Short-Sickness unto Death

Sickness unto Death?            by Michael Dodd

Mitchell Darrow has auguries of doom. He sees his five year old daughter, Marisela, falling to her death from a precipice.  It is a feeling he can’t shake.   Doom is coming.

He lays awake in bed, looking through the bedroom door into the living room.  The Suns, the basketball team, is on his mind.  Are Barkley and KJ and Thundering Dan good enough to come through this year to beat Hakeem and Horry and Cassels?

Darrow looks into the shaded living room.  There were several Mummers, Barkley among them, darkly gray with short kinky black hair, having a convocation, some sort of muttering, murmuring, conspiratorial musings, their backs turned to him, wearing cloaks now like ancient Druids gathering to cast spells to cast out the darkness and bring back the sun.

The Beatles “I’m  So Tired” fills his soul.  His left quadriceps is doing a flibbertigibbety repetitive dance.  “There!”  “Again!”  “A spasm every 42 seconds!”

Mitchell Darrow’s heart is beating too fast, as if he is just back from jogging; his heart rate is elevated and is stuck on 75 percent of a maximum pulse rate.  He goes into the living room, no longer thinking of the Barkley Mummers.

As he lays down on the couch, waiting for his pulse to slow, he hears, not in his soul or head, but in his ears, the dark lament of the old Ray Charles ’Early in the Morning’ .  Actually hearing it, as it was recorded forty years ago on the original acetate, as an auditory hallucination, is startling.

What is going on?

The thought of “heart attack” fills him with urgency.  There is a hospital only five minutes away from his house.  He drives there, walking through the emergency room doors as the sun is coming up on this cold winter’s morning in the desert…

“Can I help you?” the receptionist asks in a harried, distracted way.

Darrow can see some commotion about forty feet in front of him.  Some hospital curtains are being whisked along their tracks to create a room.  Before they completely hide the drama, he sees a flash of a man on a table, surrounded by medical personnel.

He answers the receptionist:  “My heartbeat is too fast.  It seems stuck.”

She holds his wrist with her soft warm hands; he is comforted.  She asks him if he been under stress recently.

“Yes.”    He thinks of a flying- tumbling girl.  “Can I see a doctor?”

“The doctors are very busy now.  You can but there will be a long wait.”

Darrow hears commands to fire paddles, as in trying to revive a heart attack victim.

As he stands there, thinking, he sees a doctor go to a phone close by.  All he can hear is:  “Sorry.”  The rest is hushed and grave:  he thinks he hears “sorry” again.

Darrow feels better.  He goes home.  He takes a nap and his heart beat returns to normal.

But the attacks will come back, the panic will return.  And return.

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