Drenched in my own sweat, I jumped out of the bed. My heart pounding in my chest, ears and wrists. I looked around at my room. My comfy room. A little bird was chirping just outside the window. I took a deep breath as I closed my eyes and let my head fall to the pillow once again. I opened them just to be pampered by the sights of my old room. The twinkling balls hanging from the beam. I was as safe as I could be.
The rest of the day was uneventful. I had breakfast with my mom. I put on my uniform and took the bus to school. I was in eighth grade so I had spent a considerable amount of time grooming myself in the bathroom.
“I look pretty today”, I said to myself while brushing my hair to then lock it into a thick braid.
Nothing happened at school. People had started calling me Mary again and not by my surname since the other Mary had moved out of the county last year. I liked that. Few teenagers actually are proud of their given names. I was, of course.
After school I decided to take a stroll downtown with some of my friends. Everything was going just fine when something odd called my attention. I stopped by a display window in within there was a trench coat. It was a quite pretty trench coat. Looked cozy, had many pockets and had a nice beige color, plus an elegant belt attached through the waist. But there was something off about the trench coat. I stopped walking whatsoever. My friends went on some meters before realizing I’d been left behind. They returned to take a look at what thing kept me so transfixed. There I was. Staring at the trench coat behind the window.
“You do like fancy stuff, huh?”, one of them said. I didn’t respond. I barely acknowledged they had returned in order to take me along, or wait for me to snap out of it. I for real didn’t care what they said or did, I just couldn’t take off my eyes at that trench coat.
“Mary? Are you high?”.
After what I think was a few minutes, and mumbling, they left me alone. I kept staring at the trench coat for a solid 45 minutes, practically without blinking. My mouth slightly open, like the natural reflex that happens when you’re making too much mental effort or trying to figure some strange thing that’s going on. I could sense the weirded-out glances of passers-by. Just some 14 year-old girl in uniform staring at a trench coat for very long amounts of time. I’m honestly surprised that no one from the store shooed me off. That was strange too.
It took me almost and hour until I realized that the trench coat was floating in the air. There was no hook, no mannequin, no nothing. It was floating just like if it were a magic thing. I looked closer, from a various degree of angles, trying to figure out how, why… I didn’t dare entering the shop. The trench coat was placed floating and yet it looked like it was impossible to wear. The proportions were wrong and it had no holes in it. It then looked like a solid block of concrete. I looked away a moment and then it changed color. I didn’t notice it until like 20 seconds later and after a huge mesmerizing effort. I was dreaming.
I couldn’t wake up, but I knew I was dreaming. Clothes didn’t have surreal features or changed colors out of nothing. It was obviously a dream. I pinched myself. I screamed. Everyone looked at me, eyebrows well raised.
I didn’t know what to do, so I went away, accelerated my pace and into an adjacent street. I stole a car.
“Maybe if I crash I wake up”, I thought. I drove around a bit, hyperventilating, until going out to the freeway. I then let myself loose, recklessly.
Cars didn’t honk. I was going at 100 mph at least but nothing was happening. Everything was simply in control. I looked up to see the turnpike stop. I pushed the throttle and closed my eyes as I heard the transmission grind.
I woke up.
● ● ● ●
4:21 AM. Besides me laid my wife, peacefully. She was hugging a pillow. I took it away so she hugged me instead. I went back to sleep the few hours I had left. I could rest, finally.
I got up some hours later and I was bored as fuck. I said hi to both the wife and the son, who had gotten up earlier. We had breakfast. Jelly filled doughnuts and something my wife called “soy milk” whatever that was.
“What’s your favorite animal, daddy?”, Corey asked me. I actually hadn’t thought of that ever. I had to give him a quick answer so I could ask him, what was obviously the point.
“My favorite animal? Probably the lion. Because they have lots of hair, unlike me.” We laughed, then I asked him.
“I like the coyote”. Why? “I hate it when the roadrunner wins. Coyotes deserve happiness too”, he asserted.
“There are many coyotes around here, but they’re dangerous. They bite your ass!”, I said while mimicking jaws.
Mary kissed me before heading to work. She didn’t take the car for some reason, so I did instead. Traffic was horrible and there were bikes all around. “Huge mistake”, I thought.
I arrived at the turnpike. Jamal was upbeat, more than usual. Nothing really eventful happened during the rest of the day until I got home and decided to write a little. I noticed my desk was surprisingly empty. I couldn’t find any sketch about my old Civil War novel I was working on. I asked Mary but she said she never touched my stuff, but was pleasantly surprised by the fact that I was looking for it. Truly enough, I didn’t remember when was the last time I’d written anything. That seemed surreal to me. I used to write every single day. Just put my glasses on and write. My son playing around fueled my inspiration. I went to sleep later that night, only to have horrible dreams again. I barely bat an eye, even though everything looked so suspiciously peaceful in my life at the moment.
Days went by and nothing seemed to change. Ever. Nothing wrong happened, but also nothing right. It was like a constant mist of routines, of same old habits going back and forth, protruding into my head while watching my wife and kid act robotically good. I hadn’t went off script once, not even when sitting to write.
A week passed, and grim confirmation tore me apart as I realized, once again sitting in my studio: my notes were missing. Nothing I’ve been writing over the last days was kept anywhere. I couldn’t put into words how stupid I felt as I noticed an empty, blank desk every single day when I came home after work, and then started to write as if nothing had happened. Not even wondering what I wrote, or where I left it.
I immediately confronted my wife about it. She had a look of utter confusion. Her pale pinkish skin became red as she assured me, many, many times that she never touched my stuff. After minutes of grinding arguments, I finally chose to believe her. After all: why would she do that? And even though it was very obvious that there was something very wrong going on in my life, she was telling the truth. I hugged her, apologized and cried silently a bit while trying to write, but nothing came to my mind that night.
I woke up next morning. Mary later in the day told me she had appointed me a date with a trustful doctor some day into the week. I obliged. Then I checked the date. July 11, 2029. I dropped the phone.
“Mary, this says 2029.” She looked around and winced. “Yes…? And…?”.
I turned the TV on and surfed through the channels. They were all speaking gibberish, until I recognized a commercial of Nucan water.
“Nucan water!”, I screamed at the top of my lungs, scaring shitless my wife. Probably woke my son up too.
“Mary. I’m delirious. Just give me Nucan water and I’ll be fine”, I said more calmly. “What are you talking about? Water what? What is that thing?!”.
“Oh, no, no, no…”, I started rubbing my eyes and hitting my head with my palms while chanting repeteadly. I jump out of the armchair and went to the fridge: there was no Nucan water anywhere. I inquired about it to Mary. She denied knowing what Nucan water was. I then tried to go to the other kitchen but there was a solid wall where the hallway was supposed to be.
“What happened to the second kitchen?!”, I shouted.
“What?!”. Mary was shaking now.
“Oh, God. Please, no. I wanna get out. I need to get out. I’m dreaming. This is a dream. I need Nucan. Nucan, please. I wanna wake up. I will wake up right now…”
Mary, witnessing me going insane, went rapidly upstairs to wake Corey up to take him to his grandma’s. I searched for Nucan water everywhere in the house, thrashing everything about in the process. I found a bottle of “vodka” inside the cabinet. Do they think I’m stupid? Nucan water, a distilled alcoholic beverage, obviously not vodka. I chugged half a bottle before I spotted my family sneaking down the stairs.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?!”, I yelled at Mary and Corey. Even though it hurt, I couldn’t help it but think that they were not real. Life wasn’t real. I couldn’t harm nobody.
I approached them. Both were terrified. I tried to calm them down a little and said: “get in the car right now, I will fetch something I need. It’s fine, I promise”. They complied somehow. Once in the car, everything bugged me. The bikes everywhere. The stupid hippie pedestrians crossing the streets at any place like they owned it. The Mexican food carts occupying half the road.
“We go to San Bernardino now”, I said as I took the Riverside Freeway. The faster I went, the slower it got. It was infuriating. Soon enough I was pushing the throttle as hard as I could having past the turnpike. The sun was setting and the wind was so strong I could barely hear anything. My senses were already too altered. It was too late and I was going too fast already when my son indirectly alerted me of the coyote about to get steamrolled by the ongoing car whose wheel I was behind. I swerved to the right and went off rails and into the void at more than 160 mph.
I didn’t wake up.
● ● ● ●
Sizzling flames close enough to be heard, too far away to be embraced by their mild warmness. I wasn’t waking up. I just felt the blankets over my body. My whistling nose against my swollen lips. “Stay still. The baby”, echoed in my head many times. The atmosphere of the room got so heavy that I began to feel the pressure, burdens in all my joints and onto my forehead. Faint music played as I felt my child’s heart beating in my womb.
I woke up.
I was in the rocking chair. Lights off. Alone. The room was cold as I sat up looking for Nucan water and something to eat. The sink had a leak.
“I need that wrench back. Damn Roman”, I said blurring my voice as an oncoming yawn took over my body. I almost tripped from the single stair that served as border between the kitchen and the dining room.
I thought about the Nucan water, and how it tasted like shit. Roman’s lady had told me it was rhum based, not shit based. I turned the TV on to distract myself a little. Local TV host, San Bernardino County News, had a special segment dedicated to local writer Thomas “Baldy” Miller, who had deceased one year ago in a tragic car wreck at the Riverside Freeway trying to avoid hitting a rare coyote. His wife Mary Miller survived him.
“That dude looks helluva lot like me”, I said out loud to nobody in particular. Real fucking funny until I realised that dude was, in fact, me. But I was alive, wasn’t I? That didn’t made sense at all. I’d never been so confused in my whole life.
I laughed. I laughed histerically. I threw the Nucan bottle across the room just so I could hold my beating stomach with both hands. A blizzard stripped off the plywood plane from the hole in the wall, filling the house with freezing wind as I stood up and screamed.
I looked around the whole house, looking for something. I didn’t know what it was. I needed to find it. My no-life was at stake for what I could imagine. I wasn’t myself for a single moment since I watched the news.
As the leaking cold started to grow into my weak muscles, atop a mountain of clothes I finally found: a beige trench coat. It was my wife’s favorite trench coat. I hugged it, kissed it, pushed my empty body to it. In the freezing cold, I cried myself to sleep with it.
● ● ● ●
I woke up in the hospital. My whole body ached but not so much. I felt scarring all over my chest, as my IV arm was a little swollen.
“Hey, how do you feel? Are you able to speak?”, a masked nurse said to me while fetching for a light to analyze my pupils. He called Dr. Jaroslawsky, whoever he was, to see personally my awakening after eighteen days and a successful surgery. He entered the room and I suddenly remembered everything.
“Roman”, I said, with a weak voice. His eyes looked surprised behind his surgical mask.
Roman Jaroslawsky was a cardiologist, and surgeon. I had a heart failure after my husband wrecked our car after the turnpike stop at Riverside. He was pronounced dead on arrival, but his heart was still functional. I needed a heart transplant in order to have chances to live. My husband was an organ donor, and thanks to an extremely rare twist of destiny, even through all the tragic sorrow, he was a matching donor to me. Dr. Jaroslawsky proceeded with the surgery with success, and saved my life. My beating heart was the one of my husband’s, which was keeping me alive. Me, and my bearing child. My first instinct after coming to that split second anagnorisis was to touch my lower abdomen, to see if I was still pregnant. Thankfully, I was.
“Ms. Miller, take it easy. We have good news. Your body isn’t rejecting the heart we needed to transplant you. Hopefully, you and your child will be fine”, said the doctor as he held my hand. “However, there’s bad news as well”, he said with notorious concern behind his glasses. Everyone in the room was sitting now.
“Baldy is dead”, I said. He looked behind him, right to the nurse. The nurse shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. No one had told me. I just knew. I knew everything.
“He told me he’d give me his heart”, I assured him. “He said, since the day we met, that I snatched his heart. Guess he was right all along”, I chuckled, feeling the heartbeat and feeling my dear husband all inside me, along with my offspring.
My health was being closely monitored throughout the rest of the day. The immunosuppressants were doing a good job at preventing my own cells from attacking my new functioning heart. After a few hours of consciousness I went to sleep. This time a nice, peaceful slumber that would finally disassemble all my thoughts of the horror I’d had to witness through. I closed my eyes, missing Baldy, yet so close to him.
I dreamt of him. He was me, all around. We were two persons fused into one. He was feeling every bit of my old self, and for that I knew beforehand what had happened to us. I talked with myself for hours. Baldy told me he had a dream in which he was the only survivor. He had grown insane and tried an experimental drug that enabled him to dive into his memories forever. It was called “Nucan water” he said. Dear sweetheart always talking nonsense.
I saw my child, already been born, playing around.
“Are you going to call him Corey?”.
“No, he will be called Thomas.”
“Come here, Tommy”, I said to him as he plunged into our arms. “Will you grow bald just like daddy?”.
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