Chapter 22

The aftermath from one perspective.

Roger was underwater. His ears were filled with cotton, muffling every sound. Dark, incomprehensible shapes swam in and out of his vision. He was struck with ataxia, unable to move or cry out, unable even to hold on to a coherent thought. He was too hot, then too cold, then too hot again. His entire body was in agony, a dull throb that held him in its grip and refused to let go. Sharp lances of pain stabbed his skin over and over again, relentless and maddening. Finally, it was all over and he was cast adrift, floating weightless in the aether.

With a sudden gasp, he came to. His vision focused, slowly sharpening from a blur of color to a picture he could make sense of. After an unquantifiable period of time, he realized that it was the snow white ceiling of a hospital room.

“Oh, Mr. Pink!” the voice was friendly and female, the kind that would belong to a matronly middle aged housewife in an old sitcom. “You’re finally awake.”

Groggily, Roger turned his head to look at the speaker. She looked exactly how he imagined she would; like there was a very serious threat of her baking cookies at any possible moment.

She smiled at him. “You know, the other nurses and I were afraid you would never come out of that coma! And after the one month mark, well, let’s just say that we did our best to find your next of kin.” She bustled over to him, propping up his pillows and fussing over him. He didn’t have the energy to bat her away.

“You were in quite a bad way when those police officers brought you in, I can tell you that. Oh my goodness, I’ve rarely ever seen someone in your condition who makes it more than a week before going to the great siesta in the sky! It looked like you had been hit by a car, then dropped off of an overpass, then hit by a truck! Broken bones, cracks in your jaw, fried nerve endings, electrical burns, a snapped tendon or two...my goodness, it was horrible!”

Roger opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a wheezy gasp.

“Now, now, Mr. Pink,” said the nurse. “Don’t try to speak yet; you’ve only just woken up. I tell you, I don’t know what you did to get brought in here, Mr. Pink, but it must have been something very naughty.”

Roger wheezed again. He could barely move his right arm. When he examined it, he saw that he was handcuffed to the hospital bed. With his left hand, he gently touched his neck. There was no collar. No power inhibitor. All he had to do was get this irritating woman to look him in the eyes, and he would be free as a bird.

“But we all make mistakes, Mr. Pink, and the lord forgives, yes he does. But enough about that; let me give you a little rundown on your condition, okay?” She had honest to god dimples in her plump, rosy cheeks. Where did they find this woman?

“Most of your bones have knitted perfectly, and the others are on the road to recovery,” she read off a clipboard. “The swelling has long since gone down, but you might be a little tender in the tummy for the next few months. In order to deal with your more serious injuries, we used gene therapy to artificially induce stem cell growth, and that is absolutely working like a dream! And to go the extra mile as is our duty and our responsibility, Mr. Pink, we had our folks down in the science division give your DNA sequence a little look-see to check for anything that might cause you some grief later in life.” She laughed a merry little laugh, full of the chirping of morning birds and fresh baked apple pie on window sills. Roger groaned, but she didn’t hear him. “Now overall, you were as healthy as horse! They said that, why, you had some of the best genetics they had ever seen!” Finally, her eyes met Roger’s.

This was it. He had her. Mentally, he commanded her to break the handcuffs and let him go.

“But there were a few things that they took care of,” she continued, unfazed. “I heard them talking in the break room, and they said that there was one sequence they had never seen before! Now Greg, he’s the cute one with the brown hair and the square jaw, he said that when they took a closer look, it was giving you some kind of…” she paused, tapping the clipboard with the end of a pencil. “Oh, what did he call it? Fab? Sparkle?”

Roger concentrated harder. He was justy rusty, that’s all. He had been in a bad way. His powers just needed to get back up to speed.

“Glamour, that was it!” she said, her cheeks rosier than ever. “He said the sequence gave you a ‘nasty glamour’. Now, I’m not sure how anything glamorous can be nasty, but it sounded like it was making you seem strange and scary to people.”

Roger felt a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“So Greg, and oh, I forgot to mention that he’s the head of our medical genetics department, silly me, he said who would want something like that? That’s nothing but trouble, you know, and I’m sure that’s the reason they brought a nice man like you here in handcuffs. So as a little favor to you, they snipped that horrible little sequence right out of your DNA! Now wasn’t that kind of them?”

Roger’s eyes widened as he realized just exactly what she was saying. He strained as hard as he could, telling her to shut her fat mouth and let him out RIGHT NOW.

“So anyway, all of that’s a little above my head.” She bustled back over to Roger and patted his hand. “I’m just a simple nurse, you know. But I can tell you, Mr. Pink, it’s so nice to have someone to talk to. Why, most of the patients seemed to get very agitated when I spend time with them; can you imagine that? But you’re such a good listener, Mr. Pink. I know you must be feeling just awful right now, what with your coma and everything, so I’ll make you a promise: I’ll come in here every morning and spend just as long as I can talking to you and cheering you up.”

Roger gave up. His head fall back into the pile of pillows with a thump.

The nurse didn’t notice. “And you don’t have to worry, Mr. Pink, I have a lot of things that we can talk about. Why, just the other day, I was talking to my friend Edna, who is a very active member of the PTA for her local school, and she was telling me all about the-”

As the nurse gossiped Roger into another coma, he could feel his sanity slip slowly away. He gripped the bed rail as tightly as he possibly could and screwed up his eyes, trying with all his might to scream, but nothing came out but a quiet, hoarse wheeze.

Author's Note

Is being talked to death worse than being in prison?