oedipisms

Matt wakes up.

Everything is wrong. It’s all wrong. Last he remembers is--

He can’t see.

He can’t see. It’s so, so wrong, he could see last time, he can’t see anything anymore. It’s painful. Concentrated in throbbing wrongness occupying the front of his skull. He can’t remember what’s no longer there, what feels so foreign and why. Can’t hear or feel or smell or see or taste or see or see or

Matt falls away.

The second time around is worse.

At first, it’s fizzing and carbonated fluorescents shrieking somewhere above his head. It’s the rancid cries of dying people above and below and all around, framed by nauseous fragmented mosaics of medicated sedated infected blood.

Then it’s static in his sinuses, heavy numb void somethings bookending the upper bridge of his nose. The burning acid smell of urine-soiled laundry several walls away irritates his nostrils.

Then, last, he feels the hand resting on his forearm and everything else comes flooding in.

The scrape of the carving fork. Chest caved in. Chains melting indiscriminate and callous into weeping, desperate flesh.

He has to get out of here. Has to get away from the hammer and fists, from steel-toed wrath-harbinger boots, Abe’s got him by the arm can’t let him break the arm needs to twist tries to scream--

The hand on his arm disappears when he succeeds. There’s a voice near him--not Abe: familiar, quiet, belongs at home, belongs near him--repeating something. Matt listens hard; it’s saying, “--ey, shh, hey, it’s okay, it’s okay, you’re safe, I’m here. Matt, you’re safe. It’s okay, it’s me. It’s Wade...”

It’s Wade.

He’s not--not--

He’s safe. He’s not chained to a cold, merciless pillar. He’s lying down on something soft and yielding. A bed.

The tension leaves his body. He tries talking, pushes out, “Where’m I?” His voice is lacerated, shredded, and it’s hard to push the sluggish air through the weight of a dull aching pressure in his chest and the fog of painkillers. His ribs warn him not to try to speak again and his lungs struggle to exchange enough oxygen.

Wade stops his placations. “Hospital. Found you about fifty miles upstate. Peter and I, we were, uh, almost too late. Went into surgery as soon as you got here...”

Matt loses track of Wade’s explanation. He reaches out a hand in the direction of the voice and it’s caught between two rough palms. A scarred thumb paints wide, sweeping brush strokes between the medical tape and band-aid obstacles on the back of his left hand.

Wade’s still talking. Matt drifts for a while, floats on the ups and downs of his cadence.

Safe voice, Wade.

When he musters the energy to return to the present, Wade is asleep in the chair. His hand is still loosely intertwined with Matt’s on the bed.

The world has begun to return to him. He can feel the bustling, writhing veins of the hospital coming to life under the blanket of drugs that dulls the hard-edged complaints from his ribs. From his throat and his face.

He spends some time--not sure how much, his brain doesn’t want to be cooperative about moving linearly--cataloging what he can tell of the trauma on his body. Starts at the tips of his toes and traces bruising, breaks, cuts, sprains on an upward path.

It’s an ugly trip.

His body is the skeleton of a sunken shipwreck half-buried on the floor of a dispassionate ocean. Sails have long torn to shreds, wooden hulls are logged with frigid briny water, compelled by salty years to drift up and away. Ribs don’t sound like old ships anymore--rather pulverized planks which shiver when he inhales like they’re made of breakable crumbly sand.

A cannula tickles his nostrils. The air that it delivers tastes canned and sits coppery in the back of his throat.

When he gets to his eyes, he already knows. The feel of gauze and bandages covering his face like a blindfold surfaces the deep-buried memory of his earliest experience at a hospital: after the accident. He’d spent weeks stifled under the pressure of similar bandages; they’d served as constant reminders of his newfound blindness and, by the time he’d been allowed to take them off, they were unbearably itchy.

Behind those bandages, a pain that should be unfathomably sharp needles gently at him.

There was empty space there.

After Abe stabbed his eyes out.

There was blood and nothing else.

Now the space is filled by foreign objects. Synthetic orbs of a similar mass to their predecessors.

Prosthetics?

Matt tries contracting his muscles to feign looking left, but he can feel the tissue protesting even through all the painkillers fucking up his sensory processing. He stops.

His body hurts. He’s tired. Listens to Wade’s breathing until he falls asleep.

When he wakes up, the manic hum of adolescence is sitting next to his right foot and tapping at a touchscreen.

Mmm. “Peter.”

Lots of energy focuses on him at once. Peter buzzes as loud as the fluorescents for a second. He half-yells, “You’re up! Wait, lemme get Wade, justasec--” and he’s off like a shot.

Matt tries to follow his bouncing footsteps down the hall, but he loses track of him around a corner and returns his focus to his immediate surroundings.

His head is a bit clearer this time, and he estimates from the drip of the IV next to him and the content of the bag to which it’s attached that they’ve downed his painkillers a bit.

Good thing, that. Gives him something harsh and volatile against which he can ground himself. Makes it less overwhelming to sort through the massive influx of sensory input.

God, he hates hospitals. There’s too much birthing and living and dying happening in a massively concentrated space. He can’t effectively narrow his focus because of the painkillers.

Hospitals make him feel helpless. His broken body makes him feel helpless. Feeling helpless is an angry, incessant itch in the pit of his stomach. His anxious fingers pick at the seam of the sheet covering his legs.

He finds the footsteps again. They’re headed in his direction, accompanied by a pair of longer-strided, more purposeful ones.

Both pairs of shoes pause at the nurses’ station. Peter bounces on the balls of his feet. Even with the layers of drugs and the walls in the way, Matt can feel that anxiety rolling in like a tide.

He sets to work on trying to sit up. It’s an excruciatingly involved process. His torso fights him, his arms fight him, his lungs seize and invert and implode and collapse--he stops trying to move and focuses all of his energy on breathing.

In.

Out.

In--

In--

Goddamnit, In. The air outside of his body sits stagnant and mulish and refuses to respond when he inhales. The insistent metallic oxygen from the nasal cannula pools in his nose and taunts him, just out of reach.

He ticks his jaw and tries not to panic.

Again: In.

It works. His shoulders lose tension.

A weight appears on the edge of the mattress suddenly and from out of nowhere. Matt flinches away, surprised.

It’s Wade. He says, “Hey, Red. S’me. Peter told me you were awake. Got your nurse here too.” His hand finds Matt’s and his index finger asks permission to hold it. Matt lets go of the sheet to allow Wade’s fingers to intertwine with his.

Peter’s tucked up against the wall opposite the bed. There’s another person at the foot of the bed. Smells like exasperated exhaustion and sounds like a pencil scribbling notes on a metal clipboard--nurse.

Matt makes sure his breath is caught before he says, “Hey. G’morning.”

Nurse pipes up from behind the clipboard. “It’s rapidly approaching eleven at night, but a good morning to you, too. I’m Shay with a ‘y’, and my shift’s about over, so I’d super-duper appreciate it if nothing dramatic happened in the next hour or so.”

Matt pulls the aching muscles in his cheeks into a wan smile and nods. Nurse--Shay--shuffles a couple of things around at the foot of the bed, then comes to check on the mess of beeping monitors and bags of drugs above Matt’s head.

Satisfied, they ask Matt way too many yes or no questions about his level of pain, symptoms, whether or not he remembers what happened. He shakes and nods his head until the world spins in circles.

Peter scoots along the wall to which he’s attached and nearly runs into a trash receptacle.

Last thing Shay does before they leave the room is press a plastic remote into Matt’s hand. They guide his thumb to the largest button and tell him that it’s for if he needs anything.

And then Nurse Shay is out of the room; heavy door closes behind them, whiff of caffeine withdrawal and mint gum disperses in their wake, Peter comes off the wall to occupy the newly available space.

Matt’s tired. Every inch of him--down to the marrow of his bones. He turns his head to face Wade.

Wade asks, “You goin’ back to sleep?”

Yeah. Sleep. Needs some fucking rest. Needs to get the fuzzy, drugged feeling out of his veins.

He quits trying to process what’s happening outside of himself. He squeezes the hand trapped in his, and lets himself sink into unconsciousness.