The Boys from Santa Cruz

CHAPTER NINE
1

Darkness. Dreams. Teddy, burning. Dusty, falling. Rudy, staring. A round bed afloat in a black sea, jagged flashes of lightning on the horizon. Big balloon faces, bending low to mine. Voices, inhuman voices like running water. And terrible creatures, obscene, impossible creatures, turkey vultures with human faces, humans with feathered arms and long curved talons instead of hands…

A windowless room. A nurse holding a syringe to the light, tapping it delicately a few times with her finger. We both watch the bubble rise to the light. “I want to go home now,” I whisper hoarsely, through dry, cracked lips.

“Sure thing,” she says. “Home you go.” A prick, a sting, a falling away…

Sometimes darkness and dreams, sometimes the windowless room. Sometimes a tray of food is in front of me, sometimes pills in a tiny paper cup. And sometimes a whitecoat with a bandage on his nose takes me into the bathroom and twists my arm behind my back and hurts me and I pray for the darkness to swallow me up again…

There comes a time when, instead of the whitecoat with the bandaged nose, it’s a whitecoat with a long scar down his nose who takes me into the bathroom and twists my arm behind my back and hurts me, but then one day another man in a longer white coat and one of those things with black tubing and a silver disk around his neck rushes in yelling at him to stop, and after that I never see either the man with the bandage or the man with the scar again…

Over time, the darkness and the dreams begin to fade, until one morning I awake to find myself in a new room, one with a window. And when I look out the window I can see a small garden with flowers, pink flowers and red flowers and yellow flowers, and sometimes I see a bird, one of those blue birds, the name is on the tip of my tongue but I can’t quite remember it.

Slowly my world opens up. Now there are other rooms, other people. I learn to braid shiny plastic strands into something called a lanyard, I have no idea what it’s for. And sometimes a new, different whitecoat, a much nicer one, leads me out into a garden that I think is the same one I can see from my new window, and I see that blue bird flying by again, and I discover that I know its name now, it’s a jay. A blue jay. Duh!

Not long after that, maybe even that same afternoon, I’m back in my room, washing up in the bathroom after using the toilet, when I notice an oddly familiar-looking fellow in the mirror over the sink. He has dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, and a little brown mole next to his eye, just like me. But he also has hair on his face, like he’s growing a beard, which I’d never been old enough to do.

As we stare into each other’s eyes, a confused look comes over his face. He reaches up and rubs his chin wonderingly, with his fingertips, like he’s wondering why it’s all stubbly. And when I realize that I’m rubbing my chin, too, and feeling the stubble, the other man’s eyes fill with tears. “Luke,” he says, with the tears rolling down his cheeks now. “Your name is Luke.”