1.10.09

the ladder - blueprint (part 4)

The Ladder – An experimental web-only fiction series that spans multiple story lines and characters…Tune in every Wednesday for a new installment.

A waiting room like all waiting rooms – nondescript, inoffensive, with beach scenes on bleached wall and a vending machine filled, ironically, with candy bars and chips. The corridor bisecting the rows of chairs with worn blue cushions hummed with tight-lipped nurses and sour-faced doctors rushing along with insomniac medical residents, visitors, and the occasional shuffling or rolling patient. When they arrived, the overweight Latina handling phones, computers and impatient visitors like a calm octopus regretfully informed them that they would to wait for news. So they sat. And they waited.

While Mrs. Robertson retreated into quiet suffering, eyes moist but filled with resolve, Eriq sketched furiously on a large pad of paper. Vlad watched as vast scenes of superhero carnage unfolded in jagged black and white linework – caped muscle men and tightly-clothed women against armies of robot with volcanic eyes and the armament of a dozen Abrams tanks.

Waiting.

Mrs. Robertson stood up every so often to ask the receptionist for news, only to be told that the doctors were at work and would come out when ready.

Waiting.

Eriq was more angry than worried, fully expecting Aaron to bounce out of the intensive care like a doped-up tigger. What angered him was knowing that his brother would make yet another resolution to quit, yet another promise to his mother to be a good son, yet another attempt to do his part in healing the family. They’d been through it before, stuck in some hellish cycle of expectations and false hope.

Waiting.

Vladimir Kossakovsky remembered his years in the old Soviet Union, but only as if his memory were fogged in. He was nine when glasnost took hold and, in the euphoric freedom that emerged from a new age’s birth, his parents felt compelled to finally escape to the American Dream instead of suffering through the painful pangs of a transforming county. He had memories of that inimitable Russian stoicism, muted opinions, whispers, and a small candle to hold out against the looming shadow of the KGB. Why he thought of this now, he didn’t know, except perhaps for the fact that he caught a look between Eriq and Mrs. Roberson, a guilty exchange that suggested the familiar spectre of uncertainty.

Waiting.

What kind of mother was she? For a moment – a brief, stabbing moment – Mrs. Robertson wished Aaron would die, picturing him on a hospital bed lifeless and with tubes. Not out of punishment, only to spare him the wasted life of a junky or criminal. Oh dear God, she prayed. Why am thinking that? Of course she didn’t want him dead. She wanted him whole and returned to her. She wanted him living up to his potential. But if he wouldn’t listen to her or his brother or to the doctors – what hope did he have?

Waiting.

Eriq also thought of Aaron’s death – how it would be better for everyone – and the self-loathing bubbled up and burst from his pencil onto the page in the form of grotesque battle scenes. But what love did his brother have for him? When he needed someone older and stronger help fend off the bullies, someone more mature to dispense advice, where was Aaron?

Waiting.

No comments: