Ashley Murray
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die
It happened late one Tuesday
afternoon. He hadn’t shown up to work and hadn’t called in. It was a slow day,
orders barely coming in for the greasy burgers we all came home smelling of. While
he was the typical 17 year old kid, long greasy hair, rockabilly who frequently
skipped class, it wasn’t like him to be late to work. I was beginning to get
worried. That’s when my coworker received the call from his sister. Stephen had
been in a terrible car accident.
I met his mother and sister at the
hospital that day. It’s a wonder we haven’t met yet and they hadn’t heard of
me. Although, Stephen and I just started seeing each other a few months back,
so it’s not a big surprise that we hadn’t had a formal introduction. I
introduced myself as his girlfriend and expressed my deepest sympathy. The
vision of them faded as burning tears welled up in my eyes. And then it came, a
warm and unbreakable embrace from his mother. It both saddened and encouraged
me that they were so trusting and open when we had only just met. They shared
with me that Stephen had endured major internal injuries. One of his lungs had
collapsed due to the impact, his ribs were broken, his small intestine was
lacerated and he had sustained major trauma to his frontal lobe, which was
responsible for emotions and memory. They told me that he was completely
unresponsive, but the doctors encouraged them to speak with him because even if
he couldn’t respond, speaking to him would stimulate his brain and it may
encourage him to wake up. They blessed me with a few moments to see him alone.
I suited up in my gloves and gown and walked to his bed in
Trauma ICU. I peered over at his young, lithe body, lying there in a desperate
state, tubes coming out of every vein, hooked up to every monitor in the room,
some of which I had never seen before. He laid there, just a shadow of himself,
eyes closed and resting peacefully. The last time I had the pleasure of seeing
him this resting this way was two weeks ago , all twisted up in my floral bed
sheets. Unable to afford my own place on
a burger-flipper salary, my parents had an old travel trailer placed on the
back of their property. Here, I was able to have the kind a privacy a woman of
my age deserves to have. Stephen may have been 11 years my junior, but he was easily
the best lover and partner I had ever had. He came over a few times a week, and
although we didn’t have much money to go out on dates, we enjoyed our time
together indulging in dark fantasies we shared and afterwards watched B-movies
like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and Evil Dead. Afterwards, he would leave
and I would look forward to the next time I could make him mine. Now he was
here in this terrible place, totally unaware of what was going on around him. I
wondered for a moment that if I spoke to him, would he hear my voice? And if he
could hear me, how would he hear it? Would it be like shouting down a deep hole
in which he sat at the bottom of, straining to hear, only understanding
fragments of words? Or would it be like it is now, with him lying next to me,
him understanding everything, only he is unable to respond; trapped within the
walls of his own mind? I had to try.
“Stephen,” I whispered, “can you
hear me?” I searched his face for the slightest sign of understanding. Not a
flicker of the eyelash or a hint of a word on his lips could be found. Nothing.
The low hum of his machines seemed to roar in the silence of the TICU.
“Stephen!” I almost shouted, “How
are you feeling? Everyone at work is so worried about you. I drove by the scene
of the accident on my way to the hospital and it’s a miracle you’re still
alive.” I grabbed at his hand like it was me who was clinging to something. The
tears came again, coming up in my eyes, falling and swimming into the folds of
his blue hospital blanket.
“I love you,” I confessed, “I love
you so much”. The EKG machine’s beeping sped up almost instantaneously with my
words. His blood pressure shot up immediately and soon it was like his body
thought it was running a marathon and still, there he lay. It didn’t occur to
me at the time that maybe I should call for a nurse; that maybe I should do
something. I stood there, overwhelmed by the possibility that my sweet man was
still in there. A nurse, who must have been startled by the speed of the
beeping and the subsequent alarm, threw open the privacy curtain and demanded
that I leave. As I turned to leave, I looked upon his face once more, and found
his eyes were open, but unfocused as if trying to find something far away. I
yearned to return to him once more, but the nurse prevented my reentry with her
closure of the privacy curtain.
I removed my garb and got onto the elevator,
alone, to ride down to the lobby. Suddenly, the elevator doors opened and a
young man whom I recognized got on. He could not conceal his shock as our eyes
met. It was Stephen’s best friend, John.
“What the
Hell are you doing here?” John demanded, as he punched the DOOR CLOSE button.
“I have
every right to be here,” I responded quietly.
“What are
you talking about? He broke it off with you a week ago! He doesn’t want
anything to do with you!”
I wanted to
believe it wasn’t true, but John was right. Stephen had broken things off with
me a week prior because the age difference was too much for him to accept. He
was embarrassed after being ridiculed constantly at work because of our purely
sexual relationship. Although he could never bring himself to say it, the
stares and snickers we received in public brought him down, and prevented him
from making our relationship official. We were restricted to expressing our
admiration for each other in the confines of my little love shack.
“He was on
his way to your damned shack-on-wheels when the accident happened! He wanted
to make sure you got this back!” and he threw a VHS to me. The outside of the
cassette was banged up from being in his car, but the label was still intact.
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, 1962. It was his favorite.
My favorite aspect of this story was all of the imagery it contained. It was easy to empathize with the narrator as she looked at Stephen with "tubes coming out every vein" and "hooked up to every monitor in the room." I specifically liked the personification of the narrator's tears "falling and swimming in the folds of his blue hospital blanket." Another part of this story I liked was the ending- it threw me for a complete loop! The narrator (with the help of first person point of view) tricks the reader into thinking that she and Stephen are in a serious relationship. It is not until John shows up that the reader learns the whole story. Without this trickery on the narrator's part, the story would likely have had the overused storyline of one member of a couple getting into an accident an forgetting everything about their relationship. Instead, with the twist in the story, that possibility was evaded. Normally, it is frustrating to be deceived by the narrator, but in this instance I was not bothered by it because it added a humorous element to the story. After the truth about her relationship with Stephen was revealed, the narrator's concerns and thoughts seemed much more obsessive and possibly psychotic.
ReplyDeleteThe one problem I did have with this story was John's sudden arrival. It seemed a bit outlandish that John just happened to catch the elevator right as the narrator was about to ride it down to the lobby. To make this scene more believable, the narrator should have noticed him in the lobby beforehand and, perhaps, tried to avoid him. This would have effectively foreshadowed John's appearance later in the story.
The story I was reminded most of when reading this story was "Are You Mr. Lonelee?" Just as the narrator in this story fools the reader into believing she and Stephen are deeply in love with one another, Conroy in "Are You Mr. Lonelee?" fools the narrator into believing that his wife is dead. In both stories, the narrator makes the reader feel sorry for them by lying or withholding vital information.
This story is wonderful. The tittle itself would pull any ready in, and the fact that you incorporated the name of the story with the story itself shows the art in your writing. I was drawn into the story from the get go, and once I was in it was impossible to stop. The narrator/main character was so believable when she spoke of her lover Stephen that I half expected them to be close to holy matrimony by the end of the story. Her believability attributed to the shock I felt when the story took a turn in the opposite direction. When I read that Stephen had broken up with the main character I felt her pain, and I felt it even more so when I read he was in his fragile condition due to the returning of her movie. One thing I would have changed about this story is the character depth. I would have liked to know the age and period of life that Stephen was in before the story concluded. This story reminded me of the "The Shooting Man" by Kevin Wilson in an odd way. I felt that Stephen, even though he broke up with the main character, was on his way to try and patch things up with his broken relationship. The same thing happened in the shooting man when Guster hopped on that bus to prove he could survive a gun shot to get his lover Sue-Bee back. In conclusion, your story was truly interesting and enjoying to read.
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