12
ROLAND
It was probably the worst week of my life.
Somehow, I pulled myself out of the boxing ring and made it back to the lockers. My opponent, the dragon douche, was gone; Boris said he hot-tailed it out of there shortly after beating me, even though he'd been offered free drinks. Which was good, since I just wanted to sit alone for ten minutes and try to put the pieces of my aching head back together.
While clutching the gryphon, of course.
Because as terrible as my wounds from the fight were, aching ribs and a jaw that was on fire, it wasn't as bad as the sensation of being away from it. Back in the locker room with it in my hands, the pressure left my ears and I could finally hear my own thoughts again. I sat there with the gryphon held between my legs and rubbed its surface like a good luck charm.
But the relief was only momentary. By the time I got home and showered all the sweat and blood off my body, I wanted to call Harriet and apologize. I couldn't believe how I'd acted at the restaurant, and I could see it with the perfect clarity of hindsight. I needed to make things right.
And then I saw the text message from her, which she'd sent while I was fighting.
I deserved it. All of it. Even though she was wrong about my intentions, I could see why she had that impression. That I was just some asshole who was nice to women only up until the moment I slept with them, and then could reveal my true colors. It was wrong, but in my humiliated state I couldn't protest. Couldn't insist that she was wrong, because even if I did she wouldn't believe me. She wouldn't give me another chance even if I begged her.
So I told her I was sorry, and left her in peace.
Yet as bad as all of that was after getting the shit kicked out of me by some cheeky weirdo with a dragon tattoo, it wasn't what made this the worst week of my life.
I woke up the next morning deathly sick. Feverish chills, and drenched in so much sweat that I thought I'd pissed the bed in my sleep. All of my joints ached, and far worse than the normal day-after-a-fight pain. I thought I had the bloody flu.
I tried to ignore it, shivering in my bed and getting my roommate to make me chicken soup, but by the second day I finally gave up and went to the hospital.
The flu test came back negative. The doctors ran some other scans, and when I told them I'd been in Belize last week they got all worked up into a froth. Three dozen blood tests later they were still no closer to discovering what was wrong. They kept me overnight, and I clutched the gryphon tightly in my sleep.
An old news story popped into my head during the night. Or maybe it was something I saw on a medical TV show. In any case, a kid was deathly sick. Slowly wasting away, and no matter how many tests the doctors ran, they couldn't figure out what was ailing him. It turned out that the kid's father worked in a junk yard and made a special keychain from a piece of metal he'd found. It turned out to be something radioactive. The kid had radiation poisoning.
And so, with great reluctance, I pulled the object out of my pocket and showed the doctor the next day. He looked skeptical, but at my insistence (which was a polite way of saying I called him a stubborn cunt) he ran some tests on it. All came back negative: nothing radioactive.
They discharged me with a broad-spectrum of antibiotics, even though they claimed it wasn't bacterial, and then I was standing in the waiting room with a handful of papers.
"No insurance," I told the woman who gave me the total cost, my teeth chattering even though I wore three layers. I never even heard the total, nor did it matter. Not to me. "Cash."
"Okay..." the woman at the front desk said. "We offer a variety of payment plans for--"
"I fucken said cash." I pulled out my debit card and tossed it on the table. She didn't say another word to me after that.
Carter did his best to take care of me when he was home, but he worked two jobs in addition to boxing at night, so all that really amounted to was heating up chicken noodle soup from a can three times a day. I cloistered myself in my room under three blankets, and when those weren't warm enough I piled my clothes on top. Carter complained about me keeping the heat cranked up to 80, but I promised to cover the extra heating bill, and whether it was that or the awful condition I was in he didn't complain any more.
Sometimes I looked at my phone to gauge the time and date, because otherwise time held no meaning in the sick containment of my room. I had a bunch of missed calls from Ethan, and a text message that said, "Dude, Roland? Do I have the right number? Pick up!" which made me faintly worried. Why would he call me after we'd just seen each other? I hadn't talked to him in practically a decade before that. But I didn't have any energy to devote to him right then. I didn't have the energy to do much of anything.
By the fourth day I was ready to die.
That's not an exaggeration. I literally thought I was going to die. I barely had enough strength to walk 20 feet to the shower, and although the scalding water rejuvenated me marginally, it never lasted more than a few minutes. It felt like a million needles were stabbing me simultaneously, moving deeper one millimeter at a time. I struggled to think. I was driven only by primal need: huddled in a ball to suffer the agony, then slurping down soup to feel hot liquid in my body, and drinking only enough water to get the ibuprofen down my throat.
Carter offered me drugs on day five. Prescription opioids, or weed, or something harder, he promised he could get me whatever I needed. I don't know how I resisted the initial offer. Maybe all those DARE programs forced the immediate rejection onto my lips. But then he went to work, and while I was alone I began to daydream about the sweet release that only hard drugs could offer. I'd never done anything beyond smoking weed back in college, so my fantasies were a cartoonish impression of what I assumed real drugs were. Relaxation. Soothing relief, even if it was only for a few hours. That sounded like heaven. Several times I tried to reach for my phone to call him and change my mind, but I could never get the phone to my ears.
And then I was too weak to even fantasize about a relief to the pain. There was no conscious thought in those final hours, when all I knew was the pain. It pulsed so strongly in my head that it left no room for anything else. To conjure up a single thought would have required monumental effort. I lay in bed, under my mountain of blankets in clothes, and I prepared myself for the end.
The knock on the door was the only thing that saved me.