Page 150 of Two Marlboros

I didn’t deserve anything.

Not even to cry.

Maybe in the end I really did rest. A few hours. Or a few days, I couldn’t have said. My parents had also arrived, although I had not been the one to call them. My father in his 30-years-old Raybans and my mother with a pitiful look on her face. In the waiting hallway there was also another man. But he sat there alone, looking out over the doors that separated hope from certainty. I was looking at them, too. I was hoping, too. And meanwhile I was thinking about what I could do for Nathan.

The man stood up at one point. Nelly stared at him but said nothing. He ran to the doctors and asked questions. Everyone looked at him apprehensively, and I remembered that those were the doctors who were treating Nathan.

The man was very agitated. I thought back to the way he had walked, and something came back to me. He was over forty, but he had a pleasant face and a cut of the eyes that was familiar.

I took the useless crutches and ran with them. One step at a time, I reached nearby. The nurse interrupted.

“Excuse me, but this is a private conversation.”

“How is he? Is he going to be okay?”

The man looked at me. So did the nurse and the doctor. She looked at the man, who nodded his head in agreement.

“He will recover. He’s not badly hurt.”

My blood froze. Then it thawed. Then it started flowing slow again, warm, and intoxicated my whole body. I levered myself onto a crutch, but I had no strength left and fell to the ground.

I had said they were useless.

Nathan’s room was spacious. He was rooming with another man, who was sleeping like him. Nathan’s chest rose and fell in regular rhythms, and I felt that I could not have loved another scene more than that. He was quiet, placid, and resting. He would wake up and we would go back to talking as before, he would smoke a cigarette and blow the smoke in my face. As bad as it was, because it was, I would have breathed it in at the top of my lungs. I would have allowed it to flow into every corner of my body, into every cell and let it take root wherever it wanted to.

It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time. But some second times are definitely better than first times.

Nathan slept for another half day. It was late at night, and I was at his bedside. The nurse had made an exception for me, butshe had intimated that I had to leave within half an hour. I would never do that, and she knew it too.

Nathan’s hands were smooth. In that white hospital gown, he looked almost like an angel. He was breathing evenly, free of any distress. I rested my chin on my palm and stood watching him.

I thought back to the day before, to the man who had come to the hospital. It could only have been his father. I had no idea why he had come, given the relationship, if you could call it that, that united them.

But Nathan lived to please him. And maybe he had noticed and thought to thank his son that way. I had no idea, and I didn’t even want to speculate. I liked to think of it as a gesture of filial love, pure and unconditional. I hoped to see him again, to tell him that I would take care of the medical bills.

I must have been crazy. I longed to do so much for a boy I had known for such a short time. Yet, he had turned my life upside down. He had allowed me to start over and rediscover love, a feeling that still scared me, but that at that moment I was happy to feel it for him. I didn’t know if it needed to become something concrete, but it was enough for me to feel it.

I still watched his face and prayed that he would wake up. The prayer forced me to close my eyes, and closed they remained for some more time.

“Alan?”

I opened my eyes wide. It was dark, but not dark enough for me not to see him. Nathan was looking at me, breathing and stretching his fingers. The nurse had said he had not been seriously injured, but I wanted to see it for myself. I had imagined that they had broken his back, but apparently, they had hit him a little further. He looked at me with those beady eyes, as I rubbed mine.

“Hello,” I whispered.

The other patient was sleeping like a log and occasionally snoring.

“What are you doing here?”

His voice was overpowered by the cluttered ticking of the clock on the wall, but at just hearing it I almost felt like crying. I stroked his hand in slow movements, and he smiled at me.

“I was waiting for you to wake up.”

His face was partly illuminated by the artificial light outside the window. I could catch a glimpse of a few grazes, medicated and covered with a band-aid, while others, minor, were left uncovered.

“How are you feeling?”, I asked.

I remembered the moment when he had fallen to the ground. I had already known what was going to happen. I had tried to free myself and had screamed, as if my desperation could have saved him, as he was hit and as the bat raged on him. When he had stopped moving his feet, I had thought it had happened. Again.

---