The Works of Nick Hayden

They told me I’m sick. They ran the wand over me and it beeped. I protested, but they led me away, into one of their wards, where we sick people are stacked in cubicles and told to wait until we recover or we die.

My room is a white, with a bed and a chair and an opaque glass door behind which is a bathroom the size of a telephone booth. The door to the outside is sealed. Food is delivered with a whirr. The screen on the wall listens and responds. It babbles and cracks jokes and fills the silence.

I shut it off and sit in sterile light.

After three days of meals slid through slots and false-sun brightness and three paces to cross the world, I begin to feel the sickness they discovered with their wand. I shiver upon the white bed and cough into the silence. The screen sings to my aching head. I shut it off again. I turn off the lights. The meal cools upon the floor. The screen pops on to tell me to eat and to drink 8 ounces of water every hour. 

I scream at it. It continues unabated.

I stir and moan. I sleep and do not sleep and run my hands along the walls, restless and burning. There is a crack in the wall, a hairline fracture. I run my finger along it, up and down. I try to stick my fingernail in it, as if I could pry it open. 

Finally, the screen sleeps, but I am wide awake and dead tired. My body aches. I hear something soft and almost inaudible. I listen. There it is–I press my ear against the wall, against the crack. 

There is a voice, very soft.

 “Hello?” I whisper, lips pressed against the wall.

A moment. “Yes?”

“Are you…I’m sick.”

“So am I.” It’s a woman. “Everyone is. Or nearly.”

“I heard your voice.”

She says nothing.

“Who were you talking to?”

“No one.”

“What were you saying? I haven’t seen anyone. Since I got here, I haven’t seen anyone.”

“No. We’re sick. They’re afraid.”

“You don’t sound afraid.”

“I guess I’m not.”

She says nothing else, and I have nothing more. Even this short exchange exhausts me. I think I could sleep now. I do. I don’t know how long. I wake sweating and thirsty. I drink. My nausea rises and rises and I gag, but I hold the liquid down. I lie still and try not to move, every position uncomfortable. 

Across the silence, as across realms of space, I hear her words, but I cannot understand them. My ears reach out into the silence, trying to decipher the murmur. It is direct, fervent, almost pleading. It ends. Space is vast and empty once more. To speak is to issue meaning into the void.

“Are you there?” I rasp.

“Yes. How are you feeling?”

“Like I’m dying.”

“I’m sorry.” There is a pause before she says it, and I realize that she does not know whether I am actually dying. I do not know either.

“I tried to understand what you were saying.”

She does not answer at first. “There is another crack in my room.”

“Is he dying?”

“No.” There is no laugh, but a smile flashes across the world. “He is not.”

“What does he say?”

“I can’t–it’s not clear.”

I should pursue the conversation further. I should ask her questions about her own life. But I can’t think of anything. I can only feel, and that numbly, miserably, selfishly. I lay on my back, aching, sweating, eyes closed, out of breath. A meal appears, disappears. I stare at the door. No one enters. Machines clean the vomit off the pristine white floor. 

There is no one in the universe. I alone exist.

“Are you there?” I call out. My voice is weak.

She does not answer. 

“Help me,” I say. Perhaps she cannot hear me. I do not know what time it is or what day it is. I have forgotten what it is to be healthy.

“Listen.” I sense the words as much as hear them. Her voice vibrates meaning into my ear. “There is a crack….”

“Tell him I need help.”

“Another crack–in your room.”

“Where? Where?”

“Outside. Beyond.”

I gaze wildly about me. For days, I have stared at the ceiling, at the wall, at the floor with a restless mind, searching, searching for something. My room is unchanging, unyielding.

“I’m dying. I know I’m dying.”

“Tell him,” she whispers from the next world over. 

“Who? How?”

“We’re all in boxes–sick or well. He’s outside. Pray to him.”

What do I say? I have no words; my soul is blind and mute. I lift my hands. I repeat the only words I have. “Help me.” I close my mind and drift in delirium.

Later, my trembling hand finds water. I eat. I sleep a dreamless sleep. When I wake, I sit up and eat again. It is as if I have shed an old skin, as if the room has been remade, as if it is the sixth day of creation. The screen cheerily comments that after 10 days more, if I continue to recover, I will be released. Also, it tells me to drink.

I shower and return to my bed. There are new sheets. I lay down, exhausted and press my face to the crack.

“Hello?”

There is no answer.

“I am feeling better. I am going to live, I think.”

She will not answer. I know why. Deep sorrow weighs upon me as I close my eyes, unable to sleep. I am not well enough yet to cry. My soul is still shriveled. I grope for  the other crack and search for my gratitude and my tears.

He lay as if alive. It seemed that if they waited just a little longer, he would open his eyes. He would sit up. He would smile at them – their firstborn, with his mother’s nose and build and his father’s way of pausing before he spoke, of losing himself in his work.  

But he did not open his eyes.

They had wept. It was a different sorrow than they had known, though they had known loss, deep, earth-shattering loss, before this. The father had been the one to find his son’s body in the field, with the flies buzzing around it, with the blood soaking into the ground. 

He had wanted to hide the body from his wife, to spare her this new sorrow. He almost buried his son there, in the field, so she wouldn’t have to look at it.  

The tears burned. Their souls were dead within them.

The father dug into the dirt. That was all his son was now – dirt. It had seemed as if his son would live forever, that the flame in his eye and the vitality of his movements were fueled by unquenchable life. When he had been born, he had been a miracle in their harsh world. 

As the father dug, his wife prayed. In one long, honest outpouring, she questioned the Lord and asked forgiveness and praised him and wept with words unspoken since the creation of the world. He joined her and even as they spoke, they sang, and their tears watered the dirt. 

Into the earth, they lowered their son. In the earth he lay as if alive, as if a word could raise him. No, to dust he would return. With grim resolve, the father buried his son, knowing it was his fault. 

They stood, husband and wife, in silence when it was finished. 

They did not know how to move on from this moment. But time continued, and God was good. That they knew. They felt a lightening of their burden and knew he had not left them.

When they had gone again to their dwelling, as the sun set in the clear sky and shadows grew long, another figure approached. He moved slowly, silently, until he knelt before the fresh dirt.

He began to dig, using his hands. He dug determinedly as the darkness grew. He breathed heavily, angrily, as he scraped the soil up with fingers already stained with dirt, with nails already black with dirt.

The moon shone bright and the stars emerged in clusters before he touched the face of the dead man with his fingers. Carefully, now, he excavated the rest of the features – the nose, eyes, cheeks, chin, neck, ears, hair. He dusted-off the stiff skin. He ran his fingers slowly, reverently, along the lines of the empty visage.

“I have proved all,” he said, trembling. “Man is but dust.” He looked up at the moon, as if beseeching the heavens. Upon his face was a strange mark. He spoke now to the body. “I know now his worth, that he spared me when I did not spare you.”

He looked at the dwelling of his parents. His face grew grim. 

He covered again the body of his brother and walked into the night, harbinger of the death promised to all the men of all the earth.

And his brother Abel lay beneath the earth, almost as if alive, as if a word could summon him forth.

“I need to talk to the person who saw me yesterday. I think her name was Kristin. Yes, it was Kristin. I need to talk to her now.” 

The woman at the counter was firm, her anger restrained. The receptionist tried to explain that Kristin was with another client at the moment and could she please wait. 

“Fine. I’ll wait. But I want to see her.” Dani sat. She was tall, lean, with a face formed by intensity and concentration. She sat, leaning forward, elbows on knees, expectant, silent, patient as a predator. 

Kristin emerged with a great grin. “Dani. What can I do for you?”

“We need to talk. You want to do that here?”

Kristin shook her head, swishing her short hair. “Come on back.” 

It was the same white room, the same white lights, the same two chairs and narrow table as the day before. 

“I cried last night. I wept,” Dani said, giving facts. “That’s not supposed to happen. You never said that would happen. I didn’t even feel it. It bypassed my brain. The tears just came, and I cried for a long time.” 

Kristin nodded her head clinically. “I see.”

“Is that a side effect? Is it going to happen again?”

“The crying?” 

“Yes! What do you think I’m here for?”

Kristin tilted her head in thought. “How do you know the crying was bad?”

“It was an ugly cry. I bawled. It was hateful. I hated it.”

Kristin smiled sympathetically. “This does happen sometimes, but it is nothing you should concern yourself with. It’s perfectly normal.”

Dani breathed in suddenly, a catch in her throat. “Why?” 

Kristin touched the other’s hand. “Relief. You are your own again. You are free. It’s a powerful emotion, but it’s not bad.”

Dani smiled uncertainly and shook her head and blinked her wet eyes. “Is that it? Is that truly–?” She covered her mouth with her hand, took a breath, and recovered herself. “I remember looking at the pill. It was so small, like an aspirin, and I kept thinking of that when I drove away from here, when I got home, when I tried to watch something. It was small, hardly anything, just like–but it wasn’t even real, was it? It wasn’t real yet. It was just some lines on a test, that’s what I kept telling myself, but that’s when it all came, it just came, this emotion I didn’t understand, I couldn’t even feel really, and it wouldn’t go away and it was still there this morning, even though I cried and cried and finally slept, and it’s still here, I can still feel it, like a pressure, like something growing in me, something empty and dark, like something that is nothing at all. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what I feel–but it’s just relief. You’re sure? Of course you’re right. It would have changed everything. It wasn’t even anything, really. Just a few lines, a dot, the size of a pill….”

She turned away as a sob escaped her. She tried to control herself, but another ugly cry escaped. Kristin reached out to her. “It’s–“

“Don’t touch me!” Dani screamed. Tears ran down her face.

“It’s all right,” Kristin said calmly, a firmness behind her compassionate expression. “It will pass. Give it time. This, too, will pass.”‘

“How dare you!” Dani screamed. Then she laughed strangely between her tears. “It will pass.” She stood, chest still heaving. “Like a headache. Just a pill, and it goes away. It wasn’t anything.” She wiped at her tears. They didn’t stop.

Kristin stood, too. “Is there any other way I can assist you today?”

Dani walked out the white room, out the lobby, out of the clinic, empty.

Anne sat, shoulder-hunched, in the lobby of the Eye Doctor. Tall and lanky, she seemed folded in on herself like a deck chair, her big eyes roving the gentle gray and blue islands of empty chairs and side tables. She had never been to the Eye Doctor before. It had never occurred to her parents or to her that she should come. But when the letter came, just before her 17th birthday, she made an appointment for the examination. 

Softly, she was ushered into a small room and sat in a tall chair. The doctor entered and placed a Halloween mask of lenses and levers before her face. He showed her arcane words in clean print and asked her for a definitive answer. “This one, or that one?” She hesitated each time between the identical twins, answered, “This one,” or “That one.” The light flipped on. In his lifeless, pragmatic voice the doctor assured her that her pupils and her corneas were healthy, perfectly fine, unusually clear. He shook her hand firmly, led her out and to a chair in a small cubicle, and told her a technician would be with her shortly. 

The walls of this cubicle were like Ezekiel’s vision handicapped. Thousands of blind eyes stared down at her, the rims shining in the light in a rainbow of color, the lenses blinking slowly as she turned her head to examine one wall, then the other.

A woman swept in. She was slightly overweight, dressed in a tight-fitting, low-cut blouse. She smiled widely behind shapely, apple-red glasses. “I’m Jennifer. I’ll help you pick out your glasses today.”

Anne opened her mouth, a bit like a fish, as she pondered this. “The doctor said I have excellent eyesight.”  

“That’s true. Better than 20/20, apparently.”

“Then I don’t need glasses.” It was a Schroedinger’s sentence, both a statement and a question.

“Of course you do. The examination is merely a formality.”

Anne looked down at her hands as if she would find understanding in her lap. “Is there something wrong?”

“Oh, darling, has no one told you?”

Anne was not always the first to understand things. Her classmates thought this was because Anne still stared at the clouds and talked to stuffed animals, while they were reading articles on how to be real women.

“I guess not,” she said, glancing shyly at Jennifer’s beautiful, glossy frames.

“Glasses aren’t for seeing, dear. They’re for appearing. Take these for example.” She took down a pair of deep black frames that held wide full moons of glass. “I like to call these Serious Anime Schoolgirl.” She exchanged her apple glasses; the transformation was remarkable. “What do you see?”

“They look very nice,” Anne said.

Jennifer appeared more withdrawn, more studious, more timid, like a librarian turning 14. It confused Anne, because Jennifer held herself with certainty.

“Yes, you would like those.” Jennifer next chose a bright pink pair with narrow, letterbox lenses. “Tell me truthfully, how do I look?”

“Like you’re trying to have fun or trying to be smart. Or both.”

“Hmm.” Jennifer took the pink frames off, placing the apple ones back as she studied them. “That’s disappointing. Older women give off that vibe, sometimes when wearing these.”

“I didn’t mean anything.”

“Never mind. How about these?”

Jennifer removed the apple glasses again and settled a thin silver frame that covered only the upper curve of the lens on her nose. Anne sat up straight under her piercing gaze.

“You understand, now, don’t you?” Jennifer said. “Haven’t you noticed all your friends wear them? Your own vision doesn’t matter. You only have two eyes. But the world has billions. You’re almost a woman. You need to decide how people are going to see you.”

Anne gazed at all the frames gazing back at her. “Maybe they can just look at me.”

Jennifer smiled. Beneath those silver rims, it was the condescension of a great intellect. “Do you know that the eyes are the window to the soul? Socks, toes, no one cares about except your own cold feet. Hands, gloves, arms, just attachments for doing things. Legs, hips, all the rest we dress up nice, just window dressing, so to speak for what’s here.” She pointed to her blue pupils. “Give them all the flesh you want, that’s up to you But the soul, you don’t want to let that go around naked. That’s the first sin, right there. Keep it safe, keep it hidden.”

Anne lowered her head and thought. She thought for some time, and Jennifer let her, choosing a half dozen pairs she thought would be to Anne’s advantage.

Anne raised her head.

“Which would you like to try first?” Jennifer asked. 

“Give me the ones you’re wearing.”

Jennifer blinked. “Bold. Good choice.” She removed them and started to put on her apple ones.

“Wait,” Anne said. 

Jennifer hesitated, her red frames in one hand, the silver ones extended to Anne in the other.

“Look at me,” Anne said.

Jennifer did look, caught off guard by Anne’s demand. 

Anne’s eyes were brown, with a hint of green, and they looked at Jennifer with innocence, with a spark of boldness, with timidity flashing there.

“Why do you look scared?” Anne asked.

Jennifer smashed the apple-red glasses onto her face. She seemed cheery and self-confident and fun. “Here. Try the silver ones on.”

Anne stood. “There’s nothing wrong with my vision.”

She hesitated, muttered, “Sorry,” and headed out.