THE CONCLUSION
By Tom Piccirilli

The boy with the bashed-in brain is a hero, so he’s allowed to break the rules.  His hospital room overflows with family and friends, even though ICU codes state only two visitors at a time.  His sill is a jungle of flowers and house plants despite the signs that read ALL GIFTS MUST BE LEFT AT THE NURSE’S DESK.  Helium-filled balloons clutter the ceiling with slogans: WISHING YOU A SPEEDY RECOVERY and HOPE TO SEE YOU BACK ON YOUR FEET SOON!  They’ve even put a football jersey on the kid. #17.  WILDCATS.  On the back, his last name.  PIPER. 

They keep up a constant stream of chatter.  His mother is overly enthusiastic, chittering like a thing that chitters, unable to stop, terrified to hear anything besides the sound of her own voice.  If she took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds the noise of the machinery would burrow into her head and never leave.  Her son’s hooked up to about five million bucks worth of apparatus.  It breathes for him.  It shits for him.  It beats its heart for him.  His eyes are open and search a dimension that doesn’t exist.  His mouth gapes and occasionally droops into a frown.  When he grins everyone cheers.  They want to believe his mind is functioning.  Which would be some fuckin’ trick.  The kid’s got only half a head.

That’s what happens when you’re a hero.  You’re hanging out with all your football buddies and cheerleader girlfriends at a party, getting wasted on beer, pumped on teenage hormones and maybe some of the coach’s we-need-a-winning-season-boys steroid-swill cocktail.  The music’s screaming, the girls are giggling, you’re seventeen with massive muscles, the teachers are on orders from the principal to let you slide by your courses so long as you show up in class. 

And then some members of the rival team come swinging by in a loaded SUV, singing their theme song, then shouting, “PANTHERS ARE THE REAL DEAL.  WILDCATS AIN’T NOTHIN’ BUT KITTY SHIT.” 

You’d think two big cat crews might be able to get along, especially since all the real big cats were already massacred in these hills long ago, but no, it takes nothing but a little sing-song and a couple of tossed beer bottles to get everybody riled up into death squads.

The inevitable happens.  The shouting turns to pushing.  The pushes shift into blows.  The two teams meet on a lawn and spill into the street.  They can’t control themselves.  They overreact.  Johnny Piper is actually one of the cool-headed ones, not quite riding the crest of roid rage like the rest of his pals. He tries to ease them up.  He tries to get between two berserker halfbacks tearing into each other and takes a punch to the throat.  He drops into the street and sucks air like a dying mackerel, and while he’s rolling on the asphalt some punk peeling out of the party runs over Johnny’s head.

It pops.  You can hear it a half mile away.  I heard it while sitting right here, at my brother’s side in ICU.  The windows open only a half-inch.  I was sneaking a cigarette and blowing the smoke through the window crack.  I heard the kids yelling and screaming, the wild warbling savage cries, Johnny’s voice on the wind, and then his skull being crushed. 

My brother, so full of cancer that he was practically gargling on it, huffed, “What was that?”

“Johnny Piper’s brain,” I said.

I knew because it’s the thing I do.  I observe and listen and play out scenarios from afar.  I watch you and watch them and put stories together, because that’s what I’m driven to do, no less terminal than Johnny being driven to try to get a bunch of kids from fighting.  I’m head of the English Department at Johnny’s school.  From second to second I can hardly remember the name of the place, but at the moment one of my students is standing in the hall, weeping on his petite girlfriend’s shoulder.  She hugs and shushes him, running her hand through the trimmed hair at the back of his neck.  His jacket says BURNTWOOD.  That’s right.  I teach at Burntwood High.

I am recessed in shadow.  My brother likes the room dark and so do I.  We sit here together as his death continues to wear him inside-out.  He’s not dying fast enough, he says.  The doctors’ gave him a month three months ago.  He keeps his eyes on his own machines hoping to see his heartbeat floundering, his breathing beginning to stilt.  But it doesn’t happen.  For a terminal cancer patient he’s a miracle of nature. 

“He talks to me,” my brother says.

“Who?”

“That kid with half a head.  Johnny.”

“He can’t talk to you.  He’s got half a head.”

“I know, I just said it, right?  So I know.  But it doesn’t stop him.  He walks in here and sits down in your chair there and he talks.”

I don’t argue with him.  “What’s he say?”

“He says it’s a bad season.”

“For football?”

“For everything.”

Who can argue with that?  Visiting hours are over.  A delicate Asian nurse tells me in broken English that I need to leave.  Johnny’s family will stay another hour or two at least.  His mother will chitter on into the night.  My brother rolls his eyes at the beeping graphs of his machines and says, “Jesus, she never shuts up.  Does she think that’s helping her kid?  It’s driving him crazy.  He wants me to tell you to tell her to shut the fuck up.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I know you can’t, but it’s what the kid wants.”

“It’s what every kid wants,” I say.  It’s what I wanted when my mother asked me even the most trivial questions.  How was your day?  How was school?  How’s the homework?  Who called?  Where are the car keys?  It all sent me into an insane rage.  I barked and caterwauled and roared at her, and I was a skinny geek who couldn’t even blame the steroids for my vicious bellowing. 

“He wants you to read to him too.  You gave him an assignment before he got hurt?  To read some Jack London book?”

Most English curriculum dictate The Call of the Wild or White Fang, but I preferred the dark brutal themes and raw honesty of The Sea-Wolf.  It was my own way of bucking the system, garnering a small victory against the powers that be, the school board, the PTA, the world at large. 

“Yes.”

“Nobody over there has thought to read to him.  They just talk and talk and it’s driving the poor kid out of what’s left of his mind.  It’s fucking making me berserk too.”

“Me as well,” I say.

The nurses rarely make rounds.  They rely on the beeping machinery to tell them what to do.  If something squawks they come running.  If not, they just look at their charts and play coy with the young doctors who also chitter like things that chitter in the night. 

I start to fall asleep in my chair.  I can break the rules too.  I sit back in the dark, unseen by anyone passing by.  It doesn’t matter.  I have nowhere to go.  I’m not married.  I have no children.  I have no pets.  I don’t even own any goldfish or houseplants.  My home is as sterile as the ICU ward. 

My brother has a lot of girlfriends, a lot of buddies, who came around all the time in the beginning.  But he just won’t die.  They have lives to go on with.  A cancer-riddled bastard who won’t shut up doesn’t drag them in anymore.  They’ve got action to find.  They’ve got bills to pay.  They’ve got spouses to cheat on, scams to run, schemes to play.  Every now and then someone will send a card or flowers or a DVD that the nurses snag.  They have tiny televisions at their station that they watch when they think no one is looking.  They smell of the freshest roses.  They watch coma patients’ movies and then discuss their favorite actors together.  They squeal about the latest celebrity gossip.  Who’s dating who.  Who is suing who. Who is who.  Who is not who.

My brother’s machinery lulls me towards sleep.  It reminds me of my brother’s heartbeat when he first took me riding on his motorcycle when I was a kid.  He was eighteen, I was eight, sitting behind him with my arms wrapped around his waist, my ear to his muscular back.  The rhythm of his heart continued to throb louder than the bike engine as we rode mile after mile around town, only occasionally stopping for him to talk with pretty girls.  He’d tell me to hop off and invite them onto the motorcycle with him.  I’d sit on street corners for hours waiting for him to come back, after he was sated but still so full of cool.

In the morning I wake with a start.  Camera crews are over in Johnny’s room again, interviewing his mother, who smiles and discusses her son as if he just has a head cold.  No one has the strength of character to disagree with her.  She says Johnny has a wonderful football season ahead of him and that he’s likely to propose to his girlfriend, Lynn Collins, shortly before they go off to college together next fall.  She foresees a lengthy engagement.  It’s the smart thing to do.

The Asian nurse brings in my brother’s breakfast.  He rouses and I feed him.  It’s only the pantomime of an average morning.  He’ll throw it all up in a couple of hours.  He takes his nourishment, what little he can get, through his IV. 

“He wants you to look out for Lynn,” my brother says.

“What?”

“The kid.  He sat in your chair last night and told me she has a crush on you.  He wants you to watch over her.”

“I was in my chair all night long,” I tell him.  “I slept here last night.  Don’t you know that?”

“I know that,” my brother chuffs, the machines forming a chorus behind him, in tune, in sync, an entire rhythm section playing in four-part harmony.  “He sat in your lap.  You hugged him in your sleep.  He rested the side of his face against your chest and listened to you breathing.  He’s always liked you.  You’re the best teacher he’s ever had. Today, if you get the chance, between his fucked up family visiting, go over there and read that Jack London book to him.”

I need a shower and a change of clothing.  I have to get back to school.  The substitute is probably at his limit by now.  I know how the kids can run a sub to pieces.  They’ll put him through his paces, or worse, since he’s only a sub not committed to actually teaching, he’ll be more interested in acting the good guy, the one who understands kids, the hip dude who lets them run rampant so long as it’s not too rampant.

I’ve got to show up and tell him, Not too rampant?  What the fuck do you think is not too rampant?  Can’t you fucking see what’s going on here?  People are dying.  People are dead.  Don’t you know what’s happening out there?  Didn’t you hear a brain skittering across the road?  It woke up Buddhists in Himalayan temples, you prick.  The gushing noise is still picking up momentum in the south Pacific, the tsunami growing, still heaving, a shattering storm that will wipe out entire Peloponnesian islands. 

I find a locker room.  I don’t know if its for doctors or the security guards or who the hell.  I don’t care.  I stand beneath the shower head letting the bristling water stab at me with its needles.  It’s like ten thousand injections meant to immunize me against all the ills of the earth.  I feel strong and healthy and incapable of falling beneath a car tire.  I turn and there’s a sagging old man with balls like kiwi limes standing beside me soaping up.  He nods morning to me.  So do his balls.  I nod back. 

There are no towels.  I shake off like a dog and put my clothes back on.  Sodden, they stick to me like a clutching lover.  Right.  I check my watch.  It’s first period.  I left instructions for my kids to read their textbooks and answer a series of questions.  What are the themes of the novel?  Are the characters clearly defined into the hero class and the villain class?  Do you associate with one over the rest?  Is the structure sound?  Do you agree that the archetypes found herein properly express most people you’ve met in your life?  Do you like Tammy?  Check one: YES I_I NO I_I.  Tammy with her short skirt and lovely pale knees, especially the left, which is lightly freckled?  Tammy, who sits in the back, tempting me with her eager glances.  Tammy, who is too young to dance with lest you do anything illegal and/or morally reprehensible?  Can you guess the conclusion to the story yet?

My hair is plastered to my head.  My feet squish a little in my shoes.  I reach for my back pocket and find The Sea-Wolf there.  I didn’t think I had a copy with me.  I head for the front door but there’s a more of Johnny’s friends there, though they should be in class.  The football players drop their shoulders and walk forward with their chins tucked tightly to their chests, as if fighting a powerful breeze.  I see that some of their coats read PANTHERS.  There’s been a truce of some kind.  I’m sure the papers have played it up.  Peace shall reign.  Brothers in adversity.  Johnny Piper is a bright and shining example of the cost of armistice. 

I hide again.  I am always hiding.  I’ve been hiding since I can remember, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to be hiding from.

Lynn Collins is among them.  Her dark red hair is curled in lengthy loops that bounce wildly as she steps past the admittance desk.  The kids walk towards the elevators past the ER waiting room.  Scattered in the chairs are bleeding men, pregnant women, bald toddlers with eighty-year-old skin.  There’s a guy still stuffed in his seat clutching his chest with one rigor-mortised fist.  I think, That’s going to be me.  I’m going to die and no one will care.  No one will even notice, not even me.

Lynn walks across the vestibule with an extra heavy step, barely able to drag herself along.  A couple of jocks are sort of hugging her, sort of pulling her, helping her.  Everyone’s eyes are red.  Everyone’s got bruised lines of weariness cutting into their flesh.  Lynn is beautiful, even if she’s not as beautiful today as usual.  Even as they all walk along to this dirge her fiery curls dance lightly. 

I want to break from my hiding place and put my arms around her.  I’m not a dirty old man, I’m just a man.  There are things we’re allowed to do and things we aren’t.  It seems everything I want to do I can’t.  It will appear wrong.  It will be ugly.  It will bring the cops and priests.  The boy-diddling cardinals will excommunicate me.  The guy dead in the ER waiting room finally topples out of his seat, his corpse petrified, hand still clutching his heart.  A fat nurse steps to him and it almost seems like she’s about to kick him.

Lynn passes my hiding spot.  She moves through my shadow.  My pulse jumps and ticks in my throat.  My wrists pound.  She’s a straight A student who always marks up her test papers with little pictures and smiles and caricatures of me.  Except they’re not caricatures.  They look exactly like me.  Pug nose, enormous glasses, grey-streaked hair, fat belly, soft mouth, jowls, weakness, shallowness, piggishness, average evils. 

I stand at the door looking outside at the large and embracing world.  I think of my home with no fish, no dog, no wife, no kid.  I think of my brother leaving me on the street corner for hours while he went off to get laid.  I have a sudden and unreasonable need to confront him about that and maybe a million other slights and resentments.  It’s insane to think I could get an answer, but the hospital lives off of pain and fear.  I’m at home here much more than I ever was in my house.

The hospital won’t let me go, or I won’t let it go.  My brother’s croaking upstairs, how can I leave him to his fate alone?  How can I get out the door and face my own future?  I need a shot.  I need some machinery to pump me full of vital fluids.  I need to be monitored.  I need to be loved by one of those teeny Asian nurses, stick her in a pair of teakwood sandals.

I make a break for the elevator but I’m too late.  The doors have shut.  Lynn and the others are on their way upstairs.  The corridor is crowded with people waiting for the next car.  Where are they all going?  Maybe they’re like me, just wandering the corridors because there’s nothing better for them to do with their lives.  I lurch up a hallway and come to a pair of fire doors that shriek MUST STAY CLOSED AT ALL TIMES.  I assume they’re allowed to be opened in case of fire.  I imagine burning bodies on the other side, beating at the windows, flesh smoking and melting while empty-faced doctors safe on their side simply point at the signs and shrug.

I walk into a room.  I don’t know why.  The bed is empty.  There’s dust coating the plastic piss jar.  The television is on, tuned to some daytime television program.  A fat acned white girl is shouting into a young black man’s face, Uh huh, yew ar so the daddy a ma baby!  The audience oohs and caterwauls, applauding.  Another fat white girl tackles the first and they go flying over the cheap furniture.  The host can barely contain his glee.  The huge security guards do little to break up the fight.  The DNA tests will be announced after the commercial break.

You’d think I might be looking to ease someone’s agony, play with a dying kid, confess to a coma patient, make myself comfortable in the morgue.  Prop myself on a Gurney beside the embalmed.

Are the themes obvious enough?  Is my character clearly defined into the hero class or the villain class within the context of this story?  Does anyone associate with me over the rest?  Is the structure sound?  

Maybe it’s my bed.  Maybe it’s been waiting for me since before I was born.  The hospital feeds on terror and agony, but also fate.  It takes your destiny and it lays it to waste.  Instead of going out and changing the world you’re forced to get beneath the covers and wait for your medicine and your injections and your lunch.  Instead of becoming a part of history you wait impatiently for the commercial to end so you can find out who the father of the fat chick’s baby is.

I think, Lynn.  I think of the freckled knee of Tammy.  I think, Lynn, what are you going to do?  You can’t stay with a boy with a bashed-in brain.  You’ll go off with one of the other jocks, one of the Wildcats, one of the Panthers, and Johnny’s mother will glare at you and hate you from the confines of her private dream, and the cameras will continue to follow up for a few more months at least, and the dark lines will etch themselves even more deeply into your beauty.  There’s no way out for you except to go straight through. 

Your grades will slip a bit and you won’t draw smiley faces or caricatures on your papers anymore, and I’ll be the boring awful teacher at the chalkboard incapable of showing or giving or doing anything beyond the expected.  I’ll ask the same puerile questions I’ve asked ten thousand students before you, and you’ll respond with the correct answer or with no answer, perhaps staring out the window at the hidden arch of your future, and Tammy’s knees will remain freckled. 

The Wildcats will dedicate themselves to winning this season for Johnny Piper.  The rest of the student body will show up at every game and hoot and cheer, and perhaps it’ll be a winning season of football, and perhaps it’ll be a losing one.  The coach will shriek at the team trying to spur them on.  Let’s do this for Johnny!  And the boys will cry with him, For Johnny!  For Johnny!  For Johnny!  And the crowds in the bleachers will join in, For Johnny!  For Johnny!  For Johnny!  And Johnny Piper will drool on himself and stare at the balloons crawling across his ceiling demanding that he GET WELL SOON.

I run up the stairwell, suddenly terrified for Lynn. I take the steps three at a time until I make it to the fourth floor.  I rush around one corner, and then another, and another, until I’m at the ICU ward.  Lynn and her friends pack themselves into Johnny’s small room.  I want to say something.  I want to show that I am capable of breaking out beyond all my mediocrity, but I can’t.  That’s the whole point.  Mediocrity doesn’t allow you to leave it. 

I walk by the nurse’s station.  No one sees me.  I walk by Johnny’s room.  No one sees me.  I virtually dive into my brother’s room.  He’s grinning widely, his eyes clear and full of weird happiness, even giddiness, all of it scrawled into his features.  He’s got both hands up and is pointing with his index fingers like he’s playing cowboys, shooting guns at the machinery.  I glance around and see that his heart monitor is fluctuating crazily.  The green lights are turning red all over the place.  The breathing apparatus is staggering, like it can hardly take a breath itself. 

“Look at that,” my brother says, “I think this is it.  I think this is finally it.  Isn’t that somethin’?  This is really somethin’.”

It’s something.  I jump up and start to call for the nurse but my brother shouts with more strength than there ought to be in his chewed-out, frail frame. “No!  Leave it!  Let me go!”  He waves me back to him.  “Here, take it, take my hand.”

I step to him and take his hand.  He grips me tightly, with a kind of fierce love that he’s never shown me before.  At least not since I was a kid.  Back then, he loved and protected me the way an older brother should.  Most of the time.  His mouth moves now but there’s no sound.  I dip my ear close and he still can’t speak, but he doesn’t waste the moment.  He purses his lips and kisses the side of my face. 

When I withdraw, he winks.  His eyes roll back in his head as the machinery begins to whoop and howl.  I stand back so the doctors and nurses can come running in with their crash carts, but nobody enters.  The machines keep running electricity and air and vitamins into him, and I watch as his heart monitor slows and slows, fighting back for an instant, trying to regain ground, and then falling off again, slowing, until it registers zero zero point zero zero even though everything else keeps buzzing on as efficiently as ever.  The IVs drip with the same perfect timing. 

I sit there for the rest of the day.  The nurses come in with little cups full of his medication and prod his dead mouth open and stick the pills in.  They change the colostomy bags.  They hang new IVs. They turn dials and push buttons.  They say nothing to me.  I have nothing to tell them. 

The day passes slowly, but it passes.  Johnny’s mother is murmuring to him again, mumbling, sometimes tittering.  Johnny’s father tries to shut her the fuck up every now and then, tells her, That’s enough.  That’s enough. 

But it’s not enough.  She knows it.  He knows it too.  It’ll keep going on and on until the end.  Maybe he’ll kill her to end her chittering.  Maybe she’ll shove him off the roof to keep hold of her precious fantasy.  It won’t make any difference to Johnny.

They break the rules again and stay until well after visiting hours are over, but eventually they leave.  The floor is quiet except for the humming and warbling of the machinery.  My brother’s dead mouth slackens a bit and the pills pop out.  I grab them, swallow them, and wash them down with a glass of stale water.  Why not. 

I look up and Johnny Piper is standing in the doorway, wearing his football jersey, #17, his head swathed in bandages so thick they’re practically a turban, yet they can’t hide the fact that half his skull is gone. 

His eyes are black.  His lips are a leering red.  He could be the angel of death or some clown about to visit the kids’ cancer wing.  He cocks his misshapen head at me.  I hold his gaze firmly.  I want to cry but there’s just no chance of it. 

He holds his arms out the way a baby learning his first steps might.  I reach for him and he falls forward, his mouth working but, as with my brother, no words or sounds issuing forth.  I catch him and help him back to his room.  I put him to bed but he doesn’t want to lie down.  He resists.  He’s still strong.

His face falls in on itself and he looks upset, turning in circles.  I try to sit him in a guest chair but that only makes it worse.  He does a little dance of frustration, mewling.

Finally, I understand.

I pull out The Sea-Wolf and sit in the chair.  Johnny Piper drapes himself across my lap, with his head against my chest, snuggling comfortably.  My chin rests perfectly in the pillowy gap of the bandages covering the missing portion of his head.  I can feel him thinking in there. His mouth works some more.  I think I can read his lips.  He says Tammy.  He says Lynn.  He says GO WILDCATS.  He says BURNTWOOD FOREVER.  He agrees that the archetypes found herein properly express most people he’s met in life.  He says, God is watching, don’t fuck it up.  I begin to read aloud, knowing Jack London well, wanting Lynn to return soon, hoping my brother will be left exactly where he is for another few days or weeks or decades, and wondering if I am the hero or the villain here, incapable of guessing the conclusion of my own story yet. 

# # #

Tom Piccirilli is the author of twenty novels including SHADOW SEASON, THE COLD SPOT, THE COLDEST MILE, and A CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN.  He's won two International Thriller Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and Le Grand Prix de L'imagination.  Learn more at:  www.thecoldspot.blogspot.com