Pain, Roberto A Robles [best classic novels txt] 📗

nervous terminals yearning for their fix that now sent desperate signals shooting through his nervous system, demanding the only substance they now cared about.
In Jackson Dobbs’s humble opinion, it made no difference whether his nervous system was a fucked up shambles of neurochemistry misfires, or if a band of demons had taken up residence inside his body and were just now performing increasingly complex foxtrot steps on his nerve endings. Pain was god. No, pain was God.
And he needed his morphine.
Ah, what a word.
Morphine.
Just its melodious name rang an evocative bell of tranquility and relief in his body. Jackson knew morphine was a colorless liquid, yet in his mind it shone golden. Rivulets of ambrosia. Pure water from a virgin spring high in the Himalayas. Nectar droplets of Nirvana. Wine of Xanadu.
Transfigured by the pain prompted by such an exertion, Jackson raised the sheets covering his body and threw them aside. He lay back on his bed panting, gasping for air, drenched in sweat. If the effort of turning his body face up, and sliding his prone body upwards to the headrest, and his head onto his pillow, took so much out of him, how would he be able to reach that luscious syringe on the vanity table?
With the willpower that only a mother in distress and a desperate junkie can resort to, he pushed his torso up and wedged his arms behind him on the mattress. This is the hard part, now, he thought. His right leg moved an inch towards the right edge of the bed. His groin complained, affronted, and Jackson Dobbs ignored it as best he could. He moved his leg another inch, the muscles in his legs taut, wretched tears streaming down his cheeks. He paused. He had to bring his left leg next to the right. If he separated his legs any further, his groin would scream bloody murder. Should he pass out from the pain, his body would be temporarily alleviated, but he knew the price he’d pay when he woke up even after a few minutes of unconsciousness in this position. He slid his left leg a fraction of an inch and his body convulsed in a paroxysm of agony as the wrinkled sheet scratched at the open sores on his thigh. His arms trembled for the effort of sustaining his torso, but he held on in what was perhaps the last grand stand of his life.
“Mom!” he heard Ginny scream in the kitchen.
“Marion!” he cried out himself wondering why he was doing all this when Marion would be up any second now to give him his shot. Yet, deep down inside he had understood from the moment Marion had left the room that she would be busy for a while, sorting out whatever stupidity his quarrelsome offspring had cooked up this time. He couldn’t wait. Minutes for them meant consecutive life sentences for him. He looked down to see that for all his exertions, he had only managed to slide both his legs perhaps five inches towards the edge of the bed, and he had already been on the verge of losing his consciousness and falling back on the bed to a position from which he might just be unable to make it up again.
“God,” he rasped, “remember me? It’s Jackson.” He gasped for breath, trying to bring his treacherous heart, that one which might give up for good any day now, to a normal rhythm. “I know it may seem blasphemous to ask for this, but surely you remember what it felt like to take this much punishment? What did I do to deserve this, God? So. I’m not complaining. I haven’t so far, have I?”
His right arm stopped trembling and started shaking, it was losing the fight. It would lose its lock at the joint any second now, and he would fall on his side. He could see that if his arm gave out, he might just stumble out of bed onto the floor, and what new visions of pain would that evoke?
“I might tell you I need some strength to stand and drink some water, God,” he continued, “but you know everything and, anyway, you’ll see I won’t go for the water, right? I’ll go for the stuff.”
His brain commanded his arm to stop being such a sissy and stop shaking, but either his arm didn’t give a rat’s tail what the brain said anymore or, most likely, it couldn’t comply.
“So, how ‘bout it, God,” he finished his prayer, “cut me some slack, okay?”
His arm gave out. Immediately, Jackson Dobbs fell on his right side and found new evidence that he had not yet reached perigee in his reeling wheel of pain. As he had feared, momentum carried him onwards, and as his powerless hands clutched at the sheets, he fell to the floor on his face, breaking his nose.
Fortunately, for the sake of his immortal soul, he had no time to contemplate what this said about God.
He passed out.

I rang the bell for the third time, letting my finger linger on the button for a few seconds longer than I normally would. I could visualize Mrs. Dobbs and Ginny leaving the house and walking to church. Even if they didn’t usually attend mass on a week day, these were less than normal circumstances, for sure. Talk about an understatement. I might even explain the car parked in the garage. They might have decided to walk those four blocks. Getting away for a while, taking a walk in the morning, sounded like a good idea, particularly for Ginny, who would need some exercise, and especially in this mild weather.
What I couldn’t account for was Trenton not hearing the bell. I knew the Dobbs slept lightly these days, poised to rise as exhausted zombies the second they heard a sound coming from their father’s bedroom. It seemed that a blaring doorbell would be at least a little more alerting than a groan or a moan.
Yet the door remained shut.
No way they left the old man alone, I thought and walked to the back of the house. The Dobbs were not the trusting type. They would never leave the kitchen door unlocked, but I had seen Trenton retrieve a spare key from the space over the doorframe often enough. If I was challenged by a recently awakened Ginny on her pajamas, as I entered the kitchen, I would feel embarrassed, but I would also feel relieved.
Walking the hallways in my friend’s house, just to discover that the whole family was enjoying a well-deserved sleep after so many sleepless night, I would tiptoe back out and pray to God nobody had heard me.
What I found instead has marked every waking moment of my life since, and has haunted my every moment of sleep, too.
The smell hit me first, a pungent, coppery odor I now know is the smell of blood, and something else, a whiff of something gone bad, which forensic specialists later ascertained was chicken broth.
Only the well-loved kitchen table was as it should be. Although it had been pushed to one side, it was the last thing standing.
A house is defined by its kitchen. More than that, its inhabitants tend to bond in the kitchen. Sitting around lovingly prepared food, a carefully decorated table, families spend some of their best times in the kitchen, not in the dining room, not in the living room, not in their bedrooms, but in the kitchen.
This was no longer a kitchen; this was the tenth circle of hell, so gruesome even Alighieri hadn’t dared describe it.
A cold, viscous substance coated the floor, the fridge, kitchen cabinets, chairs, and walls. Bits of chicken, even some noodles, stuck to the ceiling. There was blood everywhere. Long smears of blood crisscrossed the floor from the stove to the table, and from there they painted a half moon that went around to the far side of the table. Blood smears clearly made by a sneaker. A pool of blood at the foot of the stove displayed two white irregular circles in its center, where someone had sat, preventing the blood from spreading completely, leaving the testimony of a fall.
Trenton’s head lay broken just inches from that pool of blood, his body partially lying under the kitchen table, its arm over a fallen chair he had dragged on his fall, as if he were claiming it as his possession so he might have a place to sit on in his long wait in eternity.
An iron pot stood immutable near the place where my friend had fallen, stricken in an inexplicable fit of fury, a silent witness with a dash of blond hair stuck onto its metallic surface, along with something else I didn’t dare contemplate.
Ginny looked like she was sleeping on her mother’s chest, an endearing tableau of daughterly affection, if not for the fact that she seemed to be the source of all that blood. Her jeans were covered with dark brown stains that ran from her crotch down to her white socks. The soles of her sneakers, her hands, her face, hid behind the abundant, ghastly red make up.
Marion Dobbs’s hands belayed her motherly affections as one was clutching at her chest, the other clawing at the floor; none embraced her sleep-like daughter. The expression on her face was one of silent desperation, if not fear, though it seemed to me not completely devoid of a measure of resignation.
I knew I shouldn’t enter. I would be seriously put down by the police for this, I was sure, but I couldn’t think of anything else than Mr. Dobbs. An awful certainty had taken residence around my heart, and wouldn’t leave me, no matter what sorts of recommendations my conscious, more conservative mind, was issuing.
I couldn’t heed the warning to step outside and call the police, any more than I could postpone taking my next breath of air. I had to go upstairs. I had to see Mr. Dobbs. I couldn’t quite convince myself that he must already be dead. What if he wasn’t? He certainly hadn’t participated in these appalling festivities, so he might even now be desperate for a drink of water, a commode… a shot of morphine.

I no longer stay awake until dawn trying to understand. I mourn, and I don’t forget. I ache, but I am spared pain. I regret, but I don’t assign blame.
The coroner said none of my friends took a long time dying. Wisely, he didn’t say they didn’t suffer much. For a broken nose, there wasn’t enough blood that led to the assumption that Mr. Dobbs had lived for more than a few minutes after his fall. The dead don’t bleed. So, the absence of whole pints of blood indicates the end came quickly after that.
They bleed plenty while dying, though.
As for suffering?
They leave that to us.
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