Bill Watterson
“Come on, Cas. You have to help me. Stay with me here. Stay with me.” Moses spoke in my ear. Part of me wanted to tell him to fuck off, but for the life of me, I couldn’t pull together enough energy to get my mouth to move.
“Moses, this is crazy…’ I hear someone else say, but I don’t open my eyes to see who. It has to be one of the workers.
“No, we can’t. It’ll just give the board another reason to kick him out. We can’t.” I heard Moses respond, but still, I couldn’t move. Oh well, it didn’t matter.
Darkness, sweet, peaceful darkness.
“Cassian! Can you hear me? Fuck, boy, just open your eyes! You have to open your eyes!”
Someone was screaming at me, and I could feel my body being jostled around. I didn’t want to move, but I didn’t have the strength to avoid it.
I felt something shoved down my throat. I gagged, and the vomit I was sure was about to spew all over the place was sucked into the tube. The taste on my tongue was revolting. Whatever I was throwing up tasted like soot, and the taste was enough to make me throw up again.
“There it is. Get it out, Cassian. Get it all out.”
Someone shoved the tube down my throat again and restarted the whole process. After throwing up a few times, I was so exhausted I passed out.
The bright light burned into my eyelids. I tried to turn over in the bed, but the wires attached to my arm pulled me back.
“What the fuck?” I groaned. The pain in my throat was intense, as if my tonsils were on fire, and every time I swallowed, I was adding gasoline to the flames.
“Mr. LeJeune, please try to relax.”
I heard Moses move from where I assumed he was sitting and shuffle over to the bed. “Close the blinds. Why do you have them all open like that?” I croaked at him.
“Sir, the blinds are closed, it’s dusk, and there’s only one light on.”
I took my chances and tried to open my eyes, only to find that he was telling the truth, All the blinds were closed, and the clock read 5:14 pm.
I looked at the wires attached to my arms and recognized the IV. I didn’t know what was being pumped into me, but I wanted that shit out now. I didn’t do needles. Sure, I snorted blow and popped pills from time to time, but I didn’t shoot anything into my body. I reached over to pull it out, but even that small movement had my body rebelling in pain. My chest felt like it had been run over by a fucking tractor-trailer.
“Cassian, please.”
“Please what?” I yelled harshly at the old man. “For fuck sakes, Moses, I just want to get the fuck up. Why is that so much of an ordeal now? What is all this shit anyway?”
“All this shit was needed to bring you back from the dead.” He yelled right back at me.
“Watch your fucking tone, old man.” I squinted my eyes at him and waited for him to recoil, but he didn’t. Whatever happened must have rattled him. “Now, what the hell are you talking about? What do you mean bring me back from the dead.”
“He means you died, and we had to bring you back.”
I turned towards the door where Dr. Slava had just walked in.
“You’re lucky you have someone like Moses here to look in on you. If you had slept through to the morning with the amount of alcohol you had in your system, you wouldn’t be here this morning.” Dr. Slava pulled up a chair and moved it over to my bed. “Cassian, I think we need to talk about your alcohol consumption.”
I rolled my eyes and let my head fall back to the pillow, which felt like rocks. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Really? You think so? Do you know what your blood alcohol level was yesterday?” Dr. Slava asked.
“Fuck am I supposed to know? Do I look like a doctor to you?”
He sighed, “No, you do not. Cassian, your BAL was 0.2.” He said slowly.
“Oh, that’s not that bad.” Wasn’t the legal limit like .8 or something like that.
“Not so bad? Are you kidding me?” The doctor shot up from the chair, his body becoming more and more animated the more he talked. Honestly, all the moving was giving me more of a headache. “Cassian, the legal level is .08.”
Oh well, fuck me.
“You essentially dosed yourself with a lethal injection of anesthesia with the concentration of alcohol in your system. We had to give you CPR to get you breathing again. I know you want to party, but there’s such thing as too much.”
I could hear him still lecturing me, but all I could focus on was I nearly died. So close to death that all the bullshit would have been over.
“What are you still yelling at me for?” I raised my voice.
“I’m not. I need you to hear me, Cassian. You’re going to kill yourself if you keep this up. Your liver is already stressed, not to mention your kidneys and stomach. What would have happened if Moses wasn’t there? If they didn’t get in contact with me? Where would you be then?”
“Dead!” I sat up, “And that would have been my fucking problem. You expect me to grovel and kiss your feet because you did your job? Moses' job is to tend to me; it’s his job to get what I need. It is your job to be a doctor and fix me up. Next time you want praise for doing your job, get it somewhere else.” I reached over to the needle in my arm and yanked it out. “As for my partying habits,” I stood up as best I could from the bed and walked over to Dr. Slava, “I’ll party as fucking hard as I want to. I have enough fucking money to buy a hundred new livers if I need to. If I fucking die, I die.”
He opened his mouth to speak but snapped it shut before saying something he was sure to regret. There was nothing else that he could say. I didn’t work for him. Hell, I could have his license revoked if I called the right people. Dr. Slava knew better than to go against me, no matter what he thought.
“Now, if you don’t mind, I have shit to do.” I hobbled over toward the bathroom and closed the door.
“Moses, he has a problem. He needs help.”
“What do you expect me to do, Lem? I know he needs help; I’m doing the best that I can.”
“You don’t need this stress; he shouldn’t…”
“Are you finished? Or do you two need a fucking room?” I yelled through the door as I tried to pull the shirt off my body. They tried to hide their relationship, but I knew. It’s not like I gave a fuck. It wasn’t my dick being sucked by either of them, but I knew they thought I’d get rid of them because of it. If it proved to be a distraction to either of them when it came to their job, I would, in a heartbeat. They could be in love and out of a fucking job.
I heard the door to my room open then close, and a shuffle of footsteps moved in my direction. Moses knocked on the door.
“Cassian, how are you feeling?”
“I feel like you all need to learn how to save someone's life better. What the hell were you all doing to me?” I peeled my shirt up the best I could, and he helped me get the rest of it off. The bruises already visible on my skin, deep and purple, right over the center of my chest.
“My apologies sir, next time, I will go find someone more equipped to keeping you alive.” He smiled smugly. I cut my eyes at him for a second before I went back to trying to figure out if there would be any lasting damage.