He spent the entire day in bed, gazing at the light that came through the blinds. The only time he ever left was when he needed to use the bathroom.
He was told he would be leaving the hospital soon, but he didn’t know where he should go. Much might have changed in the world. A great many things out there might carry an entirely different significance, or may even have been rebuilt anew. But as far as he could figure, nowhere in that new world would there be a place for him. He spent the days lying in bed, unfeeling, taking a detached notice of Maryland’s soft sunshine.
If only tomorrow would never come.
That might sound like a trite expression, but to him the dilemma was grave. How damnable the existence of time. Things came, then adroitly slipped past you, darting off to some distant place behind. With consciousness came the imposed nature of time.
To him, each day in this hospital was like a battle. A fight of not fighting. A fight of not doing. A fight of not feeling; of not thinking.
Troubled that tomorrow might be the day he could no longer keep up that battle, he slept on the bed, surrounded by the medical machines.
That was why, when the nurse came in and said he had a visitor, the man didn’t do anything in response. When someone came, all he did was reaffirm his conviction that ultimately there was no place for him. Of course, even when the two passing through the door were Rose and a young boy he’d never met before, his reaction remained exactly the same.
Holding a white bouquet of her namesake, Rose approached Jack’s bed. The boy hid warily in Rose’s shadow. Jack rolled onto his side, putting his back toward her, returning to the Bethesda sunshine.
Rose smiled sadly and spoke awkwardly to his back.
“Jack, how are you feeling?”
Jack voiced a noncommittal sound. He didn’t have anything more to say. When Rose asked if she could sit, he didn’t respond at all. Without change, without a place, just the flow of time to let pass by.
Rose sat in a folding chair a couple of feet away from the bed and placed the flowers on the side table.
Standing behind her, the boy peeked his head out to stare at Jack. Sensing this, Jack glanced over his shoulder, only to meet Rose’s eyes. He immediately regretted his curiosity.
“What do you want?” he said. “Come to laugh at me?”
Hearing the self-torture in his words and tone, Rose decided this was no time to worry about the distance between them. She stood from the chair, pulled the child over, and sat on the edge of Jack’s bed. Jack tried to move away, but the wall on the other side of the bed provided no room to escape any farther.
“Jack,” Rose said. “Look at the boy.”
“Campbell’s kid?”
Jack wanted desperately to run from the pain. There was the life that was supposed to have been his future, the life that was to lead him into a new world; the life that had not been granted birth.
Being stared at by the possibilities he had been unable to attain, Jack saw the depth of his despair as low as he thought it could ever be. This was the very bottom. This was when you were at the bottom and someone said dig.
Then, as Jack decided he might as well fall as far as he could and embarked on his way down to a new stratum of despair, Rose’s words held him back.
“No … he’s yours.”
In that moment, when time stopped, the soft hum of the medical equipment felt harsh and grating. Time had simply streamed past. The void had been something only to pass through. But now all was still; time had been frozen by one sentence.
Frightened and confused, Jack said, “I don’t have any kids.”
Rose touched her hand to Jack’s shoulder. The arms she’d heard he lost had been replaced with new ones without that purely functional aesthetic of the exposed combat exoskeleton. They were more like typical artificial limbs, coated with material that looked almost like real skin.
“He’s your son,” Rose said.
“You said you had a miscarriage …”