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Sleeping passed like a dream. Which is how it’s meant to pass, but really, I mean that I'd sure been sleeping, but it happened so quick and so colorful that I'm not sure I didn’t just blink my eyes a katrillion times until my blood vessels started playing a movie marathon behind my eyelids; which is to say that when I woke up out of the blue, it felt like I'd been awake for years. Suddenly navy blue and army green become a hospital room in bright, scalding white. My eyes sting like I've been playing staring contests as a kid again, playing at deliberate pain for the sake of proving something. It’s hard to blink out.
“Lister?” Jimmy says, like an angel. “You awake?”
Blink, blink.
Divinity has been prescribed to a lot of things in our songs. God, the band, the fans. But never just Jimmy, not like how it feels right now. He is haloed in the window light and I can't look headon, both because my eyes hurt but also because he is so incredibly radiant, and all of a sudden I'm trying to find a way to atone for my sins. Scrambling before I even know what I've done wrong. My chest tightens. My hair is in my face. He was… panicking? And I kissed him like an idiot. He was panicking, and I made it worse. He was about to kill himself, and I went ahead to take the choice out of his hands and got myself stabbed… at some point.
How long has it been?
My throat might actually shred itself into ribbons if I try to talk right now, so instead of asking, I vaguely croak a hum. Jimmy lights up like a Christmas tree.
“Ro, Ro, Rowan,” He's shaking something up to his left, covered in what must be a trenchcoat, Jesus, is it winter already? How long have I been asleep? “Rowan, he's awake,”
Rowans sits up like Dracula, stumbles to his feet, and half trips over the foot of the hospital bed that I am belatedly realizing my real life body is laying in and not just conceptually next to. “Are you okay," He asks, voice sleep heavy, except it's not much of a question. I nod anyway.
Rowans breathes out fast through his nose, and sighs out, “Oh, thank fuck,”
I don't know how my physical form will react to that. Apparently, a twitch of my left eye. God, they have me on the good stuff, huh?
Rowan Omondi is usually known for his rhythm. He's a bassist, but he has such an instinctual sense for what fits where and what doesn't work structurally that it's probably an embarrassment to me, the drummer, who is off beat 80% of the time to Rowans 0%.
When he hits the call button, he's lacking all of that cadence. He's just spamming, and then his hands shake, and I’m starting to tremble just looking at him, and then he hits the button another 20 times for good measure, except its stuttering and I’m suddenly panicking with him, whats wrong, whats wrong with me, why is Rowan fucking Omondi ringing the emergency bell like I'm gonna die,
And a nurse bursts into the room suddenly, eyes wide and panicked, mask half hanging of her face to see Rowan hunched over me like he's gonna throw up, and Jimmy curled up on the sad plastic chairs, and my hands half lifted like I want to hug Rowan and I don't know how to reach, which is kind of true, because I can't reach but really I want to shake him out of his skin, what is wrong with me this time whats wrong what's wrong,
“Patient awake in room 706,” She says, eyes not straying from our tangled mess. And then she meets my eyes, because I'm staring at her too.
“Off the bed, kid, now,” She says, eyes shuttering from wideyed shock into something more professional. “Rowan. What are you doing.”
Fair question. He's shaking on my lap like a puppy, and Jimmy is flitting around anxiously, looking like he wants to help the nurse perform emergency surgery. “Is he gonna be okay? When was he supposed to be awake? What's the timeline of recovery?”
The good stuff for sure. I feel like I've stepped into an alternate reality. Into her radio, the nurse belatedly adds, “Mental Health services in 706 please. Guest is exhibiting signs of a panic attack.”
“Rowan,” I say, because we are on the 7th floor apparently, and a building with seven floors probably doesn't have the mental health services room right next door. Rowan lifts his head to stare at me with the classic kind of big brown eyes I didn't know he had. And then the world tilts sideways, other way, upside down and flips inside out, and my neck muscles relax without my sayso, and I'm back to sleep just as abruptly as I'd woken up.
The next time, I fade out of reds and pinks like a zombie rising out of the grave; digging my way out broken fingernail by broken fingernail. One moment, I'm in a nightmarish crowd of bodies, nothing particularly scary except that there’s so many and im so singularly alone, and then I gain the sudden, like, metaphysical feeling of knowing that something is wrong, and I'm pushing and shoving my way out of the heap of bodies because there is something wrong here, there's something wrong, I have to investigate it, and my eyes are open before I quite realize I was struggling to open them.
“Lister?” Jimmy says, like an angel, “ Are you awake?”
Deja vu. I hum. The only reason I don't fall into the belief that I've somehow found myself in a time loop is because the dark lump of Rowan's trenchcoat is replaced with a metallically silver windbreaker. Somehow, it's been a few months. It must be April.
“What day is it?” I say, vastly overestimating my throat's ability to not rip to shreds. By the end of my coughing fit, Jimmy has pressed the call button on my bed, grabbed a thin plastic cup of water, and filled it up from a water filter jug.
“Tuesday,” he tells me, eyebrows furrowed.
“Of April?”
No coughing this time. Instead Jimmy chokes. “It's still June! It's only been five days since,”
and then his face crumbles, and he pivots away from me. And my heart sinks suddenly, rapidly, and without even thinking I know in that same metaphysical way in the dream that he's leaving me forever. I almost call out for him, eyes already watering. My head aches. My chest tightens. My hair falls over my face from where it's been pushed back.
Jimmy looks back at me from shaking Rowan awake, concern in every edge. And then at my heart monitor, which is beeping so fast it must be having a heart attack.
Wait, no.
Am I having a heart attack?
Rowan shoots up so fast that my knees fly up to my chest.
"Is he having a heart attack?” Rowan asks, and wastes no time in pressing the call button again and again and again.
Ow, ow, ow, lightning shoots up my side belatedly, pain and agony and why does it hurt so much, why am I in a hospital bed anyways, and why does my brain feel fuzzy like I've been doped to hell and back, I don't think I took any drugs, what is going on, what in the freaky Saturday morning hell is going on, why is Jimmy at the door like he's gonna leave me and why is he shouting, why is everything so loud,
A nurse comes in like she ran across the hall. “706 needs medical assistance, heightened heart rate, and Mental Health services-”
Rowan lunches off of my legspace to throw up in the sink. I have the overwhelming realization that my liver might be failing. I was supposed to have a few more years in me at least,
“Alister,” the nurse says, pulling at my shins. ”Lay your feet flat. You shouldn't have been able to lift them at all. Let's get your back tilted up a bit, yeah?”
Rowan reaches again. Jimmy is absently rubbing his back, having come back - he's back, he didn't leave - and staring deadset at me, looking very much like he's in a nightmare he would like to escape now please. God, what I would do to escape. What I would do.
“Jimmy,” I start, so many questions hitting around the words, trying to ask.. what… whats…. whats happening? hap… and then the world does a backflip and doesn’t stick the landing.
The third time I wake up with the lucidity of someone who is realizing that he is back in the real world. White room. My leg is up in a cast in those cartoon suspension things. My hands feel stuffed. My brain is even more so. I'm the one in the hospital bed, and I'm the one in my bones. This is not as reassuring as one would think. Here's what I have gathered, between the time I press the call button and a nurse shows up at my room:
I've been in an intermittent coma. April has passed, and the view through the window makes me suspect it's summer again. My liver has failed. They had to operate on me, and for some reason my leg had something wrong with it. I might have broken it after I fell from liver failure, or something. Jimmy and Rowan were here up until April, which is longer than I would have expected them to grieve my bad choices over my half dead body. But now they've left, and I'm well and truly alone.
I must have gotten a transplant, right?
“Alister,” the nurse says, looking remarkably familiar, and I just know I know her the same way I know that my liver had been replaced. “How are you feeling? Any pain?”
I shake my head. Nod when she asks me if I feel present. Give verbal responses when she asks me to. By the time she's finished whatever questionnaire she probably has to give all coma patients, I feel absolutely vying for answers.
“How long has it been?”
The nurse gives me a sympathetic look, but not a long one. “Eigh-”
I sit up. The nurse eyes widen in alarm, hands already at my shoulders before my elbows can buckle, lowering me down. “What is wrong with you? Kid lay down, how do you keep doing this, it's not like you're an athlete, oh my god-”
“Eight years?” I whisper hoarsely Oh, God. Oh god. That was so much more time than I thought…
The nurse straightens, hands on her hips. “ No, eight days. Are you sure you feel okay?”
Eight days. Eight days. My horror is promptly curbed over by a semi. So I haven't lost years to a liver transplant. Unless… eight days is not long enough for an operation, is it?
“When's the transplant?” I ask, and the nurse frowns deep.
“Mental Health to 706, patient is experiencing some kind of delusion-”
“No,” and I'm surprised by how much force I can put behind my voice. That doesn't seem right… “I’m not crazy. When's the transplant!”
“What transplant?!” The nurse throws her hands up. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“My liver transplant!”
And I'm sent into a coughing fit.
“Your liver is so not the issue here,” The nurse says, politely offering a vaguely familiar plastic cup of water from the tap. “You got yourself stabbed in the thigh.”
Mental Health services, it turns out, is a short curly haired woman that smacks her forehead in the doorway from where she just walked in. “Why would you tell it to the patient like that.”
The nurse huffs, but her cheeks flushed red. “‘s what happened.”
Great. So I got drunk at a party and… started a knife fight?
My eyes drift to the chairs. Rowan and Jimmy were definitely here, I know I remember seeing them. On the contrary to half a year, not even eight days is a pathetic sitting by the bedside streak. Figures they didn't stay, though. My fucking mess.
The nurse must follow my gaze, because she says, “Oh, Tonya kicked them out for distressing the patient. Er. You. We didn't know that you were just crazy.”
“Again,” Mental Health Services says, sounding deeply exasperated. “Why would you say it to the patient like that?”
“Sor-ry” The nurse says sullenly. I'm kind of ignoring her. Politely. Because the world is probably, most likely quietly collapsing. That must be why I feel like the ground has fallen though.
Like, here's the thing. About Jimmy and Rowan and me. Either they care, or they don't. If they care about something about me, it's great! They won't let anything get in the way of imposing their will. It's as annoying as it is our life. And if it's something minor, something they don't care about, or something they don't have the energy to care about, it's just another thing they let play out. But the idea that they were kicked out has to mean they were first here. and the idea that they didn't fight their will into matter has to mean that they’re… indifferent. And I genuinely don't know if I can live in a world where the purest, sweetest souls ever, the angels, especially the angel, especially Jimmy, has the capacity to go numb to someone that I kind of have to believe they cared about. Because that someone was little kid Me. And if I don't believe that they cared about me then, at least then, goddamn it I don't give a shit about now, just then, just vestiges of it in the now with Jimmy, well. The last few years get a lot more sinister.
And they're not here.
I have the fleeting thought of, the real, real good stuff before my eyes well up in tears, and God is it painful, but God is it inevitable.
“a'ight,” I press my hands to my eyes, because this is so painfully embarrassing. “What do we…”
and then I'm forced to shut up, because I'm actually about to start sobbing. Mental Health Services facepalms again.
“Hey, kid? Kindly. Your friends have been arguing to get a camera installed here.” The patterns behind my eyes turn to starbursts where my fingers press against my eyeballs. What does that even mean?
Like a cat, the nurse bats a hand at mine. “Don't do that!”
“Hey,” the curly-haired lady is closer when she speaks next. I crack open my eyes to look at her, feeling so pathetic I might choke on it. “Kid. They're still worried about you, alright? I bet I can get them down here in ten minutes. They're probably lurking in the waiting room, actually. Do you want to see them?”
Yes, is my first instinct.
No, is my second.
What am I supposed to do with that information? Last time I'd seen them, the world had quite literally inverted itself. Rowan was crying on my blanket. Jimmy was grilling the nurses.
“Sweetheart, don't overthink it,” The woman smiles kindly enough; the nurse looks ready to phone someone by the door.
I nod.
But by the time the oldschool landline rings, reality feels too far away to catch.
I wake up to yelling and the feeling that I didn't get to nap nearly enough. It's probably Cecily, right? I've overslept after a party, and we have something to do today; an interview or session in the studio or a press event. Or an advertisement, maybe I've finally gotten that Listerine ad that the fans have been rallying for. But I'm late, and Cecily is still yelling overhead, and even though my whole body hurts - a crazy night, it must have been a crazy night, holy shit, I haven't felt this sore since… - and the show goes on long past I start feeling like a corpse anyways. God bless the makeup team. God bless makeup.
And the anvil over my head becomes a little more physical. That shiny new US contract…This is as good as it's gonna get for a long while. A long, long while.
“‘m up,” I sigh, cracking one eye open and sorely regretting it. “wh'ts on t’day's agend-”
“Lister!” Says a voice that is decidedly not Cecily.
How long must I have slept in for Cecily to send in Jimmy? What did I do to warrant this kind of punishment?
“Lister,” Rowan echoes, “Lister,”
Oh, shit. Is Cecily on break? The boys are gonna kill me. I probably should have been ready half an hour ago.”I'm up, I'm up,” I push myself up on bucking elbows, oh god, that hurts, “I'll be ready in five. What the hell happened yesterday?”
“Lay back down!” A decidedly new voice says.
Without much fanfare, I'm suddenly flat on my back, black spots dotting over my vision. The last thing I hear is, “Oh shit, not like that, fucking ALISTER BIRD,”
Reality slams right back in silverquick. Ow. The facts overlay themselves over my vision; it's been over 8 years since I first got drunk enough to start this nightmare. My liver is gone. My bandmates have moved on. And I am totally, completely, one hundred percent alone.
“What year is it?” I whisper.
“Not this again,” The nurse, who, wow is everything blobby right now, groans, at the same time the Jimmyblob says, “ 2019?”
“Jimmy!!”
My eyes tear up. Wow, what's up with that? But also, if it's 2019, it hasn't actually been 8 years, and… wait, no. It's been eight days. Shit.
“When's the transplant?”
“Your liver,” shouts a nurseblob who looks sorta familiar, “Is not the problem! You! Were! Stabbed!”
“Lister,” Jimmyblob says.
Must have been at a party. I must have gotten into a fight, right? Who would have stabbed me, though? The fans might actually commit a homicide. Genuinely, I know Jimmy is always overreacting about stalkers and bedrooms and just because a picture that I shouldn't have sent ended up on the internet doesn't mean that there's stalkers in our closet, and I’m so sorry about that, but also they are so obsessed with us that they would throw a brick just for the hell of it, and I know, I know they're crazy enough to kill their favorite teenage heartthrob's stabber. Stabber Guy so done.
“Was it that guy that voices Miles Morales?” Because if he is, the murder is deserved. Only a little bit. But it's deserved.“ I always knew he was a motherfucker, it's so not fair he got to voice him, it should have been Rowan.”
“... Exactly how much morphine did you put him under?” the Rowanblob asks. Which is sooo not the point right now. He could have been Miles Morales! I could have known Miles Morales!!
“Lister,” The Jimmyblob says again.
“How are you not mad about this?” I gesture wildly in the direction of Rowanblob. “ You could have voiced Miles Morales!”
“Lister,” Jimmyblob says again-again.
“We were on tour in Wales,” Rowan sighs. “We didn't have time for a whole movie. Especially with a new album on the way.”
“LISTER!” Jimmyblob yells, and it sounds like he's gonna cry. “You got stabbed because of me!”
…No.
“No, I didn't. It must have been the loser Miles Morales. How does he keep ending up at my parties? I’m certainly not inviting him.”
The nurseblob closes the door with a click, and I realize that the Jimmyblob and Rowanblob are gone.
“Are they gonna go visit the loser Miles Morales?”
“No, Alister,” She sighs, standing very blobbily in the door.
“Lister,” I correct. And then I'm in the dark. Kinda rude of her the cut the lights, huh? The sun shouldn't even be able to do that.