It’s not pretty.
You will be experiencing the worst of it, as you read this. Your hair will be long gone, and the nausea will largely have passed to be replaced by the continual pain of your joints swelling up and internal organs shutting down, flooding your body with toxins. Your skin will be peppered with ugly lesions, which your body is incapable of healing, and as the condition progresses you will start drowning in your own bodily fluids as your lungs break down. I know, because this is precisely what my body is doing, even as I write this for you, Vincent, my last living will and testament. You have, at most, a few days to live. I have a few hours.
“Stay with me,” I said.
Vincent stayed.
After a while the nurses brought another bed in for him. I didn’t comment on the drips they plugged into his veins as he lay down beside me until, seeing my stare, he smiled and said, “Just a precaution.”
“You’re a liar, Vincent Rankis.”
“I’m sorry you think so, Harry August.”
In a way, the nausea was worse than the pain. Pain can be drowned, but nausea eats through even the most delicious opiates and cutting chemicals. I lay in my bed and tried not to cry out until at last, at three in the morning, I rolled on to my side and puked up into the bucket on the floor, and shook and sobbed and clutched my belly and gasped for air.
Vincent slipped out of his bed at once, coming over, entirely ignoring the bucket of puke at his feet, and with hands on my shoulders held me and said, “What can I do?”
I stayed curled up in a bundle, knees tucked to my chest. It seemed the least uncomfortable position I could assume. Vomit ran down my chin in thick, sticky bands. Vincent got a tissue and a cup of water and wiped it off my face. “What can I do?” he repeated urgently.
“Stay with me,” I replied.
“Of course. Always.”
The next day the nausea began for him. He hid it well, sneaking out of the room to puke up in the toilet, but I hardly needed nine hundred years of experience to see. In the night the pain began to take him too, and this time I staggered out of the bed to hold him, as he puked and retched into a bucket on the floor.
“I’m fine,” he gasped between shudders. “I’ll be fine.”
“See?” I murmured. “Told you you’re a liar.”
“Harry,” his voice was acid-eaten, ragged between breaths, “there’s something I wanted to say to you.”
“Was it ‘Sorry for being a damn liar’?”
“Yes.” I didn’t know if he sobbed or laughed the word. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s OK.” I sighed. “I know why you did it.”
The lesions, as they broke on my skin, didn’t hurt so much as itch. They were a slow splitting, a gentle peeling away of flesh. Vincent was still going through nausea, but as my body began to break down, the pain grew intense again, and I screamed out for comfort and morphine. They dosed us both, perhaps considering it rude to only fill up one patient, least of all the one who wasn’t paying for this extensive medical care. That evening a box arrived for Vincent. He crawled out of bed and unlocked the padlock on the front, pulling from the inside of the box a crown of wires and electrodes. With shaking hands, he held it out towards me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It… it will make you f-forget,” he stammered, laying it down on the end of my bed as if it was a little too heavy for his tastes. “It will… it will take away everything. Everything you are, everything you… It will take away this memory. Do you understand?”
“What about me?” I asked. “Will it take away me?”
“Yes.”
“Bloody stupid then, isn’t it?”
“I… I’m so sorry. If you knew… if you knew some of the things…”
“Vincent, I’m not in a confessional mood. Whatever it is, I forgive you, and let’s leave it at that.”
He left it at that, but the box with its crown of wires stayed in the room. He would have to use it on me, I concluded, before I died, and before he grew too weak to operate it.
In the night we were both in pain.
“It’s OK,” I told him. “It’s OK. We were trying to make something better.”
He was shaking, at the limits of his pain meds, and still in pain.
Tell me a story, I said, to distract in this hour of need. Here, I’ll begin. An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scot walk into a bar…
For God’s sake, Harry, he said, don’t make me laugh.
Then I’ll tell you a story–a true story–and you tell me one in reply.
Fair enough, he answered, and so I did.
I told him of growing up in Leeds, of the bullies at the school, of B+ grades and the tedium of studying law.
He told me of his wealthy father, a good man, a kind man, entirely under his son’s thumb.