Lawrence Dagstine: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror

Speculative Fiction; about 2,000 words:

[Author's Note: Horror Icon Mort Castle had very positive things to say about this piece.  I hope you enjoy it just as much as he did...]

 

Being Michael

 

by

 

Lawrence R. Dagstine

 

Not a good day for my brother―so weak, face so gray and sunken.  He looks awful to me.  Little swelling, but his stomach almost seems flat.  He is getting thinner each day and much weaker from the toxins.  He can hardly keep his food down, and he can barely move from the hospital bed to the bathroom without exhaustion.

I bring up a Nintendo DS game that I bought at the Electronics Boutique across the street.  Though he is not much younger than me, he still loves the things kids love most: comic books, Star Wars action figures, video games, baseball and Mom’s apple pie.  He’s twenty-four, mind you, but in my eyes he’s still eight going on nine.

He seems very happy with the Mario game.  He tells me though to go to the waiting room for an hour and then come back.  When I return, Michael is lying on his side, his arm crooked under his head, the bare forearm so thin, even above the elbow, no bigger than my wrist.  There are areas where the bruises have become large red sores, and even now, the flesh is starting to rot.  He is so weak, so fragile.

The doctor in attendance turns to me and says, “Don’t worry, he’ll beat it.  He’s a fighter.” The voice is reassuring, soothing.  But even I know it is a lie. “He fought brave and hard overseas, and he’ll fight this.  You’ll see.”

“I hope so, Doctor.” Then Michael looks up at me, and I lean over and say, “I’ll see you tomorrow.  I love you,” and then give him a kiss on the cheek.  And as I straighten up, his lips purse together as if there are lemons in his mouth.  I pat his hand.  He says, “Take care of yourself, Sis.”

I stay for a moment, outside the door to his room, watching.  The brother I love so much: the blue-eyed, freckle-faced kid who was there whenever I needed a shoulder to cry on.  Whenever I needed him most.

In a mood of lethargy he allows the nurses to undress him.  They fetch water to wash away the blood and pus-filled patches from the spreading disease.  It is no ordinary plague, and sponge baths soothe the flaky areas of skin that continue to fall off and not regenerate.  The head nurse comes inside donning a pale protective gown, and another member of the staff, this one male, brings a luncheon tray to the room.  It tells him that he must eat if he is to stay alive.  He holds down the apple sauce, nothing solid, and this small meal gives him time to recoup strength for one more night; he would need very little when he did decide to depart this earth.

I go home with Mom, who then goes back to her hotel.  I listen to Soundgarden on the CD player.  There is a lot of angst inside of me.   It is old, but Chris Cornell is what I need right now to help me through this angst.  I heard the beginning of the same song with Michael in the hospital.  Maybe he is still listening to it on his iPod.  Or maybe he is playing Mario.  I go out to the kitchen to make sloppy Joes; Michael’s favorite.  I have to continue our brother-sister tradition even though he won’t be here.  I am so depressed. I must not have such a hopeless feeling, but I do.  Maybe if I prayed.  Maybe that would help.

Please God, let Michael live.  Even if he has to live in a hospital and be quarantined, even if we have to have doctors and nurses every day.  Let me, his only sister, have more time with him.

 

*

 

The next day the inevitable that my family―that I―had hid from has happened.  The phone calls are constant, my Mom and Dad replies in yeses and nos.  The silences are awesome.  There are no words that they or I can say.  The tears come when I hang up.  It is real.

I keep thinking the worst thing is that I’ll never have another conversation with my brother.  They were a nice way to end the day.  I could always tell him my problems, and he’d always listen.  Even when he was stationed in Baghdad.  Bush lied about the biological weapons, so now I’ll never hear him call my name again.  And his wife, who I don’t get along with, lives on a military base in Germany.  So I won’t get to see her either.

I am so angry but so very sad.

The wind and God are raging in a tempest outside―the air roars.  I don’t think God wanted Michael with Him as a permanent resident so early in his life; I think that is the case with all soldiers.  Perhaps this wild gust is how He is showing His anger.  Healing can be a long process.  But God is going to help me through these days and through the even rougher months and years ahead, especially when I need to talk to someone.  God will be there.

 

And Chris Cornell.

 

*

 

I couldn’t say goodbye to Michael, see him after he died, because to have gone to the hospital to see him would have meant he was dead in spirit as well as in flesh.  What I wanted to remember was his alive face, not a dead, vacant one that didn’t know who I was.  I needed his spirit, his sense of life and joy, his strength and wisdom, to help me through the days ahead, through his memorial service and the burial.  It was a matter of survival.

That night, after I phoned everybody, seeking that shoulder from someone else, I listened to the rain and sat on my bed in the dark.  I did not sleep.  At five-thirty I decided to take a shower, and then I thought as the service was going to be in Saint Bartholomew’s, it would be wise to go over once and sit there so that on Tuesday it would not seem so strange.  I left the apartment quietly a little after six, my mother and father still asleep on the convertible.  I was thinking in my head that just twenty-four hours earlier Michael was dying, taking his last breathes.

It was a cold morning with a fine, thin drizzle.  The previous night’s storm had let up considerably.  When I entered the church, I saw that mass had just begun.  There were older women and a few men scattered in the pews.  One young woman was there with her infant daughter and kindergarten-aged son.  I wondered who they were praying for.  I sat down and stared up at the stained-glass windows above the altar: the Baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, some little lambs and doves.  Opposite that one was the Archangel Michael holding a long sword in one hand, scales in the other.  Maybe that will help this morning, I thought.  I’ll look at that, I told myself.  An archangel with the same name as my brother.  I told myself, as Michael would have told me, that everything would be all right.  I hoped he was all right, wherever he was.  I still needed him.  I prayed to God for the safe passage of his soul. 

Staring back up at the figure in the window, I could have sworn I saw the angel’s left eye blink at me.  The mouth, too, seemed to smile.  No, can’t be.  I was tired, distressed.  No sleep.  How could my brother Michael be…be the same Michael in the stained-glass image, a servant and soldier for the Lord? I must be hallucinating.  So I just left.

I got back to the apartment after eight.  My aunts, uncles, and cousins arrived in droves.  My youngest uncle, Charles, brought Michael’s things from the hospital.  It was an aching, wrenching time.  All the women cried.  The Doctor was there, too, and he tried to soothe us.  But underneath our unbearable grief was rage.  Anger for an administration who had wronged us and many other American families. “I don’t care if he was a soldier!” family members yelled, and we sobbed, “He was still too young!” I asked my uncle if he wanted any of Michael’s things.  He said no, he wouldn’t be able to bear it, and he left with his wife to fly back to Phoenix. 

I was like a zombie all afternoon.  After dinner with my parents, I took a walk with my mother in the icy, clear night air.  She told me how her friend Gabriel, the one who had died of cancer, was probably an angel now in heaven.  

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

She said to me, “They say if you pray for the soul of someone you care about long and hard enough, then God gives them preferential treatment and wings.  He makes them that very named angel or spirit.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“Why don’t you have a little faith, Julie? I think we can all use some right now.”

Then she went on abruptly about how I used to never go running by myself in this park.  My mother’s message was clear: I must move on, like she was.  I must take walks, get outside.  But my instant reaction to her suggesting what was “best” was sheer aloofness.  With Iraq still going on, there was a quiet dignity in dying a horrible death in these terrible days, but until I recognized the angel once more in Saint Bartholomew’s, it had not given me the courage to be the woman I wanted to be at Michael’s service.

 

*

 

Again, without much sleep, I awakened early the day of the service and stood at my open closet.  Black, unfortunately, was not a color in my wardrobe, so I chose the last thing Michael saw me in, a blue cotton dress.  The service was not as difficult as I had thought it was going to be, actually very positive, comforting and uplifting.  A celebration, Reverend James called it.  Heaven is not full of angels playing harps in Elysian Fields, but a oneness with God, a heavenly place where there is no suffering or death.  These were his words as he read from the Book.

I looked up at the stained-glass window of the angel by the same name as my brother.  It winked at me again! Later, I patted the Reverend on the shoulder and asked him if it was possible if brave soldiers in real life could become soldiers of God.  The Reverend smiled at me and replied, “Only those favored by the Lord when they die, Miss Julie.  Then they’re next in order to become a member of the flock.”

“Do you think Michael… Michael became an angel?”

Reverend James said, “I think so.  Michael would have made a fitting angel, Miss Julie, so I don’t see why not.  Elysian Fields, you see, is a place where the souls of the heroic and virtuous go.  Your brother was all these things, and more.”

I somehow sensed my brother Michael had died only to become the archangel by the same name, to take over the heavenly post as, I’m sure, many brave Michaels before him had.  Looking around I saw the church was packed, people standing in the back.  I gripped my mother’s hand during the rest of the service.  When it ended, I obeyed the motioning hands telling me to get up and was the first to leave.  I walked out alone.  I got to the church entrance, where the family was to stand to receive condolences, and somehow we were lined up near the door.  I didn’t realize until then how much that packed church meant to me, to see people standing there, waiting to say a few words to us.  And I didn’t realize how special it was when I looked up and saw the stained-glass image of the angel gone from it, as if, after the service, it knew to fly back to the heavens.

 

End