Jabberwock Jack (25 page)

Wasting time while smoking a cigarette is kind of an art. Some would call it even magic, as it can summon a bus or train you've been waiting for - often sooner than the end of the cigarette. Even without an impending mass transit vehicle, it's slow, meditative, and pensive. You spend a long time staring at your cigarette and the tongue of smoke that slowly rises from it. You act as though this is loftier than just looking out the window or staring at your shoes, as if you're 50% cooler because what you're staring at is a cigarette and not the husband and wife yelling at each other half a block down. It also works well in bars when you're trying to pick up girls.

Still, what I needed at that time was meditative distraction, not extra Cool Guy Points, so I was staring at the smoke as if it would take all my thoughts away. I breathed out and then watched the smoke swirling up from my cigarette. Past the smoke was someone walking toward the ER. For the most part I didn't care about the other people in the ER, but without even intending I found my eyes shift up to him. He happened to look at me as well. Our eyes locked in sudden recognition.

"It's you!" he said in fear, anger, and shock.

It took me a second to realize where I knew him from, then my face hardened as well. It was Frat Boy Chad. He wasn't wearing his hat and his clothes were different, but he still wore an Avalon U shirt and cargo shorts. His forehead was bleeding and there was some fresh blood on his lip. He had a black eye, but that didn't look new. With some pride, I realized I probably had given him that. The other wounds had happened this night, probably from Chad picking fights again.

I wanted to say something melodramatic that Chad deserved, like, "Up to your tricks again, you old villain?" But that was not my mental state. Instead I stood up slowly. I tossed my cigarette on the pavement and then slowly twisted my boot on it to put it out.

"You got a problem,
Chad?
"

"Yeah, you fucking east side scumbag!" he replied. "Fucking cheater! Couldn't even wait until we were outside? Couldn't fight like a man?"

"Says the guy who had his friends outside waiting to jump his poor victim."

"Only if I needed them," he said, but I was sure it was a lie by how nervously he said it. "But you are nothing without your friends. Where are they, huh? Or do we need to watch that bar and follow them one at a time to kick their asses?" He looked over to the ER. "Or did someone already do the job for us?"

This was too much. You don't joke about my brother being in the hospital
when he's
already in the hospital.
I moved without thinking. It was far faster than Chad had expected.

"Mikkel!"

It was Carly's call as she had run toward us. That was the only thing that stopped me. I had a handful of Chad's shirt and my fist was in the air, on the way to bludgeon Chad's face beyond recognition when Carly's voice caught me and froze me. Chad's face was full of fear, despite any tough guy front he had wanted to put on.

I let go of Chad's shirt and used that hand to push him away from me. He stumbled but didn't fall.

"Go," I said icily. "Find some other hospital. I don't want to see you. Ever."

Whatever Chad's former bluster, he knew when to cut his losses. He ran.

Carly came over to me. "Are you alright?"

I hung my head in shame. "I just... I just almost..."

"It's okay," she said.

"That's not who you want me to be. You must be so angry with me..."

"I'm not."

"But I would have kicked his ass in front of a hospital... all because he said something...
unknowingly
about my brother."

"It's not your fault, it's grief."

"It's not my fault? Of course it's my fault. This is all my fault. Everybody knows it."

"Nobody's blaming you. Nobody's saying anything like that. I don't think this is your fault."

I turned to her, sadness in my eyes. "Why not?"

Not long after our short interlude outside, there was news. The nurse asked me to follow her. Carly followed behind us as the nurse took me through some long corridors to a patient room. I didn't think this was the ICU, so I took that as a good sign. It was a double room, two beds with just a curtain for privacy. The bed nearest the door had most of the curtain around it, but I could tell from a quick look it was some unconscious burn victim that I later learned had been in a long term coma. My brother was in the other bed.

A doctor in scrubs awaited me by my brother's bed holding his clipboard. I figured the doctor must be doing his residency, since he appeared barely older than me. His manner wasn't warm, it was tired and quick. He had to tell me a bunch of info and he honestly didn't care how I took it. He wasn't mean, he was just detached. To be fair to him, by the circles around his eyes and the way his body seemed to be held up due to willpower, I think he had been on shift a very, very long time and just wanted to go home.

He didn't bother to introduce himself, he just talked about my brother. Szandor was stable. That was the good news. He wasn't getting any worse. His wounds were mostly superficial. They had treated his lacerations and his cuts. But there was also bad news.

He was in a coma.

The doctor must have known the gravity of that statement, because after he said that, he said nothing else and practically stepped back to give me breathing room.

"A coma?" I said.

"Your brother suffered a concussion," said the doctor. "Luckily there was no internal bleeding, which can really complicate things. But it was a severe blow to his head and neck. The trauma of the blow is what caused it, even if there is no specific damage we can address. We've got him stable. But he's comatose and there's nothing we can do to wake him up."

"When will he wake up?"

"That's the thing," said the doctor. "We don't know. Maybe right now. Maybe in an hour. Maybe never."

"So.... what then?" I said. "What can you do?"

"We can keep him alive and comfortable," said the doctor. "But at this point, we don't know when or if he's going to wake up. Medically there's really not anything we can go and do. I wish I had more to tell you, but that's really it."

"Do I need to like, talk to him and shit? To help him wake up?" I asked.

"You can if you like," said the doctor.

"But will it help?" I asked.

The doctor shrugged. "Probably not. But some people like doing it. They think it will do something. Like the movies or something, right?"

The doctor looked at me for a moment, wondering if I had more questions. When I just stared dumbfounded at my brother's unconscious body, the doctor just nodded.

"Well, take the time you need," he said as he put my brother's clipboard on the front of the bed and left the room. "The nurse can answer any further questions you have."

"I'm so sorry, Mikkel," said Carly.

"I feel like I'm in the worst soap opera ever," I said.

"Then maybe he'll wake up when his long-lost identical cousin shows up to get the family inheritance," said Carly. I looked back at her and she cringed nervously under my gaze. "Sorry, bad time to try to lighten the mood with absurd humor."

I grabbed a chair from near the burned man's bed and sat down next to Szandor. Carly stayed back by the door, giving me my privacy. Szandor was hooked up to machines monitoring his condition and a few to keep him alive while unconscious. His expression was calm. It was weird not seeing him tense or sour; it was almost like seeing someone else. I stared at him for a minute. It felt weird that I was just staring at him, even if he was unconscious. I figured I should say something. I lightly grabbed his arm.

"I don't know if you can hear me, brother. I'm... I'm sorry. I... I fucked up. I said I'd always have your back... but when it came down to it, I wasn't able to. I could only watch you get thrown around by that creature. I should have been there. I should have done something. I'm sorry."

In a perfect world, my brother would have heard my words and woken up. After my admission of guilt, all would be forgiven and my brother would have woken in a cloud of like, I don't know, fucking fairy dust. And then he would have gotten up, danced a jig, we'd receive the Publisher's Clearing House check, and then we'd freeze frame for the ending credits. End of the story. However, as much as I love movies, life is rarely anything like them. We have to live after the credits roll. We have to be in all those moments in between scenes. We have to live the pain, get along without the dramatic music, and see the times in between the montage. We have to live when our brother is in a hospital bed and we can't do anything.

Well, there was something I could do. If our situations were reversed, I knew what Szandor would be doing. He would be doing his best to shove his foot up Jabberwock Jack's ass any way he could. It wouldn't wake me up, but it would make him feel better and serve his own sense of justice. Alternately, he would be settling things with Jericho over this whole mission. My brother has always been scrappier than me, but right now, all those things seemed much better than sitting here at his bedside, ineffectual and waiting for him to wake, a moment which might never arrive.

"Once in a lifetime opportunity, right?" I said, my voice weak, my eyes wet from tears I wouldn't let myself shed in front of him.

I looked at the clock. 12:02. It had just passed to midnight on a new day. Szandor's twenty-first birthday.

I reached into my coat and pulled out the large ziploc bag which contained his birthday present. I had brought it with me into the Undersystem, just in case his birthday came while we were still underground. I opened the bag and pulled out the present. It was a smallish frame made of Avalon Brass. The shimmer was etched with fancy designs, all leading down to an inscription under the picture. The frame was small because the picture was small. In it were Szandor and I. He was a freshman in high school, I was a junior. It had been School Picture Day and before Szandor had started dyeing his hair or had any piercings. He had a gawky smile on his face. I had just started growing out my hair, so I had a shaggy mullet and a grin. Behind us was our mother, her arms over our shoulders, proud as anyone could ever be. On the frame below the picture was inscribed FAMILY.

I put the frame on the bedside table, turning it to face Szandor's unconscious form.

"Happy birthday, brother."

I left the room, passing Carly without a word. A dark sense of purpose had come over me. I knew what I had to do. I knew what my brother would want me to do.

"Where are you going?" she said, catching up to me in the hall.

"I'm going to see Jericho," I said.

"Him?" she said. "Don't you see he's the whole problem? From everything you told me, he's a classic Captain Ahab. He's obsessed with killing Jabberwock Jack. He suffered a great loss and then has spent the entire rest of his life trying to avenge that wrong. But Jack's not a person. Jack's an animal. That's the whole point of Moby Dick! You can't take revenge on animals!"

"I just need to do something. What Szandor would want me to do."

"No offense, Mikkel, but your brother's kind of an idiot. He's not a wise man."

"You've never liked him," I said, closing my eyes and sighing as I resurrected an old argument like magic. An uncomfortable, unintentional magic.

"I do like him!" she said. "But he's going to get you both killed!"

"He's my brother and I need to have his back!"

"Are you going to have his back when he walks into certain doom? Would you have had his back on this and ended up in the hospital too? Would I have been here sitting on the side of
your
bed?"

There was an icy silence. We both realized what happened. She had just resurrected something far bigger.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that," she finally said, her voice measured and tense. "But I'm worried about you. You're going to go off and do something manly and stupid. There's already one Nowak brother in the hospital right now and I want to keep you out of it. I care about you very much." She paused and looked back down the hall. "Both of you, to be honest."

"Look, I love you," I said, then paused on the dumbness of it. We hadn't gotten this far since she came back. I saw her argumentative reply that would have interrupted me fall from her shocked lips. I continued in that moment. "You matter to me more than anything. But so does he. I need to do this. When I'm done, I'll come back. If you're still here, I'll listen to every way in which I was wrong and dumb to do this, agreeing completely. But I need to do this now. I just have to. And if you're not here when I come back... well, then I understand. Being with me isn't easy but this is who I am. I need to do this."

"You don't have to," she said. "Your brother..."

"Would want me to do this."

"And he'd still be wrong," she said, her voice wavering and her eyes wet with tears that were about to flow.

"I have to do this," I said, turning to go.

"Don't go," she said.

It took all my strength to keep walking, to not turn around and gather her up in my arms. It took everything I had to keep going, knowing she might not be there when I got back.

Hawks & Serpents

I took a cab to the Chinatown parking garage, every minute of the way wondering if I had just screwed up and thrown away something very important. In an effort to squash that doubt, I redoubled my sense of purpose, making it a sharper blade of will to cut Jack or myself with.

Mine was the only vehicle left at the parking garage. The Pork Chop Express looked lonely parked in the bottom level near the closed access panel. The chain link gate had been open and unlocked. The guys at the exit tried to charge me, but I told them I was with Meat. One guy didn't know who I meant, but the other one explained who Meat was. The first one's eyes bugged out. Then he waved me on quickly.

On my way to Asher, I got a call from Lem.

"Hey, how are you doing?" he said. I think he had been drinking.

"Hey," I said flatly.