Even as I looked upon these signs of physical deterioration, and even though I knew things had grown much worse in a short period of time, I couldn’t actually picture her dying. I couldn’t imagine a world where she didn’t exist.
When she finished, I took the cup and straw out to the trash can near where I suited up. Disposing of the evidence, I suppose. Maybe it was because I was wearing the suit, but the hallway felt like a tunnel, like I was passing through some narrow tube between places. I focused on not looking into the few uncovered windows on the doors to my left and right, at all of the people dying off in droves. The nurses told me that my mom was lucky in that she wasn’t a bleeder. The disease affects people differently, I guess. The bleeders suffer the worst, though they don’t suffer as long. I imagine it feels long enough to them. Anyway, I didn’t want to see any of that, so I didn’t look. I kept my eyes on the floor as much as possible.
People in suits just like mine bustled by, too focused on the horrors transpiring all around to wonder who I was or to notice the stupid fast food cup in my hand. I got the urge to wad it up as best I could in my fist, but I thought that’d be more suspicious, more remarkable, so I opted against it. My fingers wrapped around the top of the cup so my hand looked sort of like a claw in one of those junk machines reaching into the pile of crappy stuffed animals to pull one out.
I reached the garbage can, tossed the cup in and turned back. None of the nurses at the station there noticed me or anything.
When I got back to the room, I could tell things weren’t right. My mom’s eyes were rolled back in her head, her neck tilted so her chin angled up toward the ceiling. Her lips peeled back just enough to reveal the clenched teeth inside. She moaned through her teeth, a pitiful sound, the sharp inhalation of a gasp blended with the weak cry of a small child. A scared sound. A helpless sound.
She leaned forward and vomited brown goo all over her chest and lap and blanket. The first wave was pretty much liquid, just viscous enough that you knew it was dairy based, I guess. The second wave came out thicker. Like chocolate snot. Strands stuck to her lips. Wads oozed down her chin. Two thick ropes hung out of her nose, flapping against her mouth as her head lolled along with her heaves.
Her eyes opened so wide, and she blinked several times, and she looked at me, and she said:
“Oh, no.”
She sounded frightened and disappointed in a way I could not have comprehended coming from my mother until I witnessed it. It’s like I couldn’t quite process how sick she was until just then, how fragile she was, how temporary. And I realized what a child I was, what a goddamn fool I must be to bring a chocolate shake to someone so sick. Like she was just about to die, and some bullshit fast food dessert drink could help her in some way or make her feel better.
She closed her eyes, and she vomited more, indecipherable chunks coming up now, all of it coated in chocolate snot. The pile of vomit on her lap seeped outward in slow motion, almost like watching butter melt in a frying pan.
I got the nurses then. They didn’t ask about where she got the chocolate drink. They didn’t say much at all, I guess. They cleaned her up, and she slept.
She woke up a few times, but it was hard to tell how aware she was. She didn’t speak again, and her breath got noisier and noisier, the air scraping in and out of her. She died early the next morning, one last breath, one last rise and fall of her chest, and then she was still. I held her hand the whole time and told her how much I loved her, and that she was a good mom. I know she couldn’t hear me, but...
I think about it all the time. I think I always will. The image of the brown mucus spurting out of her. The Frosty pooled on her lap and spreading.
Sorry. That was weird to launch right into something so personal, wasn’t it? Considering we don’t really know each other, I mean.
Let me introduce myself in a more superficial sense:
I’m 25, and um…
Not to brag or anything, but I’ve been especially good at one thing in my life. Saving money and using it to make more. It’s like a game to me. I work out ways to save as much of my income as possible, only spending it to set up new streams of passive income. I started out working in a toll booth making just more than minimum wage. Now I don’t work at all and earn in the low six figures a year from a bunch of websites on autopilot. One of them got pretty big, and I sold it for $1.5 million.
So that was good.
(Reinforced subliminal message: I am successful and willing to detail it in garish fashion. Also, that was 100% bragging. I suppose most paragraphs that begin with the clause “not to brag” are.)
Lately I’ve been thinking that when my lease runs out in a few months, I will go buy a house, but what am I supposed to do? Get a mansion with a fountain or something? What am I supposed to want? I don’t know.
I like being here where I’m anonymous. Nobody who lives here knows about me. Nobody cares. And this place is familiar. And I have the things I need.
So yeah. That’s it. That’s all. Just saying hi.
A few days have passed, and I’ve yet to deliver this letter.
I’m watching the world go to shit on TV, watching endless news footage detailing how thousands of people are bleeding to death out the ass all across the South, reading internet rumors about goddamn face eating zombies in Florida, and I don’t know how to connect to anyone. I don’t know how to say hi to the girl three doors down across the hall. I think I used to know how to do those things, maybe, but I forgot or something.
I don’t know.
I know this can’t quite make sense. I know I can’t sit here and write it down in a way that will feel real to you, feel human to you. Maybe a piece or two will pique your interest, capture your imagination in some way, but I can’t transmit my moment to you. I can’t take the things in my skull and upload them to your skull, can’t share my experiences with you or bear witness to what you’ve seen and felt and dreamed and lived. I am trapped in my head, and you are trapped in yours.
I never really tried to fix that, never really tried to bridge the gap between myself and someone else, and now that I want to, the stupid world is ending. Figures.
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