Another blinking cursor, a page as blank and white and cold as fresh snow. It's paradoxically a darkness of a sort, perfect as it is in the vacuum existent yet somehow simultaneously dead and ugly without a line.
Is that why life exists? Nature hates an empty space, not so?
-
It's day thirty three since I lost my daughter in the car accident. The driver was drunk, a stupid kid leaving a party who couldn't, or wouldn't, crash on a couch.
My wife is in a coma and I lost my left paw. It was crushed, inoperable, and had the potential to produce first gangrene then septecemia. If it offends, as the saying goes...
Pardon the cynicism that will be pervasive in this journal. My life is effectively over, and as I sit in front of this screen with a glass of vodka and a loaded gun I'm wondering why I even bother.
Why...yes. My therapist is a raccoon who recently lost her own son to an overdose, swears writing out one's feelings and keeping a daily record of both the struggle and the remaining beauty that can be found in life will help. I hope she's right.
Worth a try, I suppose. I'm trying to keep on keeping on for Sarah's sake, though when I question her doctors on my daily visits to St. Luke most are evasive. One, Garrett Farr, was mercifully frank.
"We're just not sure Mr. Graystone. There's hope in the scans, she's in there somewhere, yet concussions of this magnitude have a poor prognosis." The badger touched my shoulder. "We have to have patience."
It was strange, looking into his eyes. Doctors, especially trauma surgeons and ER physicians, have strange gazes. Ever noticed? There's a sort of diamond hardness whose facets sparkle with both clinical focus and a profound, soul shaking sadness.
I suppose they have to counter with the former to prevent their minds from unraveling in the sheer horror of the latter, having witnessed so many people die.
It's hard to look into eyes like that for long, and if you try they often look away instead.
-
There's this stretch of coast not far from where I live that I've often found serene. The three of us would often go there about an hour before sunset, roll an old, tattered carpet out on the warm sand and watch the last of the day. Cheryl wanted to see the legendary green flash and make a wish, though it never did make an appearance.
Visiting again was a mistake.
I stood there before the sparkling endlessness of the Atlantic, in the salty breeze with the crash and froth of waves, the grinding of sea shells and the ghosts of all my memories. My vision blurred with tears and before I knew it I was up to my waist in water.
I don't remember doing it, imagined how ridiculous and strange it must look, a gaunt, haunted looking fox wading half drunk in the sea in a three piece suit. I vaguely recall thinking about the fancy lighter in my pocket, that it was ruined now along with my pack of cloves, and then-
Have you ever had a moment when time seems to stop and you realize your past and future have crashed together? Collapsed, crushed into one ruin like the fall of a tower? Tomorrow's soul has been stolen by yesterdays, the present is blooded dry, and there in the immensity of the ocean and the darkening sky I felt an emptiness so deep I couldn't breathe.
One paw wanted forward, yet the other wanted back. The love of my life was still around, at least for now. I shouldn't do this, couldn't.
When I stepped from the surf and onto the beach I bent and brushed the seaweed from my loafers. I walked to my car and didn't look back.
-
Day forty. I think I'm becoming an alcoholic. I tried to limit myself to a pint and a six pack but after I got drunk I realized I didn't have enough vodka.
It's easier than you'd think, to fall like that. I did exactly what my daughter's killer did, in a sense, star wolf quarterback of house Omega who was now out on bail but whose life had been wrecked (not as bad as mine, but the courts were trying him as an adult with vehicular manslaughter).
I made it there and back, think fox in an eighty thousand dollar Mercedes and thanks to the pandemic I wore my mask and the clerk couldn't smell my breath.
Black out, of course.
The next day, realizing what I'd done, I almost conducted a personal court martial whose sentence would be to shoot myself. I poured another glass of vodka instead. It seemed the lawyerly thing to do.
-
At three in the afternoon the next day St. Luke's called. A nurse informed me my wife had been put on life support. Her heart had briefly stopped, and while they had managed to stabilize her the overall condition was worse.
I sat beside her bed and wept. The vixen's paw was still warm, yet limp. Aside from a pulse there wasn't much else except the echoes of the magic I always felt when we touched.
Knowing what I'd get from most of the medical team, I sought out Doctor Farr.
The wait was almost an hour long. Covid had loaned St. Luke's a full house.
I think the most stupid question one can ask in the entirety of history is 'tell me honestly'. Yet I asked it, because I loved her, because I needed to know.
The badger took a breath, hesitated for a full three seconds.
Honesty is hard, as a lawyer I should know.
Then: "There was a bloodclot. It almost killed her. In the interim there was...damage. I'm not sure if we can save her."
I felt nothing, not then. It takes awhile. Maybe it's a defense mechanism, maybe it's crocodilian nature trying to put out a fire.
"I'll spend anything," I said. "Millions, it doesn't matter. I-"
There it was again, that touch of the shoulder. How many times throughout brutal, barbaric history has that been done, I wonder? Before of the fall of the Ape and after the War for Terra?
"Mr. Graystone I'm truly sorry. We'll do our best. I have a whole ward of patients waiting...I have to go."
"Thank you, doctor," I said hollowly.
-
My professional situation deteriorated after that. Critical cases I had been responsible for were suffering because of my absence, and partners Reynard and Volk were blowing up my phone.
"Jack, call me back, the firm is very concerned. We need to know if you're up for this, I understand if you're not. Call me."
And,
"Jack, this is Volk, listen son...I've been through it. If you can't suit up soon we're going to have to re-assign the case load. I'm sorry for your loss. Let me know."
In the end I texted both Reynard and Volk as a group with a single word: Resign.
I got no response. At least they stopped calling.
-
Are lawyers vampires? Do they blood the guilty and the innocent to fill their pockets and puff up their own careers? Some seem to think so, and in these latter days of my own life I don't find the vehemence to argue against that theory like I used to, yet I still believe in the end Justice isn't just blind, it's a cave dwelling trogladyte feeling its way through the darkest of humanity's impulses and places.
Missteps are inevitable, and twists of the truth are like fetid air that hasn't seen the sun in centuries: it stinks, yet somehow it's breathable.
I sit on my daughter's bed with a stuffed dolphin on my lap and a fifth in my grasp, my only company shadows, the sullen glow of a street lamp and the coldness of the airconditioner. It has a button eye, black and glossy, a soul search if there ever was.
I reflect on life, not just loss but the meaning of my own and I realize then I truly don't know where the fuck I am. This house, yes, this reality, yes, this body, yes. Yet-
If I turn this in to my therapist she'll commit me. I know that much.
I was a lawyer after all, once upon a time. Strange how savage these fairy tales end, although now I understand.
-
It's called SR-3801, and it's the American Autobahn. The length is four hundred and sixty two miles and the signature feature, as suggested, is that it has no speed limit. Created in 2081, it links Northwitch and Firefax, two important industrial centres whose munitions factories were critical in overthrowing the nation of Canadian apes.
Mortality statistics vary, yet oddly enough most who decide to drive their cars and trucks at suicidal speeds wind up just fine. Though, while on the subject of suicide, ninety percent of mortality on the road is wreckage by intention after attaining velocities of one hundred and fifty miles an hour or beyond.
Burst tires are common, and though there's a collection crew the shoulders are always littered with broken glass, hub caps and shredded rubber.
My Mercedes S 550 is a sleek and sullen marvel of modern engineering, painted a black so deep and pure it rivaled Death's robe. I've never driven it past a hundred before.
When I took the exit for SR-3801 I felt a chill. I thought I didn't have a heart beat anymore, yet it turns out I did, and it was thunder in my chest. My grasp felt prickly on the sleek mahogany of the steering wheel and my hackles went up.
Are you really going to do it?
That thought, unsummoned, sparked a red, dark rage. I needed to, had to. There was nothing left here, not anymore.
It's insane on that highway. I merged into the right lane from the off ramp going one hundred and twenty and was passed as if I were at a stand-still. The odometer hit one fifty, one seventy.
At two hundred and ten I'd twist the wheel sharply right. The guardrail would either snap like a twig or catapault the sedan, either way I would roll dozens of times and I'd be crushed.
At one ninety my phone began to ring.
Bizarre, how one can still be annoyed just before suicide. The right side of my face twitched and I glanced at the odometer. Two hundred and one. The car itself was a sanguine purr, I could have been sitting at a stop light. The world was a blur of velocity that was surreal.
It kept ringing.
I bit my tongue and whispered fuck, pulled into the break down lane. At that velocity it took a couple of football fields to stop.
By then I'd missed the call, yet when I unlocked the phone the origin, as it turned out, had been St. Luke's.
The text hit a second later:
'She's awake'.
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