Flashfic: Comatose

I like to think that if I were in a coma, it'd be a little something like this.

I'm on my way home from work. My phone buzzes with updates from social networking sites and text messages from the few friends who text me nowadays. I'm such a social recluse that I can barely bring myself to respond to these for fear that my few friends will be surprised I'm awake, or not busy, or not too tired to chat. That's another category of why I don't talk to people much anymore: I don't like talking about how I don't talk.

The subway is a grimy place to be. I'm new to New York, and I'm not used to the inherent ooze that touches everything here, so different from the grassy farm I grew up on. The smell of cows used to be more familiar than the smell of car exhaust and human sweat. Now, I'm not sure which I prefer.

And I miss my dog. He was huge and slobbery and brown and shaggy. My sister had christened him "Pancake" when we'd adopted him, to my dismay, back then. He'd been jovial and comforting up until his premature death one hot July evening as a truck broke three of his ribs and maimed a handful of his internal organs. My sister had cried for hours, hiding in her room until she came out and declared that she wanted chocolate-chip pancakes for dinner, and my mom made them. We painted a gravestone and set it outside over a patch of earth that we liked to pretend the dog was buried in. In reality, we had no idea where his body had gone. Landfill? Museum of domestic animals? Medical waste? Had he donated his remaining organs to science, or to needy dogs around the world? As children, we could only speculate.

In this city there are no real dogs, no big dogs who leap up to greet you and give you slobbery kisses when you walked through the door. Just annoying lapdogs, bred for show and not personality or usefulness.

This was usually what I thought about when I was on the subway. As I stepped off, I wondered why. I thought about myself more than other people thought about themselves, or at least more than others cared to admit that they thought about themselves. I thought about my memories, mostly, of what it was like before I wandered this deathless gray city on a mission that seemed to consist of "work, eat, sleep, rinse and repeat." I remembered more colorful things that seemed vaguely surreal in their colorfulness, as if they were almost too real.

I bump into a couple people on my way onto the street. I used to be paranoid that everyone who touched me was a pickpocket or a homeless drunk with contagious diseases. Now... well, I'm not sure. Those things do exist, unsurprisingly, but now that I live in it, so to speak, I'm not sure what I think of it, or even that I think of it at all. My sister, I'm sure, would be offended by every other person she saw on the street. "That woman is too well dressed for the sidewalk... it's like she's showing off." "It seems like every dumpster in every alleyway on this street has a hobo living in it!" I remember thinking her comments used to be funny, her tiny prejudices about everything from taste in belt buckles to the way a person smiled, but I can't actually recall that feeling of being amused. Maybe because it was so long ago, or maybe because I've grown (figurative) gray hairs since then.

I think about my mother and father too. My father was never around much, but I can vaguely remember superficial details about him: his sandy brown hair, his clear blue eyes, his dazzling white smile when he was pleased because you'd done something right. He was a banker... or maybe he was a lawyer. I couldn't remember. In retrospect, it seemed unimportant. My mother, on the other hand, seemed omnipresent in my memory. She was always bandaging something or hugging someone or scolding you or making dinner for you.

I absentmindedly run into someone, a scrape of shoulders, and I mutter an apology as I try to elude eye contact. It's a girl, about my age, maybe a little older. She looks like she's an artist for a living, maybe illustrates children's books, maybe paints murals on restaurant walls. My "sorry" comes out stuttered and strange, as awkward as I really am deep down inside, a bit stilted and a bit off-center. I'm not sure if it sounds authentic.

"You have to wake up," she says with an expression that seems to accept my apology. She keeps walking. I don't understand. I've never felt a connection with another person, not once that I can remember in my whole life; I haven't developed those subconscious skills that help you read a person, derive what they're thinking from their face. Even if I had I doubt I'd understand what that meant. She was probably an existentialist: live each day as if it might be your last, a penchant against monotony. I'd take the advice to heart. I'd also probably secretly admire her for the next year of my life, long after her face had faded from my memory, for her will to help a random stranger who looked a little lost in his own mind: I have to wake up.

My apartment building was a little red, but only a little. It was also rather brown, and overall not very standoffish but not very subtle either. It stood, in stark contrast to the dead sidewalk in front of it, but in boring unison with the brick buildings surrounding it. Glancing through the glass front door to the doorman at his desk, I found that I didn't want to enter yet, didn't want to fall back into my daily and nightly routine of wake up, go to work, come home, fall asleep. I wanted to break free. I wanted to go somewhere else and do something new.

I passed a small bookstore, an 18+ shop with neon lights in the display, an outdoor cafe. The cafe is one I've never been to before, despite its closeness to my place of residence. I act on a whim and walk under the trellis of roses that marks its entrance from the street. A sign to the side says "seat yourself," and I do so at a table for two to the side. I wonder who sat here before. A couple who would never work out because the girl was too picky and the boy wasn't ready for commitment? A washed-out grad student with a cheap laptop, blogging about the unnecessary evil of money and post-secondary education?

Judging by the pigeons plucking pastry crumbs from the ground near my feet, I would have guessed the latter. Grad students like their pastries.

A waitress passes by with nothing but a menu and a smile. The former, she sets nonchalantly on the table in front of me; the latter, she tosses to me like a child's toy, neglected and superficially cheerful. I finger through the menu and pick out a nice dinner for myself. A vegetarian salad with portobello mushrooms and onion dressing, a small serving of potato soup, and a chilled turkey-and-spinach salad. I know right off the bat that I'm not going to be able to eat it all, but I want to spoil myself with the idea of variety. There was no sampler platter on the menu. This was my equivalent, my way of telling myself to find something that I enjoyed, and to enjoy it.

The waitress returned, retrieving the menu as I held it out to her. "You're in a coma," she said cheerfully, in that sociable manner all waitresses seem perpetually locked into. Her smile doesn't falter as she nods like I've just told her something important and walks off again without taking my order. I am confused, more confused than I feel inside my own thoughts sometimes. What's happened here? What sort of social dynamic is taking place that random strangers are telling me things that make no sense?

She returns shortly with the exact meal I'd picked out, like I'd told her my order after all. "Enjoy," she says, the last syllable falling off the rest of the word, as if it takes energy for her to be happy. I understand her completely. In that moment, I want to reach out and say, I know what you mean. I don't want to be human either.

This city is so dirty.

I ate more than I thought I would and now it's getting late. But I want more, I want to go somewhere I've never been. Without a bike, with no money for a taxi or a trip on the subway, and in such a small neighborhood, my options are limited. But I end up wandering toward the river. There's a little children's park nearby, which despite the late hour and the orange sunlight fading into purple and blue is still not empty. I'm sure the nearby parents won't approve if I sit on one of the swings like I did when I was a child, looking into the sky and dreaming about growing soft, feathery wings and flying away, to somewhere where nobody could ever touch me, where evil and wrongness and error hadn't stuck their grimy taloned fingers and polluted everything there was to touch.

So I watch from a park bench. There's a little girl with blonde pigtails who repeatedly tries and fails to cross the monkey bars, her feet flailing as she struggles to propel herself to the opposite side. A female teenager who is what I can only presume to be a babysitter smiles and chats to another girl with mismatched socks while simultaenously carefully watching a daredevil little boy from across the gravel playground. He yells "watch me!" as he jumps from an upper story of the fort.

There are other children too, some without watchers, maybe stragglers who haven't noticed the time or who don't have parents who care where they are. Everything seems to coalesce into a choking haze - the air, the smell of the city, the buzz of everything and anything that makes noise here, the footsteps of the cautious and the confident as they progress toward their apartments and their houses, eager to find a warm bed to collapse into so that they can sleep the night.

Like a fog, a sense of intense wrongness settles down onto me and everything around me. Infecting. Polluting.

A boy walks over and stares at me with wide, anxious eyes. I notice that a green ball has rolled to the ground outside the playground gravel and it right up against my elbow. Understanding the child's shyness, I lift the ball from its resting place at my feet and stand to walk it over to him. He takes a few steps forward until he can snatch it out of my hands, which are far older, far more callused.

Where do I work again?

I hand it to him carefully, gently, as if he is a deer or moth to be frightened away at sudden movements, and he grabs it and a smile lights his face. I am reminded of the people waiting for me to get home back at my apartment, their smiles and their worries and their laughter...

Who are they? Am I married, do I have children? Where is my family? I don't have a family...

I try to remember my mother, my sister, my father, but they fall apart like wooden dolls crudely fashioned of twigs and loosely-tied string. I can remember that my father was strong, though I can't see him in my mind, powering through his work or pulling his weight at home. I can remember my mother was kind, though I can't recall her ever explaining a grandfather's death to us or comforting us after a traumatizing first day of school. I can remember my sister was witty, though I can't remember ever bantering with her or any of the jokes I'd thought she'd told.

If I have a wife, I don't remember her. Yet there is a masculine diamond ring around a finger on my left hand... I don't remember putting it there, kissing anyone - ever, or seeing a woman I loved in a white dress as she paraded proudly down a wedding aisle to the tune of the marriage songs churches are so fond of.

I am brought back to the present as the boy smiles, green ball in hand, and says thankfully, "This isn't real."

I stand as he gallops away. He has all of the energy that I lack, that this place drained me of. I meander back to the cold sidewalk and make my way home, but all the while, I purposefully meet the empty, glassy stares of every stranger I meet on the street, and I search them for the answer to a question I'm not sure that I know how to ask.

The doorman greets me as I enter the building. His lips move but I can't hear anything he says.

The elevator lights but makes no noise as I climb in. All there is is the sound of my footsteps, and that gets fainter and fainter as I head toward my gray refuge from the life outside home and work.

I have a ring but there's no wife or child to greet me when I open the door. Just silence. Just grayness, blending all of the world together into a sad ocean of empty fog. There is nothing here. There is only grayness. There is only emptiness. There is only patience, and waiting. There is only an entrance to the emptiness, no exit, or at least not one that I can see.

How did I get here?

How do I get back?