More Daffodils

Bruce hadn't slept in two months. He watched fifty-seven moonsets and fifty-eight moonrises. Some of them, he'd viewed through the frost-narrowed panes in his bedroom window. Others he’d driven through, radio blaring, windows rolled down, moonshine dappling the quiet road. In an old life, he'd dreamt of having the time to watch these supposed modern miracles. Sadly, like so many other things these days, nature proved itself mundane and persistent. Precious few miracles on this never-ending day.

During these moments in his eternal vigil, Bruce had very little to do, except perhaps climb the naked trees. Odds favored him being the only person awake within fifty miles. Only the city denizens remained up or woke up now. He drew a deep breath, relished the self-imposed More Daffodil solitude. Bruce hawked up a forest green phlegm clot, reached for one pill box, then the other. Passed a few nondescript pills into his hand, then chewed them into a dry paste. It scraped his throat like a trowel. Another second awake meant another second to stave off blank eternity.

Modafinil. More Daffodils prized your nocturnal hibernation from your body, and illuminated your life with an everlasting daytime. Bruce needed it to cheat nature of its due, by living every last waking second he could steal. He could sleep when the minions of forever indoctrinated him into their rank and file. Bruce leaned back, chair squalling in protest. Winter slumped silent outside the window, save an occasional crisp wind boosting dry leaves skyward. Bruce's heartbeat punctuated the settled still. So long as it beat, he remained in the game. Bruce ticked off most of the The List, but there were still tasks to complete, weren’t there?

The List haunts everyone, whether conscious of it or not. The List of dreams that bestow worth and meaning unto one’s personal life. The List you make a slow, concerted effort towards completing over your natural lifespan. The List that, more often than not, ends unfulfilled, regrets distilled into “if only.” The List so intertwined with your existence, it tolls meaningless for everyone save you. The List exists as an independent entity unto itself; whether or not you appease it will not change whether or not it follows you.

Bruce’s first experience with The List came from group therapy. At Dr. Williams’s behest, four months ago, they invited him for a session. After all, pain shared is pain halved, no? Bruce milled on into the room a few minutes before the session began. The members sat in a wide circle. Stress-gaunt cheeks, even on the pudgy faces, stretched taut. He sat in the only empty chair, trying not to think about the previous occupant, where they were, if they still were. The rest of them smoothed crinkled papers on their laps. They ran their cracked and weathered fingers down their lists, comparing with each other, housewives sharing morbid recipes. Their cotton-mouthed words, imbued with flinty resolve, told of their unique losses. Hair. Bodily control. Cars. Families. Song. Hope.

It wasn’t until Bruce heard about The List that he realized his remained sorely incomplete. Lifelong goals can wait until middle-age, when youthful power and vitality dissipate, and it falls upon you to devise a new purpose for existing. However, terminal cancer imparts a stark knowledge and a subtle blessing. Bruce, unlike most, knew with unreasonable certainty, and reasonable fear, the day of his death. Here in the twilight of his spirit, moments removed from a subtle fade into virtual old-age, now was the time to complete The List he’d not even known about ten minutes previous.

Their simple words washed over Bruce as easily as sunlight. He opened his eyes, daydreaming of what he would do if given unlimited resources and limited time. The road receded behind him; the road rose to meet him. Littered fast-food wrappers, mostly McDonalds with congealed morning sandwich grease, papered all around him. The upholstered metal shell of his ten year-old Mitsubishi creaked, while he streaked across the country. The answer floated itself to the forefront. On the back of the daily agenda, he scrawled out the only concrete version of The List he would ever need. All around the contiguous U.S., there awaited landmarks, cities, points of interest. He totaled eighty-five locales. Once memorialized, Bruce sat attentive, enthralled by their words, his leg shaking as he itched to get started.

As they spoke, Bruce looked his fellow patients/victims/sufferers in the eyes. Purpled caution and bleak sclera mirrored back. None of them appeared to have slept well. How could they? The drugs crippled their internal systems to barely functioning levels, just so they could continue their half-lives, ticking away double-time. Right before he left group therapy, he borrowed another pen, this one blue-inked, and block-printed a last challenge. Whistling as he opened the doors, skipping to his car, laughing as he backed out of the parking lot, Bruce never returned to group therapy. Their group mentality helped him more than they could have suspected.

Back in his room, still slumped in his chair, he reached for The (crease-worn) List. His capacity to drive all night, coffee-infused nervous system jittering the entire time, conquered site after site. Ticks and cross-outs graffitied the wrinkled landscape. Everything had been completed, save one final blue-penned entry, in stark contrast to the dark black ink. That last-second bastard addition. "Get a good night's sleep.” When he got back from group therapy, Bruce scanned the list, laughed at number eighty-six, and decided to knock out numero uno: "All night road trip." Bruce found some friends willing to give it a go, and off they went. Ubiquitous Starbucks provided checkpoints betwixt goals. 7-11 provided the beef jerky and Doritos. His strange Latin-named drugs staved off tumor growth. Long periods of natural silence provided a soundtrack to their journey, but in the end, Bruce had dirt from Pikes Peak and Four Corners. He’d even urinated on both, the smell of steamy coffee rising to meet the group.

Bruce returned with the cheapest tchotchkes he could find, a tile puzzle with four tiles, and a branch carved to look like the mountain. In his backyard, he spread the dirt by opening the water bottle and upending it, first a slow pour, then a full-on deluge. Much of it ended up on his already dirt-stained slacks. The man in him knew there was no way these actions could ward off the cancer, or grant him more time. The boy in him kept collecting talismans and dirt and going through with the motions.

The trips did not satiate his hunger; they turned out to be tantalizing appetizers for a main course he could not return to the chef. One five-day road trip gave them all a break and a good opportunity to celebrate a life too short. Three and four trips ground on them, an escape they could not afford. What none of them admitted out loud, least of all himself, they had to continue living their lives, and he wanted them to live what remained of his. To the rest of his compatriots, life was a luxury, so abundant as to be wasted. To Bruce, it was an essential need, dwindling away. He could not spare even the seconds it took to stop the car by the side of the road and force Margie to squat in an open field. What he longed to say was that neither could they, not that he ever did. He wasn’t sure they would believe him, he, their modern Cassandra.

In the end, as we all do in the end, he went it alone. Stocked up on instant coffee crystals and sugar, a bittersweet crystalline trail mix. Townships, cities, backwater locations, nothing more than checkpoints. His brief interludes at home coincided with so-called “dead time,” slipped in between every other existence, no one to talk or relate to. Each return home required multiple little white pills (to help him live) and one little white lie (it’s all ok, as long as you have The List).

The worst came in an Alabama, at the seedy Motel 6. The creaking bed had seen more action on its own than many brothels. It was a wonder the thing hadn’t split down the middle. Seventy-one hours awake, his mind swimming across a hazy sea, Bruce had to stop here and rest. He leaned back, carefully, on the love bed, plastic shopping bags from the Piggly-Wiggly draped unartfully across the surface. Sleep brushed his forehead lightly, inviting him to embrace her. All he need do was close his eyes.

A throwaway thought, the kind normally forgotten when you stumble into sleep, scraped his thoughts: “What if I go in my sleep?” Despite the flat black painting the room, you could almost see his eyes crack open, flashing beneath the moonlight. That night, he lay atop the bags, rolling back and forth, the crunching and crackling keeping him frustrated, but awake. Oh, so awake, and so alive. It hurt so good.

At seven in the morning, Bruce stumbled into the nearest greasy spoon and bought a coffee pot. He kept it at the table and drank from the plastic spout, settling it down on an earthenware plate. Dumped in thirty packs of sugar after he finished about a third, swirled it around to dissolve it. It scorched deep burns onto his tongue; he had yet to taste correctly since. Laden with caffeine, he called Dr. Williams, explained the situation in thirty seconds, then slowed down and tried to explain it in a coherent fashion. Dr. Williams faxed the prescription to the local pharmacy. Thirty minutes later, he jittered into the pharmacy and asked for More Daffodils. Bruce went back to the diner, where they comped him a cup of joe. The napkin holder rattled as he sat there, watching the clock. An hour later, he went back to the pharmacy, procured three month supply of More Daffodils, bought a pack of adult diapers, large, and popped four of the new pills as soon as he reached the parking lot. On that ride towards Kansas, he stopped twice in nineteen hours to change his diapers, sopping to the brim with cycled coffee. Each diaper he left on the road left a smile on his face. Soon, the permanent coffee odors would be nothing more than a plausibly deniable memory. He squished a little more and went back to the long dark road.

Medical science conquered all but the mundane common cold and common death. At the hospital, three days after Alabama, Dr. Williams showed him around. Bruce smelled the antiseptic bed, and the old flatulence burned into the foam rubber. Damned if his final mark on this planet would turn someone's nose. They filled his cradled arms with medicines and prescriptions he couldn't pronounce, much less care about, and his new friends, More Daffodils, and his morphine, and set him loose. Not that they loved him, nor did they suspect he would come back. He discharged himself, and was no longer their, or anyone else’s, responsibility.

And he drove, he drove so far away. And he drove, he drove all night and day. And he listened to a lot of songs on the radio. And The List collapsed in on itself. And now, it taunted him with that one singular note, one night’s sleep. Bruce hadn’t slept in so long. He’d stopped with More Daffodils for two days now, and still couldn’t sleep. A perverse side effect that they didn’t tell you about, because it wasn’t really life-threatening. Bruce yawned. He blinked to wash the sleep from his eyes. Finally, it was about time. Checked the empty pill bottle, modafinil. Opened the other bottle, morphine, and emptied a few more pills into his hand, then into his mouth. Pain, background chatter, with enough pills, you could ignore it all. Two months since he'd left the hospital, when the doctors told him he'd had three months of life.

He slipped beneath his bedsheets and farted. Pulling the cover back down from his head, gasping for fresh air, another throwaway thought touched him. Assume a person wakes for sixteen hours, and sleeps for eight. Two-thirds of every day is spent “living.” Dr. Williams said he had three months to live, that was his best guess. Fine, but if that was true, he'd lived his allotted three months, crammed into the past two, pushing sleep back further and further. Had to complete The List. But it all passed so quick. Bruce found himself daydreaming, wondering what he could have done with another month, when everyone was awake. Now, while everyone had just slipped the bonds of waking usefulness, or were ready to put them back on, he would sleep, just out of touch with everyone else.

Panic coursed through him, much as it had in Alabama. He tried to stand, say something to the empty house, call someone, but the morphine kicked in. Yawned again, a giant jaw-dislocating bite. The room wavered (or did he?) and the desk lamp dimmed. All around, details faded, as if an artiste were deconstructing his world, stripping it to its bare essentials. One by one, the accoutrements of The (hastily planned, short-lived) List, dissolved into static, replaced with a warm, uncomforting blackness. It floated away on the sea of his future.

Bruce ended up staring at the light, spotlighting the twinned pill bottles. The light ebbed, and each bottle winked out, leaving little more than a pinprick of light amidst bleakness. Each of his blinks lasted longer, each thought slowed. All the games he played these past two months, and he'd not even gotten a good night's sleep. Breath soft, heart weak, Bruce closed his eyes.

For the last time in two months, Bruce finally dreamt.

***

I'd like to think this is one of the better items I've written as of late, perhaps because I've spent so much time editing it. Editing is the key to writing. Writing is easy, and if you'd read the first draft, you'd know what I mean. This has changed a lot, and I think (I hope) for the better.

Also, I know the story is kind of a downer, but I guess it's my gift to all of you reading this. Merry Christmas!