Tip-Top Fifty-Fifty

I shiver until I am still.

August 1st

8:00 PM

“Hold my hands,” she tells me.

“I’m okay,” I say.

“Can you read these words to me?”

The end of my life is a sequence of nonsensical sensations. The cold and the numb. Falling and ascending. Inside of me there are shadows of hopelessness and pride, but they are twisted around so that I don’t know which one I should be thankful for.

10: 00 PM

A different nurse shakes me awake by my shoulder. Wires and tubes hook me up to the machines that surround me. I try to decipher the noises and symbols.

“I need to run some checks on you,” he tells me. “Can you squeeze my fingers?” He holds two fingers in front of him. They’re solid and textured in the way that I think is impossible in dreams.

“Look forward. Tell me how many fingers I’m holding up,” he says, putting three fingers in front of my eyes. When he puts them in my periphery, I follow them. “You have to stay looking forward.”

“What happened to me?” I asked.

“The doctor will be here in a second.”

“Two fingers. One.”

“Thanks. Now, can you lift your arms in front of you?”

“Why?” I ask.

“I need to make sure one doesn’t droop.”

I hold my arms in front of me. They stay, but they shake. “Did I have a stroke?”

“The doctor will be here in a moment. Can you read these words for me?”

Please, take anything but my words. The symbols of the page make sense. “Tip-top. Fifty-fifty…”

The doctor tells me my brain is bleeding.

I have been here so long the blankness is part of me. Snow-blind is the word. I cling onto the image from the summit, the reason I am here. Was it worth it? Was anything I’ve done until now worth it? 

I’m alone. Can I survive being alone? The image fades to white from the dread that I will never share it with anyone. Dying seems impossible. I’ve never died before. The story isn’t over.

I can’t even see the ice that crashes into me, or the ground that is no longer beneath my feet. A new ground rushes towards me, and I don’t know how far I will fall.

August 2nd

12:00 AM

“Bad dream?” The nurse asks me.

“Pleasant to wake up from.”

The nurse looks around at the machines, then traces the tubes and wires up my gown and back to me. From his look, I worry there may be some reality I’m unaware of.

I complete the tests nervously. The packet gets progressively more difficult—words, then phrases, then pictures, then at the end one scene I am asked to describe a picture. None of them pose any trouble except for the fear that they may cause me trouble. That the words might crumble into mysterious symbols and my eyes will fail to connect the images with reality.

“There are two children stealing cookies from the jar,” I say. “The chair is tipping over. The children are going to fall.”

I leave the results of my MRI open on one tab of my phone browser, and open up more and more googling unknown words and odds of survival. I wish there was a calculator—somewhere I could input my symptoms and come up with a percentage. I’m conscious, at least. I’m doing fine on the stroke tests—but if I wasn’t, would I even know?

The doctor arrives.

I am looking down, warm in my coat, at a thousand rainbow specks. A thousand dead bodies. I cannot see their faces or hear their voices but I know one day they were vital, so much more vital than other living things. Their coats are colorful but as alive as bones.

How could you do this? I ask the mountain. There are so many of them. How many were on their way up? How many were on their way down. Here they all are, with dry snow sweeping over them and the wind pulling off the last of their skin.

I huddle closer to myself, thankful I am not one of them. I am alive, as angry as the wind and howling the same sort of questions,

I’m crying, but crying is cold, crying is dangerous. I stand up. It’s time to forget.

2:00 AM

“Sorry we have to do this again,” the nurse says. “You’re set for every two hours. How are you feeling?”

I think of all the bodies below me. “I’m alright.”

“You’re so young for this.”

I squeeze her hands, count her fingers, hold my arms out to her. When I get to the packet, I close my eyes. “Tip-top. Fifty-fifty. Thanks?” I open my eyes. I’ve missed ‘Huckleberry.’ “Sorry,” I say. “I was trying to see how many I had memorized.”

She looks at me sadly.

I identify a feather and a key and the children falling down in the kitchen. “I think I’m fine,” I say.

“We just want to be sure.”

“I mean—I mean I understand that. I’m just so glad I can speak and all. My head doesn’t even hurt very much.”

She looks at me like I’m lying but I’m not. I can only think about people who’ve had it worse. The people who left all the statistics I’d read, the people left unable to speak, the people whose limbs failed them.

I’m not alone in the ICU, but I haven’t had much time between dreams to think about the other patients. That’s an excuse though—I’ve been self-centered.

An old woman in the room next to me hacks and asks for a cigarette. The man across from me has been in some sort of accident. His voice is smooth and pitched somewhat high and I wonder if maybe I am not the youngest person here until he talks about his adult children. A fourth inmate shouts at the nurses constantly. I don’t know what his problem is, except that he is in pain.

And I am here, caught in a web of mildly uncomfortable machinery and otherwise without a care.

It’s everything the cliches say. The tip-top of the world. Every single point on this Earth is lower than me at this moment. The profound loneliness fills me with power. In all directions, I am alone.

I’ve conquered the mountain.

I’ve conquered the entire world.

I look out at the other peaks and wonder what they hold. All this, and I’m not happy with what I have.

4:00 AM

For the first time I wake from my dream disappointed. I miss even the longing. I go through the check purposefully half-asleep, in hopes I can return.

“I understand,” the nurse says, “It’s so late.”

He doesn’t understand though. 

“Tip-top,” I say, regretting my dream. “Fifty-fifty.” Maybe this time I make it down. When the children fall, they’ll just hit the floor. Nothing bad will happen.

I’m thwarted by my desire to fall asleep. More awake than I have ever been, I decide to try to stand. I’d done it before, to reach the commode, but I hadn’t done it alone.

The bed screams at me. I sit back down. Still it shrieks.

“What are you doing?” A different nurse asks.

“I didn’t know it would do that.”

“You need to lie down.”

6:00 AM

The nurse makes a positive comment about how she doesn’t have to wake me up this time. 

8:00 AM

10:00 AM

Not quite yet. Every step, though, every step might take me there. I am so close I can’t possibly look behind me. God my legs ache. Every step I am not there yet, though it feels like I must be.

12:00 PM

“I’m sorry.” I blink open my eyes, and then narrow them. “I’m sorry it has to be this way.”

“It’s alright,” I say. Tip-top-fifty-fifty-thanks. Thanks is a bitter word. “I can still read, at least.” But what can I can read? I can—I must—read the same collection of words over and over to prove that I’m not degenerating.

I think of the mountain. I think of dying on the mountain, even. It’s a better place to die than here.

Every hour it seems safer and safer to think I’ll stay alive. Either way, though, I will spend my whole life worrying. Every headache, every dizzy moment, every bruise or shortness of breath. I must contain myself now.

The children reach up to the cookie jar. I admire their ambition.

I am in a kitchen. Nothing overflows, there are no children, only my heart which is still a fledgling despite my age. It thrums soft and strong and singing at me to fulfill its purpose. I tell myself that it’s safe in my ribcage, but safe is such a boring word.

“Do you want to fly?” I ask it.

“Please,” it says. “It’s the only way I will truly feel alive.”

“Will you be safe?”

“That’s the risk, isn’t it?”

2:00 PM

I complete the ritual dulled-eyed and dutiful. I didn’t enjoy having the time to think it through. The first dream where my life wasn’t at risk and yet the one that scared me the most. I hate who I was. I hate that someone out there can think like that—can stake their own safety on letting their heart free instead. My safety was taken from me asking no permission and gaining no freedom.

The children reach up because they can.

I wake up in my own bed. The muscles in my body are so sharp I can feel it in every move I make—my head is as clear as a brook. The sunlight invites me to the open window. I brush my teeth, I dress, I go out into the world. It is so easy.

4:00 PM

I look at the children with disgust. I hope they fall through the floor. I hope they die. Fifty-Fifty.

Isn’t it beautiful?

I am a field of snow and coats and frozen corpses. They are dead and I am not. God, what aspirations they must have had. What did they feel when they looked up at the sky? Privilege disguised as wonder. The wind around them humiliates their once-strong lungs.

I move to pull my mask above my face but I have no mask and no hands and no face. The cold fades. I have no body. I am free.

I look down once again. People will cry for them. That doesn’t trouble me. People will cry for the loss of anything they know too well.

But what words will they say over their absence at the funeral. She was so strong, he was so bold, they were ambitious and they looked to the sky.

6:00 PM

Doesn’t everyone look to the sky?

Awoken again into this existence and my broken body on the brink of collapse. Let me sleep. Please let me sleep. I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine I want to lie, because maybe it will keep them away from me.

I want to crush the nurses fingers. I could. I’m not any worse. I’m getting better, even. Clearer.

Little bugs are crawling up my neck (though I do not know what a bug is). I swat them down and smile. Some do reach my crown, and I swat them on the way down. I afford no respect to those who manage to evade my reach. They are still bugs, but one way or another, they are gone, and I can rest easy throughout the winter.

8:00 PM

“Good news,” the doctor tells me. “You look like you’re doing a lot better. I think we move your checks to every four hours.”

“Thanks,” I say, in a sequence of similarly nonsensical words.