On Cloudless Days by Oliver Swinford - HTML preview

CHAPTER 23

I wake up and I’m in what looks like a hospital, only this time, I’ve got my own room and there are no tubes in my arms. There is no one else in the room with me, and the TV is stuck on a news station that I can’t understand, so I just roll my eyes over what’s around me. I’ve got casts on all of my limbs, and part of my lower body is being held up by strings. The only thing is, I don’t hear other doctors, or anyone else outside of my room, and the window only shows the sides of other houses, and not what you’d expect in a hospital. I hear a knock on the door, and a man comes in with a surgeon’s mask on, and his hair is slicked back.

“You’re lucky to be alive.” He lowers the mask and it’s Daniel. And I’m too tired to move, and too tired to do anything about it, I’m too tired to talk even.  “I’ve got you in a room in my house, where you’ll be taken care of a little better than before. The only difference is, you can’t move or talk, or do anything really. Except lay here and watch the news. Which, if you listen closely, they’re calling for thunderstorms later today and tomorrow. So that could really bring a damper on your new life. But, I’ll let you be for now, as I have many other things that need to be taken care of, and very little time to do them. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go now. I’ll be back later with food and something for you to drink. And by later, I mean tomorrow.” He turns around and walks out of the door and I’m just sitting there thinking, this is how it’s going to be. I’m going to die in a fake hospital room with the German news stuck on, and there’s no way I can understand a single goddamn word they’re saying.  I’m looking out of the window, and there’s a bird sitting on the window sill, and he’s just sitting there, doing nothing, looking at me. And I’m jealous of that bird. In all seriousness I’m jealous of that bird. That bird can fly around wherever the fuck it wants, and I’m stuck in this room, my body in a cast. I start to move around as much as I possibly can, and one of the strings attached to my body snaps, and then I move around some more and the other one snaps, but my legs are still too heavy with the casts on to do anything, I’m not chained or handcuffed to the bed, because Daniel assumed I wouldn’t try to leave. That he had taken every part of me that strove for survival and gotten rid of it. Then I look at the bird again.

“How many of them flew away?”

I start rocking back and forth until I can finally move my legs, and the casts are heavy, but they’re not on properly, and looking at them closer, I realize they’re not even real casts. I position myself in a different way, and I’ve got my legs slowly moving to the floor. I hear footsteps coming down the hall, and then I pause, because I’m worried that he might’ve heard me trying to break free, but then they go pacing back towards the other end of the hall and I hear a door shut, and I finally move my legs to the floor. My arms are still in casts, but the more I start bending my arms, the easier they start to loosen, and I can finally move them, and I break free of the casts on my arm, and I move my arms around, because I’m feeling a lot better, and I’m feeling like I might actually get out of here, and I take my hands and peel off the casts on my legs, and notice how much of the hair on my legs has grown back. I’ve probably been in his house for days, maybe even weeks. But he’s kept me so drugged up, I have no fucking idea. It could already be March for all I know, but that doesn’t stop me from getting up out of the bed, where I immediately fall over, because I’ve been laying there so long, my legs have completely fallen asleep, so now I have to wake them up out of entropy, and I start doing this by punching my thighs and kicking, and it starts working enough to where I can finally move a little bit more, and I’m able to crawl as well as I can to the door. Even in my hospital attire, I feel more clothed than I did in the cell. I feel free, and I start to see the finish line. I grab onto the door knob and I lift myself up and brush off what I can, and I listen closely at the door for any signs of movement. Making sure there isn’t any chance that he might be coming down the hall again, I open the door.

Sitting in the room opposite of mine is Daniel, and he’s sitting down in a chair facing my door. And I freeze. I have no ability to move, and I look in his hands and he’s holding a pistol. A Luger from what I can tell, and I can’t do anything. I can’t speak, I can’t move, I’m frozen. And then he shoots the first shot, which goes into my stomach, and I try to reach for it, but it knocks me back a bit, and I can’t really focus at all. Then another shot, and this one hits me in the fleshy part of the thigh of my left leg, and I lose all feeling in that leg, and I’m against the doorway now, holding onto the wall. I hear him pull the trigger one more time, and this bullet goes straight through my forehead and out the back of my skull.

Daniel comes and places a gun in my hand. Not the gun he was using, but a different gun. A new gun, and he makes sure my fingerprints are all over it. Then he takes the fake casts and throws them in the incinerator. He then takes the hospital gown off of me, and throws that away. He puts on gloves and takes a hammer, and smashes the window beside my bed and then puts my fingerprints on the hammer too. Then he looks over the room, making sure everything looks right, my lifeless body still lying in the middle of the doorway, and he looks at me, and sighs, then picks up the phone.

“Yes, I’d like to report a robbery. The man broke into my window and I was able to grab a gun I had sitting in the desk drawer in time to shoot him. I think he’s dead now though, but I can’t be sure, I don’t want to touch him. I’m very shaken up about it. If you could get over here as quickly as possible, that would be great.” He gives them the address and then goes to the kitchen and makes himself a sandwich, and sits right back down in the chair he was sitting in when I opened the door.

The police arrive, and he fakes like he’s in shock, said he didn’t know what the hell was going on. He had just woken up from a nap, heard the window break, and then grabbed the gun before the man could shoot him. The police are nodding, taking pictures, and they have the ambulance come in and take my body. One of the police note the track mark on my arm, and says I may have been high on heroin, and didn’t know what I was doing. They put my body in a spotless black bag, and haul me away to the morgue. Daniel gets bleach and pours it all over the carpet, and it’s like I was never there. They get me to the morgue, and they can’t identify me because I don’t have any identification on me. They note that I’m an American, and say that I was probably high out of my mind. News will eventually travel back to America, identifying me as the person who got shot, and Mr. Mitchell will be one of the people who hears about it, and he spends the rest of his life regretting me taking his daughter off to Europe, and he never finds where she is, but even if he did have an idea, she’s already burnt to ashes in the incinerator, along with Rachel and everyone else in that room. Everyone back at college will blame me for the disappearance of Ashley, and my own death. Rebecca will call Rachel, but Rachel will never pick up the phone, so she just assumes she’s off doing coke somewhere, and that she’ll call her back when she comes to, but she never comes to. They will probably hold a funeral for me, and there’s only a couple of people there. The preacher, Patrick’s parents, and Rebecca, and none of them are crying, because they don’t know what to be sad about. They say amen, and then I’m lowered into the ground, and then six feet worth of dirt is piled on top of my casket, and a gravestone that marks my name, my birth and my death, and in small writing “A good friend” will be all that’s ever known about me.

If I think back, hard enough, I remember the day I saw the big frog. I remember that frog being one of the happiest moments of my life. The allure of the thing that remained a secret. The something that I could never catch, not even if I tried. I like to pretend that he went on to live a better life, in a better pond, in a better state, but chances are, he was eaten alive by a fish or a snake, and the legend of the big frog dies right then and there, with nothing else to do or say. The only people that know the story of the big frog are Ashley, my parents, and now that they’re all dead, the story dies with them. So when people think of me, they won’t think of me as a child with an imagination, or a teenager whose parents got murdered, because the only people that know that story are dead too. Except for Sarah, who will never mention my name in a conversation again. They’ll remember me as the guy who took his girlfriend to Europe and got stoned, and tried to break into some guy’s house, and got shot, three times. And that’s the truth, as they’ll see it, and there’s not a single goddamn thing I can do to change their minds, or make them think otherwise. But I’m still on that beach where I saw my parents, waiting to get to the other part of the horizon with Patrick at my side. I look around for Ashley, but I don’t see her anywhere. I start to wonder if she’ll be here soon or if she’ll be kept in that basement. I look at the horizon, and I don’t know if I’ll make it there, and if I don’t, then that will be that, because there’s not a single fucking thing I can do about it now.