Out of the Dungeon (5 page)

Roman nodded. "I'm good at being in charge.
You might say it's my natural role."

By the time they'd finished eating, Roman's
phone had rung several times, Jeff's people rallying. Vanessa
called for more information. Suede called when Vanessa hung up
because Vanessa was too upset to talk. Mike the bartender called
because he'd talked to Suede, and he wanted Roman to tell Jeff to
hang in there.

And then Dare's phone rang. It was Doc. "Is
it true?" Doc asked when Dare answered. "Is Jeff hurt?"

Dare was trying to remember and explain
Jeff's injuries, when a lump formed in his throat that made it
almost impossible to talk. And then he was fighting back tears,
because even though things weren't perfect, it was all going to
change, and Dare wasn't ready. He didn't know exactly what he
wanted, so he didn't know what direction things should change in.
Or what to think, or how to help, or even where to sleep
tonight.

When he thought he'd got most of the
information to Doc, he said, "Let me call you later, Doc, when I
know more."

"Be strong, Cousin," were Doc's words before
ending the call. "Roman's going to need to lean on you right
now."

Dare stared at the blank phone screen. Roman
was going to need Dare. It was almost too strange a concept to
comprehend.

"Now what?" Dare asked. "Should we go back to
the hospital? Should we go home?"

"The hospital," Roman decided. "I want to be
as close to Jeff as possible. If he wakes up, I want him to know
we're there. I don't want him to think for a moment that we've
coupled on him and left him in a place apart."

Dare understood. Jeff was Roman's
partner,
like a spouse. Dare was a dalliance, an
intra-marital affair, perhaps, but still more an outsider than a
member of the nuclear family of Roman and Jeff.

The ICU waiting room was empty. Roman sat in
the chair he'd chosen earlier, and Dare again sat on the floor,
leaning against Roman's legs. He didn't know why he kept making
this choice, essentially planting himself at Roman's feet. It
wasn't because Roman expected it. Roman might hold such an
expectation at home, or at the club, but never out in the normal
world. But it felt like the right place to be, close enough to
touch, to feel the length of Roman's legs along his back, or when
Roman shifted, cradled between Roman's calves. It was comforting to
have Roman's constant touch, yet in a way that wasn't intrusively
intimate. They needed togetherness, perhaps, even while they needed
space.

T
hey waited. Roman
felt like jumping out of his skin. The walls of the waiting room
seemed to close in on him a little bit more every minute. Distant
phones rang, the elevator came and went, and the loud 'ping' that
announced its presence startled him every time. He paced. He
rearranged the furniture. He turned the television on, flipped
through channels with the remote control, then turned it off
again.

Dare asked, "Roman. Can you be still for a
few minutes? You're making me nervous."

Roman sighed and sat on one of the chairs.
Be still,
he told himself.
Breathe in. Out. In.
He
knew how to use stillness and silence to his advantage in the
dungeon. To stretch out time so a minute felt like an hour. But he
didn't want to do that here. He wanted to shorten the day to a
minute, an hour to a blink, so the waiting would be over.

A tall woman with shoulder length brown hair
and a friendly smile came into the waiting room. She introduced
herself as Katie, the hospital social worker, and invited Roman and
Dare to her office. They followed her down a flight of stairs and
into a sitting room that was comfortable and comforting. She had
the overhead fluorescent lights turned off, and a floor lamp lit
the small room with a warm glow. The seating area was arranged on a
rug of muted brown and cream and green. It was an environment that
felt warm and safe. Roman recognized the psychology of it, and
approved. "An office without a desk. Nice."

She smiled and gestured for them to sit.
"Everything we do is computerized, and every unit is connected via
desktops and laptops, so I don't need a desk. If I had one, it
would only collect superfluous paper products. Who needs it? My job
is to talk to people, and I don't need a desk to do that. I talk to
people here. I talk to them in the waiting rooms, the patient
rooms, or down the street at the coffee shop."

Roman nodded. He liked her already. "So. What
do you want to talk about?"

"Jeff's people," she answered. "He's going to
be laid up for awhile. So who will take care of him? Roman, you're
Jeff's emergency contact, correct?"

Roman nodded. "And his partner. And this is
Dare."

"Nice to meet you," Katie said, and there was
a pause, as if she were expecting more.

Roman felt the unasked question, but ignored
it. "Jeff's other closest friend is Vanessa. We'll all take care of
him, of course. Whatever he needs."

"Tell me more. Like how long you've each
known Jeff?"

"I've known Jeff for, oh…" Roman paused for a
moment, thinking. "Fourteen years? Yeah, that's about right."

"And Dare?" Katie asked. "How long have you
known Jeff?"

"Ah," Dare almost stuttered. "Um. Maybe three
months?" He threw a questioning glance toward Roman. "Something
like that. Not very long."

"And Vanessa?"

"Five years," Roman answered.

"Okay, so Jeff has a long term partner, and
some close friends. That's good. How about his parents?
Siblings?"

"Parents upstate. One brother, and one
sister."

"They're supportive and comfortable with Jeff
being gay?" Katie asked.

Roman shrugged. "There doesn’t seem to be a
lot of tension about it. They like to pretend we're roommates, but
they know better. Maybe it was a struggle at the beginning, when
they first realized, but it's not something anybody talks about.
Time passes, people change."

"This is another beginning," Dare said, all
of a sudden, as if he hadn't even been following the conversation.
"We all might be changed forever, after going through this. Jeff
most of all."

"Absolutely," Katie said. "Trauma changes
people."

Roman tried to conceive it, Jeff being
anything other than Jeff, and it didn't seem possible. Jeff was an
open book to Roman. There was nothing to hide, because they knew
each other so well nothing could ever be hidden. That was part of
their relationship, the transparency. It was how Jeff could fall in
love with Vanessa, or anyone else, for that matter, and Roman still
always knew the he came first in Jeff's heart. It was how Jeff
knew, the moment Roman mentioned Dare, that there was something out
of the ordinary happening.

Transparency was maybe the most important
quality in polyamory. The ability to share feelings, work through
jealousies, eliminate passive-aggressive thought patterns, and
avoid passive-aggressive behaviors. Because that was the stuff that
destroyed relationships. Feeling hurt and angry, pretending not to
feel hurt and angry, and behaving in ways designed to hurt
everybody else. They didn't have any of that.

"Okay. Well. I'm sure we'll talk more when I
have a better sense of what sort of aftercare Jeff will need."

Roman almost laughed. Aftercare. If all Jeff
needed was a blanket, a bottle of water, and some snuggle time,
they'd have been home by now.

"I have some papers for you to sign,
permission for treatment, permission to bill insurance, things like
that." Katie went to a file cabinet and returned with a folder and
some paperwork. "You can take your time with these, and just hand
them in at the information desk or the nurses' station."

Roman glanced at the papers in his hand.
Permission to bill insurance. He had worried at times about not
having health insurance, but they'd never had a medical crisis, and
time just kept slipping by without either of them doing anything
about it. It was way too expensive for the club to carry a group
health plan, and Jeff worked just under full-time for the realty
management company, so he wasn't eligible for their plan.

Roman decided to avoid any admission of not
having insurance. At least until Jeff was out of the woods, because
all of a sudden he had a panic that Jeff might get less than the
best of care, being a person without healthcare coverage.

Katie smiled. "Don't worry. Our ICU is one of
the best, Jeff's going to be stabilized soon, and then it will all
be improving from there. I'll send you back to the waiting room
now, and maybe you'll get a chance to visit him for a few
minutes."

"Yeah, that would be good," Roman said.

It would help to see Jeff. That would put
everything in perspective. Roman felt like his pulse had been
leaping out of control since the moment Dare passed him the phone
this morning. Maybe he looked calm, cool, and collected, and no
doubt he did, because that was his persona, that was what he
presented, always, in every situation. Roman in control. Roman
cannot be fazed. Don't mess with Roman. But he needed to see Jeff.
Once he knew Jeff was okay, stable, and would make a full recovery
and come home and make everything be okay, then his pulse would
slow down.

After three minutes of silence in the waiting
room, Dare said, "It doesn't feel real. How can something like this
happen to Jeff? He's always so careful about everything."

"Not everything," Roman said. "He's a
terrible driver."

Dare raised his eyebrows, "Really?"

"Oh, yes. Jeff is a terrible driver. In most
everything else, I let him take care of me, but he'll never be a
chauffeur, let me tell you. Many years ago we rented a car and
drove upstate to visit his parents. Once we cleared the city I let
him drive. I mean, seemed logical, right? He knew where we were
going. We were still working out who was responsible for what, like
what he could do for me that wouldn't make me crazy if he didn't do
it exactly my way, and what things he absolutely had to learn to do
my way, and what things I just had to do for myself. It was like
anyone learning to live together, I suppose.

"Anyway. He drove for about an hour, and it
was the most harrowing experience of my life. He couldn't maintain
a steady speed, he drifted from right to left in his lane in a
manner that had me convinced he was falling asleep at the wheel. I
felt like I had to talk to him the whole time, for fear that he
would stop concentrating on the road and start snoring.

"Eventually I told him it was time for a pit
stop, and when we returned to the car I just put myself in the
driver's seat. And that's not even the funny part of the story. The
funny part was having dinner with his parents, and his mom said,
"Make sure Roman sees the pole when you leave," and then everybody
at the table cracked up. Jeff's dad, and his brother and sister.
And of course I had to ask. 'What pole?'

"The telephone pole at the end of the
driveway," Jeff's younger sister told me. "Jeff's hit that thing
four or five times over the years. In fact, usually one of us backs
the car out to the street for him."

"'Oh, ha-ha, you're all so funny,' Jeff
protested, but he was laughing, too.

"A half an hour later, his mom realized she'd
forgotten to get ice cream, so Jeff offered to go get some. And
what do you think he did?"

"Hit the pole?" Dare guessed.

"Damn straight. Put a nice scrape in the side
of the car. 'No more driving,' I told him, and he tried to protest,
but he doesn't drive when I'm in the car. I can't take the
stress.

"Jeff does a lot of things well, and many
things perfectly, but not everything."

Suddenly Dr. Rashaviak appeared in the room.
"I'll bring one of you back to see Jeff now, but just for a
moment."

Roman stood. "Me," he said. "I need to see
Jeff as badly as he needs to know I'm here."

"Go," Dare said. "Tell him – I don't know,
that I'm here, I guess."

"I will."

Roman followed the doctor through the double
doors and down the hall.

Jeff didn't have a room so much as a glass
cubicle. Two nurses, a male and a female, were in the cubicle,
monitoring, well, apparently everything.

Roman stepped up to the bed. He tried to see
Jeff, to recognize him somewhere amidst all the medical
paraphernalia. He couldn't.

His vision tunneled and his legs stopped
holding him up. "God," he said, as he went to his knees on the
floor beside the bed. "Oh, my boy, my boy."

R
oman tried to find
Jeff's hand. He had to thread his fingers around tubes and cords
and what not, until he touched Jeff's skin. And then he noticed
fabric cuffs attached to Jeff's wrist that were tied to the bedside
rail.

He almost keened, almost keeled right over
then, but the female nurse put her hand on his shoulder. "It's
okay. I know it's shocking to see him like this, but he's doing all
right. I promise. He's stable right now, nothing terrible is
happening to him."

"Why is he tied down?" Roman tried to ask,
but all he got out was the "Why?" as he pointed to the ties.

"We have to do that. Some people fight when
the anesthesia wears off, they pull at tubes and thrash around, and
his neck is fragile. He needs to be quiet and heal."

Roman was infinitely glad the others couldn't
come in. No one needed to see him shocked to his knees. He'd
imagined Jeff would be pretty bad off, but this was much worse than
he was ready for. He got to his feet and shook his head. He needed
Jeff beside him to deal with this. Jeff would prop him up, keep
things in order so Roman didn't stress. He had grown dependent on
Jeff. He would have thought it was always the other way around,
that Jeff was dependent on him, and yesterday he would have
defended this point of view. But it wasn't true. Jeff the slave
gave strength to Roman the Master. Not that Roman was weak, never
that, but that the two of them together formed a much larger and
more important alliance than anyone knew. They were ying and yang,
and the energy that flowed between them was mutually
beneficial.