Ramberget | Alexander T. Damle

            You lay in bed. Warm day, sun, blue sky. It crosses your mind that you should go outside, take advantage of it. You won’t. When you wake up, all you can think about is how much it hurts. It doesn’t matter why, it always does. So you just lay there for a while, try to work up the courage to do... something. You can’t. White bed sheets. You check your phone so see if - but no one did. You grab your headphones, put on music. That song. It doesn’t matter which one, there’s always that song. It exists and it is all that exists. At least for those few minutes. Then there is nothing. White bed sheets. Blue sky. Her face, her little laugh, all fever dreams, a headache, could have beens.

            You try to think back, what happened last night, try to remember if you at least enjoyed yourself, if maybe the immediate, driving emotions that drew you back from the veil of sleep were just your mind’s tricks, if maybe things are good, but things aren’t good, that’s not how it goes, not now, not ever.

            You lay in bed. Nurse opens the curtains. Tells you how beautiful it is out. Sunny. Blue sky. You can’t see. Your ears still work, and everyone tells you to see the beauty in the small things, her voice, young and pretty, like someone you once knew. You still have your hearing, and you still have your memory. Such a gift, a memory. Recollections of youth, a better time, a beautiful, grander, faster, more romantic time, before you got broken, before your hurts overwhelmed you, stole your soul. You see her face. You ask yourself why you didn’t get out of bed when you could, why you didn’t feel that sun beating down on your face when warmth still meant something.

            The nurse puts on the song for you. That song. It still doesn’t matter which one. Memory is suggestive. This song is years and years of the forgotten, her, so many hers, names and pretty faces, laughs, so many years. What you were supposed to be, what you were supposed to do with your life, left undone in a different fate, undone under the guise of sanity.

            Her voice speaks to you through the hours, one date, not much, nothing to really worry over, but you do. That day it was cold, raining, and you just talked, just talked for hours, long into the night, forgetting yourself, tick of the clock, darkness falls, finally you make your excuses, and you think maybe things are changing. Things don’t change, least of all people. You lay awake for hours and you think of her, you think of her and you think of other things, but mostly you think of how she could make you feel, things went a different way.

            The nurse used to ask you why you never had any visitors, but she’s learned to not bother. She’s done this job long enough to understand that some of us just don’t live the sort of lives to leave behind visitors. She hopes she’s not one of those, when she gets here someday, though, of course, she hopes she never gets here.

Long shift. The guy at the end of the hall finally cashed in. The one who always asks for that song is still hanging in though. He’s doing okay, you don’t quite know how anymore. You drive home and the city lights sparkle about you, and you drive into the suburbs, around a million others on the same trajectory. Pull into the driveway. Warm summer night, crickets, murky, humid air. You open your front door, your three year old runs up and hugs you, you kiss your husband on the cheek, he makes dinner, you eat outside like you did when you were small.

Lay in bed, machine ticks away your last heart beats, your grandkids hold your hands, one found God, and now he prays, and though you don’t believe, you don’t mind. You still have your sight and you look out the window to the blue sky and you take comfort in its existence. You remember a song from when you were young, but you know it wasn’t your song.

You get out of bed, get a cup of tea because you need something in your system, a replacement for the nothing, eating away. Blue sky. That song. It repeats, and you can’t make yourself change it, though with every chord it just cut deeper into your skin, unforgivable. A later you hears the heart rate monitor slow as the song goes again through the motions. You stir your tea as your heart tries to forget your hands, you drop the spoon on the floor and you leave it. She laughs, but this time she laughs at you.

You remember the title of that Philip K. Dick story, We Can Remember it for you Wholesale, and you question where the business really is in that. Now unremembering, that would be a trick, that would be something people might pay for. Gone loves and the love that never happened. The song repeats again, and it's beginning to grate on you.

You sit in her flat late at night, two, three in the morning. Buzz is beginning to wear thin. You talk to her flatmate about transhumanism and the passage of man and to most this would be a threat, a fear, but to you it’s a comfort, as, across the room, she falls in love with your best friend and you want to pull yourself into their conversation but you don’t. Her flatmate laughs at something you said and with weary eyes you smile at him. Outside, under the streetlights of the city, the trees are starting to bud with the processes of spring.

You sit in a bar and you drink your drink. The bartender, pretty enough, you tell her it’s your 47th birthday, and when she asks what you’re doing in this shithole you only laugh, Pavlov’s response. The two of you talk, and you think sure, she seems alright. It’s coming up on closing time and she doesn’t throw you out. That song comes through on the radio, some classics station, and you marvel at the beautiful collusion of time and circumstance. After she closes up, you go home together and you have sex, and in the morning she leaves and you never go back to that bar.

The nurse comes in and she turns on your song and this time it’s raining outside, but you knew before she said it because you can hear the sound of water falling on the roof. Wash away your regrets, but it doesn’t. The nurse says something about volunteers being here today with dogs, some people like the companionship, but you mutter that you’re not interested, always liked cats better anyway. You like dogs, but you don’t want to hear the volunteers, young voices.

You think about messaging your friend about the girl, think about it over and over and the thought consumes you. The song has stopped. Blue sky. Different song now, same point, it doesn’t matter the lyrics or chords. Words from last night come to you without sentence structure. They aren’t connected to anything that matters, but you don’t care. You wish it would all just stop, love. You wish you no longer had to care, but you do, because that’s what people do. It ends as it begins. A million faces all tried hard to be forgotten, but the voices are always the hard part, cute accent, lisp, slipped syllables, thoughts of old movie actresses, repeating themselves over and over, the noise of the song and the one playing replaces itself in your head with that one, as her face is replaced with another face, as time slips by and the trees are now of full leaf, and then it’s another face as again they are bare. Another spring, another voice, over again.

This morning the nurse comes in and puts on the song and you can hear it because of how you know it, but you can’t hear it today, and you can’t hear the weather report and you now are blind and nearly deaf, nearly for you can still vaguely hear the slowing of the heart rate monitor, and now you hear one flat, metallic, transhuman scream, and you know the nurse yells, doctor comes in, but they knew when they put you here how this would end, still the doctor comes in, but you have a do not resuscitate, and after a few moments, he calls it.