#003: The Pensieve (1)

[David Sanchez]

003: The Pensieve Series
A - Dealing with Loss, Part 1 of 3

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But now you lie awake...
and you curse the world for all of your mistakes.
Well, you should have known that you'd fuck it up, some day.
You try to wish your careless heart away...
but it's not enough, it's not enough, no.
You won't be saved.

Ryan Mellor, Deaf Havana

Victor Saint’s Hospital Room
Ward 25, Floor 4B
Johns Hopkins Hospital
Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
05/09/2009 - 14:30

I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as him anymore; this withered, weather broken husk of a man that had until recently, been the closest thing to a father-figure I could remember. Unable, to meet his milky-eyed and distant gaze I turn to look out of the window and busy myself by birdwatching as the duty nurse spoon-feeds blitzed spinach and carrots to one of the most powerful, and influential businessmen the world would ever be fortunate enough to play host to.

“There’s a nest in the guttering, I think they're just garden swallows.”

Panting for breath, Victor Saint calmly speaks to me as though there were nobody else in the room; gulping back some water from a disposable cup the nurse lifts to his lips. I’d never figured him for a bird fanatic; but I guess when you’ve got a tumor the size of a grapefruit on your frontal lobe; the world would start to look like an entirely different place altogether. Still, this smalltalk-- the bird based banter he was inviting into the room? It was a prop. Something to distract me from the phantom presence of Death, the invisible harbinger who’d been sharpening his scythe in the corner of the room since Sunday.

“Well, I guess there’s nothing wrong with your eyes, that’s spot on. There’s four of them-- a mother and three flightless babies.”

Tidying him up, using a wet wipe to dab the corners of his mouth. The nurse smiles at my twenty-eight year old visage, blushing slightly as she meets my icy, blue eyes on the rise and stutters as she takes her leave. Smiling, I turn back to Victor, only to see a sadness creeping across his face; spreading from cheek-to-cheek.

“I overheard the hospital staff talking about ripping out the nest. Apparently all the chirping is disturbing too many high-dependency patients’ sleep. What do you think will become of them?”

Taken aback, my mind drifts to something he had said to me what seemed like a lifetime ago. All the way back to the outskirts of Rio, in Brazil. Where a twenty-two year old David Sanchez was having an ethical crisis. I was there to lay pipelines; anything that got in the way; I was tasked with taking care of. Until that rural, rustic village of twenty-three people, six goats and a dog-- all I’d had to do was flash some cash; or on the odd occasion, remind somebody who I worked for. But these stubborn, tribal stowaways wouldn’t be bought bought, nor terrorized, and so my orders were to simply remove them from not their ramshackle huts, but existence in general. This directive accompanied by a phrase that haunts my thoughts still.

“A dying man should spare no thoughts for the ill-fate of others… and here you are freaking out about fuckin’ Swallows. You told me that once, Vic. At this point I’m just paraphrasing your own advice and giving it back to you.”

The White Man coughs and splutters, and for some reason; I half-expect for dust to puff out of his mouth as though he were banging chalkboard erasers. Over the last six months; I’d watched the cancerous tumor in his brain become him and he become it. Defined by his new found limitations, now-- this brain defect had been instrumental in his appointing me as caretaker of his precious children: one a nineteen year-old meth addict by the name of Samantha. The other; his SaintCorp conglomerate-- the golden child.

“I’m not really worried about the birds, boy. If you can’t see that by now then I fear I’ve wasted my last years among the living grooming you for failure. I’m worried about HER. And about MY fuckin’ grandson… I’m worried about what becomes of MY legacy, and MY family.”

His dying was starting to drag on; three days I’d spent here now-- waiting. Tick-tock goes the clock on the wall. Beep-beep goes the heart rate monitor. The same sounds replaying on an infinite loop as this withered shell of my mentor shits in a bag, eats through a tube and patiently waits for death’s embrace as though the Reaper were a long-lost cousin.

“OUR family… OUR family, Victor. But don’t worry, old man. I’m keeping her close. Him too, the Bastard child. We’re getting married as planned next July and the boy is doing fine-- he’s no different to any other toddler. He eats, shits and sleeps; with regular intervals of screaming like a banshee. Besides, she trusts me… a lot more than she ever trusted you, Saint.”

For as long as I’d known her; which was closing in on eight years, I’d never once so much as overheard Samantha calling Victor Saint her dear old dad. They looked nothing alike, they had completely opposing personalities and the timescales just didn’t hold true with all I’d come to learn about the innovative war criminal turned megalomaniac that now lay broken before me.

“You’re starting to sound smitten again, Nanakia… do try to remember, none of this is real. She's only with you because that's how I wanted it. You’re just serving a purpose-- you will protect her, and raise him as though he were your own. Then, when he’s old enough; you give him full power over everything. My entire empire-- I can’t trust it to Sam… she’s using again; I know she is. But you… I can always count on you, can’t I?”

The very second he stopped talking, he turned to humming showtunes of all things in order to close the gaps in conversation. Almost as though he feared silence was to be the precursor to his unbecoming. Still sharp as a tack ‘til his dying breath; I can already see the doubt forming on his face when I offer up assurances that I knew would never be enough to garner his faith.

“Of course you can Victor, I’ve got everything under control, as I always do…”

How I’d gotten away with my own intake up to this point, I wasn’t at all sure. But for some reason he never seemed to tar me with the same brush as his darling daughter; the prodigal daughter that was meant to be a son. The little girl I’d see on that rescue boat in Ninety-Nine with a stuffed unicorn and a broken smile had grown up to be nothing short of a meth-addled, depressive, broken adult. But still, for some unknown reason-- I got butterflies whenever this beautiful disaster passed me by.

“... everything indeed, except for that heavy-duty heart in your chest.”

Thump-thump goes the lone can of Miller Lite rattling around in the icebox where my heart used to be. How could this man be lying there under the assumption that I was still capable of love? He’d been the one to beat all the good vibrations out of me in the first place. Sure, when he found me-- I may already have been morally bankrupted by the broken Bogota prison-system of a post-Castro, Columbia. But there was still hope in my heart right up until Saint Victor’s men had ‘liberated’ that camp and ‘rescued’ us inmates.

“I’m on top of it, boss.”

Swallowing the lump in my throat; I watch as he strains to turn his neck back towards the window. Milky as his eyes already were; tears start to pool up in them now, making them even whiter as his vision lands in the general direction of the mother-swallow and her chicks. All hard feelings aside, I’d been finding it harder and harder to watch as the hours marched on-- this once stone-set, certain man with the strength of an ox and the patter of a plagiarist deteriorating more and more as the hours turned into days, and those days crept into long, dark and eerily quiet nights. Filling up with dread, he turns to me and seems to whisper his final plea.

“We need to save those birds. They’re gonna die, D--”

A cutting, piercing beep. A dying man’s parting sentiments cut short by death’s sense of timing, and suddenly it’s all over. His tongue hangs out of his mouth like a thirsty dog now, and with this image comes the crushing realization that he had actually passed away. The emerald green eyes he shared with his daughter, my lover, the little lady who with this death; was now one of the most powerful people on the planet still fixated through the pane glass window. The nurse rushes back in now; puzzled by my expression of calm indifference as the resuscitation team swarms the room and I’m swept back into the corridor; the door slammed firmly between my mentor and I.

“CLEAR!!!”

The hair on the back of my neck pricks up to full attention.

“CLEAR!!!”

Goosebumps cover my flesh, and the taste? Rancid-- like bitter fruit and bad wine had a badly disfigured baby.

“CLEAR!!!”

Nothing happens. Nothing would ever happen to, or because of Victor Saint again. This time it was conclusive; I could already smell the roses.

“...”

Inevitably, as it always does-- silence falls and then is broken by the official verdict. Blunt words with no emotion but disappointment. afterall, to a doctor on this level; a dead body is just a negative statistic.

“Time of death: thirty-six minutes past two. The ninth of May, two-thousand and nine.”

It was official, a slow-stream of sullen surgeons departing in formation is almost overkill. Victor Saint was dead, and that meant more to me than one man’s mortality; it meant my own freedom; something I’d never experienced-- settling instead for playing subservient second fiddle to a deadman’s cause. Even with the wound so fresh, I still find time for resentment-- my thoughts too falling on the family of swallows that were living out their lives in the guttering; blissfully unaware of the White Man’s death.

“Goodbye, Victor.”

I mutter under my breath; pulling the Motorola phone from the pocket of my jeans and preparing myself for what was going to be the most difficult conversation I’d ever been privy to. Marching towards the elevator; the facts still refuse to fully seep into my skin-- all I can entertain is the immediate future. The news I now had to give my fiance’ about her father’s passing; and the downward spiral it was sure to cause. But for now, in this elevator-- for the briefest moment, I was free... free as a bird.

2BContinued...